Comment by draluy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by draluy | Hacker News Reader

This article is so infuriating I had to log in. All this article is underlined by the fact that Alice and Bob should try to get the most out of the negotiation regardless of needs. This is a rightist way of seeing the world, and in my mind childlike. With any level of maturity people should realize pizzas should be divided according to who needs it, whatever the definition of need is.

How about this way of dividing the pie: Alice and Bob describe theirs needs to a third party, and the third party gives each one what is needed. Or if no third party: just describe and justify your needs in an envelope, open both simultaneously, and share the pie.

The logic that "of course, everyone should take as much as they can" is an impasse. It doesnt make anyone truly happy, makes the person with the worse fallback an inferior to the other party during the negotiations, doesnt guarantee fairness, etc. And worst of all: it doesnt allow for human values such as empathy.

This article is an algorithm between programs, not any reasonable way to treat a person, valuing their feeelings and needs.

I grew up in a small village. I always like to think how my village would look when theories like these would be applied.

Would my village be a happier, better place if the one or two families who already own most land used it as an leaverage to extort as much resources as they could from the others? Quite definitly not.

The idea here is that the individual cannot trust the group to consider their needs. This is not a theory it is a collective lifestyle choice. There are countries and regions where the opposite (people looking out for each other depending on their needs) works out just fine.

In German we speak of something called the Gesellschaftsvertrag — the implicit contract each individual has with society. It can be extremely enlighting think about whether someone subscribes to this contract and if not, why. E.g. someone who has been convicted for years of prison for a minor drug charge while bankers who steal billions go free, might just stop to believe it pays off to honor the rules of the contract. Someone who thinks everybody else is just a fool to extract money from probably even thinks of society as something with implicit rules.

However every human society, even societies with slavery, genocide, etc had these implicit rules of what a wealthy person was expected to provide, what a poor person was expected to endure. Break the contract on a large enough scale and you get a violent change of power or a revolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com