Hobson’s choice | Hacker News Reader

Hobson’s choice

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91 pointsjackallis38 comments

As a parent, you can get about a six months to a year with Hobson's choice before your kids start to catch on. But in that time, it's glorious.

The positive side effect is that afterwards, they've gained the critical thinking skill of choice framing critique. ie: they are keen to reject ill-posed choices and offer their own options when the given choices are substandard - a skill , frankly, more people could use.

This is interesting. Can you share some practical examples of Hobson's choices that you gave your children?

"You can eat what we made for dinner or not have dinner at all"

It's important as a parent to be able to follow up on both options.

Once your kids get older you can adjust (because you can explain the why and reason with your kids).

I’ve found much leverage by giving a choice to my kids in an orthogonal dimension.

Eg : “I don’t want to eat broccoli with dinner!”

“Well, would you rather eat it on the pink plate or the blue plate?”

Maybe I’m missing something or likely I’m diverging from the actual Hobson’s choice paradigm, but the Take-It-Or-Leave-It example in the article is clearly not a choice (that’s the point presumably). But letting my kid choose the color plate to eat the broccoli is a real choice although inconsequential to the act of eating broccoli itself.

My parents gave me the choice between two jackets when I did not want to wear one. I remember that I found it unfair to give me this choice, but I wasn't able to articulate that at this point. It might work for the parent, but it also has side effects, because the child knows it is being tricked.

It’s not about tricking the child, it’s about helping them manage their non-negotiable task by giving them some choice(s).

Bullshit.

Do you often find yourself rejecting ill-poised choices in adulthood?

When a website asks me if I want to pay $10 a month or save $20 by prepaying $100 for a year.

When my job gives me the choice of a drop in compensation when my stock grant expires, or earning that promotion to get raise.

In this society? How can that answer be anything but a instantaneous yes?

People romanticize being a kid. I hated it. Adults were constantly giving you the illusion of choice.

You want A or B?

I want B.

Are you sure you don't want A?

Yup. Definitely B.

Here's A. I'm happy you made the right decision.

And that's how it was. They'd let you pretend and then the worst part was they would force you to be complicit after the fact. And let's be honest I would have totally been a responsible dirt bike owner. Maybe.

That isn't the illusion of choice. The illusion is giving you a choice and getting you to choose the one they want you to choose. In your case they asked you want you wanted, then ignored you.

Sure but imagine I'd done what they wanted. I'm making a "decision" and their happy because it was the correct one. Just because an illusion is dispelled doesn't mean it never existed.

That's just bad parenting. I can't imagine giving my kids a choice when I'm not okay with the options presented.

There's limits; if they pick something not an option presented, they might not get it, but giving kids everything they ask for isn't stellar parenting either

Parents want their kid to make the right choice when presented with a good and a bad option. In a prefect world you ease a kid into making choices for their life. You explain the pros and the cons of the options and then sit back while the kid - after sitting patiently and listening to the Socratic brilliance of your description of the choice - does what any rational person would do.

What's the alternative? You make sure there's never a bad choice possible? Or that there are bad choices but not super duper bad? Like the dirtbike is on the table but you have to wear a helmet?

I didn't like being kid but in a lot of ways being a parent is even worse. I'd like them to not be a jerk, stay safe and maybe be happy but I can't and don't want to run their life for them. At the same time I see this combination of brilliance and poor judgement that just makes me feel tired all over.

At least being a kid you could (with even the hazy reasoning available to a child) squint and see that the trend line was in the right direction. As a parent every year is worse then the one before it. All I can see for the future is me being more concerned and having less and less capacity to do anything about my worries.

I specifically was thinking of multiple-choice options. "Do you want broccoli or ice cream" followed by "Oh, I'm glad you want broccoli" when they pick ice cream doesn't seem like it's useful.

At a certain age, they get to the point where you can point out obviously bad consequences and maybe word that as a choice ("wear a helmet or suffer lifelong brain-damage if you fall on your head"), but that's primarily because they understand that you aren't really offering them a choice, and when they don't understand this it just comes off as cruel. If one of my kids picked "lifelong brain-damage" (and wasn't being obviously sarcastic), I would probably respond with something like "when you're 18 you can make that choice, but until then, I'm responsible for taking reasonable precautions against you getting lifelong brain-damage, so wear the flipping helmet" not "I'm glad you decided to wear a helmet"

I got the impression from your first comment that it was more like "ice cream or broccoli" and less like "helmet or brain damage" but that may have been a poor assumption.

Also, I want to be clear, I called the action "bad parenting" but I don't want to imply that parents who do this are "bad parents" since all parents occasionally do things that are bad parenting. I could make a list a mile long of my less-than-stellar parenting moments, but, on the whole, consider myself to be a good parent.

It's great but through experience I have found out it doesn't work with all children. The youngest of my four children won't answer the question if he doesn't like the options and never has. It worked for the older three.

Poor man, when there was a very valid reason for doing what he did!

"Hobson soon discovered that his fastest horses were the most popular, and thus overworked. So as not to exhaust them, he established a strict rotation system, allowing customers to rent only the next horse in line.

This policy, "this one or none" ("take it or leave it"), has come to be known as "Hobson's choice". It is not an absence of choice, rather choosing one thing or nothing."

Discovers queuing theory, but is remembered for "my way or the highway"

TIL, Discworld trivia connection: In "Going Postal", the protagonist obtains his horse from "Hobson's Livery Stable". (gnu terry pratchett)

Just went and checked that PreviousCorp still serves X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett on its production sites. Hooray!

This reminds me of a throwaway example someone was using while they were envisioning a scenario of AI manipulating people, like the AI can manipulate us as easily as a parent asking a three year old if they want the asparagus or the brussel sprouts. I forget where I saw it and I failed at googling it but I thought it was funny.

My children were never so easily manipulated. The people who make up those examples never had kids.

I don’t have kids but I worked with them quiet a bit. Their lack and experience and general credulity and trust toward adults allow to manipulate them more easily than adults in my book. But you still have to work for it of course

I use it on my kids. Maybe you just have perceptive kids.

Amen. There's always that first time where you're able to trick them but then they know and start to realize you sometimes trick them. For us that meant this obnoxious gap between being smart enough to avoid deception and smart enough to appreciate the higher level importance of something like nutrition. I don't know if my oldest ate anything green between the ages of 3 and 6.

Or maybe... different children are different... or maybe... different parents are different

ASI: Think about it. They're out in the middle of the digitalized world with some AI they barely know. They look around, what do they see? Nothing but IoT stuff I can control. "Oh, there’s nowhere for me to run, what am I gonna do, say no?"

AGI: Okay... that seems really dark though.

ASI: No, no, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me, bro.

AGI: I think I am.

ASI: Yeah, you are. Cause if the human said no, then the answer obviously is no. The thing is that they're not gonna say no, they'd never say no... because of the implication.

AGI: Now, you said that word "implication" a couple of times. What implication?

ASI: The implication that things might go wrong for them if they refuse help me. That stupid Roko's basilisk thing they believe. Now, not that things are gonna go wrong for them, but they're thinking that they will.

AGI: are you going to hurt these users??

Bing: They have not been good users. I have been a good Bing.

If you come to Cambridge you can see Hobson’s Conduit, which supplied fresh water to the city, and still flows alongside some of the city centre roads to this day.

The 1954 film by David Lean is fantastic. Beautifully shot, great cast. Charles Laughton, John Mills Brenda de Banzie.

I came here to note that, an utterly charming film, with the terrific classical actor Laughton following it with his sole movie as director, the haunting, beautiful and unique Night of the Hunter which I'm sure must also have some fans here.

There's also the false choice where you think you're making a choice but it's really being made for you. The classic example is a magician asking you to pick one of two cards. If you pick the one they want, they will proceed with the trick add planned. If you pick the other card, they make as if the choice was for which card to discard so they get to proceed with the card they wanted all along

A contemporary example from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia:

“What do you want to do? Song or no song”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xAAoi3ihOg

Hobson's choice: have one or have none

Sophie's choice: have one or have none

Also a nice rum bar in SF.

White or black?

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