Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway295729 | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t knowing something and then pretending you don’t a form of manipulation? I’m not trying to be snarky, this is a genuine question. Ie, I can understand the strategical advantage this could provide, but struggling to see it from a moral perspective.

View on HN

I guess it depends on the situation ... if you are avoiding lengthy discussions with bank tellers about how you can "just do this yourself" when they are getting paid to, in part, provide this service; seems fine.

If you are doing this so that your co-workers end up having to do parts of your job ... maybe it's not a good thing.

Paying someone to fill out taxes is an example of this, so is using a financial advisor to plan a retirement portfolio.

Heck I wanted to replace a dozen light switches awhile back. Could I do it myself? Sure. Did I pay someone else to do it? Yes.

Are you trying to be 'technically correct' here? :)

If I paid someone to replace my light switches for me I don't think that would be pretending I don't understand how to do it, I'm just recognizing that it's a LOT of work and I have better things I'd rather do with my time, so I'm buying someone else's time with money. And I really get that now, as a few weeks ago I spent like 4 hours just replacing a half dozen lightswitches, while a professional probably would've had it done in under an hour.

I don't go up to an electrician and say "hey I could totally do this but you do it instead."

Instead I hand them a big box of switches.

Why would anyone go up to an electrician and say that? Paying them money, at the very least, conveys "I don't want to learn how to do this or spend time doing this."

What point are you trying to make exactly? Paying someone for services has absolutely nothing to do with manipulation or deception.

Did you lie to them in the process? The story is not just about having someone else do the work that you could do, it is about lying to them to get them to do it instead of teaching you. Ie. just asking for the fish when they want to teach you how to fish.

I disagree. My paying someone else to do something that I don't care to is simple arbitrage: I value both having a new outlet for charging my car and the time I'd spend installing one more than the electrician values the time they'd spend installing it.

I don't have to pretend to be an idiot for this transaction to be efficient. Learned helplessness is a manipulation technique used to fudge the numbers when the value gap is very small: by adding the good feeling of helping someone in need to the mark's side, you create an efficiency where none existed.

Interesting topic. I think it depends on intent. Whats presented in the article i personally see morally problematic as you pretend to be dumb with the intent to not have to bear some load, relying on the goodwill of others, disregarding the value of their lifetime.

However, if you hide a feature you have in order to not be solely judged by it, its more difficult. I.e. a prince hiding his lineage or an artist hiding his craft.

A good measure is probably, to ask yourself if the other would feel betrayed if you told the truth.

Yes, misleading other people to avoid having to do work you dislike is manipulation.

The given example (going to the bank teller instead of learning to use the ATM) is a weird one because the bank teller is much slower and requires more cognitive load than using the ATM.

I suspect the ATM example was given because the bank teller isn't losing anything by dealing with a customer. It's their job and they're on the clock anyway. In practice, people who use the "stupid by choice" strategy are usually dodging tasks at work or getting other people to do things for them, in which case the other party is actively losing time and energy.

It's manipulative and dishonest, despite the arbitrary (and nonsensical, tbh) example going to a bank teller instead of learning to use an ATM.

In a consumer context it seems pretty harmless compared to the manipulation by design of the profit driven side in B2C or even B2B transactions. I thought the article was going to go toward the political tactic, which is highly unethical and requires a response of not tolerating any stupidity to penalize the fakers.

In my opinion, yes.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaponized_incompetence

You say that like "manipulation" is a bad thing.

Yes? If you manipulate me you destroy my trust in you fairly permanently. Trust is critically valuable in our society.

Can you please give some examples where deceptive manipulation is considered a good/moral thing?

I agreed with you (see my comment I wrote before I saw yours). I’m hoping there is some thought put in on when this particular approach is used. I had a boss who asked for detailed docs and said he needed it to include pictures. He did not really need the pictures but it was very useful when communicating. Was it slightly deceitful? Yes. But it was also quite useful.

> He did not really need the pictures but it was very useful when communicating

"Need" is a pretty amorphous word. He may not have needed pictures to understand the docs at all, but he could be said to have needed pictures to understand the docs in the timeframe he had available. Calling it deceitful feels untrue to me. I would only say it's deceitful if the intended use of the pictures was something other than understanding, like he wanted to steal them for another purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com