Reasonable Person Principle | Hacker News Reader

Reasonable Person Principle

cs.cmu.edu

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Caltech's Honor Code is simply:

"No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community."

- https://deans.caltech.edu/HonorCode

> "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community."

That's great, but I wonder why not just:

> "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other person."

If you insist on following an honor code while competing against people who are ready to take an unfair advantage of you, you lose.

> If you insist on following an honor code while competing against people who are ready to take an unfair advantage of you, you lose.

"Unfair" is in there. If you are competing against a person who will pull out all the stops against you, then there is nothing unfair about pulling out all the stops against them.

So, tit-for-tat?

> So, tit-for-tat?

That's a reasonable reading, but I think that there is a difference between competition and punishment. In the heat of the competition, I think I am comfortable with the idea that it is permissible to meet the fierceness of your competitor with equal ferocity. If afterwards someone is found to have exceeded their remit and punishment needs to be dealt, then I think that should be governed by a separate ethical principle.

War crimes have entered the chat.

> War crimes have entered the chat.

Good point, but I believe war crimes mainly come when you substitute ‘a people’ for ‘a person’ in:

> "Unfair" is in there. If you are competing against a person who will pull out all the stops against you, then there is nothing unfair about pulling out all the stops against them.

But I did specifically mean a person, just one. (I also was envisioning, like, struggling for top spot in a class, not struggling to take San Juan Hill. But I'm not immediately sure I can sign on to an ethical principle that says that you are not entitled to respond to one specific competitor with as much fierceness as they bring to the competition, even when that competition becomes deadly.)

All good points. So how about the shifting alliances and goals of Squid Game ?

> So how about the shifting alliances and goals of Squid Game ?

I couldn't comment, since I haven't seen it, but I think the mandate of fairness makes sense even in the presence of shifting goals, and probably governs the extent to which it's reasonable to switch alliances.

So nothing would change since some Caltech members are also ready

How dare you suggest that?

Perhaps the reason we have tribalism is because Ethics Doesn't Scale.

Does this cover e.g. helping people in another class cheat?

Yes. At Caltech, you'd be socially ostracized by your friends if people knew you were cheating, or helping another person cheat.

That wasn't really my question. I was asking if the person helping other people in another class cheat would be violating the honor code. Not whether your friends would ostracize you if they find out you're cheating.

If you can't see that "helping other people in another class cheat" is violating the honour code then you might benefit from taking the time to do so.

> Failure to realize the consequences of a course of action does not justify it.

https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/24878/Honor_Code_Handboo...

> If you can't see that "helping other people in another class cheat" is violating the honour code then you might benefit from taking the time to do so.

I did, and I didn't see how. If Alice is helping Bob cheat, Bob is the one taking unfair advantage of others, not Alice. For all you know, Alice could be offering to help everyone cheat.

It's not like I'm saying something outlandish here. There's a reason most places have specific rules prohibiting assisting others with their violation. Even MIT goes out of its way to specifically call out "Facilitating Academic Dishonesty". [1]

[1] https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/academic-integrity-mit/wh...

Alice is taking a small unfair advantage of every member of the community at once. A community and its practices is a form of commons shared by the members, so it's vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. If one member acts in a way that deliberately goes against the trust, that's inherently unfair to the rest of the members because it tends to push everything toward a breaking point. If her goal depends on the community's existence or function (which if it doesn't, why is she even around?), then whatever her goal, Alice has gone after it in a way that takes unfair advantage of everyone else's commitment to the system. Even if Alice's action doesn't cause a final breakdown, she's moved things in the wrong direction for her own purposes.

> Alice is taking a small unfair advantage of every member of the community at once.

Interesting take, I like it; thanks! Let me mull over it a bit... it's making me wonder whether the existence of any personal benefits (by Alice) are a necessary component of a violation.

This is from a time before CoCs. The part about resolving conflicts with as few resources as possible, as close to the source as possible, seems to be a truism about well functioning (social) systems; really: systems in general.

While we're talking about governance problems. This stuck out to me as evidence of a misunderstanding.

> It holds that reasonable people strike a suitable balance between their own immediate desires and the good of the community at large.

This is just a poor model of how people work; it's important to have a good one if you are designing governance structures. People cater to the greater good only as a means to fulfilling their own selfish desires. Systems that wish this away instead of embracing it are doomed to failure. The system has to put the good of others on the critical path to selfish desires.

Sounds like something that an unreasonable person would say.

Personally, I question the need for CoCs. It seemed they simply started appearing everywhere one day as if following some sort of trend.

People organize together everyday in numerous different professional, community and private settings…with no need for a special set of governing rules for behavior.

The main purpose of a CoC is to point to it when you want to ban someone. It's an accountability sink - instead of saying you want to ban someone, you say you have to ban them because they violated the written rules. The rules, of course, must be written vaguely enough that anyone you might want to ban is violating at least one. It's okay if people you don't want to ban also violate them, because you won't bring it up.

It can also be used as an accountability sink in cases where someone clearly should be banned but you don't have enough courage to say you are banning them because you think they should be. In this case you can also point to the rules. However, if the person who should be banned is sneaky enough, he didn't break any of them. You ban him anyway.

Best use of the term accountability sink I’ve seen out in the wild.

As is the case of most abrupt social changes with no seeming environmental impetus - someone aggressive and powerful found a means of exerting their influence to push their desired social change. And so they did with CoCs.

It may be that someone aggressive who wanted to be powerful found a means of gaining influence through latching onto and pushing a pointless but sellable social change. It's a kind of slow-moving elite on elite violence.

CoCs arose because of endemic abuses that were not organically curbed, sadly.

Not sure one should believe that - everyone with even mild experience of public spaces knows that at the end of the day rules are enforced by people. Doesn't matter if you pour a few liters of woke over the system, it's still the same system.

I'm ready to believe in a conspiracy theory around codes of conduct, actually.

Making unspoken rules public saves everyone time and heartache.

Except perhaps where there are too many contrarians, folks looking for a problem, authors who are being intentionally vague, or acts of malicious compliance.

And yet in real life it looks like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-isl...

A member of the Somalian community instrumentalizing anti-black and anti-Muslim feelings to boost the standing of his own group, and the Code of Conduct fails to protect academic freedom. Well done!

Congrats on finding an exception? Would it have been easier to diagnose if such rules were unwritten?

I still prefer communities that document their rules and expectations over those that don't.

With many people who would be at risk for an enforcement action, odds are they will complain mightily whether the rules are implicit or explicit. It’s not that the rules are codified or not, it’s rules of any kind being applied to them that they find objectionable.

This isn’t universal as some people may be grateful if you approach them tactfully and let them know that others are having difficulty with them, as they may not have realized.

To be frank if someone has driven others away I feel an obligation to to the rest of the group not to shrink from addressing the matter. People whose participation is a net negative because other valued participants flee from them shouldn’t get endless opportunities to make others miserable.

They arose as a way to make it easier to kick people out because you don't feel you have to take accountability for the decision. If the one making the decision is strong (emotionally) they don't need a CoC to kick someone out. Linus can kick the bcachefs developer out of the kernel simply because he wants to. Heck, when he banned all those Russian developers for presumably valid legal reasons, he still wouldn't say the reasons.

" People cater to the greater good only as a means to fulfilling their own selfish desires."

How does this statement account for inclusive fitness?

> This is just a poor model of how people work; it's important to have a good one if you are designing governance structures.

This is prescriptive, not descriptive. It's not trying to be a model of how people work.

Nothing about this document tries to claim that being reasonable comes naturally.

You don’t think people ever do the right thing just because it’s the right thing?

> ever

That bar is way too low.

I agree with you, the earlier post says people only do things out of self-interest, and I was surprised that nobody else had disagreed or mentioned it’s an unfortunate way to see the world.

I think that mindset is held by most people, most of the time. But not all people at all times. If you're in that mindset, however, the mindset itself may taint your perception of how often others are in the same mindset, which I suspect (hope?) may be the case for the person who wrote the original statement. I suspect (hope?) that person has done at least one selfless ethical/nice/kind thing at some point in their lifetime.

This is akin to subsidiarity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

I like how they've written down key tenets of their "unwritten culture", including a quote from someone who refers to it as such.

The RPP isn’t a governance structure. It’s a statement that the vast majority of activities and interactions shouldn’t require escalating to a governance structure, because people should first be reasonable.

CMU of course has a governance structure (advisors, department heads, honor committees, I don’t even know what all, probably ten times more nowadays than when I was there in the 80s). But the idea is not to need it.

I wish more code of conducts were written like this.

No no, we must make endless lists of specific behaviors we want and don't want.

immibis explains why that is better in one of the comment threads above:

> The main purpose of a CoC is to point to it when you want to ban someone. It's an accountability sink - instead of saying you want to ban someone, you say you have to ban them because they violated the written rules.

That reminds me of some parenting advice I saw once: Sometimes we do children a disservice when we pretend that some Mysterious Universal Force demands a certain outcome, as if we (the parent) had no agency in setting things up that way or acting as an enforcement-arm.

While refusing to own "because I don't want you do" saves argument in the short term, it may burden them with certain habits of thought that aren't so useful in adulthood.

You completely missed that u/immibis was being sardonic.

Not at all. That's exactly how CoCs are used in practice. Have you ever witnessed a CoC-related dispute?

If you're going to be arbitrary then you might as well not use a detailed CoC. Pretending to not be arbitrary when you are being arbitrary just makes you phony and lame.

If you are overtly arbitrary, people will tell you not to be arbitrary.

Your deadpan delivery is really quite good.

Badness must be enumerated.

First enumerated mode of badness: Failure to enumerate badness

I interpret this as an emphasis on value alignment. In any cooperative context, if we want to advance our goals further, we should carefully consider each participant's needs and find ways to align these needs with the direction of our objective, thus making it a 'common' goal.

Seems very reasonable.

I'm curious how these two work together:

> Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable.

> Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable.

To me this is something like "assume good faith" but also "others may accuse you of acting in good faith"?

Came here with the hope of better understanding how a "reasonable person" is defined and interpreted in legal terms. It's always bothered me that legislation reaches for this "reasonable person" in some enlightened attempt to assume that there is a coherent and uniform definition and interpretation for this.

This post didn't help me.

I think the standard "it depends" applies here too... as always.

Now add a few unreasonable people to the mix, and see what happens to your cultural norms.

This is the most important part: don't

Why would you want to do that

You thought they were reasonable.

A bracing introduction to the Paradox of Tolerance!

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