What Thomas Schelling would do. Partly tongue-in-cheek.
The Clumsy Game-Player: agree to the deal, then perform an identical "finger slip" several turns later.
The Lazy Student, The Grieving Student, The Sports Fan: make the deadline for reports a curve instead of a cliff. Each day of delay costs some percentage of the grade.
The Murderous Husband: if you really don't want these things to happen, make the wife partially responsible for the murder in such cases, by law. (Or the lover, if the husband chooses to murder the wife.)
The Bellicose Dictator: publicly threaten sanctions unless the invading army withdraws immediately. Do this before any negotiations.
The Peyote-Popping Native, The Well-Disguised Atheist: when the native first comes to you, offer to balance out the permission to smoke peyote with some sanction against the Native American church. Then the atheists won't bother asking for a free lunch.
make the deadline for reports a curve instead of a cliff. Each day of delay costs some percentage of the grade.
We had this system for my second year physics project at university. I hadn't started it when the deadline arrived and decided the penalty rate was too steep to bother starting when the deadline passed. Several weeks later I was summoned to explain why I hadn't handed the project in and I explained that it hadn't seemed worth starting given how little it would be worth by the time I finished it (by this point the penalty had long since reduced the potential grade to ~0). They told me if I completed it before the end of term they wouldn't apply the penalty
Perhaps, but my problem was more that I mistook a theoretical interest in physics for an interest in theoretical physics.
The Lazy Student, The Grieving Student, The Sports Fan: make the deadline for reports a curve instead of a cliff. Each day of delay costs some percentage of the grade.
I've always liked the "drop the n lowest scores" strategy. For example, 10 assignments given with the lowest 2 scores ignored.
You are pre-committing to a set of rules, where any excuse would have a much lower probability of being true. Any excuse would need to include 3 excuses. Combining the probabilities of each of the excuses will likely bring the total under your acceptable threshold. Basically, it's lowering the likelihood that you will want to violate the rules.
You can also look at like this. Your model of people predicts that they are scoundrels, and will try to violate the rules, maximizing their utility at your expense. So build a system where procrastinators can maximize their utility at no expense to you.
Yeah, that might work if the teacher has a poor command of English. (Schelling refers to this negotiation tactic as "turning off your hearing aid".) Even better would be to announce that you will leave town immediately after the final date. But I still like my solution best.
I precommit to acting as if I had made any precommittment I find myself wishing I had made. If I make this clear before iterated prisoners' dilemma, a rational partner would not try the "finger slipped" excuse against me, because I would wish that I had precommitted to punishing defection due to finger slipping.
I would still allow the grieving student to turn in the paper late, because in that situation, I do not wish I had precommitted to rejecting that excuse.
Hopefully, of course, everybody involved will intuitively understand what sorts of things you are likely to "wish [you] had precommitted to".
Sounds like a weak precomittment. Schelling includes the theory of excuses in his work, and they are a key part of bargaining, since pre-commitments that can be averted without appearing to weaken the bargainer's position will be.
IOW, once a breach has been made it will be in both parties' interests not to have the threat carried out, and any "wiggle room" in the precommitment will be exploited. Because of this, bargainers are well-advised to make the circumstances that will trigger their threat as unambiguous and externally verifiable as possible.
I don't see any way to do this with your model precommitment, unless the agent(s) you're bargaining with and any third parties observing have access to your source code.
IOW....
If typing an abbreviation saves you less than 10 keystrokes, but increases the time taken to parse your post by at least 30 seconds for at least one reader, it almost certainly isn't socially optimal to use it (although I did get the pleasure of an 'aha' moment when I finally figured out what 'IOW' was supposed to mean).
You both managed to have this discussion without actually saying that IOW should be parsed as "In other words." This was sub optimal as it forced me to google it myself. Hopefully this post will provide utility to future readers.
1
It can be weak on its own, if I am not predictable. But if I combine it with more specific precomittments, then other agents who plan to exploit a one time excuse, where part of convincing me not to carry through the threat, is that I can precommit never to allow that excuse again, can predict that I will wish I had precommitted from the beginning to never allow that excuse at all, and therefore act as if I had made that precommittment, and still cary through the punishment, so they should not provoke the punishment planning to offer that excuse.
This greatly strengthens any specific precommittment I make, by preventing the exploitation of one time excuses. If an agent wants to offer me an excuse, they will need to be able to convince me that I should always allow that excuse.
In the grieving student example, I am willing to allow the excuse for the same reasons that I am willing to explicitly ammend the precommittment to allow an exception in those circumstances.
The Music Fan
A month before the paper was assigned a student was talking with their professor and mentioned that the punk band "The Exemplars" was their favorite band and that they would do anything to see them live but that they almost never perform. The day after the paper was due the student comes in and says "I'm sorry I didn't get the paper in on time, professor, but you won't believe what happened. The Exemplars, that band I told you about held a one-time-only surprise concert downtown yesterday and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to attend. It is true that my excuse isn't traditionally considered a good one like that of the grieving student, but months ago I signaled to you quite clearly that an Exemplars concert would be the kind of thing that would lead me to turn a paper in late. You excused the grieving student because it is assumed in our culture that a death of a family member will give someone reason not to write a paper. But though we don't assume most people will not write a paper because of a concert you could have predicted an Exemplars concert would cause me not to write the paper. This excuse won't be used often by other students since to be successful one has to indicate a stance that would cause them to not write the paper under certain circumstances and then hope those circumstances arise."
If I were a teacher, I'd ideally allow this (and the sports fan too, for that matter, if I knew he was a big enough fan).
There's no problem in the ideal form, but I would anticipate a lot of problems in real life - other students not understanding exactly how much this person loved the Exemplars and misinterpreting it as "You get an exemption for going to a rock concert", other students trying to convince you they like [thing X] just as much as this guy liked the Exemplars and you having to judge lots of difficult cases to see if their fandom is truly as great as this guy's is and inevitably getting some of them wrong.
If I really knew what to do, this post would have been titled "Eight Short Studies On Excuses, Plus The Answers To Them"
You know, most of these problems can be avoided if you accept assignments late and have most of the course grade depend on one or more large individual projects that must be turned in "sometime before the end of the semester". The simplifying assumption is that a student who doesn't try to learn anything deserves to remain ignorant -- it's nice how neatly this works out.
I give my students a recommended due date, but allow them to turn in any assignment at any time before Finals Week without penalty, for any reason. It works better than you might think.
(I wish that I was allowed to insist that everybody do an individual project. There is so much cheating it's a bit ridiculous, and the worst part is that the students who cheat are just good enough at covering their tracks that I can't find absolutely definitive evidence. This is especially common among Chinese students, for some reason. Again, I figure that if people harm their own learning by cheating on assignments, then their actions are self-punishing.)
In "Predictably Irrational", they mention a study (don't have the book with me, can't be more specific) where a teacher assigns three projects, due at various points throughout the year. The students do relatively well.
In another class the same teacher assigns three projects which can be turned in whenever the students want. The students in this class do quite a bit worse than the first students because they're procrastinating and do all three projects the last week.
In yet another condition, students are allowed to turn in projects at any time during the year, but they're also allowed to voluntarily pre-commit to a due date at the beginning of the year (they fail the project if they don't have it in by their own due date). In this condition, the students who pre-committed did as well as the students in the first class, and the students who didn't pre-commit did as poorly as the students in the second class.
Based on that study, I predict your students would do better if you gave them assigned due dates.
I do give them assigned due dates, actually; I just make it clear to everyone that I'll accept arbitrarily late work without penalty. I make a show of collecting papers on the date they're due. About 80--90% of the students turn in their work on the due date.
Adding to the incentive scheme here is the fact that the classwork builds on earlier work, so if they just procrastinate for a few weeks, they'll be in a pretty dire situation. If they have to go see a funeral or a concert, or they've been really busy some week with exams or a big project for another class, or whatever, then my method gives them enough flexibility for that, but the great majority of people do not procrastinate the way you might predict.
I guess you could call this system "obviously fictitious due dates". Everybody knows that the due dates are made of handwaving and rainbows, but that doesn't make them much less effective. And this way I don't have to listen to any damn excuses, and my students don't have to think of any; I just smile and recommend catching up before next week.
About 80--90% of the students turn in their work on the due date.
Of the 10-20% who do not turn in their work on the due date, how many eventually turn it in, and how does their quality of work compare to those who turned it in "on time"?
It would be interesting to see a repeat of the experiment Yvain mentions, with another class added using your "obviously fictitious due dates".
Of the 10-20% who do not turn in their work on the due date, how many eventually turn it in, and how does their quality of work compare to those who turned it in "on time"?
I would say, about 2/3 of the people who miss the due date turn in their work a little late. Of those who don't, a handful will turn in a batch of late papers at the end of the semester, which is a pain in the ass, but at least they did it. And then there are the people who just give up on the class but don't actually drop it. They make up the bulk of the people who don't turn in their work ever.
The quality of the late papers is, on average, lower than the quality of the on-time papers. This makes sense; the more diligent students would tend to do better work and get it in on time.
It would be interesting to see a repeat of the experiment Yvain mentions, with another class added using your "obviously fictitious due dates".
One confounding factor is that the study Yvain mentioned has only three assignments, whereas I have a larger number that are due more frequently. I suspect that my method might not work quite as well with a smaller number of assignments.
The quality of the late papers is, on average, lower than the quality of the on-time papers. This makes sense; the more diligent students would tend to do better work and get it in on time.
Do you have a method for disentangling any negative bias you might have towards late papers (because they are 'a pain in the ass') from your quality judgements? I imagine the degree to which completely objective quality measurements are possible is a function of what subject you are teaching.
I hadn't thought of that, but it turns out that yes, I do! I handle the grading in two phases; in phase one I assign grades, and in phase two I enter them into the grade book. The pain-in-the-ass aspect comes mostly in phase two. I don't really mind grading late papers; it's dealing with the school's broken-ass computer system, Blackboard, that is really aggravating when I'm entering late grades. Or any grades, really, but late grades are worse.
Therefore the grades I assign should be fairly disentangled from any annoyance I may feel later in phase two.
(By the way, nice job thinking up that criticism. The ability to habitually see possible cognitive bias in everyday life is important, and needs to be lauded more.)
(Also, if you happen to be an educational institution, never use Blackboard. It's the worst thing since BonziBuddy.)
I should be more clear about what I'm saying. There's a certain level of evidence needed to prove cheating to The Authorities so that it can be dealt with through the official academic honesty processes of the university. That's a hard standard to meet, since in this sort of thing you really don't want false positives. However, I can be almost certain about most instances of cheating, and that's enough to get a solid idea of how much is going on and who's doing it most.
I have plenty of evidence, of course, just not enough to convict anybody of academic dishonesty. Except the guy whose idea of "writing a report" was to copy and paste from Wikipedia and hope I didn't notice. That was weird.
I have plenty of evidence, of course, just not enough to convict anybody of academic dishonesty. Except the guy whose idea of "writing a report" was to copy and paste from Wikipedia and hope I didn't notice. That was weird.
I need to share this anecdote now... a friend of mine who shall remain nameless was teaching a history class and asked for papers on the War of 1812. One student copied the entry from Uncyclopedia. And showed no signs of it having been a joke. And didn't understand what she did wrong after it was explained.
The paper explained how one of the major powers in the war was Antarctica, and dolphins carrying bombs helped the United States defend against killer penguins. So yeah.
One day the classified files will be released, and you'll be really sorry for having trivialized this theater of the war >:-(
Let's see if I can list a few heuristics for cheating:
Mismatch between the writing style in different parts of the paper. If some paragraphs are poorly-punctuated and ungrammatical, and other parts are written in very formal academic language, that's a sign that the paper may have been made by copying and pasting from other people's writings, then filling in the cracks with their own writing.
Formal academic language is a very weak warning sign. It means you should try typing some statistically unlikely phrases into Google, just in case.
Sometimes people who are asked to summarize some assigned reading will do so by copying and pasting directly from it, and changing a bit of the wording around. This is pretty easy to detect if you've read it recently as well.
If a completely incompetent student suddenly turns in top quality answers, it's unlikely that this is due to him just getting his act together.
I have no idea why your teacher thought you copied a paper for your economics class, but those are some heuristics that I've learned.
..."Mahmud Karim, of the Dadolzai lineage, was enraged to learn that a member of a "brother" lineage, the Kamil Hanzai, had carried off the palm trunks he'd prepared to roof his temporary mud-brick dwelling during the seasonal date harvest. Karim quickly mobilized a war party from among his Dadolzai lineage mates (including a few allies from closely related lineages) to retrieve the trunks--by fighting the Kamil Hanzai, if necessary.
But why hadn't Karim first simply walked over to the Kamil Hanzai and tried to clear the matter up? Indeed, it was later discovered that the palm trunks had been taken by mistake. Why risk a battle without first making a reasonable effort to talk the problem out? That sort of question is liable to be posed by someone living where a state monopolizes the legitimate use of force, and police and courts can therefore be relied upon to keep the peace. In a nonstate setting, where anarchy is kept under control only by the threat or use of force, it often makes sense to send a war party first and ask questions later.
A lone emissary from the Dadolzai making an inquiry or offering to negotiate a settlement would have conveyed an impression of weakne
The murderous husband would traditionally have received a reduced sentence in common law jurisdictions, since such a killing would not have been considered murder but rather manslaughter committed in the sudden heat of passion as the result of adequate provocation. A husband’s killing his wife’s lover upon discovering them together is one of the paradigm examples of this sort of manslaughter. (If the husband does not immediately kill the lover, but instead leaves and then kills him at another time, the killing would then be murder because it was not committed in the sudden heat of passion; or if the husband only finds out about the adultery, but does not actually witness it, it would not be considered adequate provocation.)
That is, the law has already pre-committed to the reduced sentence in this peculiar class of cases. At least this is true traditionally; I believe that in at least some jurisdictions, this principle may have eroded somewhat or been changed by statute.
I'm not just relying on my memories from my own crim law class in law school; I pulled out one of my old textbooks to check myself in writing the comment. "Under common law, an intentional homicide committed in 'sudden heat of passion' as the result of 'adequate provocation' mitigates the offense to voluntary manslaughter." Joshua Dressler, Understanding Criminal Law (1995). The book goes on to discuss the specific case of the murderous husband.
I believe my account is accurate with respect to the common law, although possibly not with respect to the current state of the law in all common law jurisdictions. Hence the caveats about the law possibly having been changed by statute or otherwise.
"Like all economics professors, I have no soul, and so am unable to sympathize with your loss."
Relatable. One time my friend was out with his roommate when the roommate got hit by a car, and my friend took him to the hospital and stayed with him all night. He came to his economics professor the next day having gotten absolutely no sleep and asked if he could take the midterm (scheduled for that day) a different day. The professor responded that he would only allow it if my friend paid his $500/hour consulting fee for drawing up and proctoring a new exam. My friend took the midterm as scheduled.
Parfit's Implausible Hero
Omega is crusing through the desert in its dunebuggy and sees a poor, hapless victim dying. It offers to drive him [1] back to the city, but only if he pays it $100 after getting there and stabilized. He says yes, and Omega scans him, looking for any sign of deception, and all it finds is that the victim intends, under all circumstances his mind can conceive of, to honor the agreement. So Omega takes him back.
One in town, he runs off to withdraw the money. Then he comes back a few minutes later and says, "Sorry, I was going to withdraw the money for you -- really, I was -- but an emergency came up. See, this guy took children hostage and ..."
"Oh no! No, no, don't tell me you gave him the money! That just rewards that kind of thing!"
"Please Omega, give me a little credit. I didn't give him anything, except a bullet. I quickly emptied my account to buy a sniper rifle and killed him, saving the children. So, I don't have your money, but really, I didn't expect I'd have to save children."
"Then give me the expensive rifle you bought and we'll call it even!"
"Well, that's the thing ... after the shot, when I p...
Do the rescued children have parents? Would said parents be willing to pool their resources and pay a hostage-rescuer at least $100 plus expenses, in order to encourage proactive rescuing of children in the future? Situations like this come up in Hayate no Gotoku on a weekly basis.
I don't see any dilemma, and I don't see that it matters whether the rescuer is Omega or some random passerby. Is the victim claiming that because he can't pay immediately, he doesn't owe anything?
It seems obvious that the agreement was to pay $100, and the victim's agreement to do so doesn't go away due to circumstances, it just gets delayed until the victim is able to comply.
Also, both the victim and Omega are idiots if their combined minds can conceive of no circumstance in which the victim does not HAVE $100 back in town, and special idiots if they failed to conceive of the circumstance that actually occurs.
OK, unusual and even inconceivable events can occur, and I'll give up the "special idiots" clause. However, it remains ludicrous for neither omega nor the victim to have considered any possibility that the victim's $100 in the bank would be unavailable for some reason.
The agreement as stated was "pay $100 after getting to the city and stabilized" It was not "pay the $100 currently in the account if you can and nothing otherwise". Omega is smart enough to phrase the offer as intended.
Typos:
These paragraphs
You say "Like all economics professors [....] I can't grant you an extension.
A third student comes to you [....] the one whose mother died.
should end in quotation marks.
In this sentence
"The student who was here before me, that's different.
"me" should be "you".
This paragraph
You respond "Although my policies [....] sufficient justification for almost anyone breaking any law.
should end in a (double) quotation mark and most of the quotation marks in it are nested so should be single.
(Upvoted, by the way.)
You missed the "they enjoys" one. You're fired as official Less Wrong proofreader. (just kidding, thanks for the corrections)
Luckily, we can make a credible story that we were following international law...
Credible, to whom? Implausible deniability is an interesting phenomenon. Everyone knows it's a lie, but we all say the lie to each other, and pretend it is not.
It seems more true (lesswrong?) that laws are for those without power, while those with power act according to interest, making up implausible denials when they want to pretend that laws are for everyone. The need for implausible denials places some small pressure on the powerful to act consistently, but not much.
If the powerful don't feel it is in their interests to protect West Examplestan, they won't. East Examplestan will tailor it's action to allow some implausible excuse, those with power will take it, and the lie of law lives on.
For the Peyote example, the powerful don't really care if a limited number of people can take drugs, while the religious certainly do care to protect religious exemptions. If there were only 10 religious people in the country, probably Peyote gets banned and we're done with it.
"Existing a long time" is just an excuse, one of many possible, and again, one that literally privileges vested interests - ...
In the first example, you should just continue playing tit-for-tat, if the other player truly "slipped" and knows you are playing tit-for-tat, he won't defect after you defect, he will continue cooperating and make you cooperate.
The whole notion of pre-commiting to a strategy is to remove the human elements like "negociation" and "excuses". You are a machine and you play accordingly. If the other player is rational, he will cooperate even after he slipped and you defected.
Suppose you are committed to tit-for-tat, and so is your partner, then if his finger truly slipped, he will defect after you defect, because his commitment doesn't include an exception for being punished for his own finger slipping (just like your commitment doesn't include an exception for his finger slipping).
The outcome to the story given by Yvain does seem wrong to me, and two actual human players would probably produce the outcome you (and Dagon) give: you defect once, and your partner keeps cooperating, to "make up" for the slipped finger. But this seems to have more to do with fairness than with commitment.
But this seems to have more to do with fairness than with commitment.
Fairness? More like easy, common sense. You play tit for tat, opponent defects, you defect. If opponent keeps on defecting, you defect too. Simple winning strategy for you, to which you should absolutely precommit to.
Your opponent, knowing your precommitment, can't really do much. Strategically speaking, he's the one to act, as your precommitment to tit-for-tat works kinda like removing your steering wheel in a game of chicken, making you indifferent and unable to stop. He can crash you just as many times as he wants to, but the choice is always left to him.
And why it is his? Because you're precommitted to a strategy, but he, by defecting, he either strayed from his precommitted one, or revealed that he didn't have any to begin with. Now that he doesn't play pure tit-for-tat, his second best choice would be co-operating twice and continuing with tit-for-tat. To him, strategy "play tit-for-tat, defect once, continue with tit-for-tat" is quite far from optimal.
Human instinct and social conventions already solve the "clumsy defector" problem. The clumsy defector is required to sacrifice any benefit he gained from the defection. Usually this is through the small-loss-of-status of publicly acknowledging their error. But in the game, they must cooperate while you defect.
This restores trust and removes any incentive for the clumsy-defector to do what they did. If they refuse to accept this, then they aren't actually seeking to form a mutually-beneficial cooperative relationship anyway, and thus they must be punished by defection unless or until they accept the penalty by cooperating while receiving a defection in return.
The Clumsy Game-Player
You and a partner are playing an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Both of you have publicly pre-committed to the tit-for-tat strategy. By iteration 5, you're going happily along, raking up the bonuses of cooperation, when your partner unexpectedly presses the "defect" button.
"Uh, sorry," says your partner. "My finger slipped."
"I still have to punish you just in case," you say. "I'm going to defect next turn, and we'll see how you like it."
"Well," said your partner, "knowing that, I guess I'll defect next turn too, and we'll both lose out. But hey, it was just a slipped finger. By not trusting me, you're costing us both the benefits of one turn of cooperation."
"True", you respond "but if I don't do it, you'll feel free to defect whenever you feel like it, using the 'finger slipped' excuse."
"How about this?" proposes your partner. "I promise to take extra care that my finger won't slip again. You promise that if my finger does slip again, you will punish me terribly, defecting for a bunch of turns. That way, we trust each other again, and we can still get the benefits of cooperation next turn."
You don't believe that your partner's finger really slipped, not for an instant. But the plan still seems like a good one. You accept the deal, and you continue cooperating until the experimenter ends the game.
After the game, you wonder what went wrong, and whether you could have played better. You decide that there was no better way to deal with your partner's "finger-slip" - after all, the plan you enacted gave you maximum possible utility under the circumstances. But you wish that you'd pre-committed, at the beginning, to saying "and I will punish finger slips equally to deliberate defections, so make sure you're careful."
The Lazy Student
You are a perfectly utilitarian school teacher, who attaches exactly the same weight to others' welfare as to your own. You have to have the reports of all fifty students in your class ready by the time midterm grades go out on January 1st. You don't want to have to work during Christmas vacation, so you set a deadline that all reports must be in by December 15th or you won't grade them and the students will fail the class. Oh, and your class is Economics 101, and as part of a class project all your students have to behave as selfish utility-maximizing agents for the year.
It costs your students 0 utility to turn in the report on time, but they gain +1 utility by turning it in late (they enjoy procrastinating). It costs you 0 utility to grade a report turned in before December 15th, but -30 utility to grade one after December 15th. And students get 0 utility from having their reports graded on time, but get -100 utility from having a report marked incomplete and failing the class.
If you say "There's no penalty for turning in your report after deadline," then the students will procrastinate and turn in their reports late, for a total of +50 utility (1 per student times fifty students). You will have to grade all fifty reports during Christmas break, for a total of - 1500 utility (-30 per report times fifty reports). Total utility is -1450.
So instead you say "If you don't turn in your report on time, I won't grade it." All students calculate the cost of being late, which is +1 utility from procrastinating and -100 from failing the class, and turn in their reports on time. You get all reports graded before Christmas, no students fail the class, and total utility loss is zero. Yay!
Or else - one student comes to you the day after deadline and says "Sorry, I was really tired yesterday, so I really didn't want to come all the way here to hand in my report. I expect you'll grade my report anyway, because I know you to be a perfect utilitarian, and you'd rather take the -30 utility hit to yourself than take the -100 utility hit to me."
You respond "Sorry, but if I let you get away with this, all the other students will turn in their reports late in the summer." She says "Tell you what - our school has procedures for changing a student's previously given grade. If I ever do this again, or if I ever tell anyone else about this, you can change my grade to a fail. Now you know that passing me this one time won't affect anything in the future. It certainly can't affect the past. So you have no reason not to do it." You believe her when she says she'll never tell, but you say "You made this argument because you believed me to be the sort of person who would accept it. In order to prevent other people from making the same argument, I have to be the sort of person who wouldn't accept it. To that end, I'm going to not accept your argument."
The Grieving Student
A second student comes to you and says "Sorry I didn't turn in my report yesterday. My mother died the other day, and I wanted to go to her funeral."
You say "Like all economics professors, I have no soul, and so am unable to sympathize with your loss. Unless you can make an argument that would apply to all rational actors in my position, I can't grant you an extension."
She says "If you did grant this extension, it wouldn't encourage other students to turn in their reports late. The other students would just say 'She got an extension because her mother died'. They know they won't get extensions unless they kill their own mothers, and even economics students aren't that evil. Further, if you don't grant the extension, it won't help you get more reports in on time. Any student would rather attend her mother's funeral than pass a course, so you won't be successfully motivating anyone else to turn in their reports early."
You think for a while, decide she's right, and grant her an extension on her report.
The Sports Fan
A third student comes to you and says "Sorry I didn't turn in my report yesterday. The Bears' big game was on, and as I've told you before, I'm a huge Bears fan. But don't worry! It's very rare that there's a game on this important, and not many students here are sports fans anyway. You'll probably never see a student with this exact excuse again. So in a way, it's not that different from the student here just before me, the one whose mother died."
You respond "It may be true that very few people will be able to say both that they're huge Bears fans, and that there's a big Bears game on the day before the report comes due. But by accepting your excuse, I establish a precedent of accepting excuses that are approximately this good. And there are many other excuses approximately as good as yours. Maybe someone's a big soap opera fan, and the season finale is on the night before the deadline. Maybe someone loves rock music, and there's a big rock concert on. Maybe someone's brother is in town that week. Practically anyone can come up with an excuse as good as yours, so if I accept your late report, I have to accept everyone's.
"The student who was here before you, that's different. We, as a society, already have an ordering in which a family member's funeral is one of the most important things around. By accepting her excuse, I'm establishing a precedent of accepting any excuse approximately that good, but almost no one will ever have an excuse that good. Maybe a few people who are really sick, someone struggling with a divorce or a breakup, that kind of thing. Not the hordes of people who will be coming to me if I give you your exemption.
The Murderous Husband
You are the husband of a wonderful and beautiful lady whom you love very much - and whom you just found in bed with another man. In a rage, you take your hardcover copy of Introduction To Game Theory and knock him over the head with it, killing him instantly (it's a pretty big book).
At the murder trial, you plead to the judge to let you go free. "Society needs to lock up murderers, as a general rule. After all, they are dangerous people who cannot be allowed to walk free. However, I only killed that man because he was having an affair with my wife. In my place, anyone would have done the same. So the crime has no bearing on how likely I am to murder someone else. I'm not a risk to anyone who isn't having an affair with my wife, and after this incident I plan to divorce and live the rest of my days a bachelor. Therefore, you have no need to deter me from future murders, and can safely let me go free."
The judge responds: "You make a convincing argument, and I believe that you will never kill anyone else in the future. However, other people will one day be in the position you were in, where they walk in on their wives having an affair. Society needs to have a credible pre-commitment to punishing them if they succumb to their rage, in order to deter them from murder."
"No," you say, "I understand your reasoning, but it won't work. If you've never walked in on your wife having an affair, you can't possibly understand the rage. No matter how bad the deterrent was, you'd still kill the guy."
"Hm," says the judge. "I'm afraid I just can't believe anyone could ever be quite that irrational. But I see where you're coming from. I'll give you a lighter sentence."
The Bellicose Dictator
You are the dictator of East Examplestan, a banana republic subsisting off its main import, high quality hypothetical scenarios. You've always had it in for your ancestral enemy, West Examplestan, but the UN has made it clear that any country in your region that aggressively invades a neighbor will be severely punished with sanctions and possible enforced "regime change." So you decide to leave the West alone for the time being.
One day, a few West Examplestanis unintentionally wander over your unmarked border while prospecting for new scenario mines. You immediately declare it a "hostile incursion" by "West Examplestani spies", declare war, and take the Western capital in a sneak attack.
The next day, Ban Ki-moon is on the phone, and he sounds angry. "I thought we at the UN had made it perfectly clear that countries can't just invade each other anymore!"
"But didn't you read our propaganda mouthpi...ahem, official newspaper? We didn't just invade. We were responding to Western aggression!"
"Balderdash!" says the Secretary-General. "Those were a couple of lost prospectors, and you know it!"
"Well," you say. "Let's consider your options. The UN needs to make a credible pre-commitment to punish aggressive countries, or everyone will invade their weaker neighbors. And you've got to follow through on your threats, or else the pre-commitment won't be credible anymore. But you don't actually like following through on your threats. Invading rogue states will kill a lot of people on both sides and be politically unpopular, and sanctions will hurt your economy and lead to heart-rending images of children starving. What you'd really like to do is let us off, but in a way that doesn't make other countries think they'll get off too.
"Luckily, we can make a credible story that we were following international law. Sure, it may have been stupid of us to mistake a few prospectors for an invasion, but there's no international law against being stupid. If you dismiss us as simply misled, you don't have to go through the trouble of punishing us, and other countries won't think they can get away with anything.
"Nor do you need to live in fear of us doing something like this again. We've already demonstrated that we won't go to war without a casus belli. If other countries can refrain from giving us one, they have nothing to fear."
Ban Ki-moon doesn't believe your story, but the countries that would bear the economic brunt of the sanctions and regime change decide they believe it just enough to stay uninvolved.
The Peyote-Popping Native
You are the governor of a state with a large Native American population. You have banned all mind-altering drugs, with the honorable exceptions of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and several others, because you are a red-blooded American who believes that they would drive teenagers to commit crimes.
A representative of the state Native population comes to you and says: "Our people have used peyote religiously for hundreds of years. During this time, we haven't become addicted or committed any crimes. Please grant us a religious exemption under the First Amendment to continue practicing our ancient rituals." You agree.
A leader of your state's atheist community breaks into your office via the ventilation systems (because seriously, how else is an atheist leader going to get access to a state governor?) and says: "As an atheist, I am offended that you grant exemptions to your anti-peyote law for religious reasons, but not for, say, recreational reasons. This is unfair discrimination in favor of religion. The same is true of laws that say Sikhs can wear turbans in school to show support for God, but my son can't wear a baseball cap in school to show support for the Yankees. Or laws that say Muslims can get time off state jobs to pray five times a day, but I can't get time off my state job for a cigarette break. Or laws that say state functions will include special kosher meals for Jews, but not special pasta meals for people who really like pasta."
You respond "Although my policies may seem to be saying religion is more important than other potential reasons for breaking a rule, one can make a non-religious case justifying them. One important feature of major world religions is that their rituals have been fixed for hundreds of years. Allowing people to break laws for religious reasons makes religious people very happy, but does not weaken the laws. After all, we all know the few areas in which the laws of the major US religions as they are currently practiced conflict with secular law, and none of them are big deals. So the general principle 'I will allow people to break laws if it is necessary to established and well-known religious rituals" is relatively low-risk and makes people happy without threatening the concept of law in general. But the general principle 'I will allow people to break laws for recreational reasons' is very high risk, because it's sufficient justification for almost anyone breaking any law."
"I would love to be able to serve everyone the exact meal they most wanted at state dinners. But if I took your request for pasta because you liked pasta, I would have to follow the general principle of giving everyone the meal they most like, which would be prohibitively expensive. By giving Jews kosher meals, I can satisfy a certain particularly strong preference without being forced to satisfy anyone else's."
The Well-Disguised Atheist
The next day, the atheist leader comes in again. This time, he is wearing a false mustache and sombrero. "I represent the Church of Driving 50 In A 30 Mile Per Hour Zone," he says. "For our members, going at least twenty miles per hour over the speed limit is considered a sacrament. Please grant us a religious exemption to traffic laws."
You decide to play along. "How long has your religion existed, and how many people do you have?" you ask.
"Not very long, and not very many people," he responds.
"I see," you say. "In that case, you're a cult, and not a religion at all. Sorry, we don't deal with cults."
"What, exactly, is the difference between a cult and a religion?"
"The difference is that cults have been formed recently enough, and are small enough, that we are suspicious of them existing for the purpose of taking advantage of the special place we give religion. Granting an exemption for your cult would challenge the credibility of our pre-commitment to punish people who break the law, because it would mean anyone who wants to break a law could just found a cult dedicated to it."
"How can my cult become a real religion that deserves legal benefits?"
"You'd have to become old enough and respectable enough that it becomes implausible that it was created for the purpose of taking advantage of the law."
"That sounds like a lot of work."
"Alternatively, you could try writing awful science fiction novels and hiring a ton of lawyers. I hear that also works these days."
Conclusion
In all these stories, the first party wants to credibly pre-commit to a rule, but also has incentives to forgive other people's deviations from the rule. The second party breaks the rules, but comes up with an excuse for why its infraction should be forgiven.
The first party's response is based not only on whether the person's excuse is believable, not even on whether the person's excuse is morally valid, but on whether the excuse can be accepted without straining the credibility of their previous pre-commitment.
The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future. There are some exceptions - accepting an excuse in private but making sure no one else ever knows, accepting an excuse once with the express condition that you will never accept any other excuses - but to some degree these are devil's bargains, as anyone who can predict you will do this can take advantage of you.
These stories give an idea of excuses different from the one our society likes to think it uses, namely that it accepts only excuses that are true and that reflect well upon the character of the person giving the excuse. I'm not saying that the common idea of excuses doesn't have value - but I think the game theory view also has some truth to it. I also think the game theoretic view can be useful in cases where the common view fails. It can inform cases in law, international diplomacy, and politics where a tool somewhat stronger than the easily-muddled common view is helpful.