Eight Short Studies On Excuses

Eight game-theory vignettes (the finger-slip Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the Lazy/Grieving/Sports-Fan students, the Murderous Husband, the Bellicose Dictator, the Peyote-Popping Native, the Well-Disguised Atheist) that all illustrate one original principle: a rule-maker who accepts an excuse thereby commits to accepting all equally-good excuses in future, so the right response to an excuse turns not on whether it's true or morally creditable but on whether granting it strains the credibility of the precommitment. Hence a funeral excuse can be accepted (few will ever have one as good) while an equally-sincere sports-fan excuse cannot (almost anyone can match it), and private/one-time exceptions are 'devil's bargains' exploitable by anyone who can predict them. Highest-karma LW post (909).

Quality 80 · Excellent. Low-Excellent. A genuinely original and exported reframing of how excuses, exceptions, and norms actually work — the 'precedent-cost of accepting an excuse' lens underlies a lot of later thinking about rules, law, and diplomacy — delivered through witty, memorable vignettes. A notch below the noncentral fallacy for being a set of illustrations of one principle rather than a single sharp concept. 80.

Claude’s paradigm shift 62 · Notable shift. Notable shift. The principle that accepting an excuse commits you to all equally-good excuses was a fresh game-theoretic lens on norms in 2010, not a restatement of prior work. 62.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. An original, exported reframing of how excuses and norms work (the precedent-cost of accepting an excuse), a lens that underlies later thinking about rules, law, and diplomacy, delivered through memorable vignettes. Conceptual influence within rationalist discourse, no material change — modest RWI.