# commitments: absolute commitments can help remain virtuous.
you create a wonderful and clear website. it gets popular. to make sure you can pay its costs, you add a clearly marked ad. 10 years later the site is full of ads and barely usable.
you are a politician who wants to change the world for the better. a lobbyist invites you to a lunch for him to better explain his point of view. it's just one lunch, that's not evil. 10 years later, lobbyists are taking you to luxury vacations, giving you luxury goods. in exchange you must vote to please them.
you are a farmer and you need a plot for your cattle. so you cut down some trees in the nearby rainforest. 10 years later you are cutting down exponentially increasing amount of the forest. 100 years later the planet has no oxygen supply.
you are a poor university student who is looking to make some little pocket money. you partake in an experiment where you have to shock another participant if they make a mistake. you start with a very small voltage. it's small, not hurtful, you go ahead. 1 hour later you are issuing almost deadly voltages.
# step by step
in every scenario the decay happens step by step. the individual steps are usually completely justifiable in the context of the previous steps.
it's just one more ad, our a / b tests show it's no big deal for our users.
it's just a little gift, that's not that different than accepting a nice lunch.
it's just a few more trees, plenty will remain.
it's just a bit more voltage, the other person can surely take it if the previous ones were fine.
none of the small steps make the person realise that something is going afoul. then even in the fully decayed state the person will not see that they are doing something wrong. in their minds they remain virtuous people.
# prevent decay with commitments
once you get into this decayed state, it's very hard to get out of it. it would create a huge cognitive dissonance, mental pain. it's easier to find justifications why continuing whatever you are doing is fine.
it's best if you can prevent decaying in the first place. and one way to do so is to make absolute, easy to verify commitments publicly. make sure breaking the commitments have repercussions. this will make it painful for you to go against them because it would result in public humiliation. and if you do go against them, it's clear signal for the others that your values have been compromised.
commit to not show more than one clearly marked ad on your website. if you add more, then you will donate x million to a competing startup or a charity.
commit to never interact with lobbyists outside some pre-determined procedure. if you fail to do so, you will volunteer full-time in a homeless shelter for a week to make amends.
commit to never cut more than 1,000 trees per year. if you fail to do so, you will reforest the double amount somewhere else.
commit to not electrocute with more than 20 volts. if you go over, you give up the payment from the experiment.
this hedges against the failures a little bit. there is at least some consolation price for the people interested in your promises.
# links
there are lot of interesting sites about this topic on the internet.
published on 2023-03-18
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