Comment by Perseids | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Perseids | Hacker News Reader

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One way to understand why this article produces so deeply emotional responses, is that it says "it is right and proper to defect in this prisoner's dilemma"[1].

Why is it a prisoner's dilemma?

- Nobody writes follow-ups: everyone has an equal chance of being noticed and only has to write one email (and the recipient gets relatively little mail).

- You write follow-ups, but nobody else does: you get an overproportional chance of being viewed at the expense of everyone writing just one mail. Also you have to put up more work to organise and write the follow-ups, but that is very much worth the extra benefit for you.

- You write one mail, and everybody writes follow-ups: you get an under-proportional chance of being found in the sea of mails, much to your dismay.

- Everybody writes follow-ups (what TFA suggests): everyone has equal chances of being noticed, but everyone has to put up the extra work for the follow-ups (and the recipient gets a factor of three more mails).

My personal opinion on the article is that it is greatly damaging, as it is difficult as hell for society to effectively normalize "cooperate" behavior in such situations, even without voices suggesting "defecting" is your moral responsibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

I think the article does a good job of illustrating that, for busy people, there are ALREADY so many defectors that you might as well defect too. When someone has 10,000 people trying to reach them, it is impossible to coordinate a cooperative strategy, and you are failing game theory by trying to play that strategy.

Conversely, the article fails horribly in distinguishing between busy people and everyone else. You shouldn't need to follow-up with your manager, because they should not have 10,000 people trying to reach them. But you should expect the VP or CEO to be a Busy Person because they quite possibly do.

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Phrasing it as "your responsibility" is also foolish: you should do it because it is the game theoretical winning move AND because this is just how Busy Person culture works. Trying to argue that Busy People should change their culture is a lost cause, because they're responding to very real incentives. You have to adapt to them.

But it's still the Busy Person's fault if they didn't set up priority channels and thus missed out on something genuinely important.

The alternative is to encourage people to not overdo follow-ups. Those with a strong moral compass with understand your words and play fair, others won’t. This will place the former group at a severe disadvantage. The only practical way to level the playing field is what the article suggests.

Edit: now that I come to think of it, another potential solution might be to encourage the people who receive a lot of emails/messages to ignore follow-ups and only recognize the first piece of communication that was sent to them.

Prisoners dilemma vs cuckoo hashing, under the assumption that people just quickly glance at their email occasionally.

i think this is a preposterous over-exaggeration of the situation. it's just people sending emails to each other for goodness sake.

Our society runs on people sending emails to each other, as it happens. What could have higher stakes?

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