There's a particular kind of widespread human behavior that is kind on the surface, but upon closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. This post is about four such patterns.

Computational Kindness

One of the most useful ideas I got out of Algorithms to Live By is that of computational kindness. I was quite surprised to only find a single mention of the term on lesswrong. So now there's two.

Computational kindness is the antidote to a common situation: imagine a friend from a different country is visiting and will stay with you for a while. You're exchanging some text messages beforehand in order to figure out how to spend your time together. You want to show your friend the city, and you want to be very accommodating and make sure all their preferences will be met. So you simply ask them: "What do you want to do"? [...]

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Outline:

(00:18) Computational Kindness

(02:36) Responsibility Offloading

(06:49) Opt-In vs Opt-Out

(09:07) The Fake Exit Option

(13:26) Isnt This Just Overcomplicating Things?

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.