Those of you who read xkcd know that the strip sometimes features a black hat character, a person who is a jerk but who I thought was supposed to be smarter than the average person, using his superior intellect to point out the follies or foibles of the human race.
In this strip: Hotels, the black hat character is trying to be his usual self, but it seems to me that his logic is faulty. The black hat guy is not as smart as he thinks he is. I’m disappointed in him.
synopsis:
Black Hat says: I post bad reviews on hotels I like to stop other people from going there. That means I always get a reservation, and the hotel will start lowering their prices if they have less demand.
Friend: You are punishing companies you like!
Black Hat:The odds of my review affecting a hotel’s business are negligible.
Bzzt! That’s bad logic. If his review doesn’t affect the hotel’s business, then it won’t be stopping people from going there, it will be as full as it usually is, which means his odds of getting a reservation aren’t improved and the hotel would have no reason to lower prices.
The odds of his comment driving the hotel out of business is negligible. That’s the salient difference. If it’s out of business, he can’t stay there again, but if it’s simply not crowded, he can get a room and maybe a deal.
“Keep some secrets, never tell, and those secrets will keep you very well”
– Michelle Shocked
Yeah, your synopsis is inaccurate. The line is “The odds of my review putting a hotel out of business are negligible.” Meaning that they’d have to get a lot of negative reviews to actually go under. He’s just trying to reduce demand a bit and also increase demand at hotels that he doesn’t want to stay at.
I don’t think BlackHat is disputing the point that he’s punishing the companies he likes, merely that he’s only punishing them a little bit and that it benefits him to do so. And is that even morally wrong? Advertisements for hotels and other businesses are intentionally deceptive. All BlackHat is doing is counter-advertising.
There may still be a flaw in Hat Guy’s plan, however. He is implicitly assuming that the quality of the hotel is static. But it’s likely that the quality of any given hotel is at least partially a function of the size of its revenue. By pushing people away from his favorite hotels, he may also be pushing the hotel into a lower tier of quality.
Of course, maybe he likes those particular hotels due to their location, architecture, or other static property instead of variable qualities like cleanliness or quality of the continental breakfast.
Yeah, the real riffraff with lower standards might choose that hotel, like me. It would seem to me that some people might go “OMG, 1 bad review and 57 good reviews! Let’s skip this place!” versus others who think “that bad review must be because the lodger was a dick.”
It’s like the opposite of Yogi Berra’s famous quote: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Sure, we’re probably over-analyzing the logic and economics in a cartoon, but by Euclid, if that’s not what XKCD stands for then I don’t know what it is.
So anyway I agree the reasoning isn’t very good. He’s basically wants
A. the hotel to be less busy, enough so that it’s easier to get reservation and that prices will be lowered
but not
B. the hotel to be so less busy that it goes out of business.
Now, this is not a logical impossibility; there certainly are hotels that could stay in business even with an appreciable drop in business. However, it’s not necessarily true for any given hotel; any one could also be on the edge of closing where any drop in business would doom them.
Anyway Black hat is saying that
His reviews have a large enough chance of causing A that it’s worthwhile to invest his time and effort into the reviews (Black Hat is rational about things like this, right?);
and at the same time
His reviews have a small enough chance of causing B that the investment is still worthwhile.
Again not logically impossible, but, factually, in this real world, I think both 1 and 2 being true is unlikely.
Quercus: Don’t forget BlackHat said he had a script to do the work. So his effort investment is minimal.
And it feeds into his other main objective on Earth: mis-using Man’s existing machinery to amplify his own ability to do Evil. He almost never just does something Bad. He does something to cause some larger system to do Big Bad. Such as this recent strip: xkcd: Chin-Up Bar
In addition, if Black Hat’s comments causes the hotel to lose customers, then you would expect that the hotel level of service will become worse because the hotel won’t be making as much money.