In this thread, I referred to someone as successfully gaming the system to obtain a desired governmental benefit. Different posters responded that gaming the system is generally accepted as implying dishonest or unethical behavior.
Rather than continue my hijack of that thread, I was interested in what other people consider to be “gaming the system.” Is GtS necessarily dishonest or unethical? What are some examples of behavior you consider GtS?
Me - I agree that GtS usually has somewhat negative connotations, but I do not think it is necessarily dishonest or unethical. Instead, it is someone knowing the rules well enough to be aware of gaps or “loopholes,” and then styling things in a manner to give themselves an advantage.
IMO&E, that describes a huge portion (by no means all) of what lawyers and accountants do. They know the rules, and they advise their clients how to act so the unfavorable aspects do not apply to them. You might consider that sleazy or selfish, but dishonest or unethical?
I recall hearing about a guy who won a number of lotteries, by simply buying up every number combination. Didn’t he successfully game the system? As I understand it, lotteries have since changed policies to make such practices unsuccessful. Isn’t any criticism properly directed at whoever designed the lottery and failed to anticipate and protect against such action?
Or one time when you could get Discover card cashback for purchasing traveler’s checks. People bought the checks, and immediately redeemed them, earning a nice little profit. Dishonest and unethical? Or do you wish YOU had thought of that?!
Eager to hear if my interpretation is far different from the majority’s.
If by gaming the system you acquire certain benefits that you normally wouldn’t qualify for, then yes, it is dishonest. If you game the system to make sure you get the most benefits that you are eligible, then that’s ok.
For me it’s quite simple. There’s law and there’s spirit of the law. To me if you break either you are either an imbecile because you didn’t understand the gist of what is being addressed or you are an asshole for willfully looking to sneak around the law. To me, just as “ignorance of the law” is no excuse, I do not excuse “ignorance of the spirit of the law”.
Dishonest and unethical? To me you are not honest or honorable if you are “taking advantage” of a situation that was not meant to exist. Loopholes are caused by poorly worded phrasing. I think every human being, when told a “rule”, instinctively understands the spirit of the rule.
Somewhat lame example, which I believe may happen some day. Major League Baseball has rules against Performance Enhancement medicine. To the lawyers this means a list of specified forbidden chemicals. The spirit of this rule is “don’t do anything that causes an unfair advantage”. I believe that one day through some awful and probably unethical experimentation outside this country, some doctor will figure a way to graft muscle from some other primate, say gorilla, int a human that will allow that person to throw a ball 140 mph, or perhaps hit a ball 700 feet. The first players to submit to such surgery (in secret, naturally) will probably do some uncanny feats before they are found out. The players association lawyers will turn their eyes away from this because it is not specified in the Performance Enhancement rules, much the same way designer drugs were never considered decades ago.
Those athletes would be cheaters and unethical and dishonest in my eyes.
It’s hard to give a blanket answer to the question in the thread title—I’d want to judge on a case-by-case basis. But at least in many cases, I view “gaming the system” with distaste: I would not be comfortable doing it myself and would have less respect for someone else who does it.
I am reminded of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”). What if everybody “gamed the system”?
This is a type of analysis where lawyers - and a good many people hiring lawyers - view things differently. I can’t think of anyone who was ever convicted of violating “the spirit of the law.”
If you are accused of a crime - say DUI - how many folk just say, “Yep, I was drunk. Throw the book at me!”
I do not think it is at all unusual for folk to say, “Is the specific action I desire expressly prohibited?” As opposed to, “Is this the sort of thing that was intended to be prohibited?”
I should acknowledge that there are some instances in which courts sit “in equity” and consider factors such as “fairness” and “expectations” and standard practices. Those are the exception.
Not to derail the thread, but if I understand correctly, lotteries have been and always were designed in such a way that the cost of buying up all number combinations exceeds the amount of the jackpot payout. A lottery couldn’t possibly work any other way, otherwise the lotto organization would lose money.
See - I think everybody (or at least the vast majority of people) DO game the system, at least when they consider it in their best interest. I acknowledge many such people might only do so when they consider the stakes relatively small, and do not perceive direct harm to anyone else. It is not at all uncommon for people to act as tho the rules are what apply to “other folk.” Your experience with people is grossly different than mine?
That is essentially where individual freedoms come into conflict with the social contract.
(Gotta point out - lawyers tend to get a bad rap - deservedly so in many instances. But behind every sleazy lawyer and you’re likely to find a sleazy client - who could be you or your neighbor.)
Heard an interview with a guy on the radio a while back, who figured out how to do it in certain lotteries when the payout got large enough. I think he might have been Scandinavian. Believe he was retired on some island somewhere.
Sure it could be easy enough to Google. Believe “powerballs” and other things made it impractical.
One aspect of ethics that I pay attention to is the effect on others.
If I do something for financial gain that directly or indirectly negatively affects innocent bystanders, then that’s probably going to be a no-no. E.g., setting up a “minority owned” shell business to get alloted government contracts hurts true minority owned businesses.
As a computer person, there’s a lot of situations where you figure out how to do something that the product wasn’t intended to be used for. E.g., I root every device I own whenever possible. This gives me a lot more control over things. I don’t see how I am hurting the manufacturer or some such.
And this becomes game like. They close a hole, a new one is found, etc.
There was a particular case with a poorly designed lottery prize that allowed it to be used this way. Interestingly, the subhead for that article is “Gaming the lottery…”
When I hear the phrase “gaming the system,” I assume that the action being referenced is something distasteful, if not outright dishonest. I wouldn’t use that phrase to refer to someone who was behaving ethically and just using the rules strategically.
There have been a number of people that have successfully hacked lotteries in completely legal ways. The games had a flaw in them that they noticed and exploited. There is also a statistics professor in Texas that has won four times and counting. Nobody know how she is doing it. There is nothing wrong or unethical about any of that. They just turned a game of (losing) chance into a game of skill.
For things like the tax code, it is up to the people that write the laws to achieve the desired outcome and not the other way around. If people can find legal ways around it, the more power to them. It just means that the laws need to be updated if they don’t work as expected. Your job as a taxpayer is to keep the government from getting as much of your money as possible within the limits that they designed. The game is already rigged against you. It is great if you can beat them at their own game.
Try talking about “spirit” the next time you are dealing with a contract dispute. It doesn’t work that way. The tax code is essentially a contract that you didn’t have any say in.
Right, I don’t doubt that some ingenious people have figured out how to crack the lottery, just saying that buying up all ticket combinations isn’t a method to do so - you’re guaranteed to lose money that way.
But anyhow, I won’t derail the thread further.
No, that’s not always the case with lotteries, particularly those with progressive jackpots. What happens is that on round one the jackpot is relatively small, but also generally doesn’t get won that time around. On subsequent rounds part of the proceeds from previous rounds are used to fund subsequent rounds. So round one has a set jackpot, round two’s jackpot is larger by an amount funded by round one, round three’s jackpot is larger by an amount funded by one and two, and so on. At some point the jackpot can become large enough that the payout is more than the theoretical cost of buying all of the tickets.
In practice, actually buying all of the numbers in a large lottery is impractical - for powerball, you’d have to buy and manage almost 300 million physical tickets, which is a LOT of overhead. And generally that type of lottery works where you don’t have a single person buying each number, but instead as many people as want to can play a particular number and if that number is drawn, all of them split the pot (powerball works this way). So there’s also a risk of only getting a fractional payout. Here’s an article about the difficulties of doing so with powerball Buying Every Powerball Ticket - Business Insider
I think many (if not most) lotteries will let you cover every combo if you’re willing to fill out the slips (hopefully no errors) and then run them all through the machines one by one. Too bad if that takes more than a week to do.
You should not be able to slap down a check and say “I’m covered”.
And to those of you arguing against the “spirit of the law”, I know your type well and I’m not your friend. Like the little asshole who slaps someone and when he’s told “don’t slap me”, starts punching the other kid and says “you didn’t say anything about punches”. Little fucks like that ought to beaten to a pulp by the “victim” or by someone paid by the victim
I keep thinking of video games, where there’s a more or less clear distinction between ‘glitching’, which is taking advantage of a bug or developer oversight to engage in shenanigans, and merely finding an advantage within the rules and taking advantage of it.
For example, glitching often takes place when there are map flaws that let people move around outside of the normal game world, giving them an undue advantage.
Taking advantage of the game is where say… you find that if you do X, Y and Z in a certain order in a certain location, you have a huge advantage, but it’s due to say… the terrain, weaponry and enemy placement being unusually advantageous, not because the developers have a literal bug or glitch that lets you do it.
Glitching is unethical, but IMO, taking advantage of the game as written isn’t. There’s often a fine line between being innovative and people screaming that you’re gaining an unfair advantage.
This is why nobody goes to lawyers or accountants for ethics advice. Their job is not to be ethical, it is to advocate for their client’s interests. It’s dishonest and unethical for a lawyer to NOT work for their clients interests above all others, as long as they don’t break the law to do so.
GtS is dishonest and unethical because if it wasn’t we wouldn’t call it gaming the system, we would call it working within the rules to get your deserved benefits. A blind person isn’t GtS to get disability benefits intended to help blind people. If you get benefits that are not intended for you, because you’re not actually disabled, you’re just stealing from the government.
When I was younger, I knew of a snack machine that could be Fonzied. Smack it in the right spot, you get a free snack. Sure, you could argue that the machine was poorly designed and I simply learned an alternate way to make it function, but I was really just stealing shit.
When I worked for Radio Shack, people would constantly return metal detectors and radar detectors. Why? Because they didn’t actually want to buy them, they wanted to rent them to find a lost ring, or drive to Spring Break, and GtS to rent them for free.
If you’re describing your behavior as gaming the system, you know the benefit isn’t intended for you, and you’re engaging in some sort of shenanigan to get what you want. FTR, I’m OK with pulling shenanigans on any gambling operation or payday loan business, because they’re shady to begin with.
How about something like Medicaid eligibility for assisted care? (Something I’m NOT expert about, so I don’t want to be drawn into debates of fine points.) In general terms, if you have disbursed your assets a certain number of years before applying, you do not have to pay them towards your care. I believe (but might be mistaken) that you can shield some assets through trusts.
What is the “spirit of the law” there? To take the personal assets of folk who were not clever enough or lacked the foresight to shield their assets? Or to provide for the neediest people? Why are more sophisticated folk (or folk with assistance) allowed a way around certain obligations, while less sophisticated - and presumably needier - folk don’t get that advantage?
For example, I think most people do tip their servers when they go out to eat. But someone who was interested in “gaming the system” might not, because the “letter of the law” doesn’t say they have to.
