A fun coinage from Eliezer Yudkowsky: in a social setting, when making a substantial request which might drain social capital, harm the relationship, or feel like an imposition, you might ask for someone’s “cheerful price.” That is, the price at which they’d feel an internal instinctive “yay” about doing the thing. Not a “yay” only after calculating the need for the money—just an instinctive “yay.” It’s also the price at which the relationship isn’t harmed by performing the request.
I like this idea in principle, though I find that evaluating my cheerful price for a task is pretty difficult, and it does feel like an imposition. Maybe this would get better with practice. My approach was binary search: try a low-ish price (nope, not excited); try doubling it (still not excited); double it (meh); double it (wow, yeah!!); okay, try 3/4 of that (hm… pretty good, I guess); add 10%?
Your Cheerful Price - LessWrong
When I ask you for your Cheerful Price for doing something, I’m asking you for the price that:
Gives you a cheerful feeling about the transaction;
Makes you feel energized about doing the thing;
Doesn’t generate an ouch feeling to be associated with me;
Means I’m not expending social capital or friendship capital to make the thing happen;
Doesn’t require the executive part of you, that knows you need money in the long-term, to shout down and override other parts of you.
Via Ivan Vendrov.