Reading the Fine Print

Almost nobody reads terms and conditions, scheme rules, or the notes to financial statements. This is entirely rational at the individual level and produces a strange collective outcome: the documents that govern the most consequential arrangements are read by the fewest people.

There is an opportunity in that, and it is available to anyone willing to be slightly more tedious than average.

The information is not hidden

The word most often used is buried, which implies concealment. Usually nothing is concealed. The information is present, in order, in a document that is publicly available.

What makes it inaccessible is length and dryness rather than secrecy. A hundred pages of definitions is not hiding anything; it is simply exceeding the attention anyone is willing to spend. The effect is the same as concealment, but the remedy is different. You cannot uncover something concealed. You can read something long.

Where the surprises are

In my experience the surprises cluster in predictable places.

Definitions sections, because the meaning of a term in a document frequently differs from its ordinary meaning, and every subsequent use inherits that difference. A great deal of apparent ambiguity in contracts dissolves once you check what the words were defined to mean.

Exceptions to general rules, because the general rule is what gets summarised and the exception is what applies to the case you care about.

Anything about timing, because obligations that seem symmetrical often are not once you notice that one party has thirty days and the other has five.

Anything about who decides, because a clause that appears to describe an objective test frequently gives one party the right to determine whether the test was met.

The habit is the point

I do not think this is about any particular document. It is about the general habit of checking the source rather than the summary, which pays off in a hundred small ways and occasionally in a large one.

The summary is written by someone with a purpose. Usually the purpose is benign and the summary is accurate. But the summary is always a compression, and the thing that got compressed away is the thing you would have wanted to know.

Reading the original is slow and mostly uneventful. The value is not in any individual reading. It is in being the sort of person who occasionally notices what everyone else agreed not to look at.