Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.
Game theory’s cure for corruption
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Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#92Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum. It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#93This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are operating.
By integrating themselves with the community, they would necessarily fall under the influences of some of the community's norms, and perhaps be better tuned, and also more accountable, to it's norms of righteousness.
That may work in many cases, but the article seems to assume that most individuals in any community will promote righteousness in the community's interest.
What happens if the community lacks the social norms to enforce righteousness, especially with respect to the property rights and justification of violence? What happens when the "community" is hardly a community at all, but, due to its socioeconomic circumstances, is a place where suspicions of neighbors and incentives to cheat the community are pervasive?
Whose job is it to establish the norms of righteousness where they are lacking, or significantly degraded?
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#94On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly.
It seems somewhat perverse at first glance, but might actually be a good incentive if carefully structured and actuaries are also one group of people that might actually get somewhere with demanding actual figures from police.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities would be oppressed... Maybe. But isn't it an experiment worth trying? Does anyone really know what would happen in a modern, secular, money-driven society if you gave people more authority to enforce the law?
This happens in cyberspace all the time (just look at any HN discussion about airport security): what reason do we have to believe that in meatspace people would behave differently?
Moreover, why do we think that this process would happen in meatspace? Distinction between on-line and off-line is getting increasingly meaningless anyway. People now mostly communicate on-line, mostly get their news on-line, so it stands to reason they'd behave exactly as they do now, only with worse consequences.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#96Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't shake the thought that this will simply lead to the formation of gangs/clans.
I think social media is a somewhat relevant corollary, where it self-polices content. I'd say sometimes--like HN--it's a success. Good behavior is encouraged & enforced. Bad behavior is punished. Other times--like reddit--not a success. The hive-mind is real there, and in particular well-mannered disagreement that is misaligned with the norm is punished pretty strongly there. Plus we all have heard how their investig…
Reddit is actually quite a complex ecosystem nowadays. There's a lot of HN-quality subreddits focused on particular topics. I'd risk saying that most topical subreddits are sort-of OK. The rule of thumb I'm seeing is: the more niche the interest, the better the community. It's only when you start dealing with "normals" that you see the worst parts of humanity.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick is still: who does the investigation?
A past idea of mine is: everyone. Every vehicle registration accumulates points at the rate of one per week. Fingering another vehicle deducts 5 points from their total and (to deter false reports) one from yours. If your total is negative, you can't drive/ride. There's probably a great deal wrong with this.
Old people who don't drive would report one vehicle per week.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like many of the cops who are filmed brutalizing people end up on brief suspension, and then back at their jobs shortly after. For filming police to be effective, we need more regularly enforced punishments (like actually being fired) for police brutality.
Those who are actually fired are sometimes discovered working as a cop in another nearby jurisdiction shortly thereafter. If you really want to punish a rotten cop, you need to prevent him from being rehired.
I'm not generally in favour of occupational bans, but I think that's a great example for an occupation you should be able to get banned from if you are found to abuse your position of power (much like caretakers). You wouldn't want to see a rapist nurse be employed as a nurse or a molesting teacher work in a school, so why should police brutality be treated any different? You abuse a privileged position, you lose the privilege for a reasonable amount of time.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not generally resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics, culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accept…
"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation." Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't jibe with my understanding of banishment, but my readings are from agricultural traditions. More specifically, outlawry under Germanic law, where someone was judge to be outside of the protection of the law. Full outlawry on Iceland effectively meant banishment from Iceland…
>This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era banishment was not a real threat.
It doesn't have to be a real threat to be considered "extremely harsh".
That is, it's not just physical damage or potential danger that's "harsh". Isolation from the community you belong too could be considered just as harsh, from a social standpoint.
Re: Game theory’s cure for corruption
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation." Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't jibe with my understanding of banishment, but my readings are from agricultural traditions. More specifically, outlawry under Germanic law, where someone was judge to be outside of the protection of the law. Full outlawry on Iceland effectively meant banishment from Iceland…
> This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era banishment was not a real threat. It doesn't have to be a real threat to be considered "extremely harsh". That is, it's not just physical damage or potential danger that's "harsh". Isolation from the community you belong too could be considered just as harsh, from a social standpoint.
I do not understand your comment. I was asking for clarification as the statement did not match my understanding of banishment across several cultures, nor does the logic used to reach the conclusion make sense.
In this context I used "threat" as a short-hand for the previous poster's "Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation". I did not mean it as a purely physical threat. Indeed, the link I gave to Aboriginal customary law uses 'threat' for both physical and non-physical punishments ("In addition to the threat of being killed for a breach of customary law it has been reported that in some cases the threat also involved the denial of mortuary rites"), so my broader use does not appear to be unusual.
Therefore, I agree with your comment, as it is a restatement of mine. But my experience is that comments with similar structure to yours are meant to point out incorrect or incomplete statement. Yet I don't see how that's the case here.
Would you kindly elaborate the intent behind your response?