[flagged]
The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
11–20 of 48 posts
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#12Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless. The credentials enable trust at scale. You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most…
Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county. I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
[deleted]
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless. The credentials enable trust at scale. You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most…
[flagged]
I attended Caltech in the 70s when it had an honor system. An anecdote on how it worked:
A fellow student of mine, "Bob", was taking Ama95, a required class that was one of the hardest classes. All exams were take home, open book, open note, but with a time limit of 2 hours. There was no proctoring, and nobody would know if one took extra time or not.
Bob took the exam to his dorm room, closed the door, and set the timer at 2 hours. He had been up late studying, and fell asleep. The timer woke him. He figured he'd been asleep for an hour. So he drew a line in his blue book, and continued taking the test for another hour. He then wrote an explanation of the line and what had happened, and turned it in.
He received an F. The professor was very apologetic, but explained that he had no choice.
Bob received the news with equanimity, and signed up to take the class again next year. He related this story in a matter of fact manner to a group of us in the dorm library.
The thing about the honor system is it turned the students and professors into collaborators rather than adversaries. The students liked the honor system very much. If their best friend cheated, they'd turn him in. Hence, any attempt at organized cheating meant ostracism. I never saw any of that in my time there.
Nobody stole anything in the dorm that I was aware of.
For contrast, I attended a class at a local college. One of the other students befriended me, and it turned out he did that to convince me to help him cheat. (I declined.) A friend of mine attended another university, and the day he moved into his freshman dorm room it was looted.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I have not lived in “the city,” meaning New York, so I cannot speak from direct experience. I agree that trust is not maintained by moral sentiment alone. But the United States is already a society with relatively harsh punishment, and yet it still has a high crime rate. So I do not think law enforcement is the whole explanation.
Crime rates in NYC move in inverse proportion to enforcement.
When the National Guard was deployed in Washington DC, the crime rate plummeted.
Crime rates soared in cities that decriminalized shoplifting.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#16Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#171. The late stage of capitalism must have started back in Roman times, caveat emptor. 2. Most societies are low trust societies, with certain exceptions usually based on draconian law enforcement. I don't trust a lot of thought was put into this article
I don't even think the examples provided are even what most people would call "trust" scenarios. In most of these examples we should have never ever assumed any trust on the other party in the first place.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting because there is a cheating epidemic going on in higher education and I'm continuously wondering what happens if it isn't resolved. Students cheating with impunity breeds more students cheating, into a spiral until all students cheat and the credentials becomes meaningless. The credentials enable trust at scale. You're pointing at people leaning on reputations for trust. What happens when the most…
Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county. I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
> I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians.
I will just say this: "Christians" is not a wholly uniform population.
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also high schools. demographics of Thomas Jefferson High School (one of the best in the country) vs. Fairfax county. I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Now, cheating is pervasive. Game theory in action
> I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. I will just say this: "Christians" is not a wholly uniform population.
Good point. Presbyterians specifically
Re: The Tax of Living in a Low-Trust Society: How Collapsed Trust Costs You
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Yeah the unpunished petty crime is the reason, not the entire economy and every politician existing solely to scam everyone.
The thing is that petty crime affects the man and woman on the street and it infects lots of others too who figure out, whelp, I guess this is how it works/ A politician embezzling is bad but you don't experience it directly --but for your tax dollars not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
People can put up with a sleazy politician but they can't live comfortably knowing they can't trust their neighbors or trust the police to fight crime for them when the police know DAs will reduce charges, drop charges, etc. Like why bother putting in hard work where you're putting your wellbeing in the balance just so that criminals go unpunished... eventually you end up with a "Caracas" & wild-west experience.