21–30 of 119 posts
Pretty sure cops see other cops break laws far more serious than speeding and say nothing, every single week. How can you expect any cop to be honest if they watch others break the law and say nothing? You'll never change bad behavior if there is no penalty for that behavior.
gotta go along to get along
That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!
It seems like the ubiquity of small recording devices that nearly anyone could own and use (like a cellphone) will have a larger impact on corruption than anything else we could do. You may not have any direct power over the cop that just shook you down for a few hundred, but discretely recording that interaction and posting it on YouTube is likely to end his career in any society.
Given that the video gains enough visibility of course but I would still take that with a grain of salt.
" Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. " This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police da…
The trick is still: who does the investigation?
https://github.com/neyer/respect
if someone you respect, directly or implicitly, performs the investigation, then you can respect the results of the investigation. if someone you don't respect does it, you can disregard it.
People aren't all logical, analytic creatures, especially when they operate in groups. They tend to act on emotion rather than logic and it often isn't clear which information is factual and which is rumor. People tend to be susceptible to groupthink, and often go with the crowd.
Having everyone dealing out justice might work if everyone was calm, rational, logical, and well-educated, which is often what game theory supposes, but that's not how things work. In reality, I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.
Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another. We'd get a lot of uncertainty whether our behavior is acceptable or not.
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 by majorities just because they had different standards of what is acceptable behavior. Goodbye civil rights, because those would count for nothing if a member of the minority did something that offended the majority.
It seems to me that this is what happens in anarchical places in the world where authority has broken down. Anyone can and will dispense justice. Violence because someone was offended by someone else's behavior (which I find completely non-offensive) is common and mob violence is common.
Strong authority often breeds corruption but a lack of authority can also breed disorder and chaos, an environment where people who can gather followers become a strong authority and become corrupt. It's bad either way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This would de-incentivize the reporting of infractions, which is the opposite of what you want. You want to incentivize the reporting of verified infractions, while de-incentivize false reports. A consensus system could be used to "verify" a report.
" Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. " This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police da…
The larger issue with urban corruption is how unions enable this corruption. All the technology and feel good sentiment doesn't mean a thing if unions continue to have this much power over the taxpayer. Police unions make sure the bad apples don't get prosecuted as well, so this goes way beyond mere traffic issues into human rights issues like being killed in police custody and having a 'code of silence' and all the powers and wealth of the police union against the victim's family looking for justice.
Can someone tl;dr this? I skimmed it but the florid prose and the lack of any, you know, concrete suggestion (that I could find) really, really put me off (and I'm normally a huge fan of aeon).
Game theory predicts that corruption is inevitable when only a subset of the population is empowered to enforce societal norms. Hence, the only way to eliminate corruption is by empowering all of the members of a society to enforce societal norms.