8 ms·

There is an important distinction between someone who doesn't misbehave for fear of being watched, and someone who wishes to be watched in fear of the perceptio

by unabst 9y ago

There is an important distinction between someone who doesn't misbehave for fear of being watched, and someone who wishes to be watched in fear of the perception of misbehavior. There is no substitute for someone who's intent is to try and get away with things, and someone who's intent is to serve a cause, be of service, and not get away with anything. So really, we should build a system where the intent of transparency is paramount, not just transparency itself. Two things immediately come to mind. 1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell. 2. Super-disincentivize ulterior motives and their actions. Treat crimes by officers as far more severe and malicious than of non-officers. And they are. So if a police officer murders a civilian, punishment should be 10x or 100x. Same with stealing a slice of pizza or ignoring a stop sign. The point isn't that we should punish officers more. The point is we should all raise them to higher standards, and the officers themselves should willingly accept that higher burden of responsibility. It should be their responsibility to not profile or discriminate based on appearances of anyone or their car. It should be their responsibility to preserve life at all costs, even at a higher risk to themselves. And this will deter crookedness and incompetence. If an officer cannot do their job, they shouldn't. And if an officer thinks they can get away with anything, they shouldn't. Being a cop or even buying a cop like in the movies should not pose any criminal opportunities.

FireBeyond 9y ago
> 1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell. They did this behind the Iron Curtain. At one point in Romania, 30% of the population were regularly reporting to the Secret Police. Wonder what the percent of false positives were?
- unabst 9y ago
  Intentional false positives need to be super-disincentivized. If all is well, the system would be open enough that the whistle blower can blow their whistle in the open. And everyone would support the investigation, and the parties on both sides. Eventually truth does need to exist regarding the why and what was reported. Although, this wouldn't work where: 1. There are still enough bad guys who would punish this person in the locker room. 2. Situations where everyone is breaking the law, but enforcement is always with discretion. Like ebay where most listings violate something but aren't given a look until "someone" reports them. Or like overlooking jaywalking until someone of "interest" starts walking. There must be other scenarios, but we can be on top of them.
  - thesz 9y ago
    What you describe is a DDoS scenario for a system you support. I, with all my good will, can "blow a whistle" on a person I don't like, subconsciously or not. Just because I don't like him. And the defence of whistle blowers is exactly that - a good will.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    This meta-incentives i sort of lost track on them by now.
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      Why not add the patcher reward? He who rants out the gamble-ability of a system, reaps all the rewards of his fellow follow up loophole sneakers for patching? He/She who steps to late up and trys to milk a loophole/perverse incentive pays.
unclebucknasty 9y ago
Funny, the machinations we devise to skirt the core problem, which is an increasing dearth of fundamental moraltity. Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are. We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Thank you. I feel like one of the few people in my friend group that isn't becoming radicalized, anti-democracy, anti-free-speech all sacrificed in favor of Justice. But what kind of justice can an authoritarian mono-Party state bring about?
  - unclebucknasty 9y ago
    Yes. It feels like everyone is under some sort of collective hypnotism or part of some strange reality show. Literally, if you told me that something was being added to our food or water supplies to produce the odd effect that normalizes the madness that's happening, it would be completely plausible.
- cheetos 9y ago
  America, since its founding, has been an experiment in extreme individualism over collectivism. We worship capitalism over all else. Even a whisper of government programs that help the poor are vilified as communist. Selfishness and immorality is a natural consequence of that. Things won't change until our culture completely changes.
  - b6 9y ago
    People in the US are extremely generous, by any measure.
pp19dd 9y ago
On books, everything you say makes sense in the ideal world. But in practicable reality, things are a bit more complicated. Re: item 1, Baltimore is the birthplace of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, a heavily distributed and well marketed street campaign defining a dynamic that a wiki entry can't possibly describe accurately. The bigger point is that it had a counter-campaign on the police side which retaliated against it, and that thinking got ingrained in the troops. In other words, officers stick together and no policy change will realistically affect that. After the Baltimore riots, there was a change on the police side - cultural change, not policy or regulation based one. As a result, homicide rate shot up through the roof and appears to be rising year after year. This behavior is a defensive mechanism and so incredibly tribal - not something you can set through policy, short of replacing 3,000 cops. To that point, most of Baltimore PD cops DO NOT live in Baltimore. They travel to work from outside. In other words, despite having 3,000 job positions in the city, they couldn't fill them locally so they expanded outward, allowing officers to take cruisers home as a commuting incentive. Think about evaluating that factor - would you want to employ cops who live in your neighborhood, or ones from a neighboring town? Would there be a difference? Then think what would happen if you didn't have a choice. Re: item 2, you're describing lex talionis, which we as a society abandoned centuries ago. You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops. In Baltimore, there are 3,000 cops for 600,000 citizens. Median cop salary is $50k and it's a dangerous and difficult job. Tons of them turn to overtime work to make ends meet and are drained of energy (look up Baltimore Sun overtime database if curious). Meanwhile, the vast poor citizens there have a median income of $30k. That's an indicator of why people turn to crime and its volume. Living in the city is prohibitively expensive (sweet mercy, the property taxes are terrifying - it's no incentive to buy a house there.) It's really messy.
- joatmon-snoo 9y ago
  > You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops. As much as I want to agree with this statement, I can't help but feel that it's highly problematic in some sense. When it comes to court cases (IANAL, but this is my understanding), law enforcement officials' testimony is treated with a certain measure of elevated credibility (there's SCOTUS precedent for this, but I can't seem to find the cases). Violation of that trust - as in this case - should be penalized, but I don't know what kind of remedy would be appropriate.
thesz 9y ago
You describe USSR and German Democratic Respublic (GDR) and I mean it in a very negative way, despite being very sympathetic to USSR and GDR. The "whistle-blowing" there was a tool to socially lift oneself. And "10x punishment" is exactly what makes such lifting possible.

by unabst 9y ago

FireBeyond 9y ago

> 1. Super-incentivize snitching. Reward whistle-blowers to the point where it becomes an easy decision. Not only monetary, but with honor and with medals. Make it the new "right thing to do" in public service. Fight corruption. Easy sell. They did this behind the Iron Curtain. At one point in Romania, 30% of the population were regularly reporting to the Secret Police. Wonder what the percent of false positives were?

unabst 9y ago
Intentional false positives need to be super-disincentivized. If all is well, the system would be open enough that the whistle blower can blow their whistle in the open. And everyone would support the investigation, and the parties on both sides. Eventually truth does need to exist regarding the why and what was reported. Although, this wouldn't work where: 1. There are still enough bad guys who would punish this person in the locker room. 2. Situations where everyone is breaking the law, but enforcement is always with discretion. Like ebay where most listings violate something but aren't given a look until "someone" reports them. Or like overlooking jaywalking until someone of "interest" starts walking. There must be other scenarios, but we can be on top of them.
- thesz 9y ago
  What you describe is a DDoS scenario for a system you support. I, with all my good will, can "blow a whistle" on a person I don't like, subconsciously or not. Just because I don't like him. And the defence of whistle blowers is exactly that - a good will.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  This meta-incentives i sort of lost track on them by now.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Why not add the patcher reward? He who rants out the gamble-ability of a system, reaps all the rewards of his fellow follow up loophole sneakers for patching? He/She who steps to late up and trys to milk a loophole/perverse incentive pays.

unclebucknasty 9y ago

Funny, the machinations we devise to skirt the core problem, which is an increasing dearth of fundamental moraltity. Look around.. Something's gone completely wrong. Everyone is angry and there is decreasing value placed on kindness and decency. In fact, selfishness is increasingly a virtue. Observe how POTUS behaves. I don't care what side you're on, there is nothing normal or healthy about that level of chaos, narcissim, and mean-spiritedness. Yet, this is the leader of the free world? It's a sad reflection of where we are. We can set up all the incentives and disincentives we can imagine but, as the saying goes, "you can't legislate morality". Until we deal with that issue, we'll continue to see all manner of its manifestations.

aoeusnth1 9y ago
Thank you. I feel like one of the few people in my friend group that isn't becoming radicalized, anti-democracy, anti-free-speech all sacrificed in favor of Justice. But what kind of justice can an authoritarian mono-Party state bring about?
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  Yes. It feels like everyone is under some sort of collective hypnotism or part of some strange reality show. Literally, if you told me that something was being added to our food or water supplies to produce the odd effect that normalizes the madness that's happening, it would be completely plausible.
cheetos 9y ago
America, since its founding, has been an experiment in extreme individualism over collectivism. We worship capitalism over all else. Even a whisper of government programs that help the poor are vilified as communist. Selfishness and immorality is a natural consequence of that. Things won't change until our culture completely changes.
- b6 9y ago
  People in the US are extremely generous, by any measure.

pp19dd 9y ago

On books, everything you say makes sense in the ideal world. But in practicable reality, things are a bit more complicated. Re: item 1, Baltimore is the birthplace of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, a heavily distributed and well marketed street campaign defining a dynamic that a wiki entry can't possibly describe accurately. The bigger point is that it had a counter-campaign on the police side which retaliated against it, and that thinking got ingrained in the troops. In other words, officers stick together and no policy change will realistically affect that. After the Baltimore riots, there was a change on the police side - cultural change, not policy or regulation based one. As a result, homicide rate shot up through the roof and appears to be rising year after year. This behavior is a defensive mechanism and so incredibly tribal - not something you can set through policy, short of replacing 3,000 cops. To that point, most of Baltimore PD cops DO NOT live in Baltimore. They travel to work from outside. In other words, despite having 3,000 job positions in the city, they couldn't fill them locally so they expanded outward, allowing officers to take cruisers home as a commuting incentive. Think about evaluating that factor - would you want to employ cops who live in your neighborhood, or ones from a neighboring town? Would there be a difference? Then think what would happen if you didn't have a choice. Re: item 2, you're describing lex talionis, which we as a society abandoned centuries ago. You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops. In Baltimore, there are 3,000 cops for 600,000 citizens. Median cop salary is $50k and it's a dangerous and difficult job. Tons of them turn to overtime work to make ends meet and are drained of energy (look up Baltimore Sun overtime database if curious). Meanwhile, the vast poor citizens there have a median income of $30k. That's an indicator of why people turn to crime and its volume. Living in the city is prohibitively expensive (sweet mercy, the property taxes are terrifying - it's no incentive to buy a house there.) It's really messy.

joatmon-snoo 9y ago
> You can't practice treating crimes differently based on who the person is, even if they're cops. As much as I want to agree with this statement, I can't help but feel that it's highly problematic in some sense. When it comes to court cases (IANAL, but this is my understanding), law enforcement officials' testimony is treated with a certain measure of elevated credibility (there's SCOTUS precedent for this, but I can't seem to find the cases). Violation of that trust - as in this case - should be penalized, but I don't know what kind of remedy would be appropriate.

thesz 9y ago

You describe USSR and German Democratic Respublic (GDR) and I mean it in a very negative way, despite being very sympathetic to USSR and GDR. The "whistle-blowing" there was a tool to socially lift oneself. And "10x punishment" is exactly what makes such lifting possible.