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It’s a pretty uncharitable article that uses the noisier easier to find “people getting away with it” stories to lay seeds of discontent without producing any d

It’s a pretty uncharitable article that uses the noisier easier to find “people getting away with it” stories to lay seeds of discontent without producing any data to show how many people are getting away with it. It’s easy to find the stories that make people angry but no where reports “system works as expected 4,000,000 times this year” stories. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t but anecdata to support the authors world view is also uncool.

mr_luc 5y ago
The author might be assuming public knowledge that some kinds of corruption in the United States, for instance, are getting worse: See [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-international-corruption-worst-decade-united-states/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-int... Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless. But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent. Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation. Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it. If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted. The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it. That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise? (It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  > I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples This dude had to cherry pick harder than an industrial farm machine so that he could all but ignore the elephants in the room.
bloaf 5y ago
I don't think you've actually understood. As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is. That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  There are also cases where we can widely observe people being punished or having other problems from some behavior but not the behavior itself. Bribery or drug use are two well studied examples. When you have a public awareness campaign that emphasizes how large the problem is people think "Gosh, I hardly ever see any one getting arrested for bribes or going to the hospital for using drugs, it must actually be safe if everyone is doing it" and the public awareness campaign backfires.

mr_luc 5y ago

The author might be assuming public knowledge that some kinds of corruption in the United States, for instance, are getting worse: See [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-international-corruption-worst-decade-united-states/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/report-transparency-int... Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless. But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent. Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation. Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it. If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted. The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it. That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise? (It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)

jjoonathan 5y ago
> I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples This dude had to cherry pick harder than an industrial farm machine so that he could all but ignore the elephants in the room.

bloaf 5y ago

I don't think you've actually understood. As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is. That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.

Symmetry 5y ago
There are also cases where we can widely observe people being punished or having other problems from some behavior but not the behavior itself. Bribery or drug use are two well studied examples. When you have a public awareness campaign that emphasizes how large the problem is people think "Gosh, I hardly ever see any one getting arrested for bribes or going to the hospital for using drugs, it must actually be safe if everyone is doing it" and the public awareness campaign backfires.