by vimes656 on 5/11/15, 3:47 PM with 115 comments
by kps on 5/11/15, 5:18 PM
> In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order.
> They were everybody.
by hammeringtime on 5/11/15, 4:35 PM
This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police dangerously disobey the traffic laws. I see them do rolling stops, putting on their lights briefly to get through a red light, or speed up and pass me on the left as I'm making a left turn.
One way to do this would be to allow anyone to report traffic violations that they caught on video. So if I record the video of someone committing a violation, I upload the video to the town's website, they send the owner of the license plate a ticket.
That said, I thought that most of this article was pretty weak, a lot of meandering, incoherence, and conflation of different ideas.
One of the best articles I read on morality, game theory and evolution was here: http://jim.com/rights.html The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.
by Maultasche on 5/11/15, 5:31 PM
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.
by dj-wonk on 5/11/15, 8:32 PM
An interesting article; still, I tire of seeing so many articles introduce and anchor game theory based on the PD or one particular configuration of it. The PD is frequently overblown, misunderstood, and misapplied. Game theory is much more than the PD.
I think it is also worth mentioning that game theory isn't the only game or theory in town when it comes to thinking about society and collective action. For example, systems dynamics is also quite interesting; see Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.
To get a handle for police corruption, I'd argue a theory probably should explain how and why:
* corrupt police do/don't get caught
* corrupt police do/don't rat each other out
* police are/aren't monitored
* police are/aren't incentivizedby abecedarius on 5/11/15, 5:49 PM
by jobu on 5/11/15, 5:22 PM
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.
by linhchi on 5/11/15, 4:33 PM
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-...
by _lce0 on 5/11/15, 5:10 PM
Is this saying that the justice system is the problem, not law-enforcement?
by javajosh on 5/11/15, 4:34 PM
by digi_owl on 5/11/15, 5:24 PM
by hasenj on 5/11/15, 7:59 PM
Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior.
I don't think that would be desirable ..
by gbersac on 5/11/15, 8:49 PM
By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker news. Loved it.
by danans on 5/11/15, 10:45 PM
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?
by lotsofmangos on 5/11/15, 11:22 PM
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.
by bayesianhorse on 5/11/15, 7:09 PM
But this has been known for quite some time: Transparency can fight corruption. That's why it may be a good Idea to put cameras on policemen, and that publishing public budgets is an inevitable step towards reducing corruption.
by api on 5/11/15, 10:43 PM
by albertsun on 5/11/15, 5:27 PM
by mkagenius on 5/11/15, 6:01 PM
The main strategy:
Here’s how it might look in practice. 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 sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.
by cies on 5/11/15, 5:29 PM
That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!
by ck2 on 5/11/15, 4:44 PM
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.
by giltleaf on 5/11/15, 9:33 PM
by sebastianconcpt on 5/11/15, 7:12 PM