25 ms·

Game theory’s cure for corruption

246 points by vimes656 11y ago

ck2 11y ago
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.
- wnevets 11y ago
  gotta go along to get along
  - higherpurpose 11y ago
    Never cross the blue line.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  That's a big part of what the article is about; so long as only the police can levy penalties against people for breaking the law, there will be police corruption.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    What I would like to see is serious incentives for police officers to turn in their colleagues and give IAB unlimited power to spy on every aspect of officers' lives.
    - aidenn0 11y ago
      There are good game-theoretic reasons why that is just a band-aid solution, compared to empowering citizens to apply some form of pressure to officers.
    - spacemanmatt 11y ago
      I think this goes a little too far. I would settle for cops being held to the same rules as everyone else for starters. If that's not enough, then sure, special inquisition powers for IAB and maybe also a citizen led review board.
linhchi 11y ago
to be relevant, this same author writes a very interesting piece about pregnancy seen as a war of conflict between mom and infant http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-between-mother-father-and-baby/ http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-...
- BuildTheRobots 11y ago
  That was a fantastic read -thank you :)
javajosh 11y ago
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).
- lisper 11y ago
  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.
  - ChristianBundy 11y ago
    Anarchy in 3... 2... 1...
  - javajosh 11y ago
    Thank you. I really like that idea!
    - mannykannot 11y ago
      You really need to read the article in order to have an informed opinion of it. At the very least, you should take into account the author's own caveats around her conclusion.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hammeringtime 11y ago
"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 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 http://jim.com/rights.html The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.
- matt4077 11y ago
  http://bribespot.com/en/ http://bribespot.com/en/ tried/is trying to do something like that: crowdsourcing info on corruption. I saw their pitch and thought it's an awesome idea, but I don't think they got the traction that would be needed.
  - gabriel34 11y ago
    India has one with quite a lot of reports: http://www.ipaidabribe.com/ http://www.ipaidabribe.com/
- baddox 11y ago
  The trick is still: who does the investigation?
  - kps 11y ago
    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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
_lce0 11y ago
> The results were startling. By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’. In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay. Is this saying that the justice system is the problem, not law-enforcement?
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Righteousness is a problem in of itself at times, and the vision of "common good" enforced by the citizens in general will not necessarily be good.
- higherpurpose 11y ago
  In other words: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  That's a pretty fine distinction you're attempting to draw. The portion of the "justice system" that is not police, is instead made up of people who interact with police several times a week. Most citizens are not in either of those groups.
kps 11y ago
> In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. > They were everybody. Attributed to John Peel in his establishment of London Metropolitan Police: “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”¹ ¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
- coldtea 11y ago
  >In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. Also in totalitarian dystopias. The thing is, before you get to who the police is (and it being everybody can be OK), it's more important to know what to police for and what is considered an offense.
  - spcoll 11y ago
    Hunter-gatherer societies that did fit this model could be considered to be the ultimate totalitarian organizations. Extremely strict rules controlling every aspect of the life of the members, from birth to death, and no deviation ever tolerated, under pain of banishment or even death.
    - iamcurious 11y ago
      Yes but the power equation wasn't as bad as a modern totalitarian society. In a 100 people tribe, you are exactly 1% of it, and know in person the entire population.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not generally resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics, culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself. This actually leads me to wonder whether "banishment" could even have been an actual threat, before the advent of agriculture. What if the tribe "banished" some people, and then a year later found itself migrating into wherever they had settled? Would it "banish" them again, if it could?
jobu 11y ago
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.
- KhalilK 11y ago
  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.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    That's why you pay attention to the people in the media that are good at distributing this kind of stuff and pass it to them.
- wyager 11y ago
  It seems like many of the cops who are filmed brutalizing people end up on brief suspension, and then back at their jobs shortly after. For filming police to be effective, we need more regularly enforced punishments (like actually being fired) for police brutality.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Those who are actually fired are sometimes discovered working as a cop in another nearby jurisdiction shortly thereafter. If you really want to punish a rotten cop, you need to prevent him from being rehired.
    - pluma 11y ago
      I'm not generally in favour of occupational bans, but I think that's a great example for an occupation you should be able to get banned from if you are found to abuse your position of power (much like caretakers). You wouldn't want to see a rapist nurse be employed as a nurse or a molesting teacher work in a school, so why should police brutality be treated any different? You abuse a privileged position, you lose the privilege for a reasonable amount of time.
digi_owl 11y ago
Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't shake the thought that this will simply lead to the formation of gangs/clans.
- mod 11y ago
  I think social media is a somewhat relevant corollary, where it self-polices content. I'd say sometimes--like HN--it's a success. Good behavior is encouraged & enforced. Bad behavior is punished. Other times--like reddit--not a success. The hive-mind is real there, and in particular well-mannered disagreement that is misaligned with the norm is punished pretty strongly there. Plus we all have heard how their investigations of real-life events have turned out--witch hunts. I think reddit's population is more reflective of the general population, unfortunately. I don't think self-policing would end well at all.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    And on twitter and tumblr, doxxing your opponents' families is the norm.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Reddit is actually quite a complex ecosystem nowadays. There's a lot of HN-quality subreddits focused on particular topics. I'd risk saying that most topical subreddits are sort-of OK. The rule of thumb I'm seeing is: the more niche the interest, the better the community. It's only when you start dealing with "normals" that you see the worst parts of humanity.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      As a general (no just limited to Reddit) observation, the easier a topic can be opinionated the more noise there will be.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    Both communities are heavily moderated
albertsun 11y ago
If your mental model for something is so malleable that it can explain cancer and police corruption the same way, maybe it's not actually providing any insight and all you've done is distort reality to fit it. Just saying... Game theory is so easy to invoke
- jmcmichael 11y ago
  On the other hand, many times deep principles can be discovered and validated when they reveal unusual correlations between previously unknown-to-be-related systems.
- patcon 11y ago
  Or maybe it suggests underlying order? https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...
cies 11y ago
I thought the article was too lengthy/wordy, so I didn't read it all. I was curious if it described the same anti-corruption approach that I know was once suggested in India: "legalize one side of the corruption". That makes those in a corruption scheme think twice (or more) -- now both sides are equally punishable (thus create a bond by bribing/taking-bribe). That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!
- jaideepsingh 11y ago
  I would love to hear more about this "legalize one side of the corruption" proposed solution. Can you elaborate? The article is lengthy but ultimately boils down to what one of the other comments mentioned: 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.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    A logical consequence of legalising one side of the corruption is that a mutual incentive to conceal its occurrence no longer exists, which makes corrupt agreements more difficult to reach as well as more likely to be exposed.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Are you talking about the legalization of paying bribes? I was looking close, because I think the topic is very interesting. They legalized paying bribes only for services that one'd have the right to have anyway. If a person get any kind of advantage over what they already have a right, it's not legal anymore. Overall, I think it's a very well thought-out law, and completely not radical. The entire world should copy it.
Maultasche 11y ago
Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but there's a big difference between insects and people. 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.
- spcoll 11y ago
  > 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. Basically what you see today on social media, where everyone is empowered to be an agent of "justice" (a public shaming and harassment-based justice system).
  - backtoyoujim 11y ago
    The Scarlet Twitter.
abecedarius 11y ago
We don't have to speculate about how widespread power of prosecution might work out; there's history. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./Englan... http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html
- notahacker 11y ago
  TLDR: despite Friedman's best attempts to spin otherwise, not very well, unless you have a particular fondness for punishments being either extremely draconian or purely financial and think justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    ...justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser. Eh, modern justice systems have their fair share of that.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      I haven't argued otherwise. But modern accusers aren't expected to pay for the costs of the prosecution and the witnesses, or enforce fine collection via escalating blood feud, and relatively few people would argue reverting to such a system would improve the chances of the likelihood and level of punishment being closely associated with actual guilt.
mkagenius 11y ago
tl;dr 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.
- kefka 11y ago
  I'm not entirely sure I like that. Ever hear of brigading on Reddit, or "your personal army" on 4chan /b/ ? That's the bad end of what we have to deal with. And it is easy to imagine every officer getting more votes than the city has residents... and we're back to square 1.
bayesianhorse 11y ago
Long story short: If you enable every member of a society to punish abuse, you get a righteous community. 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.
sebastianconcpt 11y ago
So, the world might actually work if all of us self-police ourselves from self-corruption.
hasenj 11y ago
This only works if all members of the population share the exact same set of values. Even then, it might be undesirable. Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior. I don't think that would be desirable ..
- jbhatab 11y ago
  There could easily be modern manifestations of this too. Mob beatings for a 1 percenter that they deemed corrupt. Humanity will always find a way to get too outraged over something.
dj-wonk 11y ago
This article, like many, mentions the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) but does not convincingly connect it to the particular nature of police corruption. 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 incentivized
- kijin 11y ago
  The Prisoner's Dilemma is frequently mentioned because it is one of the most fundamental building blocks of game theory. Almost everything else that we think of as game theory is either a variant of it, built on top of it, or is an attempt to tweak it. The simplest version of the Prisoner's Dilemma succinctly explains both (1) why rational beings feel compelled to have a moral code in the first place, and (2) why they so often disobey the moral code that they themselves believe in. It's best for everyone to cooperate; but in the absence of a guarantee that everyone else will, it's in my best interest to defect. Of course, you can't get from PD to police corruption in a single step. Lots of intermediate steps and computer modeling is needed to get there. But most of that is probably too technical for an Aeon article, so the article only mentions the first and last steps. A more detailed account of the models they used would be very interesting, but that's probably the job of actual scientific papers.
  - vacri 11y ago
    But the PD is faulty at it's core, because it doesn't take into account external factors. What if the criminals are in a gang that treats snitches very harshly? Or not in a gang but in a culture of 'omerta'? What if the criminals' career prospects are affected more harshly by a long vs short sentence? What if admitting guilt fast-tracks the criminal into a drug rehab course that the criminal is interested in? What if one police interrogator reads criminal A better and thus phrases the deal in a more attractive way? What if the criminal is on the third strike in a 'three strikes' location? What if the criminal is a devoted father, and can't possibly entertain the option of being away from his child for the term of the long sentence? What if the criminal is an institutionalised homeless person, and the idea of prison is attractive? There are heaps of external factors that can affect this decision, from subtle to severe, and the PD doesn't model them well at all. As a base building block, it's not very solid.
gbersac 11y ago
What is funny is that, if we sum it up with another article of this site : http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a-good-turn/ http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a... we conclude that a society without corruption (where every bad or coward behaviour are punish) is also a society without creativity ! By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker news. Loved it.
api 11y ago
Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum. It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.
- dmichulke 11y ago
  I will teach my son first Game Theory and Statistics and only then economics and law.
danans 11y ago
This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are operating. 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?
giltleaf 11y ago
Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.
lotsofmangos 11y ago
On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly. 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.
- spacemanmatt 11y ago
  I'm for this. I think it would get the same pushback that most good ideas for policing routinely gets: They'll say it might make cops timid. As if they're already too timid.

246 points by vimes656 11y ago

ck2 11y ago

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.

wnevets 11y ago
gotta go along to get along
- higherpurpose 11y ago
  Never cross the blue line.
aidenn0 11y ago
That's a big part of what the article is about; so long as only the police can levy penalties against people for breaking the law, there will be police corruption.
- amyjess 11y ago
  What I would like to see is serious incentives for police officers to turn in their colleagues and give IAB unlimited power to spy on every aspect of officers' lives.
  - aidenn0 11y ago
    There are good game-theoretic reasons why that is just a band-aid solution, compared to empowering citizens to apply some form of pressure to officers.
  - spacemanmatt 11y ago
    I think this goes a little too far. I would settle for cops being held to the same rules as everyone else for starters. If that's not enough, then sure, special inquisition powers for IAB and maybe also a citizen led review board.

linhchi 11y ago

to be relevant, this same author writes a very interesting piece about pregnancy seen as a war of conflict between mom and infant http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-between-mother-father-and-baby/ http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-...

BuildTheRobots 11y ago
That was a fantastic read -thank you :)

javajosh 11y ago

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).

lisper 11y ago
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.
- ChristianBundy 11y ago
  Anarchy in 3... 2... 1...
- javajosh 11y ago
  Thank you. I really like that idea!
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    You really need to read the article in order to have an informed opinion of it. At the very least, you should take into account the author's own caveats around her conclusion.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hammeringtime 11y ago

"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 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 http://jim.com/rights.html The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.

matt4077 11y ago
http://bribespot.com/en/ http://bribespot.com/en/ tried/is trying to do something like that: crowdsourcing info on corruption. I saw their pitch and thought it's an awesome idea, but I don't think they got the traction that would be needed.
- gabriel34 11y ago
  India has one with quite a lot of reports: http://www.ipaidabribe.com/ http://www.ipaidabribe.com/
baddox 11y ago
The trick is still: who does the investigation?
- kps 11y ago
  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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

_lce0 11y ago

> The results were startling. By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’. In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay. Is this saying that the justice system is the problem, not law-enforcement?

Spooky23 11y ago
Righteousness is a problem in of itself at times, and the vision of "common good" enforced by the citizens in general will not necessarily be good.
higherpurpose 11y ago
In other words: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
jessaustin 11y ago
That's a pretty fine distinction you're attempting to draw. The portion of the "justice system" that is not police, is instead made up of people who interact with police several times a week. Most citizens are not in either of those groups.

kps 11y ago

> In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. > They were everybody. Attributed to John Peel in his establishment of London Metropolitan Police: “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”¹ ¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles

coldtea 11y ago
>In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were everybody. Also in totalitarian dystopias. The thing is, before you get to who the police is (and it being everybody can be OK), it's more important to know what to police for and what is considered an offense.
- spcoll 11y ago
  Hunter-gatherer societies that did fit this model could be considered to be the ultimate totalitarian organizations. Extremely strict rules controlling every aspect of the life of the members, from birth to death, and no deviation ever tolerated, under pain of banishment or even death.
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    Yes but the power equation wasn't as bad as a modern totalitarian society. In a 100 people tribe, you are exactly 1% of it, and know in person the entire population.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not generally resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics, culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself. This actually leads me to wonder whether "banishment" could even have been an actual threat, before the advent of agriculture. What if the tribe "banished" some people, and then a year later found itself migrating into wherever they had settled? Would it "banish" them again, if it could?

jobu 11y ago

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.

KhalilK 11y ago
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.
- pixl97 11y ago
  That's why you pay attention to the people in the media that are good at distributing this kind of stuff and pass it to them.
wyager 11y ago
It seems like many of the cops who are filmed brutalizing people end up on brief suspension, and then back at their jobs shortly after. For filming police to be effective, we need more regularly enforced punishments (like actually being fired) for police brutality.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Those who are actually fired are sometimes discovered working as a cop in another nearby jurisdiction shortly thereafter. If you really want to punish a rotten cop, you need to prevent him from being rehired.
  - pluma 11y ago
    I'm not generally in favour of occupational bans, but I think that's a great example for an occupation you should be able to get banned from if you are found to abuse your position of power (much like caretakers). You wouldn't want to see a rapist nurse be employed as a nurse or a molesting teacher work in a school, so why should police brutality be treated any different? You abuse a privileged position, you lose the privilege for a reasonable amount of time.

digi_owl 11y ago

Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't shake the thought that this will simply lead to the formation of gangs/clans.

mod 11y ago
I think social media is a somewhat relevant corollary, where it self-polices content. I'd say sometimes--like HN--it's a success. Good behavior is encouraged & enforced. Bad behavior is punished. Other times--like reddit--not a success. The hive-mind is real there, and in particular well-mannered disagreement that is misaligned with the norm is punished pretty strongly there. Plus we all have heard how their investigations of real-life events have turned out--witch hunts. I think reddit's population is more reflective of the general population, unfortunately. I don't think self-policing would end well at all.
- amyjess 11y ago
  And on twitter and tumblr, doxxing your opponents' families is the norm.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Reddit is actually quite a complex ecosystem nowadays. There's a lot of HN-quality subreddits focused on particular topics. I'd risk saying that most topical subreddits are sort-of OK. The rule of thumb I'm seeing is: the more niche the interest, the better the community. It's only when you start dealing with "normals" that you see the worst parts of humanity.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    As a general (no just limited to Reddit) observation, the easier a topic can be opinionated the more noise there will be.
- task_queue 11y ago
  Both communities are heavily moderated

albertsun 11y ago

If your mental model for something is so malleable that it can explain cancer and police corruption the same way, maybe it's not actually providing any insight and all you've done is distort reality to fit it. Just saying... Game theory is so easy to invoke

jmcmichael 11y ago
On the other hand, many times deep principles can be discovered and validated when they reveal unusual correlations between previously unknown-to-be-related systems.
patcon 11y ago
Or maybe it suggests underlying order? https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...

cies 11y ago

I thought the article was too lengthy/wordy, so I didn't read it all. I was curious if it described the same anti-corruption approach that I know was once suggested in India: "legalize one side of the corruption". That makes those in a corruption scheme think twice (or more) -- now both sides are equally punishable (thus create a bond by bribing/taking-bribe). That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!

jaideepsingh 11y ago
I would love to hear more about this "legalize one side of the corruption" proposed solution. Can you elaborate? The article is lengthy but ultimately boils down to what one of the other comments mentioned: 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.
- notahacker 11y ago
  A logical consequence of legalising one side of the corruption is that a mutual incentive to conceal its occurrence no longer exists, which makes corrupt agreements more difficult to reach as well as more likely to be exposed.
marcosdumay 11y ago
Are you talking about the legalization of paying bribes? I was looking close, because I think the topic is very interesting. They legalized paying bribes only for services that one'd have the right to have anyway. If a person get any kind of advantage over what they already have a right, it's not legal anymore. Overall, I think it's a very well thought-out law, and completely not radical. The entire world should copy it.

Maultasche 11y ago

Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but there's a big difference between insects and people. 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.

spcoll 11y ago
> 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. Basically what you see today on social media, where everyone is empowered to be an agent of "justice" (a public shaming and harassment-based justice system).
- backtoyoujim 11y ago
  The Scarlet Twitter.

abecedarius 11y ago

We don't have to speculate about how widespread power of prosecution might work out; there's history. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./Englan... http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html

notahacker 11y ago
TLDR: despite Friedman's best attempts to spin otherwise, not very well, unless you have a particular fondness for punishments being either extremely draconian or purely financial and think justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  ...justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the accuser. Eh, modern justice systems have their fair share of that.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    I haven't argued otherwise. But modern accusers aren't expected to pay for the costs of the prosecution and the witnesses, or enforce fine collection via escalating blood feud, and relatively few people would argue reverting to such a system would improve the chances of the likelihood and level of punishment being closely associated with actual guilt.

mkagenius 11y ago

tl;dr 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.

kefka 11y ago
I'm not entirely sure I like that. Ever hear of brigading on Reddit, or "your personal army" on 4chan /b/ ? That's the bad end of what we have to deal with. And it is easy to imagine every officer getting more votes than the city has residents... and we're back to square 1.

bayesianhorse 11y ago

Long story short: If you enable every member of a society to punish abuse, you get a righteous community. 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.

sebastianconcpt 11y ago

So, the world might actually work if all of us self-police ourselves from self-corruption.

hasenj 11y ago

This only works if all members of the population share the exact same set of values. Even then, it might be undesirable. Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior. I don't think that would be desirable ..

jbhatab 11y ago
There could easily be modern manifestations of this too. Mob beatings for a 1 percenter that they deemed corrupt. Humanity will always find a way to get too outraged over something.

dj-wonk 11y ago

This article, like many, mentions the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) but does not convincingly connect it to the particular nature of police corruption. 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 incentivized

kijin 11y ago
The Prisoner's Dilemma is frequently mentioned because it is one of the most fundamental building blocks of game theory. Almost everything else that we think of as game theory is either a variant of it, built on top of it, or is an attempt to tweak it. The simplest version of the Prisoner's Dilemma succinctly explains both (1) why rational beings feel compelled to have a moral code in the first place, and (2) why they so often disobey the moral code that they themselves believe in. It's best for everyone to cooperate; but in the absence of a guarantee that everyone else will, it's in my best interest to defect. Of course, you can't get from PD to police corruption in a single step. Lots of intermediate steps and computer modeling is needed to get there. But most of that is probably too technical for an Aeon article, so the article only mentions the first and last steps. A more detailed account of the models they used would be very interesting, but that's probably the job of actual scientific papers.
- vacri 11y ago
  But the PD is faulty at it's core, because it doesn't take into account external factors. What if the criminals are in a gang that treats snitches very harshly? Or not in a gang but in a culture of 'omerta'? What if the criminals' career prospects are affected more harshly by a long vs short sentence? What if admitting guilt fast-tracks the criminal into a drug rehab course that the criminal is interested in? What if one police interrogator reads criminal A better and thus phrases the deal in a more attractive way? What if the criminal is on the third strike in a 'three strikes' location? What if the criminal is a devoted father, and can't possibly entertain the option of being away from his child for the term of the long sentence? What if the criminal is an institutionalised homeless person, and the idea of prison is attractive? There are heaps of external factors that can affect this decision, from subtle to severe, and the PD doesn't model them well at all. As a base building block, it's not very solid.

gbersac 11y ago

What is funny is that, if we sum it up with another article of this site : http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a-good-turn/ http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a... we conclude that a society without corruption (where every bad or coward behaviour are punish) is also a society without creativity ! By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker news. Loved it.

api 11y ago

Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum. It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

dmichulke 11y ago
I will teach my son first Game Theory and Statistics and only then economics and law.

danans 11y ago

This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are operating. 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?

giltleaf 11y ago

Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.

lotsofmangos 11y ago

On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil liabilities and is priced accordingly. 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.

spacemanmatt 11y ago
I'm for this. I think it would get the same pushback that most good ideas for policing routinely gets: They'll say it might make cops timid. As if they're already too timid.