Game theory’s cure for corruption

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/game-theorys-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops/

by vimes656 • 11 years ago

246 115 11 years ago

linhchi• 11 years 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-...

BuildTheRobots• 11 years ago

That was a fantastic read -thank you :)

javajosh3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Anarchy in 3... 2... 1...

javajosh3• 11 years ago

Thank you. I really like that idea!

hammeringtime• 11 years 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 The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.

matt4077• 11 years ago

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.

gabriel342• 11 years ago

India has one with quite a lot of reports: http://www.ipaidabribe.com/

baddox• 11 years ago

The trick is still: who does the investigation?

kps2• 11 years 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.

gabriel342• 11 years ago

Robert Klitgaard posits that accountability/transparency reduces corruption

MarkPNeyer• 11 years ago

the system i've laid out here can help solve that problem:

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.

drzaiusapelord3• 11 years ago

We tried this in chicago with bus drivers blowing through reds and getting caught on our red light cameras. Turns out the unions strong-armed the city early on to make bus drivers non-responsible for traffic violations and the city ends up paying their own fines.

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.

ashark• 11 years ago

Even as another driver I automatically class any police car I see as "highest possible risk of doing something stupid without warning", right up there with a minivan full of kids and a texting driver that I've observed swerving several times and has changed lanes without signaling.

The only problem with this is that the cop car probably deserves a class of its own, even riskier than the swerving distracted-driver minivan full of kids.

mod3• 11 years ago

Maybe it's a function of me living in a small town, but I have only once seen police doing anything dangerous while driving. I've NEVER seen one use his siren to get through a red-light, either.

When they have the siren on, they're typically driving much faster than normal, but normally they're indistinguishable from a normal driver.

The one incident I did see was a motorcycle officer do a U-turn across four lanes to come ticket me (no seatbelt). He turned on his lights first, and the road was relatively clear.

eric_h• 11 years ago

I have twice had to jump out of the way of an unmarked NYC police car that turned on its lights and sirens and ran a red as I was crossing the street.

I also always look both ways crossing one way streets as I've almost been clipped by a police car going the wrong way down one.

ck2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

gotta go along to get along

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

Never cross the blue line.

aidenn04• 11 years 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.

amyjess2• 11 years 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.

_lce02• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

In other words:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

jessaustin3• 11 years 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.

kps2• 11 years 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

coldtea2• 11 years 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.

spcoll2• 11 years 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.

anon4• 11 years ago

That's the point of separating powers - the police shouldn't judge or carry out sentences.

juliangregorian• 11 years ago

Believe you mean Sir Robert Peel, John Peel is an entirely different guy.

drzaiusapelord3• 11 years ago

John Peel's opinion on the Police has a lot more to do with bass lines and guitar parts than community involvement.

alwaysdoit• 11 years ago

Interesting. I wonder what it would be like if Police Duty was mandatory service that everyone was required to perform, either like Jury Duty is supposed to work, or as a mandatory service for young people.

Animats• 11 years ago

The USSR did that. Militia draftees did much routine street policing.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militsiya#Conscripted_police

richmarr• 11 years ago

I've lived in London for most of my life and have never heard that. Thanks.

It does jibe somewhat with certain modern police practices, like 'kettling' peaceful protestors, and their insistence on calling it police 'force'

jobu• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

pixl973• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

geomark• 11 years ago

For your amusement let me point out some implicit assumptions that are required for that to be true. The country in which I live has criminal defamation laws that would result in you going to jail for posting that video - the truth is not a defense against defamation here, unlike other countries. Also, the authorities would likely demand the video be taken down or they would require ISPs to block it within the country.

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

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

mod3• 11 years 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.

amyjess2• 11 years ago

And on twitter and tumblr, doxxing your opponents' families is the norm.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years 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.

task_queue• 11 years ago

Both communities are heavily moderated

albertsun• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Or maybe it suggests underlying order?

https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...

cies• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

notahacker3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

Maultasche2• 11 years 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.

spcoll2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

The Scarlet Twitter.

javajosh3• 11 years ago

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...

Maybe. But isn't it an experiment worth trying? Does anyone really know what would happen in a modern, secular, money-driven society if you gave people more authority to enforce the law?

a_c_s• 11 years ago

This happens in cyberspace all the time (just look at any HN discussion about airport security): what reason do we have to believe that in meatspace people would behave differently?

Maultasche2• 11 years ago

I do think it's an experiment worth trying. My hypothesis would be that it wouldn't work, but it would be indeed interesting to see what happens. I think that we'd learn a lot even from failure.

I suspect it would have a greater chance of being successful on a small scale and then break down on a large scale. Like corruption, I think it's somewhat dependent on the culture shared by the people who are involved, much like with successful companies vs disfunctional companies.

_lce02• 11 years ago

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...

I feel like, in tech, we have a bunch of those

DennisP• 11 years ago

You wouldn't want to legalize lynch mobs. But maybe there's a happy medium. Making it clear that citizens are allowed to take videos of cops might be a good start.

For actual punishment, force isn't necessarily needed. A lot of societies manage it by social pressure, with "shunning" being an extreme version. Pressure for conformity already exists regarding things which are not illegal, so I'm not convinced that it makes things worse to rely on it more for things which are currently illegal.

One of my anthropology professors used to say there are two ways to keep order in society: by force, and by ideology, and the second is a lot cheaper.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

It's rare but you can perform a citizen's arrest

bayesianhorse3• 11 years ago

One of the key points is that abusive "punishing" is in itself punished.

To get the best of both worlds, it would be good enough to make sure citizens are empowered to investigate and persecute abuse. Both through strong "rat squads" and good systems for reporting abuse.

gdrulia• 11 years ago

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.

That!

If there would be one set of rules that everyone would agree, then this idea could work. It works in ants, because there is no ambiguous ideas of what is right and what is wrong.

You could think that law suppose to be that set of rules that suppose to tell you what is right and what is wrong. But is not that simple, law doesn't ask you whether you agree with it, you just must comply with it. So if you disagree that listening to pirated mp3 is a unlawful, you might as well do it without feeling guilt. And even when law is already forced upon you, disputes still arise and disagreements has to be solved in court, simply because you cannot cover every possible situation in the rules.

drzaiusapelord3• 11 years ago

I would think that such a system would result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often triggered by hearsay and rumors.

We are already seeing this with the "reddit affect" where some poor soul gets targeted by "Hey this guy didn't tip me on a busy Friday night," and it all turns out to be bullshit. Even if it wasn't, thousands of angry netizens shouldn't be picking on lone individuals.

There's also an element of bikeshedding here as an average Joe can understand being stiffed and be unreasonably angry about it, but perhaps cannot understand the intricacies of sexual assault or financial fraud. This is why police, lawmakers, prosecutors, lawyers, and judges are all trained, educated, and regulated in some fashion. This stuff is much harder than it looks. Anyone who has ever lived in a HOA knows exactly what happens when average Joes are given the authority to enforce random things. Its death by a million paper cuts and everyone is miserable and hates each other in the end.

We tried the snitch society in communist regimes (and still have it in places like Cuba and N Korea) and its hellish.

Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included."

Except the police have a powerful union behind them. 100 reports against me will lead to my arrest or a beating or whatever. 100 against a cop will merit nothing, maybe a rubber-stamped investigation that always leads to 'innocent.'

abecedarius• 11 years 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./Englan... http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html

notahacker3• 11 years 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.

jessaustin3• 11 years 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.

mkagenius• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

bayesianhorse3• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

hasenj• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

kijin2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

KingMob• 11 years ago

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

Not to mention the huge numbers of psychologists and anthropologists who provided data illustrating the numerous fallacies of game theory. In the early days, game theorists were laughably naive about actual humans.

gbersac• 11 years 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... 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.

giltleaf• 11 years 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.

api• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I will teach my son first Game Theory and Statistics and only then economics and law.

danans• 11 years 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?

lotsofmangos• 11 years 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.

spacemanmatt3• 11 years 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.

Game theory’s cure for corruption

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