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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I don't know how to fix it either and I have been losing sleep about it for a while, but I am glad to know you can see it now too. In the broadest scope @faceh nails it with consequences, but enacting consequences is going to be a real challenge. It does seem like we're going to need a significant numbers of lives lost in an actual disaster to occur before we can snap enough people out of the fog of complacency, because until lives are lost the buck is too easy to pass, it's too easy to downplay and dismiss it as 'misinformation'.

Wouldn't surprise me if lives were already lost from black parents losing trust in white doctors or similar effects, just not in a legible way.

I think the best 'consequences' are those that follow naturally/intrinsically from failure to be honest. Lying must have a cost, one that cannot be avoided if you lie/defect consistently.

If you're flying a passenger plane, you probably shouldn't have an ejection seat or parachute if your passengers don't have such an escape option. That way you will be extra sensitive to possible danger. The norm that The Captain is the last to leave a sinking ship operates similarly. And you can also surmise that the more responsibility inherent to your position, the more severe the consequences should be for misuse or screwup.

Sometimes you can't make the consequences that immediate but you can still align incentives. Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.

For politicians, I'd suggest that they must be forced to endure the direct consequences of rules they impose. If you are supporting criminal justice reform, you should probably be required to live at least part-time in the most crime-ridden districts in your jurisdiction. If you want to drastically increase police authority or make penalties for crimes harsher, you should be subject to 'random' investigations where you will be arrested and tried for ANY crimes discovered. "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide," right?

The penalty for publishing bad science or bad statistics, especially if you intentionally hide the stuff that would destroy your conclusions... well that's tricky. We discussed this a while back and I admitted to not having a solution. Prediction markets are a decent mechanism, require scientists to put their money at risk on a market betting on whether their results will replicate or not.

Many institutions seem to have failed or been corrupted by introducing 'false' consequences, where a member who is caught screwing up is 'publicly' reprimanded but privately, they're not punished, or maybe they're even rewarded, and rather than removed from power, they get shuffled off somewhere else in the system and hope that nobody notices.

Partially this is due to a 'circling the wagon' effect, if someone is part of your ingroup you don't want to let the outgroup hurt them so that you, too, can be protected if they come for you. Even a 'good' person would want to insulate their fellows from consequences since they are insulated in return.

But I suspect a lot of it comes from malicious actors FIRST convincing members of a group to remove the factor that actually punishes malfeasance, and then grabbing up as much power as they can for their own purposes... and other bad actors see that there's power to be grabbed and minimal consequences, so it becomes attractive to bad actors.

So the REALLY important factor is that the consequences actually have to filter out bad actors or incompetents from the system entirely, which allows the system to improve via iteration. You can't have consequences that ONLY inflict pecuniary loss, for example, if the person can afford to pay the 'fines' and yet continue to maintain their position of influence and authority.

Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence.

This assumes that you have control over the dangerous parts of producing the airplane. If you run the company, perhaps you do in some sense. If you're an engineer or software developer, you do what the company tells you to do, and you can't resign from the company after every poor decision outside your control that goes into the airplane, so this is just a way to doubly screw employees over by management.

Management, up to and including C-Suite, should really be the ones on the hook as they're the ones with authority and responsibility.

I vaguely remember hearing something about architects in ancient Rome (?) being obliged to live in houses directly under the bridges they'd designed.

Probably made up and didn't actually happen, but its the exact kind of idea that would align incentives.

A friend works on high-danger vehicles (let's say helicopters) as a software engineer. The first thing that happens when they push a software update is that as many engineers as possible get rounded up to take a flight on the helicopter.

Similarly Kawasaki Heavy Industries used to show off their confidence in the precision and reliability of their industrial robots by having the CEO and various others sit on a sofa while their biggest robot moved it around, although that's obviously more staged.

My favorite example of this is the weird enthusiasm with which Richard Davis loves to shoot himself to promote body armor.

I wondered for a second why he has to pull the trigger himself and not a trusted, very steady-handed compatriot.

But it actually occurs to me he probably didn't want anyone to risk ending up with a death on their conscience, or worse a manslaughter charge, if something goes wrong.

It has to be quite exhilarating. All your instincts telling you you're done for, only to escape death without a scratch. I could see myself getting addicted to it.

but I am glad to know you can see it now too

Nah this problem is why I first started posting way back in the days where some of our most reasonable contributors didn't see that the news and "science" was biased. I think pretty much everyone still here gets that at this point, so I've spent more time arguing about overreaction lately, but my views haven't changed.

This is a particularly good example for everyone to toss into their brain for later though.

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