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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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You theoretically can, but probably won't do it in any way that matters; if you are inherently dishonest, you'll see specifics of the case justifying another deceit or swindle, your barrier for excusing transgressions is lower than in people with strict moral code. And it probably does not even have the pronounced negative component. In my experience, archetypal WEIRD/Hajnal-born people genuinely feel terrible when they are «forced to cheat» against the consensus morality. By the same token they don't experience exhilaration at discovering a clever hack there (even when they love to hack and tinker in the abstract or in mediums that are not morally laden).

Now, in a sense you're right. With large-scale intrusive social engineering, it should be possible to nudge the whole society towards greater effective cooperation and conscientiousness, in a way no education and nutrition beyond the basic can do for intelligence.

A year and a half ago, on reddit, I quoted::

A commenter in Steven Hsu's blog wrote 2 years ago on his recent visit to China:

I also took a trip to China recently. Had not been back since 2007. The infrastructure is certainly impressive. The airports and train stations are quite amazing. The biggest change had been the behavior of the people. Much more orderly. Traffic in Guangzhou and Shanghai could pass for any U.S. city. Beijing is still more chaotic. I think mainly due to the massive overload of the roads. In the tourist places, there were just throngs of people. If the driver needs to get through, he has no choice but to cut in front of pedestrians.

There are no longer any pick pockets. People have better manner than I expected in the subways. No one toss trash on the streets. The roads, even high traffic areas like the Bund in Shanghai, are quite clean compared to the U.S. big cities.

All this should be credit to the omnipresent cameras and the fact that people don't carry a wallet anymore. However, I went to a bank to exchange some currency and left my umbrella there for a couple of hours, It was still sitting in the same place after I return. This would not have happened in 2007.

Effective punishment also helps. People are not sent to jail when they violate the rules, they are barred from riding the subway. All the entrances of the subways now have check points to correlate the picture taken there against the file picture from the ID. Not being able to ride the subways is a major drag in a big city like Beijing.

I believe underneath, people are still basically the same animal. There were reports of a park losing all of its lotus flowers (acres and acres of them) to looters who scale the fence at night to steal the flowers. Camera caught them to be mostly women and older men. However, the high probability of getting caught and the effective punishment changed at least the behavior. This is the start of the march toward the Singaporean model. When the older people die off, the younger generation will take the law and order to their heart as they are brought up that way.

What struck me about the Chinese government is their ability to get things done. Try something, does not work, try a different approach until one works. replicate nation wide. In the U.S., our government has lost this ability and has become a hindrance to progress.

Isn't it wonderful?

But this is just pleb stuff. The Chinese are still cheating horribly in governance, in crucial business and in science. It seems to require specific pressures for every single strand of the social fabric.

That's a ton of friction. Conscientious societies, in contrast, are almost frictionless – to the extent that your worst roadblock there is some moral busybody or a worrywart with red tape.

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