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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I have seen the end of the line for this kind of corruption and it is not pretty. Once it starts it spreads like a cancer.

After some years we'd have doctors, engineers, lawyers, banker, nurses, safety inspectors, police officers who got into those positions by cheating. Then because they did it, they don't mind hinting and advising their children to do the same, and so on.

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We're ruled by politicians, bankers and corporations who lie, cheat, bribe, tax-dodge, and break the law with impunity. Why shouldn't the rest of us?

That's a great point. It was educational to read an article from one of those high-brow economics or policy journals after the housing crisis warning about regular citizens noticing that banks and other institutions are happily using bankruptcy as a strategic option. The fear was that people with underwater properties will stop feeling guilty about bankruptcies and will walk away from their mortgages. Basically making the same calculated business decision that bankers make. Paraphrased the message was "careful, or the plebeians will start doing what we are doing"

Guilt is the fuel for the machine. Without it, we might be so much happier as an economy, and no one wants that. https://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/202207935/Alan-Watts-Money...

That's an entirely separate issue. Exercising your contractual right to default on a mortgage is not corruption or cheating. It's all out in the open and recorded in public records.

> Exercising your contractual right to default on a mortgage is not corruption or cheating

But most American believe it wrong and there is a mixup between what is wrong and what is legal. Keeping it that way is a very profitable thing for financial institutions.

GP post brought banks as an example of corruption. And many would agree. However it can still be legal. At that level, those player are basically writing their own laws and regulations.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Tianasquare.j...

Because then we end up with a broken third world society.

Because two wrongs don't make a right. If you believe cheating is wrong, start by not doing it. There's no path to eliminating this behavior that does not start with people saying it's wrong and backing it up with an alternative example.

You not cheating will not lead to the powerful being less corrupt. It will actually reward them for being corrupt. In a prisoners' dilemma, they are constantly defecting without cost, and you are refusing to defect on principle. That makes you a sucker.

The way to eliminate corruption is to overthrow those who are corrupt.

If you believe in western civilizations' principles, there's two ways to handle corruption. The day to day type of corruption is usually treated as a crime, it requires laws, and funding investigations and prosecutors and courts, etc. Some corruptions of civil officers are so bad they qualify for impeachment, one important consequence of which is being barred from holding any elected or appointed office again. So there is a mechanism, if you think civility is busted then a.) help work to fix it, b.) be prepared for violence. Because the only antidote for violence we've come up with so far is civility.

Violence isn't inherently wrong. Nonviolence is less important than ending injustice and continuing to innovate, such as building megaprojects, forming new states or restructuring existing political systems. Those who say otherwise are conservatives or benefit from continued injustice.

This seems to assume a binary choice between non-violence and violence. As noted in the parent there is a range of effective responses to cheating in particular and corruption in general.

Also, violence does not necessarily lead to less injustice. The French Revolution (and countless others) provide rich counterexamples.

No, they do not all do that, and not even most of them do it, or yes the sky would fall. We wouldn't, in fact, have the civilization we have. The choice is to have strong anti-fraud funding to find, catch, and prosecute most of these sorts of things; or to go back to feudalism/law of the jungle/might makes right.

> doctors

Would we really? I mean once you really get into your field, someone is going to notice the guy talking Ralph's tests for him .. isn't Ralph.

Doctors especially are pretty tight knit with their group. Even if they buy answers for tests, they still have to do real clinical work and residencies with real doctors. There's a limit on how much they could fake.

It depends. It differs between countries. I have heard in Eastern Europe doctors buying their diplomas just as public prosecutors, judges, and so on.

Another example: someone I went to school with has bought himself a "public prosecutor" title. He doesn't work as one, but it gives him a higher rank than any of the traffic cops he encounters daily. So he basically speeds and drives recklessly around the city like an idiot. When a cop stops him, he pulls rank tells him to fuck off, and they all do. He out-corrupted the corrupt cops. If it wasn't tragic, it would be funny.

That is just an example of an end-game for when cheating and corruption spreads completely throughout the society. And it always, in a person's life starts with education. That is where they learn and internalize how to cheat and how to game the system using it.

Honestly, when I submitted this, this comment is what scared me the most. A tinpot intellectual economy is what I fear when I teach my kids to play by the rules (and watch them struggle.)

There's this hacker tension: teach them to hack the system (and effectively teach them to cheat) or recognize the disease and do things ethically. It's an easy decision to focus on doing the right thing, but it's hard not feeling like a sap if the world goes the way of some libertarian Nirvana where cheating is just survival of the fittest by any other name.

Getting my first job in Silicon Valley, I assumed that all jobs asked technical questions when hiring to see if the candidate was fit. I later found out that while this "work sample" test is common here, it's much rarer in other industries.

Why doesn't every industry use such a test? You can't fake your way through an in-person technical interview.

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