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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.

Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.

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You can still do this at hardware stores in the US. You put your nuts and bolts in the plastic bag and write down the price and quantity and then they add them up at the register. I was really shocked as a teenager when I realized they just "trusted" you to do it correctly.

Well...

Worked in a busy bike shop as a kid and sometimes you would have someone come through the door after a nut or bolt. I would go to the workshop and spend quite a bit of time finding the bolt, then I would only be able to charge 50p for it. By the time I had came back I could have used that time to serve a customer after some real purchases, e.g. a whole bicycle. There wouldn't even be any 'word of mouth' benefits, the bolt could be for a lawnmower or something and the customer could be far too wedded to their tin box vehicle for there to be the chance to upgrade them to a bicycle.

Anyway, it was not cost effective to do personal service bolt sales, at 50p a time, had I been smarter I would have had a big box of random bolts under the counter and made things 'self service'.

You can mostly trust Swiss people to be that honest. It doesn't work like that everywhere.

Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task. The question is of course how to transition there. I can't say to have any recipes, but I'm reasonably sure that taking away civic rights is counterproductive. Maybe try to get one electable political party that makes it their thing to protect and even expand citizen's rights and allow for more self responsibility? I don't like the Libertarians for some of their antisocial ideas, but at least that's where they seem to have gotten something right.

> IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task.

Like passing anti-minaret laws?

Societies and culture are more complex than you make it sound.

if there would be public vote about this in all european countries, most if not all would ban it. that's the current attitude unfortunately. swiss are just the most free nation to decide these things themselves

>IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task.

That's one hypothesis. Another is that trustworthiness is a genetic trait.

I'm sure it has genetic components, but the question for me is rather whether those components differ between peoples. I'd assume that evolutionary pressure selected quite heavily for people who can be trusted to cooperate.

But there are also obvious evolutionary pressures towards self-interest, even when it means breaking promises/trustworthiness. (Remember, selection happens at the level of individuals, not of whole groups and societies!) The balance between the two pressures could be different in different environments. In other words, it's quite possible that one environment could select more for trustworthiness, another more for untrustworthy self-interest.

Not being a dick and working together without everyone constantly on edge that everyone else is going to screw them the first chance they get is a totally valid strategy, even from a self-interest standpoint.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341

Crikey, anyone seriously think its a genetic trait?

Do you imagine the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway?

Surely everyone thinks that trustworthiness is about poverty, inequality and values?

Actually, what I recall from reading studies of adoption and criminality (it was a few years ago, though, so I don't remember the authors or exact titles to find them) the "the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway" has a truth in it - if you analyze the heritability of antisocial behavior and criminality (and the heritability clearly exists) to see how much of it is e.g. "nature vs nurture" or genetics vs environment and socioeconomic status, then about half of it still remains in case of adoption to a 'low risk' environment.

One plausible explanation for some of that, which wasn't analyzed there, but has some basis in other research is that things like risk-taking behavior or being prone to addiction are quite genetic.

But in any case, for many(most? all?) "moral" characteristics saying that they're only about "poverty, inequality and values" is wishful thinking. Yes, they are in part about that, but they are also in part about genetics; the answer to "nature or nurture" pretty much always is both.

Quite so. Most twin studies on the subject turn up similar findings: https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/10/02/time-preferen...

"The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity."

So impulsivity (which is obviously closely related to your propensity to betray the trust of your fellow-man for a short-term gain) appears to be a combination of genetics and random luck (non-shared environment).

I don't know about trustworthiness in particular, but lots and lots of personality traits turn out to have a heritability of about 50% (or more), so much so that it's a decent rule of thumb to guess that a trait is about 50% heritable.

Everyone thinks that way, but it turns out the science says otherwise.

I am more inclined to believe it is a CULTURAL trait.

You and the folks who down-voted the parent comment agree on that point. That doesn't make it true.

> "You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag"

How is that different from self checkout in most of the big food stores in USA?

I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.

No. The majority of vegetables I buy (in Canada but it's the same in the US as far as I've seen) are not pre-packaged. Self checkouts have a scale built into them that you weigh your own produce and punch in the code to say what kind of food it is. It's trivial to cheat if you want, but most people are honest. This is also true in hardware store self checkouts where you buy loose items and the store relies on you being honest about punching in the correct code when you check out.

Not exactly. Typically there will be a sign that lets you know how much the produce is per imperial pound. There are analog scales there that you can use to weigh your produce to give you an idea of how much it will be, but the real digital scales are at checkout. At self-checkout you put the produce onto a scale and then click on the picture of the produce your are purchasing so the computer can correlate the weight with the item. There isn't anything stopping you from clicking the picture of a cheaper produce item other than the honesty system.

... and the staff member hovering around the self check out area.

Not around where I live. They hang out about 15 feet away.

Who is definitely going to notice the that you rung up something expensive as something cheap...

> already weighed and tagged portions

generally no. They do sell stuff like that as well, but most is out in the open and you bag yourself. And then punch in the item codes or look them up at the self checkout. There's no real check, although sometimes they catch people cheating by reviewing video.

Here in the UK, like the US, the self-checkout machines have built-in scales that weigh your produce and calculate the price automatically.

There's no extra tags involved, you just have to select what the produce is if it doesn't have a barcode.

There is indeed an opportunity to "cheat" by weighing something expensive but telling the machine it's something cheap like onions or potatoes.

But the machines can be monitored remotely from a security station, so there is a small chance you'd get caught. That keeps most people pretty honest.

I'm sure a few cheats do slip though, but the losses from this sort of thing are presumably much less than the savings from employing less checkout staff!

Here in Toronto, we have both. In fact, one location of a grocery chain might allow you to tag and weigh your own items, whereas another location of the same grocery chain might require an attendant (usually right next to the automated machines) to verify it.

I've seen one location go from requiring an assistant to allowing full self-serve.

Not sure about the U.S. but I have the impression that there must be places which are similar in the U.S.

Selfcheckouts are pretty recent. Grocery shopping like described above is how it worked forever.

>You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.

The US has its faults to be sure, but it's not that different here for buying produce these days. A lot of things had little stickers on them which can be scanned directly, and for other things the automated cashier lets you type in or look up a code number and then set the item(s) on the scanner/scale to be weighed. If you really wanted to cheat, it would be trivial to buy a bag full of some expensive item and type in the code number for some cheap item.

well, for supermarket this is common all around europe for fruit&veggies, east, west, everywhere. probably cheaper than hiring extra person to mark everything correctly.

all super/hypermarkets in france are same, shopping there every weekend.

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