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Comment by zimablue | Hacker News Reader

This whole piece, and to be honest most of the comments here come from such a dark, authoritarian, arrogant perspective.

"lying to the plebs modifies their behavior very slightly in a good way or is it in a bad way?"

It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects".

Anyone caught casually deceiving people for some tiny perceived benefit to either themselves or the people deserves a severe lesson in how "irrationally" angry people get when they're lied to.

You can save this page and the comments as an example to future generations of how the elites of this century had become morally bankrupt.

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There's a spectrum to "nudges". Some government nudging is actually morally justifiable, IMO. Things like making retirement saving opt-out instead of opt-in, or hiding information about a probable disaster to avoid panic[0]. Placebo buttons I find somewhere between justifiable cost saving (if buttons were working in the past, or could in the future) and being disrespectful to people. But in this case, and in almost all cases, you can avoid lying to people.

Beyond that, I strongly agree with your sentiment, and I frequently point out that if you were to apply standard marketing practice to your friends, you'd quickly get punched in the face - and justifiably so. To me, lying needs heavy justification - on the level of saving lives.

I like this quote: "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." [1]

[0] - E.g. evacuating a city of million+ will necessarily cause a lot of deaths and heavily disrupt regional economy, leading to further deaths and suffering. Therefore, it's IMO justified for the government to avoid triggering evacuations if the risk is low, even if that means sitting on some information.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130728200940/http://www.accele..., via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-...

> Things like making retirement saving opt-out instead of opt-in

This isn't about the retirees as much as it's about society as a whole and the economics thereof.

Simply: Most cultures are now unwilling to put up with old people dying in the streets. We're even iffy on the idea of workhouses and other accoutrements of the Poor Law. Therefore, we have welfare, in multiple forms, and having a lot of people hitting welfare in their Medically Expensive Years is bad for multiple reasons.

> hiding information about a probable disaster to avoid panic

More like avoiding blame when they're culpable.

> E.g. evacuating a city of million+ will necessarily cause a lot of deaths and heavily disrupt regional economy, leading to further deaths and suffering. Therefore, it's IMO justified for the government to avoid triggering evacuations if the risk is low, even if that means sitting on some information.

Failure to prepare on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part... and if it does, I demand to know that you failed to prepare, so you can face some consequences.

> To me, lying needs heavy justification - on the level of saving lives.

Agreed, and in case someone is looking for scientific justification, you can just look at it as specialized market economy (as quite a lot of things can be). Lying in this case reducing market information, which reduces efficiency. In this case, that translated into you wasting a small amount time and effort pushing a fake button. But multiply it across all the times you do it, and all the people that do it, and it's actually a fairly large drain overall (not to mention the frustration of expecting your actions to matter and them never seeming to).

I think the common refrain against this is that people don't act rationally or in the best interest of the whole in these cases, but I think that's more often just another case of poor market information leading to inefficiency, even if the source is different. The problem with manipulating the market by reducing information even more (deceiving people) is that if it works it likely only works while existing conditions persist, and may become much less useful later as conditions change. I.e. if people were crossing before the button was pressed and the placebo button helped, what happens when crosswalk sings start showing countdowns and people then become accustomed to noting that and waiting for them regardless if there's a button or not? Better information has make the system more efficient... except for those that still waste their time with the buttons that don't do anything, and now the prior strategy to manipulate people is making the system less efficient than if it wasn't present.

Which is all just a really drawn out way of saying and showing that treating people with respect and giving them as much information as possible (and definitely not giving them false information) should lead to better outcomes overall.

It's not really lying if the buttons used to work, now they don't, but they're expensive to remove so the government just leaves them there. It's at worst a lie of omission. The moral question is more like, is it the government's responsibility to spend money removing a nonfunctioning button to save people the negligible amount of time/effort it takes to press it? The answer is probably not considering that there are lots of ways the government could save people time/effort by spending more money but doesn't.

if that's actually the case, how about put a small sign by the button? but is it really that hard to remove or disable the button?

do people really need another data point that interactions with government services are filled with pointless exercises and things that may or may not matter?

and it isn't negligible. what about people in wheel chairs or other handicapped situations? and how many times are people wasting time, energy, and conversation discussing traffic light buttons? it's wasteful and disrespectful.

1. Is is better to, say, spend $2mm to remove nonfunctioning buttons, or instead to reduce wait times at the DMV? I think you could make the argument either way; personally, I don't experience much mental anguish about the existence of buttons that might or might not work -- I would rather save the time/money at the DMV, DEQ, filing state taxes, etc. Note that adding signage still costs money and is also only a temporary solution - signs need to be replaced every few years, depending on the initial implementation.

2. If it's overly difficult for handicapped people to press the buttons then they should never have been implemented in the first place. But considering that they exist, if they are difficult to press and pressing is required to cross, isn't that just altogether worse for disabled people than if they are difficult to press but entirely nonfunctioning/nonrequired?

> if that's actually the case, how about put a small sign by the button? but is it really that hard to remove or disable the button?

These days, I think it would suffice for the local/national (depending on the scope) government to announce that pedestrian lights buttons are no longer working because $reasons. Rebroadcasted by media, it would reach many people, and anyone else would know where to look for answer, if they become interested in the question.

There's no real need to lie. It could be as simple as a tweet.

> It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects".

If we want to get philosophical, just the existence of a police force treats people as an antagonist, and interaction between people and the police makes it clear that respect and dignity are out of the question. Nothing is more authoritarian and arrogant than the existence of the police.

But no one will argue in favor of dissolving the police, and the reason is very obvious.

My point is: people are not perfect, never has been, and never will. Acknowledging this is something basically everyone does when childhood ends and adolescence starts.

If we are being philosophical, plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

> plenty of left-wing thinkers have advocated for police abolition.

Impossible. Not bad or wrong or even stupid, but impossible.

If you have no police, everyone's police. How is that abolishing the police?

If you're reducing terms to meaninglessness yes, "everyone's police."

The thinkers analyze the role police play in modern society. This refers to modern police forces that have their most direct roots in the late 18th century.

My point is, if there's no specialized police, you have everyone trying to be police, and, well, when every random person tries to do a technical job where peoples' lives are on the line, how do you think it's going to turn out? How do you think evidence is going to be handled?

The thinkers have a political point to make. Well and good. They'd do well to think about chains of custody and interrogation rules and why those things are important to having a society not run by capricious mobs who convict and then hold the trial.

The commonly suggested alternative to the top-down authoritarian police we know today is horizontally organized citizen militias. In other words, a "police force" not beholden to the interests of the elites and the state, but by and for the common people.

I don't know where this is coming from but this "plenty" you've spoken to is not at all representative of the left-wing thinkers I've spoken to personally. There's no reason to drag politics into this.

It was merely a philosophical digression that clearly went nowhere.

I'm not sure how you could've assumed I meant "all" left-wing thinkers. Only that a significant amount have talked about it.

You're very much welcome to go-to Anarchist or Marxist circles and argue for the modern policing system though.

> If we want to get philosophical, just the existence of a police force treats people as an antagonist

That seems specific to United States, or maybe even to United States' media coverage. Elsewhere, existence of police treats people as vulnerable and in need of protection from occasional dangers that pop up.

How is this relevant to this century? The concept of the Noble Lie has been around at least since Plato. Lying to someone isn't treating them as an object, it's actually confirming their subjectivity.

Lying to someone for their benefit is treating them as an object because you're not respecting their right to honesty or dignity, you're just treating them as an object that might or might not get run over and deceptive technology as just another input. You're optimizing them without their consent like they're some code you're trying to speed up. In the same way that PUAs is objectifying women because you're not respecting them as sentient humans with a right to honesty, you're treating your interactions with them as arbitrary code to be optimized.

re this century, maybe this has always been the attitude but I think you see it in "nudge" ideas which came about within the last 20 years. Govt/Corp application of applied behavioural psychology combined with (at least the UK and I think Europe) an acceptance of a nanny state to a degree that would have been unthinkable previously.

Isn't the whole market based on things like this? The way supermarkets are organised, how advertising works at all, the government applying import tarrifs to dissuade you from buying from abroad, etc.

I don't think there's anything wrong with incentivizing the behaviour you want to see. In the end, every modern corporation does the exact same thing as what you claim nanny states do: try to make your desire align with theirs, and making it hard to resist by exploiting superego affinity (e.g your boss presents herself as your friend so you feel bad disobeying or refusing to work overtime).

Yeah and markets are notoriously immoral, so are manipulative bosses. We banned subliminal imaging remember.

There's some blurred territory I totally agree, in between egregious deception and "expected, competitive" deception eg. make-up, presenting yourself well on a date, moderating your opinions, but this example isn't even close. Noone expects buttons to not work and there's no unavoidable competitive marketplace in public infrastructure providers where there's some massive pressure to be immoral or die.

I agree with your sentiment, but I think the extreme of your tone might put some people off.

These buttons have bothered me for a long time because it just illustrates how short sited the thinking is in our government institutions.

This small lie may reduce jaywalking by 3%, in the short term.

But for the future generations growing up in a world where the government makes buttons that don't work, public trust will erode, conspiracy theories will seem more reasonable, and most importantly government employees will have a new standard to weigh their decisions against. If lying was permissible in this case for a slight benefit the maybe a slightly more egregious lie would be acceptable in a different situation.

And on a separate note, once you expect these buttons to be fake people stop pressing them. When you then encounter a "real" button you miss an entire cycle on the crosswalk because you have been trained to ignore the buttons, and this results in people getting absolutely furious.

To add, everyone's boss everywhere pretending the economic value their workers create is approximately in line with what those workers get paid.

> Lying to someone isn't treating them as an object, it's actually confirming their subjectivity

Found the lawyer.

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