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Comment by gravitas | Hacker News Reader

This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned.

Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap - in my mind, it's just a modern digital con (confidence game) - some of y'all may remember having created self-signed OpenSSL certs with the Snake Oil, Ltd company named in it. :) Even Wikipedia has a page for "there's a sucker born every minute" it's so institutionalized.

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I think the more important point here isn't about ethics and punishment, but incentives. The larger a system is and the stronger it incentivises something, the more effort you're going to have to put into enforcing the status.

This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.

Also, I feel like every system can be abused if the incentivised metric is defined poorly.

Example: almost every advertising KPI.

1. A Brand wants to sell a product (incentive: sales). 2. Agency sales people want to reach a particular KPI—budget in this case, the higher, the better. 3. An Ad Tech company will serve ads based on a KPI agreed with the Agency (e.g. CPM, impressions).

It's very easy to satisfy 2 and 3 without bringing any additional value to 1., for example by applying less strict viewability metrics (is 50% in view "visible" or 1%? should we pause the video ad below the fold? what is an impression, exactly?).

The original intent (sell more units of product x) is gone. This is due to systematic issues with the industry, not a single specific company. But mainly, this is due to the fact that the established incentives represent only a chunk of the reality and can be followed without focusing on the actual problem. The overlap between actors' goals is poorly defined, small and often doesn't exist.

In a nutshell: if we define a metric serving as a shortcut for our goal, people will find a way of improving the metric, but rarely reaching the goal. A broadly defined incentive is better than punishment.

That has a name, the Cobra Effect [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

The Cobra Effect is when you're trying to make there be fewer of things (cobras) but the incentives you set up actually lead to there being more of them (it's now worth it for people to be cobra breeders).

Perhaps you're thinking of Goodheart's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

That's why attribution is such a big story in advertising. With semi-persistent identifiers, you can learn the story of whether someone was:

1) Visited your store before they saw your ad

2) Only visited your store after seeing your ad

You can do this online or for physical store locations. There are lots of players there because big marketing teams are fairly sophisticated now: they want cross-channel identity (across mobile, web, TV), attribution, and measurement.

A short term metric is necessary to allow campaigns to optimize their spend without a long multi-month turn around as conversions are fully tracked and users act upon the ad.

While there is risk that the wrong short term metric is chosen (that is not indicative of the real goal the advertiser is trying to achieve), it is not an invalid approach.

It is untrue that setting a short term goal will _rarely_ achieve the long term value. Otherwise, the advertiser will throw out that short-term goal since it is flawed.

> This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.

Indeed, this is what drives the Tragedy of the Commons - everyone acting according to their individual incentives, maximizing their individual benefit, but while exploiting an unregulated limited common resource, and externalizing the cost of doing so upon the commons.

There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs.

In many cases, the current incentives and resulting approaches keep us stuck in local maxima. An example is commuting in single occupancy personal vehicles in urban areas in the US. When you consider the layout of our cities and the limited mass transit availability, it very often makes more individual sense to drive when you consider factors like transporting children to school/activities, grocery shopping, appointments, etc.

Sometimes the costs are actually to the individual rather than the commons, or are delayed in impact to the commons. In the previous example hours spent sitting in a vehicle instead of walking deprives individuals of opportunities to burn calories to control their weight, resulting in a variety of health issues.

The problem is that there are a powerful set of interests who are interested in maintaining the current approaches and incentives at all cost. Again, in the transportation example above, these would include the fossil fuel extraction and highway expansion industries.

> There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs.

I think the second one isn't really a solution. If you find a more efficient way to achieve the needs, the needs will expand to compensate. Even if everyone executes restraint, an entrepreneur will show up and start selling the remaining resources to people who don't have access to those resources.

As far as I know, the only way to solve tragedies of the commons is for everyone to agree on a set of rules, and punishments that disincentivise breaking these rules. Which, in real life, is achievable only through centralizing the power that sets the rules and executes punishment - ongoing coordination is an unstable state.

If you study Anarchist philosophy "mutually agreeing on a set of rules etc..." is effectively the syndicalist answer to this problem. However as you point out, history seems to show that this is incredibly unstable and is easily dominated by someone breaking the rule of non-violence.

The radical monarchist-libertarians answer is to eliminate the commons, such that everything has an explicit pricing mechanism. No less problematic, or unstable.

I think in the end, there is something about humanity that does not allow for stable equilibrium over extended periods (100s of years). Not sure what.

The problem with consensus based rules is that it takes way too long to do anything. Around the turn of the century, when anarchism was still opposed to capitalism, rather than just people swinging bike locks in the name of identity politics, any kind of anarchist style organizing basically amounted to spending the whole day sitting in a giant meeting, and then leaving with nothing important decided on.

Not sure which century you're referencing - 2000s?

I concur though. The Occupy Wall Street meetings I had the luck of attending at Zuccotti Park reflected as much and nearly all of the other anarcho-syndicalist meetings I've seen do work at the snails pace of consensus.

The adherents would argue that this speed is a feature not a bug. I would generally agree with the argument that slowing down decision making is a good thing. Not sure it's a survivable strategy as a group however.

> Again, in the transportation example above, these would include the fossil fuel extraction and highway expansion industries.

Those are only side effects. The main set of interests keeping things like this is the American consumers. The majority like way more space in their homes and property than their European counterparts.

The real issue is that public transport doesn’t actually work when the middle class is living in 3-5 bedroom homes with 1/4 acre lots. There is no country with good public transit where a middle class income can easily support that size home. The hard truth is that it’s going to be a trade-off.

> The main set of interests keeping things like this is the American consumers

I concur to a degree, but American consumers have also been so captive to the narrative of large houses that they are mostly unaware of other ways of living. Their only image of denser living is slums and tenements, or Park Avenue penthouses, not middle class townhouses.

However, Americans have increasingly travelled to places that have higher density and transit and seen that those can offer a high quality of life.

Many then seek a different balance of space to transit by moving to areas where they can make a different trade-off than the standard American model, hence the recent urbanization of suburbs and growth of previously sparse cities like Austin and Salt Lake City.

> Their only image of denser living is slums and tenements, or Park Avenue penthouses, not middle class townhouses.

Maybe that was true before the internet became widespread, but it’s not the case anymore. The American Midwest is aware of the walkable streets of Rome, Paris, and Tokyo. It’s still a big sacrifice to those used to yards, sparse commerce, and the scheduling freedom that comes with vehicles.

> hence the recent urbanization of suburbs and growth of previously sparse cities like Austin and Salt Lake City.

Yep, and I personally wish there were walkable options like in Europe. As someone who has lived in Austin for the past 7 years, getting around without a car is a joke and you’re going to take a big quality of life hit if you limit to yourself to one walkable area. Its density certainly is increasing (see east side), but it’s just turning into the Bay Area with worse highways.

I sometimes like to think of ethics as an incentive system that is (generally) stronger than social norms but weaker than laws. Once you reduce it to incentives, it is a matter of comparing incentives. If the incentive to behave ethically is much lower than the incentive to not, then people will pick the better option. That some people seem to be more ethical than others can be viewed as the extent they estimate the incentives from different behaviors (importance placed in the thoughts of others, if they believe some greater power judges them for their actions, etc.).

There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin

Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too : https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/

"We upvote with very strong accounts; if you don’t make it on the main page after 10 upvotes, more won’t help"

Oh god. Imagine the thousands of bland consensus talking points they had to regurgitate to build those accounts. Never trust somebody with no gray comments.

Don't help them :) They can just throw in a few posts disparaging Rust to look credible.

I guess that means I can trust you.

They also need a few warnings from dang for absolute trust.

> On Hacker News, when the post is new, it doesn’t matter how much you upvote it after a certain point. After fewer than 10 early upvotes with great accounts, you’ll usually make it to the front page. From there, HN moderators select manually what they want to keep there. A good strategy is to buy only a few upvotes first in order to make your post visible; then, after it remains approved for 10 minutes or more, buy a lot more upvotes in order to rank it better, or help maintain its good position.

Is this actually true? I don't think so.

It also seems funny they offer to sell a factor of ten more upvotes to articles already on the front page. Maybe they'll just sit back and watch it happen regardless?

Well here is a thing. Do these guys expect any repeat sales? I mean, they could try their technique and if it works then great but if either way they still have the money. Is there a rating system where reviews are posted and would it matter if there was? (see https://www.xkcd.com/325/)

edit: Anyway, the mods have access to the database to see who has been upvoting articles onto the front page. If a group of ('high value') accounts upvote in a similar way on a regular basis then they could be detected..

I feel like mods could easily just pay the $2 and create a post for them to upvote. Then detect those accounts and IPs and block them. However, it's likely just a whack-a-mole situation. Perhaps they could shadow ban them instead?

They probably have accounts that match the topics and regularly upvote. So they have some accounts that upvote those entry level ML medium articles, another that upvotes lifestyle Saases, another that upvotes pet language posts, etc.

Is it better for the community to ban the fake clickers with disposable accounts, or to ban the actual people who pay fake clickers to promote their spammy posts, instead? Once you know who the fake clicker accounts are, leave them alone and let them continue to help you identify and ban dishonest self promoters who are trying to game the system to their advantage.

Hell, maybe dang runs upvotes.club himself, so he can take their customer's money then ban them immediately: that would be most efficient and least error prone. As far as I know, buboard might be one of his sock puppets, posting the URL as a honey pot to catch dishonest HN users. ;)

Only problem is that if I don't like you, I signe up and have them upvote the next DonHopkins post.

I think one method is to watch for upvotes that come when someone goes to a link directly instead of organically finding it through /new

I'm starting to understand how all the mediocre metaphysics articles from Quanta and Medium keep ending up on this website. They're the textual equivalent of graham crackers. Just bland enough to not be thought-provoking, but just interesting enough to keep people reading. And with so little to say on the subjects in question, they provoke huge off-topic discussions.

Bland Graham Crackers for Paul Graham's Hackers?

Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker. One of America's first diet hawks, Sylvester Graham was certain that sexual desire was ruining society. His solution: whole wheat. How a zealot's legacy lives in our foods today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-t...

Wow, does that even work - I just assumed that HN was too small a community for misbehaviour to be lost in the noise.

Would love to hear moderators opinions on this?

Recently HN seems to have become more heavily targeted. I think bad actors have realized the value of the community here. I am increasingly wary of opening links to unfamiliar domains except in a sandbox environment.

This has been going on for quite some time. But the mod(s) do a more than credible job at keeping up with the trash and identifying such behavior.

The bigger problem - in my opinion - is people submitting (unwittingly) content cloned from elsewhere.

There is quite a bit of blogspam that makes it to the front page. Usually even that is taken care of sooner rather than later but for every time it works there is proof that it can work which will drive more people to try to get away with it. We can all help with this issue: ensure that we submit content from original sources and in case content from a cloned source is submitted flag the article and point to the original.

> in case content from a cloned source is submitted flag the article and point to the original

It sure would be nice if there was a way to add a comment to explain why one has flagged an article, so the moderators don't have to guess why it was flagged! As it is, I occasionally add an explanation in a comment or direct email, but it always feels awkward.

i presume if someone would use this, they d use an "OK" domain like medium

HN is not small by any measure. It is often featured on the first Google page. The HN hug of death is just as real as the Slashdot effect.

It is quite obvious when companies who think these sites are relevant for their social media is featured. Suddenly a whole lot of upvotes comes along. Make of that what you will. Personally I think it is naive to believe that any open community is free from bought votes.

Does anyone have any actual measures of this? I guess there are some API services re I could investigate but ... I'm lazy and it's xmas. It still just runs on one large server IIRR

Here's a post from 2013, "What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day"

tl;dr numbers: 15,000+ unique visitors, 25,000+ page views

https://levels.io/hacker-news-number-one/

And here's a thread from 2016 where users chime in with their results.

tl;dr numbers: A #2 or #3 ranking was about 50k-75k pageviews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12008384

it's not small. even if a show HN doesnt even reach the frontpage it s decent traffic, and , depending on the product, can be pretty relevant too.

one could do the math to figure out how they came up with this $2 / upvote price - i presume it's the equivalent of paying google for the same amount of traffic.

Bitcoin is not trust less, the more compute power you have the more « votes » you have.

then Monero. the point is there is a system that minimizes trust , certainly more than the corporate system

Whenever somebody starts spouting off about Bitcoin or Monero, I minimize the trust I have in them.

trust comes and goes - we ll see that when the current negative-rate world goes belly up. even as last resort measures, cryptos have their uses

When that happens, I'd surmise that the following is not going to be a good hedge: a completely ephemeral "asset" that is not backed by any conventional power structure or society, while at the same time being fully dependent on a highly sophisticated infrastructure made possible by said power structures and societies.

Cryptocurrencies depend on a redundant and highly interconnected network of many diverse actors to be able to maintain their trust guarantees. How that network is going to stay around in a doomsday scenario is very much up in the air.

The main point, the crucial point of a doomsday hedge is that it should depend as little as possible on the intricacies of the old world.

the same goes for cash & credit card, and in any case an apocalyptic war resets all prices to 0. Or you could extoil the virtues of gold but good luck carrying your gold in an EU country from Jan 1st, let alone the Moon and Mars

Of course traditional assets are highly uncertain if the world goes tits up, but you were the one hinting that cryptocurrencies would be a good hedge in a doomsday scenario.

The truth is that it is extremely difficult to predict what asset to hold in such a case. Physical assets can be confiscated by force, ephemeral assets are likely to just cease to exist.

Perhaps the best hedge is nothing as material as gold, or guns, or money, but having a large and robust network of friends and acquaintances. Ultimately, being connected (not just in a technical sense) is the best enabler of success in or out of a doomsday event I think.

The Europol investigation and presentation says Monero works as advertised, I trust that, especially since chain analysis companies aren't on the other side advertising their capabilities to undermine Monero

It doesn't matter if the technology or the mathematical theory behind it is trustworthy or not, the problem is that get-rich-quick money-for-free pyramid schemes attract untrustworthy people, so even if they technically work on the chalkboard in the lab, those people ruin them in the real world.

Social engineering and deceptive marketing trump Razzle-Dazzle Globetrotter Calculus every day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P1bu4HUAMs

I just find it incredibly easy to understand private digital assets without being led on to the guru's other untrustworthy product

What you are basically saying is that because people lack critical thinking skills, you distrust the other people that happen/claim to actually know about the topic, that seems awfully reductive.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

"Incredibly easy", huh?

Incredibly: adverb. used to introduce a statement that is hard to believe; strangely. "incredibly, he was still alive"

Even after your edit, I don't know what you are saying and how it relates to trusting people less for a relevant short comment mentioning Monero. Care to articulate that specific sentiment or how its doing more than painting with a large ignorant brush?

In the case of buboard's post, first he posted something wrong about Bitcoin (and plugged upvotes.club), then when corrected, backtracked to "then Monero". In the case of your post, first you posted something promoting Monero, then you claimed you found it "incredibly easy to understand private digital assets", but then criticized other people who "lack critical thinking skills".

What do you find so "incredibly easy to understand" about private digital assets that people who "lack critical thinking skills" don't get, and why are you more trustworthy than they are? "Incredible" literally means "not credible". Bragging about how "incredibly" clever you are and how dumb other people are doesn't make you sound trustworthy.

> "Incredible" literally means "not credible"

Like many words, incredible has multiple definitions usable in context, such as nothing to do with credibility, and typically what English users do is pick the most likely applicable context to the circumstance, such as the definition which completely undermines your entire argument and is more congruent with everything I have said.

With that in mind, how would you rewrite your entire post?

Since you asked: With the fact in mind that you're deliberately trying to misunderstand what I'm saying, I'd repeat my question that you didn't answer:

What do you find so "incredibly easy to understand" about private digital assets that people who "lack critical thinking skills" don't get, and why are you more trustworthy than they are?

Isn't it a bit ironic that you want us to trust your claim that we should trust Europol about a "trustless" system?

"There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin" -buboard; "there is a system [Bitcoin -- bzzt -- oops! -- Monero then] that minimizes trust" -buboard; "I trust that [the Europol investigation and presentation about Monero]" -rolltiide.

So why should we trust you and buboard, then? Care to link to your resume or PhD dissertation or any code or research papers you've written on the topic, since it's so "incredibly easy" for you to understand? Or should we just trust you without any evidence to tell us who to trust about a trustless?

So on the topic of Monero there are two parties that I mentioned: Europol and chainanalysis companies. Europol, a government agency, can be incentivized to lie about their investigative capabilities to help with their investigations. They detailed how they cannot track Monero, but lets assume they are lying.

Chain analysis companies advertise their investigative abilities in order to attract business. By theory alone they cannot track Monero transactions, and in practice, they are not advertising that they can while they do advertise how they can follow transactions on surveillance networks like Bitcoin. This is a second confirmation that Monero works as private digital money.

This part is a cat and mouse game, all while Monero continues receiving software updates to improve its use, via open source pull requests, which bolsters confidence I have in the system as it doesn't exist in a static state. A lot of people analyze the digital asset ecosystem in a current or prior state and dismiss them based on that.

I think that is enough ammunition for you to investigate further to come to similar conclusions without you needing to trust me or buboard.

But if you would like to dive deeper on why these parties are not able to follow Monero transactions in both theory and practice, there are some books on the subject and then code you can compile yourself to test it out. That's typically what we are referring to when we say trustless, the independent verifiability.

Heeiille

can I buy being upvoted outta the shadow ban?

> Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too

HN credibility just dropped 80% to me for the moment ;-)

No but seriously, this is pretty bad. Many people are kind of addicted to HN and to many this is a stream of inspiration. I've seen people often share posts in internal Workplace chats where most people are not frequent HN readers.

Also having learned today that one can buy Reddit upvotes, I think this whole count thing is now officially useless.

i assume it s been happening for quite a while now, at least for some products featured sometimes, but it doesnt seem it's very prevalent

Edit: I've been asked to make this more explicit. How about: If you do this you will get banned.

Don't assume that those upvotes are counted. It's a cat and mouse game. We eat a lot of mice.

If you or anyone suspects that a post has made HN's front page because of vote manipulation, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We have years of experience with this data.

I'd never say it never works, because we don't know what we don't know. But I can tell you that many people who've used that spam service have gotten their posts buried, their accounts banned, and their sites blacklisted.

In the case of click farms driving virtual browsers with selenium or puppeteer, there aren't even any actual mice involved in those clicks!

> https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/

I checked out that page, and at least with this one, it imo doesn't devalue HN credibility for me. The max number of upvotes you can buy for HN on this website is 10 per post, which hardly makes or breaks an HN post.

Those 10 upvotes would only be useful for an initial kick off for a post, but if the post itself is trash and legitimate users don't upvote it enough, it will all go in vain. So it would be kinda impossible to use this service to boost absolutely trash articles that people don't care about it.

Using that spam service will get your account and website banned here, as plenty have discovered to their chagrin.

I'm of a similar age, and generally agree with you, but for the sake of countering complete pessimism I also think it's worth adding some context in that it depends on numbers of people and the medium. The village that my mother lives in, population roughly 1000, has a broad cross-section of ages and political views, but everyone genuinely looks out for each other and does the right thing in the vast majority of circumstances. However, I live in a block of flats with around 150 people, and the residents association had to take down the forum on the website because people were making all sorts of wild accusations. (The WhatsApp group with families is pretty self-policing). The Internet is a problematic mix of vast numbers of people and very little personal accountability.

>Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap

Some years ago I made a post on /r/learnprogramming that TL;DR was along the lines of "go to college, great ROI, plus for your first job most employers auto reject resumes without a degree" or something along those lines.

I was offered $500 up front and $500 referral bonuses to edit my comment to link to a fake degree mill. IIRC they charged something like $1500 for a fake degree and one year of service for employer education checks/transcripts. (by the by, if you're going to run a fake degree mill out of a residential address in San Mateo, use a VPN!)

Point being, Reddit comments are ripe for abuse.

I used to mod an active subreddit and I saw this type of thing all the time. Once a post hits the front page or a comment gets gilded, the majority will just assume it's factual and will run with it. If anything it was kind of scary to see how easy people can be manipulated.

If you built an upvote system that works more like the old Netflix system worked in theory, then the only outcome of my upvoting something is that I see more things like it.

There are quite a few problems with that, but the obvious ones I think are obvious to different people.

One, movies are a fairly concrete topic. There are tons of laws about Copyright, so every movie has some bits of information you and I could exchange to know that we are talking about the same thing. And for purposes of marketing and awards ceremonies they are even grouped and tagged in some fairly official ways. Comments are amorphous. How do I tell if your comment and mine are 'alike'?

Two, Netflix only sort of works because liking things is not free. If I were promoting a horror movie, I could create a bunch of accounts that like all of the classics of the horror genre, then add a few random movies, and my movie. Everyone who loves classic horror movies would correlate with my account, and that will mean my likes affect their suggestions. But... This is going to cost me. I have to create an account to vote. I have to (probably, I haven't checked in a while) attach a credit card to that account, so I could do that once, twice, a dozen times (everyone on my PR team) but beyond that things get complicated. There are limits to how much I could amortize those costs across multiple PR campaigns, but it might still be lucrative to do so.

With Twitter or Facebook or a million other sites, there is no friction. I could create bots to do this for me, for the cost of some network-connected CPU time (Amazon spot instances). I could speculatively create bots so that I have a stable of 'clean' accounts for future activities that haven't even occurred to me or my customers yet.

These activities are effectively parasitic, in the biological sense of the word (though some would agree in the rhetorical sense as well, but let's not get into that). Only when the host begins to die is there any selective pressure against them. Maybe we're seeing that now. The 'parasite' load is getting so high that the health of the host is in jeopardy. In nature this is one of the major selective pressures on parasites and some pathogens. Kill the host and you lose your meal ticket & transportation.

> This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned.

100%.

I live in a big city and while there are bylaws, without enforcement people will break them all the time. An example of this is people bringing their dogs where they are not allowed to (e.g. school yards) or have them off-leash when they're not supposed to (e.g. on-leash parks). But because there are so few bylaw officers, few dog owners follow those rules.

I think you are ignoring all the thousands of laws, bylaws, norms, and codes of conduct that most people do follow most of the time. Without these, society would collapse within hours.

You only notice the few laws that are sometimes broken.

>any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it...

Doing the right thing can vary by culture, perspective, and situation. What is right or wrong to us may be entirely different to someone who's family is starving as just one example. Given the world-wide nature of the Internet, as a species, it is unlikely we are going to be able to agree on a single set of rules or punishments within our life-time.

"Rules are only as good as their enforcement"

Does anybody besides me wonder why they never seem to do anything about it? Its really not that hard of a problem to solve.

Thousands of engineers at Facebook (and Google, and probably Twitter, and ...) work on stopping this kind of abuse. There are many very hard problems in this area; it is not remotely easy to "solve" a constantly evolving adversarial landscape.

Do you have any concrete evidence of major attempts to stop it that failed? I'd like to see what they tried and what failed.

>I'd like to see what they tried and what failed.

Being as how fake likes are possibly fraudulent and detrimental to the paying customers, I feel like these companies should be the ones openly demonstrating their attempts at stopping them. Otherwise, I'll default to "they allow it".

The problem is incentives.

There is, in all likelihood, a way to build an upvote system that is resistant to factory automation. The problem is that such a system doesn't have the exact feature set of the current system. Which means you have to give someone (probably several someones) bad news whether they want to hear it or not.

This is not a strong suit for software devs in general, and in the case where the 'right thing' involves financial concerns, we almost always lose. Even when we are right.

So rather than losing millions on taking away some feature that someone got promoted for, we lose millions by investing multiple man-decades into palliative care.

People do the right thing if it's worth their while. You don't need people to fear the state showing up and inflicting physical violence or rotting in hell for eternity in order to get people to act "right". You just need "right" to be more worth their while than "wrong". Now, fear of the state and/or fear of god are often used by society to weight people's choices but there's no reason thing have to be all stick and no carrot.

I know I think differently than most, but this idea always confused me. Yeah, if I threw a piece of trash out of my car window, I could possibly get in trouble but where I live, nobody will notice and I will probably get away with it. Instead, I could just do the right thing and not do that. Personally, I don't need that scary presence of responsibility to choose the "better" path. I guess it is really hard for me to see it from the other side's shoes.

My girlfriend and I recently found a lost dog. A package of salami, a phone call, and about 15 minutes later, the dog was reunited with its owner.

We helped the dog despite a variety of risks to ourselves, despite not knowing when it would end, and despite being in a hurry. We didn't do it with any expectation of reward or kudos. And although we do train and board dogs as a side gig, we're already booked enough to be choosy about clients, so we weren't doing it for potential business.

We did it because ignoring the dog felt bad and helping the dog felt good. That is, it was completely selfish on our part, but we still did the right thing.

But at least a dozen other people just walked by the dog as if they didn't see it. It was off leash, unkempt, and clearly scared. They saw it, but they just walked on past. Why? Because, for whatever reason, they didn't feel badly enough or wouldn't feel good enough if they helped.

I don't litter, either. And I take some personal responsibility for the litter of others. Again, because it feels good (or, in this case, living in a marginally cleaner city feels good). It also feels good knowing I might not be the only one who does so.

Neither of these makes me a good person. There's one instance where I know I don't do the right thing: I don't visit people in hospitals unless someone else drags me along. The experience, for reasons I'd probably need a psychologist to figure out, is painful for me, and whatever reward I get visiting the person is dwarfed by that pain. Even the shame and embarrassment of being a person who doesn't visit people when they're in the hospital isn't enough of an incentive to go. I need an external incentive. I need a friend to say, "Hey, let's go visit Phil in the hospital" or I'll be 'too busy' to go.

We all 'think differently' than each other. We're all doing what feels best. We all have different internal incentives and disincentives. So, for any sufficiently large group and any desired behavior, external incentives are required to get some of the people to exhibit that desired behavior.

"All actors are locally rational."

Thanks for writing that. I have been trying to explain for years that in most people, the brain rewards things like this in the same way that it rewards eating candy. Saying that doing something that gives you a pump of serotonin is selfless is ridiculous.

Show me someone who is absolutely repulsed by something, but does it anyway because creates the serotonin pump for someone else, and I'll show you a selfless person.

Well, no-one said "selfless".. This and the GP sound like psychological egoism[0], the claim that "all of our ultimate desires are egoistic":

"Psychological egoism is the thesis that we are always deep down motivated by what we perceive to be in our own self-interest. Psychological altruism, on the other hand, is the view that sometimes we can have ultimately altruistic motives. Suppose, for example, that Pam saves Jim from a burning office building. What ultimately motivated her to do this? It would be odd to suggest that it’s ultimately her own benefit that Pam is seeking. After all, she’s risking her own life in the process. But the psychological egoist holds that Pam’s apparently altruistic act is ultimately motivated by the goal to benefit herself, whether she is aware of this or not. Pam might have wanted to gain a good feeling from being a hero, or to avoid social reprimand that would follow had she not helped Jim, or something along these lines."

I was attracted to this years ago, and even more to the related theory of Mark Twain in What Is Man?, which seemed very convincing[1]:

"...we ignore and never mention the Sole Impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs. To it we owe all that we are. It is our breath, our heart, our blood. It is our only spur, our whip, our good, our only impelling power; we have no other. ... FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE A MAN NEVER DOES A SINGLE THING WHICH HAS ANY FIRST AND FOREMOST OBJECT BUT ONE–TO SECURE PEACE OF MIND, SPIRITUAL COMFORT, FOR HIMSELF. ...He will always do the thing which will bring him the MOST mental comfort–for that is THE SOLE LAW OF HIS LIFE"

but came to think (as most philosophers do) that both are just mistakes. They explain too much, are unfalsifiable (how do you know about what people never do - it's just asserted), and are crazy and a horrible way to live. There's no goodness in the world?! No kind acts? Why would you want to believe that. You really didn't care about that dog at all, GP?

[0]https://www.iep.utm.edu/psychego/#SH3d

[1] http://www.fullbooks.com/What-Is-Man-1.html

I went through this same questioning phase and looked at many of the same sources. However I came out of it with the opposite conclusion of you: Society rewards people who have a neurochemistry that rewards "altruistic" behavior.

In fact when I was researching this topic, I remember there being some reporting about Mother Teresa writing that she had doubts about what she did and how difficult it was - reinforcing the idea that she was suffering internally. I also recall some interesting studies on serotonin reward feedback in people who do altruistic things or have "sacrificing" jobs. So it's not woo woo as you seem to make it sound.

I take issue with a lot in your last paragraph - but I'd suggest you revisit the concept.

Hi, thanks. Yes, I didn't have the hours needed to make a decent last paragraph! Haven't read anything on the subject or thought about it much at all in 20+ years.

I recommend Christopher Hitchens' book on Mother Teresa, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't write about her like that if you'd read it.

Know it well. Saw the documentary too

No matter how misguided her actions were, it was clear she was doing what she did without those same altruism mechanisms - yet millions think she was a saint. That's the whole point of that anecdote.

> You really didn't care about that dog at all, GP?

If you're asking that question, you've adopted some sort of fatalist view of the concept I don't hold. I don't know what caring is if it doesn't have something to do with feelings. To answer your question, I cared, empathized, and sympathized enough that it outweighed my fear, anxiety, and doubts about helping.

Why do I feel that way and others don't? Probably because of my experiences with dogs, my thoughts about dogs, and my thoughts in general. I could, with intention, retrain my thoughts so I am likely to not help dogs in the future, if I so chose. Likewise, I suspect I could have taken the mental hit and not helped the dog; but I don't think that's what people generally do. And I think when people generally do a thing, if they're not getting a reward, they're building a reward system so when they do the thing in the future they get a reward.

I'm very skeptical of any claim of purely altruistic behavior, because altruism can have many rewards, both internal and external. Pam rescues Jim because Pam cares about Jim. But what does it mean to 'care about' a thing? Isn't that just pro-rescue feelings?

I always blamed white coat syndrome for not wanting to be in hospitals. A couple years ago I had to visit an ER for some people who were in a highway collision. They were just bruised but one of them had a vital sign the doctors didn't like so they were holding him for observation, to try to figure out if it was new or existing condition.

One bay over, more than a dozen people were consulting on a kid who fell out of a high window. When someone volunteered me to take their kids home so they could stay, I'm not even sure I finished my whole sentence before leaving. Pretty much gone in a puff of dust like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Hospitals are full of hurt people. Some of them are never going home. Sometimes they know it. Sometimes the family knows it. I'm now pretty sure it's not the people in the hospital I have a problem with. It's what's happening around them and to them.

You are ignoring the incentives. If doing the right thing cost $5 instead of being free, there would be a lot more litter

I am not sure I know many examples that would fit like that though. Recycling probably is a big one, since I have to pay to have a recycle bin picked up weekly. Holding on to litter costs me time and energy since I have to hang onto it until I find a trash can. I feel like people have a "minimum" threshold of how much they can be put "out of their way" before they go with the bad option. I really don't know. I think it is tough to think about. How much time/money would you be willing to part with to properly dispose of a candy wrapper? How about the same question but now you have to pay/waste time to not steal a TV? I don't know how to explain it without going full on slippery slope.

that's kind of the reverse for the 'bottle deposits' - where it costs you up front, and not doing the right thing (returning the bottles for recycling), costs you as not getting money back.

So, deposits on plastic cups! and straws! (might get people to pay the cost of washing and re-using a sturdy one)

You're saying the same thing GP says, just in a different way. Right being "more worth their while" than wrong is another way of phrasing "people follow incentives". Rules and consequences are meant to change the incentive structure, and they don't all have to be sticks. E.g. tax deductions are carrots.

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