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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

I'm totally fine with raising their paychecks by a factor of 10 for their loss of privacy if we implement this... the amount of money we'd save elswhere dur to less corruption would be a few orders of magnitude higher.

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We've already had some experiments about "what if we select politicians based on their love for being on TV and their lack of concern about concealing their corruption" and the results aren't good...

Public figures kinda need to be narcissistic just to be able to face seeing themselves so much each day. And that includes the good ones.

I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.

For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:

I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.

Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.

Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.

>I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.

Humans are violent too. If we tried as hard to train it out of people we'd make good progress.

Violence serves a purpose - although it doesn't serve this purppose well, it stands in place as a last resort. Removing that resort, what do you propose replaces it for the purposes which must be served?

I meant that we could train out hypocrisy the same way we train out most of the violence.

For example, how many showers a day can a person take and "forget" to get dressed?

> and "forget" to get dressed?

The old Ted Kennedy maneuver

You mean Zelensky?

If you mean Trump, a lot of people think the results were great.

A lot of people are brainwashed.

>A lot of people are brainwashed.

On both sides. It's all theater like WWE. You have the good guy and you have the heel. Each side has their own story with this format.

Much earlier than Trump, politicians discovered that they could further advance their own interests by virtue signaling during Congressional sessions instead of actually make progress on legislation. Now, all meaningful negotiation happens behinds closed doors. If that also gets broadcast, then I'd be surprised if they get anything done at all.

> now, all meaningful negotiation happens behinds closed doors

This is fundamental to loss aversion and compromise. There was never a "before." Open "negotiations" reward posturing, not compromise.

I don't think we should impose loss of personal privacy.. even in this scenario a politician acting impeccably could fall to one one signalling for part of the public's irrational approval, like two gladiators in the colosseum. The decisions of the politician's themselves need to somehow be opened up for scrutiny as they are, artifacts independent of their origin. Like code being submitted for review, and being subjected to human + automated checks. I know people will decry this as naive / impractical to implement but I still think it has got a better shot then 'create dystopian state where politicians are monitored 24 / 7, and trust the ever rational cooler heads of the public mob to (a) properly reward the good and punish the bad, (b) advocate for the best policies'. Not to mention that if such a system were invented then politicians were just get corrupted in advance of their career, in secret.

The Singapore System - their ministers are the highest paid in the world and it (apparently) makes a difference.

Singapore remains an authoritarian state, not a democracy. It allowed for massive progress in a difficult political climate but it does so at the cost of a good amount of political freedoms. That might be fine, but not in all cultures.

I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)

But that is a perceptions index. People are going to answer based on what they heard about the previous year's index.

Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.

This is the best authoritative source that I could find. The few assertions I've seen that Singapore is less corrupt than most european and north american countries quote Transparency International as a source, so I assume it might be an acceptable one. They also supplement their findings with a "GCB" survey[1] (which is less recent), and given enough time I guess there are other sources one could find.

These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb

Yeah it's not entirely crazy when you are talking about something to quote whatever you can find.

But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.

Assuming what you say here is true (which in my opinion is a pretty high leap), one could then ask why those biases exist in the first place. I expect authoritarian states to enable corruption but it's the contrary in the case of Singapore. Why? Because I doubt it boils down to the salary of the ministers.

On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!

Crazy that you've been downvoted for this. The single ruling party of Singapore for the past 70 years, the People's Action Party, is overtly fascist. But I guess people are eager to overlook that because they like the results? Seems like a barely warmed over reformulation of 'they make the trains run on time.'

You don't even need to raise it that much. One can implement onlyfans.com business model when their electorate pays to them for access to their cam feeds.

The richer would be the ones that do things on their livefeed that attract people. Do you want politicians orgies? Because that's how you get politicians orgies. The poorer politicians would be the perfectly honest and completely boring ones, not a great way to encourage honesty.

Do you want politicians orgies?

Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.

So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?

Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.

Lauren Boebert is secretly a total hottie. But I really wanna see Mitch McConnell shake what he got.

I know that HN isn't supposed to be for jokes, but legit, I assume that a naked Mitch McConnell looks like the nudist alien scammers from futurama.

https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png

Or Dana Carvey trying to get into the Turtle Club.

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