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Comment by throw0101b | Hacker News Reader

> Had he cooperated, it's plausible to see him getting away with a license revocation and fine.

Reminder of the quotation from Howard Baker (R-TN): “It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.”

Though some would disagree:

> There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that 'it's not the crime, but the cover-up.'

> But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable. Let me repeat that, the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable. Indeed, the cover-ups are usually successful. And that's why they're tried so often. Just look at this administration [in 2007]. They're the ultimate example of this truth.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20071026022311/https://talkingpo...

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> the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable

There are numerous counter-examples to this claim. In many cases, it's obvious because the cover-up is of a civil infraction.

I feel like the Toupee Fallacy is lurking around in this conversation. We know how many cover-ups are successful, and the ones we know about are nearly universally unsuccessful.

Not disagreeing. Just pushing back on cover-ups being rational. In many cases, the cover-up wasn't worth it. "Full revelation of the underlying bad act" would have been utterly survivable, even taking into account the odds of getting away with no consequence.

Yeah, my feel is that the underlying act was often enough survivable, but it didn't feel like it at the time. A cover-up attempt in state of panic is opposite of rational (except maybe in terms of calming your own nerves).

And it takes a steely set of nerves to calmly wait for the dice to finish rolling.

Panic tends to bias towards action.

Depends on the person. Panic has always biased me towards inaction: this is helpful in urgent circumstances (where waiting and thinking for a few minutes feels really bad, but is usually the right move unless someone's bleeding to death), but harmful in non-urgent circumstances (where there's only a few minutes' worth of thoughts to think about the situation, so waiting and thinking for a few months is completely counterproductive).

Even in cases where the perpetrator believes that the underlying act is survivable, they'd probably still rather not get caught at all.

Guess some people like to play the odds. Rather than take 50% damage, they choose to gamble between 0% damage (cover up successful) and 100% damage (cover up failed and isn’t survivable) - they are equivalent in terms of expected value.

But they're not necessarily equivalent. If option a (0% damage) is equiprobable with option b (100% damage), then yeah, the expectation value is 50% damage. But if option b is 4 times more likely than option a, then the expectation value is 80% (1/5 *0 + 4/5*100 = 80). It's that misapprehension of the probabilities that is the error of the person failing to coverup a crime.

Just because there are only two possible outcomes doesn't mean that they are equiprobable. Not all coin tosses use a "fair" coin.

There are three outcomes in this hypothetical: don’t bother with the cover up (50% damage); successful cover up (0% damage); and failed cover up (100% damage). So the calculation is a bit more complicated.

"don't bother with the cover up" doesn't contribute to the probabilistic model. If I flip a coin, it can't come up "I didn't flip the coin".

You're right. To expand: don't bother is the null. Deciding to cover-up leads to one of two outcomes, the good one (you get away) and the bad (you get boned). You don't know which of those outcomes you'll get.

The percentages the comment you're responding to provides aren't probabilities, but damage fractions; 50% isn't a 50/50 likelihood, but 50% damage of the 100% case.

If your outcome is defined on a continuum, then the expectation value is the sum of product of (probability of some event times the outcome value of that event).

Fair coin flips have 50/50 odds. If we say that you get $100 if it comes up heads, and $0 if it comes up tails, then the expectation value for the money you'd have afterwards is $50=0.5*$100 + 0.5*$0. If it was an unfair coin with 30% odds of coming up heads, then your expectation value is $30= 0.3*$100 + 0.7*$0. And so on. The fact that the outcomes are dollars or damage percentages is irrelevant to the calculation.

Tangentially relevant, I have found that when people crash into my parked car, they universally attempt to cover up, and flee the scene. Inevitably they are on camera, and they end up paying for damage. This has happened multiple times. However, there is no extra punishment adminstered for the fleeing and the cover up. So (at least in Australia) you are universally incentivsed to try and coverup a vehicle hit and run, than you are to leave details. Sad.

The three outcomes are:

* Successful cover up (0% damage).

* Failed cover up (100% damage).

* Don't bother (100% damage).

So if doing nothing and failing to cover up lead to the same result, you might as well give a shot at successfully covering up. Whatcha got to lose?

It is assumed not bothering is 100% damage because the screw up is apparently bad enough to warrant attempting a cover up.

In the UK it’s a crime to “flee the scene of an accident”, even if that accident was a minor scratch on a stationery vehicle.

It is the same in many other European countries. But I guess in case of minor scratches those laws belong to the most frequently broken ones... ;)

Except that in a lot of cases, a failed coverup incurs a few more felonies, so "don't bother" is closer to like 75%, while "failed cover up" is definitely 100%.

In terms of risk analysis, rationally considering a coverup is in the same ballpark as rationally considering shorting a stock, in the sense that making the wrong call can cost a whole bunch more.

I'd say failed cover up is 100% damage, but "don't bother" is under 100%. A failed cover up is always worse than the initial screw up. E.g. this exact case, which went from civil penalties (loss of pilot's license) to criminal (jail time) AND civil penalties due to the failed cover up.

Simple. Look at what was a conspiracy theory in the 80’s and turned into a “yeah we did that, so what” in the 2000’s re: the government?

The Dalai Lama literally pulled down a six figure paycheck from the CIA, for example. The government was, is, and will continue to spy on you.

The difference is that if something is successfully covered up for 10-20-30 years, by the time the public finds out about it nobody really cares.

> We know how many cover-ups are successful

Did you mean "we don't know"?

https://fairing.co/assets/images/blog/known-unknowns-matrix-...

Probably including Watergate which I believe was the inspiration for that quote. The underlying act was probably survivable. The coverup was not.

It’s worth mentioning that the Watergate coverup eventually failed because of a plane crash and the events set in motion due to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Air_Lines_Flight_553

Your link says that’s a conspiracy theory?

Woodward and Bernstein were already investigating (for many months prior to the crash), and Nixon's later coverups (after March 1973) don't seem to be connected to the crash in any way.

Perhaps if the crash hadn't happened, the people/money on board could have ensured McCord (and the other plumbers) would have stayed quiet instead of telling Judge Sirica that it was a White House operation. Without some significant evidence of intent for the passengers, though, this is a pretty soft argument.

I guess. WaPo thinks it was pretty significant:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/12/08/dorothy-hu...

> What’s clear, though, is the influence the crash had on the arc of the Watergate scandal. It was a crucial turning point. Howard Hunt, worried his children would be orphans if he spent years in prison, asked his lawyer to meet with Colson and request a pardon from Nixon after a year of incarceration if Hunt would plead guilty and avoid trial.

> Colson spoke with Nixon, as recorded in White House tapes. Nixon agreed to the clemency proposal.

> Four other Watergate defendants, Cuban Americans from Miami whom Howard Hunt had brought to the burglary operation, took this as a cue that they’d be pardoned, too, and also pleaded guilty.

Nixon didn't know that the evidence tying him to the Chennault Affair was weak. If it was weak, he could play the "I didn't know" card. If it was strong, he would have had to play the much worse "It wasn't illegal" card. These are mutually exclusive, so conducting a criminal operation to get a peak at the evidence was a rational gamble. It didn't pay off, but no, just chilling was not a good option and no, the underlying act was not the lesser evil.

Isn’t the Martha Stewart insider trading story one of these counter examples?

Martha Stewart was never convicted for insider trading. This is a common mistake people make.

She was found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct, of obstruction of an agency proceeding, and of making false statements.

Had she said she made the trade(s) on the basis of a tip, would that have been the better outcome? Was keeping her mouth shut an option?

> There are numerous counter-examples to this claim. In many cases, it's obvious because the cover-up is of a civil infraction.

Indeed, people go out of the frying pan and into the fire all the time.

I think the kernel of truth in the parent post is that the subjects might genuinely believe that the revelation of the original "crime" alone would be impossible to recover from, so they might as well go all in on trying to cover it up.

So, the "marginal cost" of additional penalties from a failed coverup just doesn't seem all that high given the potential upside of a successful coverup.

I probably watch too much popular media, but I am only thinking of bigger crimes where it seems like the rational choice is to attempt a coverup.

Murder? Check. Stealing a Snicker's bar? Probably just leave the evidence in place.

What is the threshold where you have to make the call? White-collar crimes feel the only place where you could make the argument that further action on the scene is likely to leave behind more evidence.

>White-collar crimes feel the only place where you could make the argument that further action on the scene is likely to leave behind more evidence.

Nixon tapes, Iran Contra paper shredding, Enron paper shredding (we got Sarbanes Oxley out of that.) There are plenty of places where further action likely prevented far far worse things.

I think white collar crime is harder now, as evidenced by recent political scandals (fucking up your secure messaging app, bungling PDF's). I dont know of any one who has the technical acumen to fully cover their tracks.

Well, part of it is that the systems are generally designed with the idea that covering up or otherwise trying to fight the system is likely to happen when the system is likely to inflict a negative outcome on someone. So the obvious course is the make obstructing the system in this treated as badly or worse than the actual thing being covered up or obstructed. You see this in the judicial system all the time, where if you're found to be hiding or tampering with evidence, the court can just assume the worst possible version of whatever such evidence could have been, or just outright award a default verdict, as Alex Jones has been finding out recently.

Survivorship bias...

When the coverup works, we don't hear about it.

Often we know about the coverup, but we don't know what was covered up. "Lost" documents are quite common in politics.

And we will never know if it was worth it.

>To say that there's a scandal because the cover-up didn't work is no more than a dingbat truism

This nails it quite succinctly, IMO.

I think you're misinterpreting it a bit. Yes, the covered-up thing is usually bad enough that there's an incentive to conceal it, but it's the efforts at concealment that often end up drawing attention to the perpetrator. Absent those, many crimes would either not be investigated so thoroughly or talked down to less significance with a 'so what' or 'I didn't think it was illegal/a big deal' response (this happens a lot in politics nowadays). Covering up some incriminating action implicitly admits that the action was known to be bad, making it impossible to downplay after discovery.

The problem with cover ups is that they are creating more data points and evidence to find/arrest/prosecute you.

They also demonstrate intent that was potentially unproveable before the attempt to cover up. It's pretty hard to say "oh whoops, was that illegal?" if you've gone to significant lengths to hide it from law enforcement.

In practice, there are examples both for and against the proposition that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Having said that, the argument presented here against the proposition is being justified with a fallacy: numerous cases have shown that cover-ups are attempted even when a full revelation of the underlying crime is survivable (either literally or metaphorically.) In at least some and perhaps many cases, attempting a cover-up may be the statistically-justifiable rational choice even if its failure will bring worse consequences than the infraction being covered up.

this has some faulty reasoning involved as well.

There are the following conditions:

1. individual determines correctly the crime is not survivable and does cover up that fails and you have both crime and cover up.

2. individual determines correctly the crime is not survivable and does cover up with succeeds in covering up crime sufficiently but then the individual gets damage from cover up, since there is a strong suspicion the cover up was of crime the cover up punishment is nearly as bad as crime.

... variations of above until

X1. individual determines incorrectly the crime is not survivable when it was, and does cover up and suffers more from cover up than they would from crime.

These things are of course also hampered by what one hopes for - if you think you will be damaged by crime but not as much by cover up if cover up fails you may still attempt cover up because successful cover up means no damage.

3. Individual does cover up, which gets discovered along with a crime, and the individual gets punished for both the cover-up and the crime that was discovered. The cover-up was successful. It hid a much more egregious crime that nobody ever learned about.

right there are a number of different variations that I didn't add in because I didn't have time - just wanted to show there is more than just "it's not the crime it's the coverup" or "no it's the crime!" going on here.

I don't think there's cold rational thought that goes into most coverups, it's more like ....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rN97tqSwI44

Filming the crime and then covering it up isn't exactly going to work in your favour.

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