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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

There are two primary argument for police to have them IMHO.

1. Police have extraordinary power over others.

2. Juries believe them by default.

This gives them much higher requirements for accountability than most people.

I do really like the idea though. Human memories are incredibly inaccurate, but we believe our own memories and can't really do otherwise. If we had the option of a surrogate memory that could be really transformational. Imagine what that would do to your perception of time and your discount rate if you could have perfect recall of your whole life?

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1. Police have extraordinary power over others.

2. Juries believe them by default.

There are many contexts where juries will believe one party prejudicially over another, and/or one party has some form of extraordinary power in defiance of facts or objective reality. (What these are, and their directions vary over time.) Up until now, it seems that our only and very crude solution has been to introduce a "correcting bias" in the direction deemed most likely to increase the amount of justice enacted in society.

It seems to me that gathering more information in a more timely fashion and making objective and contextually relevant determinations is the rational and technically savvy direction to go. However, I'm not so sure that human beings are mature enough as a species to actually apply such informational power in a truly fair and rational manner. I rather think that we'd be prone to using such power to bolster the whims and prejudices of the status quo, at least in the short term.

> what that would do to your perception of time and your discount rate if you could have perfect recall of your whole life?

Now that is an interesting question. Lowering the time discounting of an entire society is pretty much awesome for everyone involved.

We need to get some RCTs or at least large epidemiological surveys on the time discounting of sousveillers & lifeloggers.

This is the subject of an episode of Black Mirror. It's hardly an exhaustive investigation but it's certainly a good slice of Twilight-Zone-y sci-fi.

> If we had the option of a surrogate memory that could be really transformational.

I'm inclined to believe that I don't want surrogate memory. You might be interested in an episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You", that is premised around this.

Maybe not surrogate, but the ability to back up memory and maybe index it would be almost equally transformational and wouldn't involve having perfect recall of every time you screwed up. I know that wouldn't solve the issues raised in "The Entire History of You", but I'm not entirely sold "forgetting it happened" is a better solution to that episode anyway.

The Reversal Test is a good thing to think about when examining the possibility of Status Quo Bias: If you had the option to make your memory more unreliable, or to give up what videos, photographs, and other recordings of your life that you currently have; would you take it?

If not, what makes you think that the current spot on the continuum from "accurate/prosthetic memories" to "inaccurate/solely internal memories" is the best spot?

What happens when the police enter private property? Information leaks happen all the time from law enforcement storage.

If there are police officers in my home, 99 times out of 100 it would be preferable for me if they recorded everything and uploaded it directly to youtube on purpose, than if they recorded nothing.

There is obviously nothing in your home about which you fear your neighbours finding out. Not everyone is in that category.

Or, an even more likely occurrence: Police get dispatched to domestic disputes quite frequently, where there's lots of hateful argument going on. The content of these arguments is often something that you don't want your neighbours or colleagues finding out, for a host of reasons.

>There is obviously nothing in your home about which you fear your neighbours finding out. Not everyone is in that category.

Or the risk of what the police might do if unrecorded outweighs the neighbours gossiping.

Also in suburbia it is my experience that neighbours can hear what is being sad in a domestic anyway. Drywall doesn't muffle yelling much.

Downside: your Tom of Finland collection is exposed on YouTube.

Upside, most especially if you are black: the police do not smash your door down in full riot gear, shoot your dog, point rifles at your kids, put a gun to your head and threaten to arrest you on a trumped up assault charge. All because they got the wrong address.

Yeah. This decision (personal transparency) depends largely on how much an individual fears they have embarrassing personal lives vs how much they fear legal system (police, prosecutors, judges) incompetence and corruption.

There is no "right" decision.

I personally fear the legal system much more. Both because it is more likely and it's consequences are more severe. Being ostracized and fired from my job cause I'm a furry vs spending anytime in jail/prison (which would probably get me ostracized and fired anyways).

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