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Comment by shinymark | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in the SF Bay Area and feel the same way. I thought that this is how the whole world worked. You have to be constantly concerned about having your possessions stolen if you leave them briefly exposed in a public place.

Then, I lived in Tokyo for a few years. People leave belongings unattended in coffee shops and restaurants all the time. It's a common occurrence to see someone put down their belongings at a table, leave them there, then go order food or drinks where their belongings are out of sight.

Sure, there is still theft in Japan. But it was a really eye opening and nice experience to see that there are places where distrust of others in this context isn't the default state.

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I know that I'm the weird one, because everybody I know never lets me forget it, particularly on this issue. But I've always thought the opposite: I always thought it was weird that everybody thought somebody would steal their stuff. What are the odds of that? I've always left everything unlocked and left my stuff wherever if I needed to walk away. In all my 35 years, I've only ever had one item stolen: a cheap bicycle. Granted, it wouldn't have been stolen if I'd locked it up :)

i started getting paranoid when it actually happened to me. Think about this girl who got her laptop stolen. Do you think she'll ever not be paranoid about leaving a laptop in a cafe? She'll be packing that up before she goes to the bathroom for the rest of her life.

It's not weird at all, in my opinion, because it's just so TRUE. There ARE weird people out there that simply want everything that you have and will take it all when they get the opportunity. Not to mention the people who are stealing because they really need the money, and people with Alzheimer's who can't help stealing things.

I've never had a flat tire in my life, but I'm still driving with a spare tire in the trunk.

People with Alzheimer's can't help stealing things?

probably meant kleptomaniacs

The odds of getting your stuff stolen are very low. But having your stuff stolen is so bad, that it is worth doing stuff to avoid it, like taking it with you to the bathroom.

That's not necessarily true. There is a cost to lowering the risk of theft. In this case, it's mostly the time it takes to pack up the stuff, and potentially losing your seat in the coffee shop. There must be point where it's not worth lowering the risk of theft. It would be highly dependent on the cost of your possessions, the likelihood of theft, and the cost of risk-lowering activity over one's lifetime.

I still leave my bicycle unlocked even though I've had one stolen.

The bike cost $30. If I get one stolen every 10 years, I figure I'm paying $3 / year for the convenience of not having to bother with locking or carrying a key.

In a sense, it's the replacement that someone who has their bike stolen is paying for, not the original. If it gets stolen, you'd need to get a ride home, find a new bike without transportation for a bit, and put in a decent amount of time and money to fix a bicycle at that price.

The odds are probably not high, just high enough. It's more of a statistics game, and even with a relatively low rate of theft, occurrences will happen.

And when they do happen, they'll be very loud and publicized. That's probably what we see more often than first-person cases.

This is true in China even if that doesn't seem intuitive: go to the bathroom, just leave your stuff at your table and you'll probably be fine. Depends on the traffic though.

You'll also hardly have a problem in the states barring some high crime areas.

Not only Japan. Singapore and China are the same. When leaving in Singapore it took me a long time to trust it, but I never trusted leaving my laptop.

Sweden also used to be like that, but it's been changing over there.

Unfortunately most places are not like this. From developing countries (especially Brazil) to major touristy cities in Europe. :-/

That's just sad

Sure, Japan's culture is great when it comes to personal safety. But many would say that that same culture is responsible for its economic malaise of the last 25 years.

huh?

Yes, but those two aspects of their culture are totally orthogonal. Why can't we build a society where we have the former and not the latter?

> Yes, but those two aspects of their culture are totally orthogonal.

No, they're not. The social uniformity and equality in Japan that makes Tokyo surprisingly safe for its size is also responsible for the lack of entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan.

> Why can't we build a society where we have the former and not the latter?

If you want some young people to succeed spectacularly, then you also have to allow some (a lot) of young people to fail spectacularly. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If you want some young people to succeed spectacularly, then you also have to allow some (a lot) of young people to fail spectacularly.

How does the second statement follow logically from the first? How does putting a floor under the bottom of humanity automatically put a ceiling over the top?

I think of it as two normal distributions. One is tight in the centre with few outliers at either end, the other is flatter. More excellence and more rubbish. The former is Japan, while the latter is your baseline - I believe we were using USA. It is common to see normal distributions, but rarer to see them skewed in the way you are proposing.

Note, I don't believe this is deterministic at the individual level. People choose to do crime or to think differently. Nevertheless, at the level of society, the law of large numbers applies.

There is absolutely no reason it has to be a normal distribution. But let's say you started with one for the sake of simplicity. You could shift the peak a very small amount left (with taxes) and use that money to bring the entire left edge up to the same standard of living. This would have next to no effect on the right edge, the ones succeeding spectacularly.

The distribution is already highly skewed anyway.

People choose to do crime or to think differently.

One of the interesting conclusions one can draw from studies of physics and biology is that it's highly likely that "choice" is really a very complex chemical process, rather than some independent act that a unified person entity performs in complete isolation from their brain and body.

Assuming for the sake of argument that this is completely true, I think we can make significant progress in improving people's ability to "choose" by approaching the problem of detrimental or criminal choices from a biological and physical perspective -- that is, to use a rational, scientific approach to influencing brains and bodies as highly complex, sentient physical objects, rather than a moral, philosophical approach to distributing punishment and reward.

>> it's highly likely that "choice" is really a very complex chemical process, rather than some independent act that a unified person entity performs in complete isolation from their brain and body

I see this as a false dichotomy. It's the old mind/body duality again. Your assertion about chemicals is not wrong, but you'll run into trouble if you act as if it negates the subjective perspective.

If the subjective perspective is an illusion, an emergent behavior of a complex reality, then wouldn't we do better by trying to alter the reality (biochemistry and environment) directly than by abstractly influencing the illusion with notions of reward and punishment?

> How does putting a floor under the bottom of humanity automatically put a ceiling over the top?

There is no fiscally responsible or sustainable way to do the former without doing the latter as well.

It's fine to make that assertion, but how do I know it's mathematically true, and what makes it true if so?

This comment may be suggesting that the hidden cost of trust in Japan is uniformity of behaviour. Which can have economic consequences when individuals and organisations are unable or unwilling to embrace disruptive change. If so, I tend to agree with the comment.

"Disruptive change" is a funny euphemism for theft. I'll have to remember that one.

My argument was that uniformity of behaviour can have different consequences simultaneously. A positive one can be trust (lack of street crime). A negative consequence of uniformity of behaviour can be lack of disruption.

I don't understand how uniformity of behavior is inherently anti-theft. These still seem like unrelated things.

Uniformity of behavior may not be inherently anti-theft in all circumstances. What I see this happening in japan though is that, to a larger extent than I have seen elsewhere, people are consistently, almost uniformly, pro-social. Group consideration tends to trump individual opportunity. Consider the different value of cost/benefit to society and to the criminal of a criminal act. I am arguing that Japanese will tend to see the social cost more than the individual benefit, even when they themselves may be the beneficiary. And on the other side of this coin, as we have been discussing; the same social consideration tends to make people more reluctant to force unwanted (disruptive) changes on others who might be hurt in the short term.

That may or may not make sense, but I was just cracking a joke.

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