132 karma · joined June 15, 2020
speak for yourself
If you are genuinely at the point in your life where "people saying they like things" is the same as ... what you're describing ... please be aware of the emotional impact you're having on the people around you.
Were they pointless, or were they positive feedback about a thing you personally disliked?
I don't know that I agree with the ethical conclusion that the optimal amount of fraud is therefore non-zero. The leap from "anti-fraud efforts are expensive" to these sentences in the final paragraph was not, in my opinion, convincingly made here:
>We should, as a society, accept non-zero amounts of benefits fraud. We should accept non-zero amounts of cheating on taxes.
>An intervention aimed to discourage participants from choosing the cheating-enabling environment based on social norm information did not have the expected effect; on the contrary, it backfired. In summary, the results suggest that people low in moral character are likely to eventually dominate cheating-enabling environments, where they then cheat extensively.
In other words: we tried to tell the cheaters "you wanna cheat? fine, you can only play with the other cheating pieces of crap." The intent was for this to be a punishment, but it turns out they like it. The strategy backfired.
Don't dismiss this as a "well duh" thing, there's cool stuff in here!
Written by, and for, a specific audience.