RSA ANIMATE: The Truth About Dishonesty
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it for Ariely's finding that people cheat a little without feeling guilty.
What it is
An RSA Animate adaptation of a Dan Ariely lecture on dishonesty. It explores when ordinary people lie or cheat and how they rationalize small acts of dishonesty.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2015 to 2015.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Maarten88 · 2015-12 · on “Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game”
Very few people really think of themselves as evil. But in my worldview most people (including engineers) cheat a little bit and then rationalize it so they don't have to feel bad about themselves. Big corporations and complex economical systems lend themselves very well for rationalizing your part in something evil away, especially for upper management. Watch this video. It changed my view on the world: [this video] p.s. It has been shown that the psychological profile of top-criminals and CEO's are remarkably alike.
Cites pdkl95 · 2015-05 · on “The dangers of letting algorithms make decisions in law enforcement”
"Decision-making algorithms are politics played out at a distance, generating a troubling amount of emotional remove." This is absolutely key. Adding distance[1] between the point where a decision is made and where the consequences of that decision are realized make it harder for any feedback from those consequences to affect the person making the decision. This makes the decisions worse (from lack of information) and the implementation worse (error must be much larger before the feedback from that error reaches the decision maker). You see this effect in many areas. An obvious example is the law enforcement mentioned the article (or military), where "just following orders" to the modern var
Cites vanderZwan · 2015-09 · on “People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End”
That is almost exactly what Daniel Ariely's research on dishonesty is about, this notion of cheating so slightly you don't feel guilty about it: [this video]
Cites pdkl95 · 2015-11 · on “Congressman introduces bill to end warrantless Stingray surveillance”
> eavesdropping on cell phone calls That's not the part that warrants a strong punishment. Jail time is justified for the abuse of power while acting under the color of law. The particulars about that abuse (eavesdropping on a cell phone) is less important. > registry While this is an interesting idea, I caution strongly against creating any kind of "registry". The current examples we have seen (e.g. "sex offenders") has shown how registries dilute important concepts like "innocent until proven guilty" when presence on the registry doesn't map 1-to-1 with "found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". Even more worrying is the idea that someone should be tainted for life (or "a long time") for a