
Game theory’s cure for corruption - vimes656
http://aeon.co/magazine/society/game-theorys-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops/
======
kps

      > In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order.
      > They were everybody. 
    

Attributed to John Peel in his establishment of London Metropolitan Police:
“To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to
_the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are
the police_ , the police being only members of the public who are paid to give
full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the
interests of community welfare and existence.”¹

¹
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles)

~~~
coldtea
> _In righteous societies, police were not a separate, elite order. They were
> everybody_.

Also in totalitarian dystopias.

The thing is, before you get to who the police is (and it being everybody can
be OK), it's more important to know what to police for and what is considered
an offense.

~~~
spcoll
Hunter-gatherer societies that did fit this model could be considered to be
the ultimate totalitarian organizations. Extremely strict rules controlling
every aspect of the life of the members, from birth to death, and no deviation
ever tolerated, under pain of banishment or even death.

~~~
jessaustin
Over most of human hunter-gatherer prehistory, the population was not
_generally_ resource-constrained. (Rather, it was constrained over the long
term by catastrophes, which could be related to resources, diseases, genetics,
culture, or some combination.) Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not
lead to starvation or even necessarily isolation. One just walked for some
time, until one was alone or in more accepting company, and then started
hunting and gathering wherever one found oneself. This actually leads me to
wonder whether "banishment" could even have been an actual threat, before the
advent of agriculture. What if the tribe "banished" some people, and then a
year later found itself migrating into wherever they had settled? Would it
"banish" them again, if it could?

~~~
dalke
"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even
necessarily isolation."

Do you have a reference for that? It doesn't jibe with my understanding of
banishment, but my readings are from agricultural traditions. More
specifically, outlawry under Germanic law, where someone was judge to be
outside of the protection of the law. Full outlawry on Iceland effectively
meant banishment from Iceland or death. (See
[https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-...](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/09-10/0910hirschicelandicoutlaw.pdf)
.)

I found
[https://books.google.com/books?id=9ZkIAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA81&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=9ZkIAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA81&ots=mcBgq8sJ5P&dq=banishment&hl=sv&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q=banishment&f=false)
which says:

> By the end of the last ice age .... To be cast out of a band .. usually
> meant total banishment from the society and eventual death, either by
> starvation or as a result of aggression by members of another society
> (Salisbury, 1962).

And here's a reference concerning Aboriginal use of banishment, from
[http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter2.html](http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter2.html)
:

> As in European societies, some crimes required the complete removal of the
> criminal from society. In most Aboriginal societies, this meant banishment.
> In such close, family-oriented societies, where survival depended upon
> communal cooperation, such sanctions were considered a humane alternative to
> death, no matter how traumatic they may have been to the offender.

Further,
[http://rsc2012hscls.wikispaces.com/file/view/Law+Reform+Coun...](http://rsc2012hscls.wikispaces.com/file/view/Law+Reform+Council+-+Customary+Law.pdf)
:

> Exile or banishment has been described as an extremely harsh punishment and
> was not embraced by all Aboriginal societies.

This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural era
banishment was not a real threat.

Further, I do not follow the logic to "Therefore, most of the time, banishment
did not lead to starvation".

Consider this non-real scenario. Humans can survive only be eating buffalo
meat. There are huge numbers of buffalo compared to humans, so there is a food
surplus. However, it takes 10 people to kill one buffalo. In that scenario,
exiling someone leads to certain death as a lone human cannot hunt a buffalo.
While the human species is not resource-constrained, a single human is.

Similarly, in Intuit cultures there were strong specializations between male
and female roles. For example, it was women who were trained in how to sew the
skins to make clothes against the harsh weather, while the men learned hunting
skills. If a male were banished, I wonder if he might not have the skills to
survive on his own.

~~~
coldtea
> _This does not sound compatible with your conjecture that pre-agricultural
> era banishment was not a real threat._

It doesn't have to be a real threat to be considered "extremely harsh".

That is, it's not just physical damage or potential danger that's "harsh".
Isolation from the community you belong too could be considered just as harsh,
from a social standpoint.

~~~
dalke
I do not understand your comment. I was asking for clarification as the
statement did not match my understanding of banishment across several
cultures, nor does the logic used to reach the conclusion make sense.

In this context I used "threat" as a short-hand for the previous poster's
"Therefore, most of the time, banishment did not lead to starvation or even
necessarily isolation". I did not mean it as a purely physical threat. Indeed,
the link I gave to Aboriginal customary law uses 'threat' for both physical
and non-physical punishments ("In addition to the threat of being killed for a
breach of customary law it has been reported that in some cases the threat
also involved the denial of mortuary rites"), so my broader use does not
appear to be unusual.

Therefore, I agree with your comment, as it is a restatement of mine. But my
experience is that comments with similar structure to yours are meant to point
out incorrect or incomplete statement. Yet I don't see how that's the case
here.

Would you kindly elaborate the intent behind your response?

------
hammeringtime
" _Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never
ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by
developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously
report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports
would be investigated – police included._ "

This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police
dangerously disobey the traffic laws. I see them do rolling stops, putting on
their lights briefly to get through a red light, or speed up and pass me on
the left as I'm making a left turn.

One way to do this would be to allow anyone to report traffic violations that
they caught on video. So if I record the video of someone committing a
violation, I upload the video to the town's website, they send the owner of
the license plate a ticket.

That said, I thought that most of this article was pretty weak, a lot of
meandering, incoherence, and conflation of different ideas.

One of the best articles I read on morality, game theory and evolution was
here: [http://jim.com/rights.html](http://jim.com/rights.html) The author
derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of
sense.

~~~
baddox
The trick is still: who does the investigation?

~~~
kps
A past idea of mine is: everyone. Every vehicle registration accumulates
points at the rate of one per week. Fingering another vehicle deducts 5 points
from their total and (to deter false reports) one from yours. If your total is
negative, you can't drive/ride.

There's probably a great deal wrong with this.

~~~
fchollet
This would de-incentivize the reporting of infractions, which is the opposite
of what you want.

You want to incentivize the reporting of verified infractions, while de-
incentivize false reports. A consensus system could be used to "verify" a
report.

~~~
kmkemp
In this kind of system, I think the negative points are to remove the burden
of confirming infractions. It's in an individual's best interest to both keep
driving AND to remove poor drivers. Hitting the correct ratio is the key.

------
Maultasche
Have everyone empowered to dispense justice is an interesting proposition, but
there's a big difference between insects and people.

People aren't all logical, analytic creatures, especially when they operate in
groups. They tend to act on emotion rather than logic and it often isn't clear
which information is factual and which is rumor. People tend to be susceptible
to groupthink, and often go with the crowd.

Having everyone dealing out justice might work if everyone was calm, rational,
logical, and well-educated, which is often what game theory supposes, but
that's not how things work. In reality, I would think that such a system would
result in mob violence, sometimes triggered by good information, but often
triggered by hearsay and rumors.

Not everyone agrees what is correct behavior and what isn't, so what would be
acceptable to one person would not be acceptable to another. We'd get a lot of
uncertainty whether our behavior is acceptable or not.

If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of
upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities
would be oppressed by majorities just because they had different standards of
what is acceptable behavior. Goodbye civil rights, because those would count
for nothing if a member of the minority did something that offended the
majority.

It seems to me that this is what happens in anarchical places in the world
where authority has broken down. Anyone can and will dispense justice.
Violence because someone was offended by someone else's behavior (which I find
completely non-offensive) is common and mob violence is common.

Strong authority often breeds corruption but a lack of authority can also
breed disorder and chaos, an environment where people who can gather followers
become a strong authority and become corrupt. It's bad either way.

~~~
javajosh
_> If we had a system where a mass of people decided via some sort of
upvoting/downvoting, it would be a "tyranny of the majority", where minorities
would be oppressed..._

Maybe. But isn't it an experiment worth trying? Does anyone really know what
would happen in a modern, secular, money-driven society if you gave people
more authority to enforce the law?

~~~
a_c_s
This happens in cyberspace all the time (just look at any HN discussion about
airport security): what reason do we have to believe that in meatspace people
would behave differently?

~~~
gertef
People behave very differently online and offline

~~~
pixl97
No, not exactly. People behave differently when they believe there will be
consequences for their actions. I may troll because there is almost zero
repercussions to the action online. You see the same action in large crowds. A
few people in a large crowd can easily start a riot by realizing their
individual actions are not likely to be punished.

------
dj-wonk
This article, like many, mentions the idea of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) but
does not convincingly connect it to the particular nature of police
corruption.

An interesting article; still, I tire of seeing so many articles introduce and
anchor game theory based on the PD or one particular configuration of it. The
PD is frequently overblown, misunderstood, and misapplied. Game theory is much
more than the PD.

I think it is also worth mentioning that game theory isn't the only game or
theory in town when it comes to thinking about society and collective action.
For example, systems dynamics is also quite interesting; see Thinking in
Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.

To get a handle for police corruption, I'd argue a theory probably should
explain how and why:

    
    
      * corrupt police do/don't get caught
      * corrupt police do/don't rat each other out
      * police are/aren't monitored
      * police are/aren't incentivized

~~~
kijin
The Prisoner's Dilemma is frequently mentioned because it is one of the most
fundamental building blocks of game theory. Almost everything else that we
think of as game theory is either a variant of it, built on top of it, or is
an attempt to tweak it.

The simplest version of the Prisoner's Dilemma succinctly explains both (1)
why rational beings feel compelled to have a moral code in the first place,
and (2) why they so often disobey the moral code that they themselves believe
in. It's best for everyone to cooperate; but in the absence of a guarantee
that everyone else will, it's in my best interest to defect.

Of course, you can't get from PD to police corruption in a single step. Lots
of intermediate steps and computer modeling is needed to get there. But most
of that is probably too technical for an Aeon article, so the article only
mentions the first and last steps. A more detailed account of the models they
used would be very interesting, but that's probably the job of actual
scientific papers.

~~~
vacri
But the PD is faulty at it's core, because it doesn't take into account
external factors. What if the criminals are in a gang that treats snitches
very harshly? Or not in a gang but in a culture of 'omerta'? What if the
criminals' career prospects are affected more harshly by a long vs short
sentence? What if admitting guilt fast-tracks the criminal into a drug rehab
course that the criminal is interested in? What if one police interrogator
reads criminal A better and thus phrases the deal in a more attractive way?
What if the criminal is on the third strike in a 'three strikes' location?
What if the criminal is a devoted father, and can't possibly entertain the
option of being away from his child for the term of the long sentence? What if
the criminal is an institutionalised homeless person, and the idea of prison
is attractive?

There are heaps of external factors that can affect this decision, from subtle
to severe, and the PD doesn't model them well at all. As a base building
block, it's not very solid.

~~~
kijin
All the complications you mentioned can be, and usually are, modeled as
additional constraints on PD.

You can add arbitrary constraints on PD, such as a 50% chance that a third
party will punish you for defecting. More importantly, you can play PD many
times in a row and have each round's incentive structure depends on the result
of previous rounds, sort of like encrypting in CBC mode.

The rewards and penalties don't need to be jail time, either. You can gamble
with money, your life, or anything else you value. Usually it's done with some
representation of money, because money is easy to measure and more intuitive
to people who've never been in a prison.

The iterated (many rounds) variant is extremely powerful, as it allows
researchers to simulate all sorts of complicated constraints. For example,
other players might become more likely to defect on you if you defect on them
three times in a row (three strikes). Certain players (the mob boss) might be
much more interested in your performance than others, and defect on you much
more severely when disappointed. You might be given an opportunity to reset
your records (rehab or pardon) after a certain pattern of defection and
cooperation, or maybe it will be game over (death sentence) after a different
pattern. Iterate a few million times, and you've got a pretty damn accurate
picture of how effective each policy will be in discouraging defection
(crime).

Iterated PD also allows researchers to study whether a given incentive
structure is stable, i.e. doesn't change much over thousands of iterations.
According to the article, the incentives that give rise to police corruption
are stable, but tweaking the constraints in a certain way can disrupt them.

More information on iterated PD:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoners.27_dilemma)

------
abecedarius
We don't have to speculate about how widespread power of prosecution might
work out; there's history.
[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./Englan...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html)
[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html)

~~~
notahacker
TLDR: despite Friedman's best attempts to spin otherwise, not very well,
unless you have a particular fondness for punishments being either extremely
draconian or purely financial and think justice is improved if the likelihood
of punishment is more closely related to the wealth and connections of the
accuser.

~~~
jessaustin
_...justice is improved if the likelihood of punishment is more closely
related to the wealth and connections of the accuser._

Eh, modern justice systems have their fair share of that.

~~~
notahacker
I haven't argued otherwise. But modern accusers aren't expected to pay for the
costs of the prosecution and the witnesses, or enforce fine collection via
escalating blood feud, and relatively few people would argue reverting to such
a system would improve the chances of the likelihood and level of punishment
being closely associated with actual guilt.

------
jobu
It seems like the ubiquity of small recording devices that nearly anyone could
own and use (like a cellphone) will have a larger impact on corruption than
anything else we could do.

You may not have any direct power over the cop that just shook you down for a
few hundred, but discretely recording that interaction and posting it on
YouTube is likely to end his career in any society.

~~~
wyager
It seems like many of the cops who are filmed brutalizing people end up on
brief suspension, and then back at their jobs shortly after.

For filming police to be effective, we need more regularly enforced
punishments (like actually being fired) for police brutality.

~~~
logfromblammo
Those who are actually fired are sometimes discovered working as a cop in
another nearby jurisdiction shortly thereafter.

If you really want to punish a rotten cop, you need to prevent him from being
rehired.

~~~
pluma
I'm not generally in favour of occupational bans, but I think that's a great
example for an occupation you should be able to get banned from if you are
found to abuse your position of power (much like caretakers). You wouldn't
want to see a rapist nurse be employed as a nurse or a molesting teacher work
in a school, so why should police brutality be treated any different? You
abuse a privileged position, you lose the privilege for a reasonable amount of
time.

------
linhchi
to be relevant, this same author writes a very interesting piece about
pregnancy seen as a war of conflict between mom and infant

[http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-
battleground-...](http://aeon.co/magazine/science/pregnancy-is-a-battleground-
between-mother-father-and-baby/)

~~~
BuildTheRobots
That was a fantastic read -thank you :)

------
eridal
> The results were startling. _By making a few alterations to the composition
> of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a
> state called ‘righteousness’_. In righteous societies, police were not a
> separate, elite order. They were everybody. When virtually all of society
> stood ready to defend the common good, corruption didn’t pay.

Is this saying that the justice system _is_ the problem, not law-enforcement?

~~~
Spooky23
Righteousness is a problem in of itself at times, and the vision of "common
good" enforced by the citizens in general will not necessarily be good.

------
javajosh
Can someone tl;dr this? I skimmed it but the florid prose and the lack of any,
you know, concrete suggestion (that I could find) really, really put me off
(and I'm normally a huge fan of aeon).

~~~
lisper
Game theory predicts that corruption is inevitable when only a subset of the
population is empowered to enforce societal norms. Hence, the only way to
eliminate corruption is by empowering all of the members of a society to
enforce societal norms.

~~~
javajosh
Thank you. I really like that idea!

~~~
mannykannot
You really need to read the article in order to have an informed opinion of
it. At the very least, you should take into account the author's own caveats
around her conclusion.

------
digi_owl
Maybe I'm cynical, but I can't shake the thought that this will simply lead to
the formation of gangs/clans.

~~~
mod
I think social media is a somewhat relevant corollary, where it self-polices
content.

I'd say sometimes--like HN--it's a success. Good behavior is encouraged &
enforced. Bad behavior is punished.

Other times--like reddit--not a success. The hive-mind is real there, and in
particular well-mannered disagreement that is misaligned with the norm is
punished pretty strongly there.

Plus we all have heard how their investigations of real-life events have
turned out--witch hunts.

I think reddit's population is more reflective of the general population,
unfortunately. I don't think self-policing would end well at all.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reddit is actually quite a complex ecosystem nowadays. There's a lot of HN-
quality subreddits focused on particular topics. I'd risk saying that most
topical subreddits are sort-of OK. The rule of thumb I'm seeing is: the more
niche the interest, the better the community. It's only when you start dealing
with "normals" that you see the worst parts of humanity.

~~~
digi_owl
As a general (no just limited to Reddit) observation, the easier a topic can
be opinionated the more noise there will be.

------
hasenj
This only works if all members of the population share the exact same set of
values. Even then, it might be undesirable.

Mob stoning individuals for extra martial sex is an example of this behavior.

I don't think that would be desirable ..

~~~
jbhatab
There could easily be modern manifestations of this too. Mob beatings for a 1
percenter that they deemed corrupt. Humanity will always find a way to get too
outraged over something.

------
gbersac
What is funny is that, if we sum it up with another article of this site :
[http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-
does-a...](http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/when-bad-behaviour-does-a-good-
turn/) we conclude that a society without corruption (where every bad or
coward behaviour are punish) is also a society without creativity !

By the way, this is one of the greatest article I have ever read in hacker
news. Loved it.

------
danans
This article has interesting implications for the current attempts to revive
community policing, which promotes the idea of police getting more involved
and integrated into the communities in which they work, with the hope that
they become more trusted and aware of the social landscape in which they are
operating.

By integrating themselves with the community, they would necessarily fall
under the influences of some of the community's norms, and perhaps be better
tuned, and also more accountable, to it's norms of righteousness.

That may work in many cases, but the article seems to assume that most
individuals in any community will promote righteousness in the community's
interest.

What happens if the community lacks the social norms to enforce righteousness,
especially with respect to the property rights and justification of violence?
What happens when the "community" is hardly a community at all, but, due to
its socioeconomic circumstances, is a place where suspicions of neighbors and
incentives to cheat the community are pervasive?

Whose job is it to establish the norms of righteousness where they are
lacking, or significantly degraded?

------
lotsofmangos
On a very similar theme I was discussing the merits of requiring police to
have personal professional insurance that pays out for a portion of any civil
liabilities and is priced accordingly.

It seems somewhat perverse at first glance, but might actually be a good
incentive if carefully structured and actuaries are also one group of people
that might actually get somewhere with demanding actual figures from police.

~~~
spacemanmatt
I'm for this. I think it would get the same pushback that most good ideas for
policing routinely gets: They'll say it might make cops timid. As if they're
already too timid.

------
bayesianhorse
Long story short: If you enable every member of a society to punish abuse, you
get a righteous community.

But this has been known for quite some time: Transparency can fight
corruption. That's why it may be a good Idea to put cameras on policemen, and
that publishing public budgets is an inevitable step towards reducing
corruption.

------
api
Game theory as a subject is something I wish was taught as standard curiculum.
It contains so many answers to so many deep and vexing questions and problems
of our age, and it holds the promise of so many more. It is among the great
intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

~~~
dmichulke
I will teach my son first Game Theory and Statistics and only then economics
and law.

------
albertsun
If your mental model for something is so malleable that it can explain cancer
and police corruption the same way, maybe it's not actually providing any
insight and all you've done is distort reality to fit it. Just saying... Game
theory is so easy to invoke

~~~
patcon
Or maybe it suggests underlying order?

[https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence?language=en)

------
mkagenius
tl;dr

The main strategy:

Here’s how it might look in practice. Imagine a city where police commit
blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could
decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all
citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received
too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. This
sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to
do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many
online communities.

~~~
kefka
I'm not entirely sure I like that. Ever hear of brigading on Reddit, or "your
personal army" on 4chan /b/ ?

That's the bad end of what we have to deal with. And it is easy to imagine
every officer getting more votes than the city has residents... and we're back
to square 1.

------
cies
I thought the article was too lengthy/wordy, so I didn't read it all. I was
curious if it described the same anti-corruption approach that I know was once
suggested in India: "legalize one side of the corruption". That makes those in
a corruption scheme think twice (or more) -- now both sides are equally
punishable (thus create a bond by bribing/taking-bribe).

That's also a game-theory approach to corruption!

~~~
jaideepsingh
I would love to hear more about this "legalize one side of the corruption"
proposed solution. Can you elaborate?

The article is lengthy but ultimately boils down to what one of the other
comments mentioned: Game theory predicts that corruption is inevitable when
only a subset of the population is empowered to enforce societal norms. Hence,
the only way to eliminate corruption is by empowering all of the members of a
society to enforce societal norms.

~~~
notahacker
A logical consequence of legalising one side of the corruption is that a
mutual incentive to conceal its occurrence no longer exists, which makes
corrupt agreements more difficult to reach as well as more likely to be
exposed.

------
ck2
Pretty sure cops see other cops break laws far more serious than speeding and
say nothing, every single week.

How can you expect any cop to be honest if they watch others break the law and
say nothing?

You'll never change bad behavior if there is no penalty for that behavior.

~~~
aidenn0
That's a big part of what the article is about; so long as only the police can
levy penalties against people for breaking the law, there will be police
corruption.

~~~
amyjess
What I would like to see is serious incentives for police officers to turn in
their colleagues and give IAB unlimited power to spy on every aspect of
officers' lives.

~~~
aidenn0
There are good game-theoretic reasons why that is just a band-aid solution,
compared to empowering citizens to apply some form of pressure to officers.

------
giltleaf
Did anyone else read this and think about the ending of The Stand? It's the
same problem; as society scales, policing scales and problems start to arise.

------
sebastianconcpt
So, the world might actually work if all of us self-police ourselves from
self-corruption.

