RSA ANIMATE: The Truth About Dishonesty

"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 variant of "just following an algorithm" end up causing problems. A more interesting example might be the existence of the derivatives market and the invention of increasingly-exotic financial instruments. A bank giving someone a loan has some fairly well-known possible behaviors, and is (probably) close enough to allow feedback between the parties for things like capitalism to work (if you don't like the bank's behavior, you let them know that isn't acceptable by refinancing at a different bank). On the other hand, bad decisions bundled up and hidden in collateralized debt obligations sheltered these bad decisions until the problem blew up and introduced the world to the phrase "too big to fail". A very interesting discussion of this problem - focused on how this kind of distance relates to

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: [VIDEO]

> 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 mistake. Branding people with a modern "scarlet letter" for their mistakes doesn't create an incentive for that person to change their behavior[1]. Once someone has "paid their debt to society", they deserve a 2nd chance that is free of past accusations. There may be a way to make some aspects of a registry work without these problems, but I'm haven't seen it. [1] [VIDEO] ("The Truth About Dishonesty")

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: [VIDEO] p.s. It has been shown that the psychological profile of top-criminals and CEO's are remarkably alike.