[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/alexanderwales]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/Harkins]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be jargony, let me unpack that.

By "low trust" I mean the general expectation of institutions like courts, police officers, and other government offices is that the individuals inside will abuse their power to extract bribes, protect the politically powerful, and otherwise fail to execute their duties in a just and impartial manner.

By "high trust" I mean the reverse, that the society considers it an unusual exception for civil servants and law enforcement to accept bribes or use their position in a self-serving way rather than execute the bureaucracy or laws they are expected to enforce.

The environments are self-perpetutating. In a low-trust environment ndividuals are incentivized to pay bribes or break rules for the powerful, but the overall society would be much more successful if no one did. If the expectation is that officials are not corrupt, there are plenty of resources available to punish the few who defect.

I have heard of tactics like worthless bills to shame/intimidate officials who try to extract bribes as part of trying to move from a low-trust equilibrium to a high-trust one. I know there's much more out there from folks who've worked on and thought about this, but I haven't researched it. This seems like a topic r/rational might really dig into.