Hidden Cameras Are Changing Politics, Economics, and Culture

So what are your thoughts on abortion Joshua? I think you've danced along the line of eugenics in the past, and sniping spinal cords and pulling limbs is the pillar of eugenics. Sorry a little facetious 🙂 " For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mothers womb. I praise You because i am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful i know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when i was made in the secret place, when i was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. Psalm 139: 13-16a
Cherio,
Scott

Bear in mind all the horrific structural birth defects like omphalocele, anacepholy, diphragmatic hernias, and metabolic birth defects (usually inactive enzymes) which are hereditary or random (or both) when contemplating how "wonderfully" made we all were when "you [God] knit me together in my mothers womb." True enough that holding a healthy newborn baby, especially one's own, is one of life's great experiences, and is indeed a spiritual one even if you're not religious, but remember that many more die from completely natural causes in utero, for every baby that does make it.

Funny how people easily accept the concept of an all-seeing God as justified and ethically sound, but freak out when it actually gets implemented here on earth.

A literal deus ex machina, eh? We're amenable to that.

Now face us and genuflect. Show some respect.

I think to believe that technology and the presence of monitoring will make people moral is a very... optimistic view of human nature. At the micro level, people make decisions that have very obvious and undesirable consequences all the time - eg the meth addict in the examples above who first did enough meth to kill a normal person, and then reached for his waistband when the officer told him to put his hands up. You can't force someone to structure their life so that they avoid temptation, and any attempts to have a mass version of this would result in an appropriate outcry for personal freedom and personal choice. And even regarding abortion, if a teen is not taught or is not willing to learn about sex and its possible consequences (due to how they were raised, for example, the Duggars acting as moral thought police on their children, or just stubbornness/being rebellious for the sake of it because they're teenagers), you will still have unwanted pregnancies. You can't cure faults of human nature.

Sure you can, technology doesn't force someone to restructure their life, it reduces the temptation without any input on their part.

The cash register cured lots of human faults by making it hard for employees to embezzle store owners. They could no longer steal easily from the owner without great effort.

Mass produced cheap food cured a whole variety of human faults by keeping stomachs full all the time.
They no longer had to decide whether to steal food to feed a starving family.

Having a single pill that stops conception, when taken once, that has zero side effects, will stop most unwanted pregnancies. (and another pill that reverses the effect) Without any effort of the teenager or loss of personal freedom.

Being able to repair genetic faults in the fetus, will stop people from aborting kids with Down Syndrome. Thus removing the decision completely whether to abort or not.

The cotton gin reduce the need for slavery, thus removing the decision whether to have slaves or shut down the farm.

I disagree completely with your points. No matter what technology does, people still have to opt in or actually use the technology for it to benefit their lives. You're assuming that everyone will behave rationally and strive for the best version of themselves they can be, but all around us examples prove time and time again that's not the case.

The cash register is a form of control, that stopped easy petty theft, but it doesn't remove the human nature instinct to steal. That's why Joshua and Munger et al are always talking about controls and internal audit. The Munger quote came way after cash registers were invented - you can't invent your way out of human greed, and small business owners who do not have the right checks in place suffer and learn lessons from that. Look at Mark Cuban, his first secretary stole $80,000 from him because he failed to put the proper procedures in place.

I don't understand your mass produced cheap food analogy - there's still a large population of thieves and also people in poverty who are going hungry. Because people want an above average standard of living (ie to be better than their neighbors or the people around them), even though the absolute standard of living has increased and there's more food for everyone to share, people reject it as being enough and demand more, at times to unearned resources

Re: contraception - we already have the pills/tools in place, but again people have to decide to use it. Unless if you're going to force them to take it, there will always be certain segments of the population (the very poor, where unwanted pregnancies are highest, and the very religious, who view all attempts at controlling fertility as evil) who won't opt in or use the technology. Additionally, the first time human error causes the pill technology to have an undesired effect (making the drug permanent by accident instead of reversible), you can be sure the ensuing uproar will crush drug adoption rates.

Gene selection is too hard of a topic for me with its wide range of moral and social issues, so I will decline to discuss it here - you are possibly correct about the ability to alter genetics reducing abortion rate, but I would think that'd be a minuscule amount and genetic alterations would lead to other undesirable (and in my opinion more serious) 2nd and 3rd order consequences

I don't really know where to begin with your cotton gin/slavery association - the cotton gin was invented right before 1800, and slavery numbers continued to increase until the civil war. I would say the answer to whether Southerners had slaves or shut down the farm would have been 99% "own slaves". I feel this is yet another example of human fault/greed at work (as well as the power of incentives working against moral fabric) - instead of using the gin to free slaves, it meant that each slave could now produce even more shippable cotton - which meant more and more wealth for those who owned slaves

My general point about the examples is that technology doesn't remove people's instincts to steal or cheat at all, but it can lessen the opportunities they can exploit. People are looking for high reward with little effort and risk, you raise the effort and risk you reduce crime, but you can't eliminate it. Really desperate people will scale up the crime as you indicated, but others will give it up completely. You don't think that is true? There are lots of people who steal software but would never give a second thought to stealing hardware.

Cotton Gin: The reduction in intensive labor of separating seeds from the lint by hand made small farms practical without slavery (picking the cotton was much less labor intensive then separating the seeds). But yes, the larger demand that eventually occurred due to the cotton gin resulted in the establishment of very large farms which in turn required more slaves to pick the cotton, so for very large farms, the cotton gin may have increased the need for slaves. I don't know what the net effect was, so I retract that claim. Sorry.

Joe, thanks for clarifying. You originally wrote: "technology doesn't force someone to restructure their life, it reduces the temptation without any input on their part."

This confused me because temptation is, by definition, one's desire to commit an act despite the knowledge that the act is reprehensible. I think Ang and I both took your original comment at face value, but in reality we all agree that technology can't quell human impulses but it can deter behaviors arising from those impulses.

When I say "technology" I mean technologies that can be implemented within the bounds of fundamental human rights. Chemical castration, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies can modify our impulses, but at great cost...

Ah, yes I wasn't referring to technology that removes/modifies the impulses themselves, although I guess that exists today with medication (i.e., reversible chemical lobotomies).

I agree with you that technology can make it harder for people to carry out immoral actions, but I think it's not very good at promoting moral actions. For example, when you wanted to steal large amounts of money before the technology age, you likely would have had to rob a bank, or a rich person's home, using violence of some sort. Now, technology/home security has made physical theft tougher, like you suggested, but now there are widespread examples of identity theft, wire fraud, and even extortion of companies (the latest trend being to scramble company data and then blackmailing the companies to unscramble for them).

An example of (let's stick with surveillance) technology that promotes moral behavior to me would be if in some parallel world, whenever someone driving sees a person with a flat tire pulls over to the side of the road to help them, the act is immediately called out on everyone's smart phones, and (this is the important part) everyone in his community cheered because they were brought up and taught to cheer this kind of act (as opposed to eye rolling and then immediately opting out of further notifications by texting back "CANCEL" in giant capital letters)

Basically, I think technology can raise the absolute standard of living for the general population due to its boosts on productivity, but I think its effect on the human condition can be negative when it comes to the emotional and moral side of the equation

I wonder what that Charlie guy would say about rape on campus, then. Replace "street in the ghetto" with "frat row" and "money" with "an empty bottle of Captain Morgans" and you got a lot of butthurt college students, lol.

Ashley Madison eliminates temptation? Also, if we are all on candid camera, then our behavior is also a result of what we think that the intended audience would expect from us...as seems to be the case with reality TV...and it doesn't necessarily equate to good behavior.

I came across this during my morning readings and thought "my God, anyone can be a great general with enough data and computational power... what used to be the realm of certain, unique individuals who had enough knowledge, wisdom, and pattern recognition in warfare can now be done better and faster by silicon."

Is this - and the examples above - incremental steps towards opening a pandora's box of potentially nasty societal consequences? Ah, Friday morning musings.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33804287

Hey, enough about trinkets and porridge. We want your opinion, in lengthy article form, of the political anomaly that is Donald Trump.

Check Joshua's comment history. He's already written on Trump.

I wonder if it's really a "non-expected dividend" or more like a $10 coupon on a $50 bill in which your date eats your food.

Three things tend to happen when bad behavior is caught on camera.

The first is that the bad actor often suffers a social rebuke that is out of proportion to the offense. It seems that it is becoming essentially impossible to lead a Walter Disney life where you can make significant mistakes and then "go West" to make a new start. Not even Nathaniel Hawthorne's imagination could anticipate the scarlet letters American society now puts on those who do wrong. Is proving that someone is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-whatever really worth it if the amount of social harm that follows the aggressor is much worse than any relief gained by the victim?

The second is that social disturbances rise and get needlessly agitated when information is presented out of proportion. You mention that people react more when they see something happen compared to when they read something happen. This is undeniably true. Seeing Ray Rice drag and beat a woman is far worse than reading a news report claiming that is what happened.

But I wonder if video footage also bastardizes reality because it might lead people to conclude that certain phenomena occur more naturally than is really the case. I'll use the last video as an example, but it can apply to anyone engaged in undercover camera work on a social/economic/political issue.

If I am someone that wants to measure how white teenage girls react to race, which conclusion do you think I will be biased to find? If the girl reacts exactly the same to the white teenager and the black teenager, there is no news. No social justice mission gets achieved when you conclude that something is not a problem. Who knows how many people acting the right way you might encounter before finding footage of a clip that demonstrates the type of bigotry you seek to prove exists.

If 900 white girls treat a white and black teenager the same, you don't have a story. But if that 901st girl acts in the prejudiced way that you seek to demonstrate, you are able to easily prove your point. Just upload the footage and you can set social media on fire.

In the New York Times, Gail Collins once argued that, on any given issue, at least 5% of America is inclined to have crazy views on the topic. When you wrote a post about the watermelon thief, you mentioned that true wisdom involves knowing when to tolerate some loss. By analogy, you have to recognize when something is worth getting upset about--is it when 1/100,000,000 interactions are bigoted, or 1/10,000 actions are bigoted? Martin Luther King said an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, but that quote flunks the test of pragmatism because attempts to fix small injustices may create bigger injustices through the administration of the cure.

Even when you correctly spot a wrongdoer, if it is rare, don't cameras exacerbate the problem by stirring the population to social agitation worse than the harm? People on Twitter have called for Walter Palmer's death and told his whole family to commit suicide; if we learned of Palmer's deeds through camera evidence, and the expected Twitter reaction is calls for the death of the bad actor and his family, is it really the unexpected dividend that you claim it is? It seems that this unexpected dividend fulfills the Shakespearean prophesy in which aggrieved men and women become the monsters they seek to slay, except in mirror image of values.

The third consequence of camera footage is that legislators may respond to the social agitation by actually changing the laws. And when laws get changed, it often means something gets banned, and we are left with less freedom. Of course, some people would call it the abolition of a freedom to discriminate or cause harm, and few tears may be shed. But if Democrats control the government and something bad involving a gun gets caught on camera, citizens will likely experience weakened Second Amendment rights as a result of the camera evidence + social agitation + laws changed formula being executed. Or, if Republicans control everything, and Planned Parenthood gets caught doing something perceived as sinister, then women will find their abortion rights curtailed.

Joshua, you have previously faulted the media for characterizing risks as greater than reality. Isn't this intertwined with the rise of hidden cameras? I believe the example you used is that kidnapping and gun-related crime is at a multi-generational low, yet the media creates the narrative that your children are facing perilous risks. As a result, you have people like my neighbors walking their kids 0.4 of a mile to school. The freedom to walk to school, which my dad enjoyed when greater risks existed, is now curtailed because schools either ban students from walking to school/home or the media creates such social anxieties that an exercise of the right comes with added social restrictions. It seems to me that hidden cameras perpetuate this paranoia. Don't legal rights lose value when social conditions limit their practical ability to be exercised, and don't hidden cameras amplify this?

TL; DR: Hidden cameras catching the malfeasor leads to results that: (1) cause the bad actor to suffer social, economic, and perhaps even legal consequences that are out of proportion to what the hidden bad act captures; (2) encourages a victim mentality and confirmation bias that the rest of the world is out to get you for being black, Christian, or whatever; and (3) leads to the establishment of political laws that restrict our freedom to protect us from ourselves as we continue to run away from Locke and into the arms of Hobbes in our understandings of man's relationship with fellow men and government.

Tangential point is that it seems to me video "evidence" almost makes it easier for society to be lazy and focus on the issues that inspire outrage instead of looking at the data to see how frequently an event actually occurs, as you point out. When you dumb the world down for people, instead of teaching them to think in terms of interconnected models, you get this very undesirable result where energy is spent on moral outrage for self satisfaction instead of solutions and tiny improvements to society which can eventually compound and build one on top of another to actually mean something.

But like you said, the incentive for news/social experimenters is to portray biased views, so what can you do? A tagline is much more effective of an attention grabber than a well written, rational essay - even Joshua does this on the beginners invest - structuring articles as a list so that it's easier for the general public to digest and focus on

Excellent write-up, Tim. The advent of hidden cameras is just like any other useful tool: it can be used for great good or great evil. If I hand you a screwdriver, you can use it to construct a shelter for orphans, or you can use it to build a doomsday device. If I hand you a remote-controlled drone, you can use it to search the neighborhood for a missing puppy or you can use it to spy on your neighbor's sunbathing underage daughter. I'm trying really hard not to quote a superhero movie, but it's too salient to pass up: with great power comes great responsibility. And when you place great power (i.e. a useful, new technology) into the hands of the masses, someone will abuse that power.

I think hidden cameras are one small part of the overall problem where always-on social networks make rare events seem bigger and closer to home than they really are. This itself is a useful tool: during the 2011 Virginia earthquake, people in areas far from the epicenter received tweets before the earthquake actually hit them. Our 21st century inter-connectivity is a very useful tool that can be used for great good or great evil.

TL;DR: Every useful tool is a double-edged sword, with the amount of potential damage roughly commensurate with the potential utility. Hidden cameras are only one example.

I'm ... I'm just trying to look on the bright side until the inevitable rise of AI after which we are all hunted in a terrifying doomsday scenario. Insurance fraud is reduced. *shake fist in excitement* Yeah! Good times!*

My dad jokes I've entered Old Man Phase I (I was delivering some off-the-cuff diatribe on 18 to 22 year olds on Tumblr who have adopted this bizarre notion that gender is like a fashion accessory you put on or take off any given day as if it were entirely a cultural construct despite the overwhelming neurological evidence to the contrary). He's probably not wrong. Over the winter, Aaron and I were at the grocery store and I picked up this magazine about cabin living or something. The idea of having some huge piece of property, no electronics, a real honest-to-God fireplace, and mountains in the background gets more and more appealing as I see my mid thirties approaching. We could grow our own food for self-sufficiency. If there were a Great Depression, I wouldn't have to pay attention or participate as life wouldn't change at all other than needing to sit on the front porch with my shotgun from time to time.

Though let's be honest, that last part is really because I played Fable II and want to roam around the dirt trails with my rifle and trusty dog. And it would give me an excuse to buy that Holland & Holland I've wanted forever.

* I doubt this is going to matter long-term. Almost nobody is talking about it but when I look at the technological projections for self-driving cars combined with cameras that will make assigning fault effortless, I can't help but conclude that within the next generation or two, property and casualty insurance companies are going to suffer a significant decline in intrinsic value as their ability to generate cash from float is severely impaired. You might even get into a situation where the automobile manufacturers themselves offer replacement plans on the cars. We probably won't see it until we're collecting Social Security but I think they're bound for the fate of newspapers. There's probably still a lot of money to be made in the meantime.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7ed69faf36e4b7b283fb18a451d8a6e3516abbee0fded71936473ade8142952a.jpg

...is that a Holland and Holland with the barrel removed?

All better? Haha! https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7e8f2a9b6c08aa327776dd41af6b9b0ef5fc2e190d74a8a6794336056f646346.jpg

Do you own one of those?! I never thought of you as a safari hunter.

In any case, during a self-sufficiency scenario I'd prefer to have a gun in a more common caliber like .223. Much easier to stockpile ammo and acquire more through trade. The fancy gun might be useful in case an elephant wanders into the American Midwest.

Not yet. It's one of those random "I'd like to own one of those" I have filed in the back of my mind as being on my list if we ever do get a cabin or something, mostly because I think it'd be beautiful above the fireplace. I'd be more like a "oh no, there is a terribly frightful creature on the porch in Colorado trying to get into the house and if it doesn't go away, we might need to use deadly force" type thing. Though I don't even know what caliber this is, I just keep pictures of the specific engraved models I like for reference so I know what I want design-wise if I ever get around to doing it in my 50's or something. (I really can't think of a justifiable reason to need one but ... Fable. That game also made me want to buy real estate and furniture, so it seemed to resonate with me.) I imagine I'd probably learn to quail hunt or something. That's doable. We have some cornish game hens in the freezer so I can test recipes.

Then again, maybe I can convince myself it's necessary for a low-probability event. You never know ... look at what happened in Zanesville a few years ago. In a single night, 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, 6 black bears, a pair of grizzly bears, 3 mountain lions, 2 wolves, and a baboon were killed. One minute you're walking along, eating your ice cream cone, then BAM! It's a fight for survival in the middle of Ohio. It always struck me as weird it happened there. Whenever Aaron and I would drive back and forth from Missouri to New Jersey for college, it was the point at which we would stop for the night and sleep.

Actually, I can dig the mounting-above-the-fireplace thing because that makes the gun more decorative than practical. I personally wouldn't want to fire a gun that's an art piece any more than I'd want to cut raw meat with a 15th-century knife forged out of Damascus steel (the real stuff, not the imitations being sold today). The fouling left behind by a fired cartridge gets into every nook and cranny of the gun's innards, so I'd be reluctant to fire such a piece unless my life depended on it. I look after my nice clothes, nice bags, and scientific/financial curios like a fussy mother hen, but I like my tools (including guns) to be sturdy, tolerant of physical and chemical abuse, and altogether resistant to entropy. But hey, that's just me.

If you ever get an over-and-under, there's more to do than just mounting it over the fireplace or hunting quail with it - have you considered sporting clays? I've shot trap before (with a run-of-the-mill 870 because I'm a peasant like that) and I'd recommend it. If you don't have much firearm experience you could ask your brother. Judging from the shotgun shell Thermos pic from a while ago, he'd know far more about the subject than either of us.

I don't even know what caliber this is

A google reverse image search seems to suggest that it's a .500 Nitro Express. If that's accurate, I cannot express strongly enough that the first gun you ever shoot should most certainly not be a .500 Nitro Express! If you would like to understand why, I've linked a video of what it looks like when inexperienced shooters try a .500 Nitro Express below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh7EOqWwzIs

Gotta love how they portrayed a bunch of middle-eastern men in traditional attire getting dominated by a single shot. Then Chuck Norris with his t-shirt tucked into jorts is like BAM, "dinner's ready."

There's a longer, higher-quality version where a bunch of different people (including Americans by the sound of their subsequent cursing) also get tossed around.

Scott, have you ever fired a .50 BMG?

No, I haven't got experience with a .50 BMG. Nor do I expect to anytime soon - I live on a continent where anything over .308 Winchester in a rifle or maybe .41 Magnum in a handgun is pretty much just for show. I feel absolutely no need to spend that much money on a rifle that's just going to hurt my ears and shoulder.

Overkill is underrated. Why use a chainsaw when you can fell an oak tree with a single magazine of .50 BMG?

I didn't think you owned anything in that caliber - just asking if you've ever fired that cartridge before. There was an M82 on display in a shop a few months ago and I asked to hold it. Damn thing is heavy. At the very least, that would dampen the recoil a bit.

Ahahaha, loved this clip!!

On a related note,
Even after all these years, sometimes, after my raw bones have chilled for hours on end, in the freezing dead of winter, I creep my face just a bit too close to my scoped 12 gauge...
(I don't even notice till I find blood dripping from my eyebrow)

At 32, it seems I'm going through an Old Man Phase as well. It's to the point where when I see people doing/saying frustrating things (ie. shouting "Get a car, hope you DIE" at me as I rode my bike along the street IN THE BICYCLE LANE...), I just turn to my significant other and say "Farm" and he knows what I mean. "Gosh, wouldn't it be pleasant if we bought 100 acres outside of town where we could grow our own food, tend to the land, live semi-off-grid, and soak up nature without having to deal with ignorance and meanies?"

Maybe it's just because at ~30, one has met a diverse enough swath of the population to know that plenty of Good People exist, and consequently no longer desire to suffer fools (as my southern grandmother-in-law would say).

"Farm"

Great code word!!
Do you mind if I use it with my wife too? I am trying to wear her down. (Don't say it...)

sounds like a good "safe word", my current one "keep going" isnt working out

Discrimination along with the many ways one can now lose their employment or even their entire career has brought to light the incredible importance of redundant financial security. Until Joshua wrote the Walter Palmer article, I had not really considered the great utility of stocks and their capacity to go stealth in comparison to real estate which is much easier for a bulldog attorney to sniff out.
Below is an interesting hidden-camera video in regards to the halo effect and an individuals looks when interviewing for jobs. It starts at 2:30 if you're interested. We all have to play the hands we're dealt in regards to raw looks (facial aesthetics, height,etc), but it seems like we may be heading to a time where individuals will seek some remedy to looks based discrimination i.e. fat acceptance .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTwSSTWfwuM

Hey, has anyone here ever been to Dollywood? Worth the trip?

Two things:

1. I believe it was Richard Maybury has mentioned before that he believes one of the technological inventions that hastened the collapse of the British Empire was the invention of the video camera (i.e. when people can see the atrocities that their government commits in war to keep the empire going, they're less supportive, etc)

2. I think the "racist" video above at the bus stop is less racist and more just pure social dynamics. The approach of the two dudes, how the black guy started out asking for money, the white guy warmed her up first, white guy hunched over, had a very "collapsed" and non-threatening body language, probably didn't sit as close as the black guy (he sat WAY too close for comfort on a near empty bus stop seat -- I would of moved too), etc etc

All that said, I get the point

I half expected to see a driver actually run one of the insurance fraud people over.

Actually this hidden camera thing happened to me this last week on my new job. I had 3 people tell me I could take something home from work to practice using it in my free time. Hey that's what they all did when they were starting out. So I looked around and stuffed it in my pocket until said time that I could ask a supervisor about it. Then I realized how stupid that must look on camera, regardless of if a supervisor said I could do it. So I threw the item back. Fast forward a day and there is hush hush talk about not firing me for stealing because I put the item back, however when it is time to let people go I'll be the first one to go. Apparently management saw it on security camera but haven't even the decency to ask me about it. Well just for once I'm glad cameras changed my behavior, I'm sure I'd have already been out the door by now if they hadn't.

Please express the principles used that lead to the support of The Equality Act.