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196 points RapperWhoMadeIt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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itissid ◴[] No.43494328[source]
Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.

If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.

One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

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1. Aurornis ◴[] No.43494891[source]
More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers.

People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.

In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.

The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.