Sunday, December 9, 2007

Am I corruptible?

Lord Acton said that "power corrupts." Others say that corrupt people in power were already corruptible to begin with; we just don't notice that people are prone to corruption before they gain power, because they never had the opportunity to benefit from corruption.

As a thought experiment, let's use the following model. 80% of the people are corruptible: that is, they will act corrupt if they become the King; there is no way of determining whether someone is corrupt before they become the King. Everyone publicly denies that they are corruptible. Two worlds exist, identical in every respect except:

In the "Self-Deceptive World", everyone has a self-image of themselves as incorruptible before they gain power.

In the "Self-Aware World", everyone is fully aware of whether they are corruptible; the corruptible people merely lie and claim that they are incorruptible.

These are the only two worlds that exist; to put it another way, the a priori odds that you live in one world rather than the other is 50%.

You have the self-image of yourself as someone who is incorruptible, but you have never been the King, and are unsure of which of the two worlds you live in. In this case, I would reason as follows:

Pick ten people at random, maybe five will be from the Self-Deceptive World, and five will be from the Self-Aware World. On average, there will be five self-deceptive people from the Self-Deceptive World with an incorruptible self-image, and one self-aware person from the Self-Aware World with an incorruptible self-image. Therefore, the odds are 5:1 that you live in the Self-Deceptive World, and are corruptible.

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