I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that had to be respected and that it wouldn't matter anyway because in the workforce I'd excel and they would not, so why did I care? After entering the workforce I encountered many many resumes, especially from contract houses / body shops, that were obviously lies, and have interviewed thousands of candidates across my career that clearly lied on their resume.
My basic take is that low trust societies encourage cheating and dishonesty and think if you're honest and honorable that you're a naive rube asking to be taken advantage of. For my part, I've never cheated in any interview, in anything at school, and never lied on my resume, yet being in tech which is dominated by people who originate in low trust societies, I see how it becomes something insidious that creates extremely negative behavioral norms in corporate politics, where it's now acceptable for people to bald-face lie about project status, receipt of information, or the severity of an issue if it gets them ahead or makes someone else look bad and deflects the blame.
Luckily, my professor was right though, despite exposure to a lot of negative behaviors I don't like, don't respect, and don't endorse, I did excel and I continue to excel above my peers, especially those who cheated. Cheating ultimately cheats oneself, but it's very galling that it's now becoming accepted as okay behavior in American society due to cultural shifts aligned to low trust societies we do business with. The Blind app demographics make it unsurprising to see this there or that it's essentially universally supported in the comments there. I am honestly unsurprised that most of the comments on HN support it. There's absolutely an attitude of "lie now, and figure out how to make it not a lie before investors or customers notice" in the startup world as well. Frankly, it disappoints me deeply that so much our society has become one big grift, especially as someone who entered the tech industry when it was still dominated by honest nerds doing cool stuff.
I had a fantastic thermodynamics instructor in undergrad school. He was from a rough part of a city in Iran. At the beginning of the course, he told us his policy on cheating, which was zero tolerance. He added that he had seen every kind of cheating and dishonesty in his neighborhood growing up and there was no way anyone in that class would get away with anything because he had seen it all. It was a great course.
At any rate, being from a "low trust society" can also motivate someone to go in the other direction because they have seen the injustice that is a consequence of cheating and dishonesty.
This. Low-trust countries generate an outflow of people in the direction of first-world countries. This is an incredible talent-pool of disciplined and motivated idealists and a lot of the technological IP that gives an upper hand to Western economies comes from this process.
Personally, my parents are such people - they left Poland in the 1970’s and excelled in America. One of the best things that our country has done since is that we have climbed into a higher-trust category in the 90’s. This has gradually limited that brain drain mechanic. While things aren’t perfect, there are far fewer such people leaving our economy and it has done wonders.
However, everywhere in the world this is a continuous battle that will always have to be fought and won over and over again. The lying and the cheating always creeps back into every system.
I don't know where are you from, but there's a difference between wanting to be different by leaving your community and going to another place, and trying to be different from your social circle yet staying there.
If he stayed, he wouldn't have been as successful as he is now.
I am from India, and I just recently completed my Masters from a US university. I have never cheated in my life when it comes to interviews, exams, or assignments; not once. I am worried that calling us “low-trust” because of your experience with a few students might lead others to think that the entire country that is so diverse and large is comprised of just an incompetent set of cheaters. I agree that a lot of students cheat, but that's true of students from other countries(like US, Uk, etc) as well. I know this from my experience as a TA. I love computer science and so do many of my friends.
Edit: I should also add that I realize by low-trust OP meant the academic term for kinship-based society but my worry is that tying low-trust with cheating students from a country that gets its image tarnished because of various other reasons like low-wage labour and tech scams might paint a different picture to those who don’t know about the term or OPs intent
I came to US from India in 1996. During my college years, at a state school in CA, 80% of the student in CS courses were from India. Almost all of the boys from India cheated on exams because professor would generally leave the classroom. Grading was done on curve so those of us who didn't cheat had bad grades to show for :-)
India has been a low-trust society for a long long time and remains so. Every Indian I know would admit this in private. Back in 90's there was an Indian grocery store in Fremont, CA owned by a Gujarati gentleman. He had a poster on the wall that offended many of his countrymen. It said, "100 mein sey 90 beyimaan, fir bhi mera Bharat Mahan!". Roughly translated it says 90 of 100 Indians cheat but still my India the great.
I realized that’s what they meant but I was worried that tying low-trust with cheating students from a country that has a tarnished image because of tech scams and low-wage tech workers might paint a different picture to those who don’t know about the term or OPs intent.
It isn’t defined that way, but yes it is strong evidence that people from that society are less trustworthy. People are less trusting when others are more likely to cheat them.
well you tell me, who is defrauding them causing them to trust others less? Are you going to find a way to blame White people for how Indians treat each other?
Like all observations, they are reflective only of the individuals observed, even if a pattern emerges. 17% of all people in the world are Indian, India alone has 1.4B people, and that doesn't even count the hundreds of millions of Indians in the diaspora around the world. Nothing you could possibly say about Indians is true for every person in that group, because the group is so large that it necessarily includes every possible facet of humanity, good, bad, or otherwise.
I say all that to say, that I stand by the truth of my observations, but I do not intend for those observations to in any way imply that it would be acceptable to discriminate against people from India, or anywhere else, on the basis of their origin or ethnicity. I do not discriminate in this manner, as it is just as ethically reprehensible, incorrect, and dishonorable as the behavior I was pointing out in my original comment. I have worked with many Indian colleagues throughout my career that were excellent engineers, managers, and otherwise decent people.
Just to clearly state it, I do not in any way think that any individual person I meet from India is any more likely to cheat or otherwise be dishonest than any individual person I meet from anywhere else. India is far from the only low-trust society in the world, and in general most of the countries in the world qualify as low-trust societies. These are academic terms, and it is entirely expected that there is a higher variance in behavior for individuals in low-trust societies versus high-trust societies, so if anything honestly referring to India as a low-trust society implies within it that there is a higher variance of individual behavior and it's even less accurate to generalize about the behavior of Indian people.
I would be happy to work with anyone who loves computer science and embraces the cool things that we can do with technology to reshape the world and improve the human condition, no matter where they originate from.
It doesn't invalidate the easily observable phenomenon of widespread cheating in low trust society like India. This is also a huge problem for universities around that accept students of wealthy parents from these countries which cause grade inflation. Multiple articles have been written around this in mainstream publications.
> It doesn't invalidate the easily observable phenomenon of widespread cheating in low trust society like India.
Agreed. I am very carefully saying that I stand by my own observations as well. The point is that, while these behaviors may be commonplace in a particular society, it does not mean any given individual person from that society engages in these behaviors. We should always be careful of the heuristics we apply to people and work to treat every individual as an individual.
Not being careful here can actually create a form of category error. It's similar to the expectations of visitors to the US that everyone is walking around openly carrying guns and shooting each other constantly due to what's in the news or the statistical probability of a shooting occurring compared to other countries in the world. If you have a 4x higher chance of being involved in a shooting per capita in the US vs a random Western European country, both numbers could be minuscule chances (and are). Just because this type of dishonest behavior is more commonplace in low trust societies, and in this case in India in particular, the population is so large that it still represents a small fraction of the total number of people and you have to be careful not to indict everyone within the society on the basis of the behavior of a few. 15% of the Indian population would be the same as half or more of the US population, but there's a very big difference in categorization between something that is the behavior of a minority of a population vs half or more of the population.
That's all I'm saying. Treat individuals as individuals.
I graduated with my Bachelors about a decade ago and recently went back to school for my Masters. I work full time and attend school part-time.
I was shocked when I went back and started to work alongside many of the students in group projects. About 3/4 of the class were from India or Nepal. When I would meet up for group projects on Comp Sci security labs, I was shocked that everyone's instinct when we would start was to immediately google or use Chegg to find the lab done by other students and essentially copy it. I got frustrated because many of the times, my group would resort to cheating before even understanding what the lab wanted us to do, it was instinctual.
I didn't see this in the few groups I had with other American-born citizens. I feel guilty to even suggest a difference like this and I am conscious of cultural bias, but it was impossible to ignore the dichotomy between these groups.
Up to this point i have chalked the difference to an age gap. Many of my classmates are young and have zero work experience yet. They want their degree as a piece of paper to get a job. By contrast I already have a high-ranking and high-paying position and extensive resume. I am not looking to use my Masters as a rite of passage, but I truly want to go back to school to deepen my knowledge academically at some scientific concepts that you won't find in YouTube videos or through personal study. I am there to learn, not just pass a class. So when given these labs, I see them as opportunities to learn something to apply in my current career and my teammates just want to get it done so they can get a job. But this doesn't explain why the American-born teammates who were also young were willing to learn and not resort instantly to cheating, so it likely is deeply cultural.
I read his complaint as more one of societal reinforcing of certain behaviours. Certainly cheating exists in all societies, but if it is considered acceptable or necessary as a reaction to others, it's going to be a problem.
My spouse works in a large multinational non-profit. India is one of the countries they will not partner with very often, due to the massive amount of, shall we say, unexplained cost inefficiencies (lost money) that happens. One of her Indian coworkers explained that the culture is just like that, for better or worse, it's a hustle culture. And once you get someone to buy, it seems it's expected to use that as resources for the next hustle.
I'm glad you've never cheated, and hope this becomes more common in the future.
But you're fighting an uphill battle to expect people not to possess prejudices based on what is statistically likely. People will believe the evidence of their eyes.
The most you can hope is that people not act on their prejudices before getting to know you. And, as unfair as it is that you can't change it, you'll have to find ways to live with the reality that there are people who will act on their prejudices before they get to know you and know that you're really different.
Can’t believe I have to state this explicitly, but I am on Hacker News, after all-- scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
It is absolutely reasonable to ask people to reconsider their prejudices. Your line of thought does nothing but reinforce people’s existing biases without leaving room for the nuance of social context. Racists misuse statistics all the time to justify their awfulness. Consider whether you’re really different from any of those people. Or do I just need to get to know you more?
I'll stick up for btilly here - I don't think you've read his comment fairly, and instead are criticizing something he didn't say. He didn't say, or imply, that people shouldn't be asked to reconsider their prejudices. Of course they (or we, rather) should.
This is covered by the HN guidelines, which ask: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I could imagine a criticism of btilly's post on the basis that it didn't really meet the GP's experience, didn't show empathy (though I think he was trying to be helpful, not mean), and didn't contribute anything positive, just "you'll have to find ways to deal with it". A better comment might have been more constructive and less coldly generic. But those aren't the criticisms you've offered.
Instead, you crossed into personal attack and snark with your last two sentences. Those things are definitely against the rules here, so please don't do them. It's always possible to make your substantive points without that, and you're of course welcome to do that instead.
No matter how low in the barrel HN is or you feel it is, there's always room to sink lower! That's why we have guidelines—to try to stave off further sinking. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and posting in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
Sure, I agree that I could have been nicer. On the other hand, I have very few spoons for responding politely to people who retort to others’ requests to not be judged on the basis of their race with, effectively, “suck it up”. It’s difficult for me to consider that an attempt at helpfulness, though it’s possible that someone without personal exposure to these issues could mistakenly think otherwise. It causes a lot more damage than some snark on my part, imo.
In any case, thanks for taking the time to offer a more charitable perspective on the comment I responded to.
...though it’s possible that someone without personal exposure to these issues could mistakenly think otherwise.
Please do not mistake differing opinions for ignorance.
My father grew up in a time and place where they were persecuted by the KKK for being Irish. I have a half-brother on that side who lives on a native reservation. My half-sisters on the other side were half-Chinese at a time when public opinion absolutely condemned interracial marriage. I have close friends from many different cultures, who have arrived in a wide variety of difference circumstances. Including my wife, who was a refugee from the Soviet Union.
All this has taught me that the more real the problems that you face, the MORE important it becomes to focus on that which remains within your control, while trying to shrug off that which isn't. You'd absolutely be in the right to go around being upset at the world for being unfair to you. But your justified outrage amplifies your problems, and makes your life worse.
The positions that you put down as "suck it up" are therefore the best advice that I know of to improve things. To the extent that individuals and groups do that, they make their lives better. Both in the short term, and the long term. I have seen the truth of this, both for my family and for my friends.
I hold this position based on experience, not ignorance.
If it still sounds crazy, I highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitiv.... In particular for its "backwards law". Which says that trying to hold on to a good thing is a bad experience, and accepting a bad thing is a good one. Nobody wants the bad thing to be true. But if the bad thing is true, the act of consciously recognizing and accepting it is far better than the alternative. (The rest of the book is full of other good advice that flies in the face of common preconceptions.)
I was happy to see this comment but expected to see it much higher up. "low-trust" is obviously an established term but it's really giving me a bad feeling here. These are enormously diverse cultures and we only see a very specific filtered set of demographics that end up in the US / West.
This is why I enjoy both woodworking and code golfing. There's an inescapable objective success or failure indicator that no amount of posturing can overcome.
Either the code is short, or it isn't.
Either the chair supports your weight, or it breaks.
I think I enjoy these pursuits as an antidote to the kind of software I have to deal with on a daily basis - it's the kind that is so complex there are "no obvious deficiencies", so being able to retreat to domains where there are "obviously no deficiencies" is a treat.
Yup. I've gravitated towards difficult domains in my career because they serve as a very effective filter on the people actually applying for them, they keep me sharp, and people that have needs in these areas tend to less of the stereotypical "idea people," that are looking to milk those who can execute.
While what you say is true, my experience at such jobs is they also tend to have the most dysfunctional people/teams, unfortunately. And career growth tends to be very stagnant, and working conditions are poor (the supply of labor exceeds the demand).
Switching to "dumb" jobs made my life a lot happier. While it's easier, the demand exceeds the supply. Easier career growth, and better colleagues (no egos, etc).
You still need to be picky about teams. Where I am currently pays decently, has interesting work, and is small enough that there is meaningful progression, and is low drama. (We're hiring, check my profile for email if you like some of the stuff I mentioned above!)
* Distributed systems (on my list of things to learn, know basically nothing)
* More generically: high-performance code, doesn't have to be fintech-fast, but designing and maintaining code that makes excellent use of hardware resources
> When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that had to be respected .
The reality (speaking from experience) may be that international students are a lucrative market and getting a reputation as being hard on cheating will make them choose to go elsewhere.
Yep, I know for a fact the higher ups tell (heavily imply to) the professors/lecturers to go easy on the undergrad international students with cheating and other behaviors at least in the smaller US colleges.
With the advent of AI and wearable IoT gadgets, the only way for schools to test out their students will be one one one filmed interviews that the students can give to future employers.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Fortunately, most of your comments have been fine so this should be easy to fix.
We discriminate tuition based on national (even state!) origin. That's not physical segregation but it has the same result.
I'm calling for schools to just create a "international student focused" campus where they can collect all the rich international students, let them party and cheat for 4 years, collect the outrageous tuition, and shield the indigenous students from their bullshit.
If you're wondering why international students are so lucrative, it is because the majority of them they pay full price for tuition. This is particularly noticeable at state colleges/universities because those institutions have to provide in-state residents a significant discount.
This just reminded me of a comment from my father from like 40 years ago. He was a civil engineer who designed waste water treatment plants when the US was funding it in the '70's (clean water act). Apparently there was some huge water treatment plant project in India at that time, and everyone he interviewed from that area said they had been in charge of the project.
I think you absolutely are cheating yourself if you cheat on something you're supposed to be learning. On the other hand, I have a tendency to be brutally honest about my own knowledge and capabilities, and it has bitten me multiple times.
I've gotten negative performance review feedback from management that was word for word from the 'things I think I can improve'. I've gotten passed over for jobs and promotions because I don't do a good enough job of 'selling' my experience.
Basically, the most successful software engineers I've met also have the ability to bullshit with the best used car salesmen, and it's hard to argue my unwillingness to do so hasn't held me back.
>brutally honest about my own knowledge and capabilities
Is this a lack of confidence?
> I've gotten passed over for jobs and promotions because I don't do a good enough job of 'selling' my experience.
Selling your experience IS an important skill. Other factors may have played a part too.
> successful software engineers I've met also have the ability to bullshit
Is it their bullshit that gets them to be successful? Or is it that they're more friendly, tactful, and and positive?
To be clear, I don't doubt that you're telling it as you see it. I'm just wondering if your perceptions match the reality.
If someone is always talking about how bad they are at something, then I'll interpret that as the person being negative, lacking confidence, and pessimistic. That's not the kind of person I'd want to be around in general, let alone hire.
I was always raised that you don't brag about yourself, you don't take credit for things you didn't really do, and you don't over promise and under deliver.
As I've gained experience, I've learned that people can take self deprecating things as gospel and as a worker it's your job to talk up your abilities and invitations to identify 'things you can improve' have to be spun in a positive way. As much as I hate to admit it, salesmanship, presentation, and ones ability to 'smooth talk' seems to get you further than raw technical ability. I don't hold it against devs that are able to do that, it's just been an adjustment for me.
Those who make the hiring/firing/promoting decisions rarely have the technical chops to determine which of the engineers is good and which isn't. So it's the engineers that are the most convincing that get the benefits, rather than the highest performers.
There are those who constantly put in overtime to put out fires that they created. To management, these seem like hard-working, dedicated folks. Meanwhile those who design things well, don't have fires to put out, and leave on-time every day seem lazy. All too often the first group is given praise instead of the second group.
This is a point of unfairness that is rampant in the industry. I don't know of any way to solve it, besides each person being their own promoter, hype man, sales man.
> If someone is always talking about how bad they are at something, then I'll interpret that as the person being negative, lacking confidence, and pessimistic. That's not the kind of person I'd want to be around in general, let alone hire.
That sounds more like bad management than anything you did. I'm the same way, I try to be honest about my own knowledge and abilities. I hope you don't change that because there are assholes out there, supportive managers definitely exist
Everyone seems to have come out of the pandemic convinced that they need to tighten whatever screws they have to get theirs. And that triggers other people to do the same thing. Cheating enters the realm of possibility because people (correctly and incorrectly) believe others are doing the same thing.
It's gross and feeds on itself. I'm not sure what will help it get better.
It's pretty simple. There are few incentives for integrity and few disincentives for lack thereof. This shows up in all kind of contexts - from business leaders, to social media "influencers", to athletes, to politicians.
I'm not sure why anyone would expect "the average Joe" to maintain some semblance of integrity when very few successful individuals do the same. The overall message is pretty clear - if you want to succeed, you will need to cheat.
People that don’t cheat much think that cheating is easy. Often times I see cheaters put in almost the same amount of effort as non cheaters the cheaters just get a higher probability of success.
But the long term success for cheating is actually much lower, those who actually learned things will do better in the long term even if they have a lower probability of short term success
> the long term success for cheating is actually much lower, those who actually learned things will do better in the long term even if they have a lower probability of short term success
I want to believe this, but I'm not sure it's always true. Timing of opportunities matters a lot. Someone who is not as skilled in programming probably cheated their way into a FAANG job during the height of the pandemic and made absolute bank, perhaps being able to sock away $200k-$300k since then. That money could then be invested and start compounding, leading to a materially different outcome from someone else who played it by the rules and was better.
The long-term for the cheater might be to simply find a less demanding job and continue riding the prestige hike they got when they snuck into the FAANG job.
The cheaters learn to cheat better that can be a better or equivalent level skill. Human lifetime are sort and human opportunity windows are even shorter. Not cheating put you at the mercy of variance as many now dead great people died in poverty
That said, Falcon 9 actually flies and is a very reliable rocket; SpaceX does not seem to be "cheating" in the classical sense of the word, but making money due to genuine innovative capability.
"Fake it till you make it" has been a thing for a long time -- hence the catchy phrase.
When did this wonderful meritocracy exist? Where?
I think back to Jobs and Woz, and how he got him to hack a project to win a contest, and then didn't tell Woz and kept the money. It's been here since day 1.
Meritocracy doesn't exist for the poor. Before getting my job at The Atlantic through a random personal connection, I experienced job discrimination on the basis of not having graduated from a "prestigious" institution. Obviously this is coded language for being poor. To add insult to injury, I had actually aced a couple engineering courses that University of Michigan had provided to my high school class. You don't get to put that on your resume though. Even though I've always been honest to fault, I would never judge a poor person for skirting the rules of society. At the end of the day, if hiring managers can't tell whether candidates have fake credentials, all that does is prove that credentialism is not about merit.
Actually its over 70% of kids in USA grow up with two parents still. 50 years ago it was 85%, but that would have been with a lot of unhappy and abusive marriages that now with no-fault divorce are able to be dissolved.
Also child sexual and physical abuse has reduced during this same time frame. "According to David Finkelhor who tracked Child Maltreatment Report (NCANDS) data from 1990 to 2010, sexual abuse had declined 62% from 1992 to 2009 and the long-term trend for physical abuse was also down by 56% since 1992." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse
We have a lot of problems, but your understand of the issues are poor.
Twice as many children are raised by single mothers today compared to 50 years ago. Maybe that’s the more relevant statistic? (Yes there are hero stories where one could argue this doesn’t matter…)
Abusers are at their most dangerous when you try to leave them. They will be even more dangerous if you have to damage their public reputation with the ugly truth to try to escape.
No fault divorce makes it vastly easier to divorce for a lot of reasons and making it unnecessarily hard to leave can foster situations where it becomes abusive because they don't get along that well and can't just up and leave because they want to.
How I can be a good example to my child is what I’m most worried about. I’m not even convinced myself that having the highest levels of integrity is beneficial in current society, let alone when they’re of age.
> Luckily, my professor was right though, despite exposure to a lot of negative behaviors I don't like, don't respect, and don't endorse, I did excel and I continue to excel above my peers, especially those who cheated.
Disagree from my experience.
When I was a TA in grad school, I had a PhD student who clearly had access to the instructor's solution manual. His answers were copied verbatim. If the solution's manual had an error, so did his answer. If the professor assigned a problem not from the book, he wouldn't answer it. I debated reporting him to the professor, but didn't want the drama and figured what your professor did: He'll do poorly on the exams (I was right), and poorly in the work place.
He got his PhD, got a fairly senior position, and quickly rose to be the director of a well known company's research division.
He probably was smart - he did get the PhD from a top ranked university. But I strongly suspect he gamed the system at his company just as he gamed the system there.
In grad school, I had a close friend. Clearly a very bright, skilled guy. Was kicked out of the PhD program when it was discovered he had been fabricating data (Nature was right about to publish his paper when he got discovered).
He went off to another top ranked university and got his PhD in the same area. I don't know how/why he had the balls to do it, as surely his former advisor would be in close proximity (conferences, etc) - and at least within my university his advisor was quite open about my friend's malfeasance.
He then got a research position at the top company in his field. Got promotions, and then quit and founded a startup that is doing well, and is known to some in this crowd here. If all goes to plan, he'll have his exit and be quite rich.
Now I don't know if he cheated in his second PhD or on the job, and I'm still in touch with him. But ... no - cheaters often continue to do well after graduating.
It is disappointing philosophically but I would imagine how the game theory of this works out strategically if really trying to play an optimal strategy is "always cheat".
There just such asymmetry between the risks vs payouts.
Sadly, I imagine your professor was simply wrong. Most likely even for you there is something you could cheat/lie about that would be practically undetectable and give a huge payout for almost no risk.
This is also why a level of a self delusion is an advantage in our system too. Then you get the benefits of cheating/lies without even knowing it or having to intentionally cheat/lie.
"Cheating ultimately cheats oneself" sounds right but just isn't reality.
> it was a cultural difference that had to be respected
I strongly disagree with that professor. Dishonesty does not have to be, and absolutely should not be, respected. Even if it is a "cultural difference" [citation required].
Taking issue with the 'absolute' part: The cultural context does impact what gets respected, though. For example, having an organization that avoids nepotism is generally respected in the U.S. There are other countries/cultures that do not, at least to the same degree. From their perspective, the more respectable act is to help out those in your tribe/family when you are in a position to do so.
Parent specifically said dishonesty should not be respected. Helping people in your family/community is a fine goal as long as it’s not dishonest. If Bob gets hired at global corp A and is able to hire his unqualified family to the detriment of corp A then that’s just as bad. If they’re qualified then there might be a culture clash, but it doesn’t sound necessarily dishonest.
Fair enough. I maybe unfairly characterized both "dishonesty" and "nepotism" as a display of lack of integrity (by the Western definition, which tends to bias toward meritocratic values). “Dishonest” from the standpoint of deviating from the social contract of unbiased and meritocratic hiring.
Yeah, I didn't draw the distinction I was making clearly enough. I've edited the post, but it's too late to clearly show the edit.
My point being, in the U.S. there is an agreement (implicit or explicit, depending on the context) that hiring will be fair, above board, and based on meritocratic principles. Nepotism undermines this and is, in the distinction I was trying to draw, dishonest from the standpoint that an organization will say one thing ("We hire based on merit") and do another ("We hire based on connections"). Other cultures do not necessarily play this game and make it quite well known that you will be hired based on your network above most else.
> it's very galling that it's now becoming accepted as okay behavior in American society due to cultural shifts aligned to low trust societies we do business with
Pull the bandaid off and just admit it -- we're just becoming one of those "low trust societies". And it has nothing to do with who we're doing business with, and it is due to our own culture.
I assume such events are fairly common, at least in the US. I was once colleague with a [nationality to be preserved, to avoid expanded blame] guy in a CS graduate program, in the US, who had his sister (yes - different gender!) sitting a few exams for him, and passing them, of course.
Absolutely. Values such as "it's wrong even if nobody gets hurt or finds out" are not universally held. Besides differences in culture, there is almost no liberal arts education in places like India.
The explanation provided by the professor assuaged your concerns, but their salary was funded in part from the tuitions paid by the cheaters.
The 'grift' is a collaboration between the academic institutions that tolerate cheating and award degrees and GPA scores, and the cheating students that game the process.
It's the "fake it 'til you make it" and "good artists copy, great artists steal" mentality that some people really stretch and abuse the meaning of to lift any guilty conscience they would otherwise have, and think "if you can't win, then join 'em".
I mean, I do see the appeal. I would guess it's better to cheat and be successful than to be honorable and be a failure. I can say that the latter really sucks.
I looked at this and followed the whole thing. So good and interesting. It basically implies that one of the keys to a trusting society is repeated interactions and low "mistakes", I.e. things that can be perceived as evil even though they're just honest mistakes.
This is why it's important for in politics and media for them to police their own behavior, because without it there are too many mistakes for a trusting society.
One thing that isn't shown though in the games sandbox mode is for the players to be able to change the rules and reward structures, which is more akin to our society. This would create a much more hard to predict dynamic.
I had classmates from France which would be middling in the social trust spectrum -boy oh boy, did they cheat on homework and exams. Same for Koreans and Chinese, but Japanese didn't cheat (or at least I didn't notice).
> folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that had to be respected
I mean I'm sympathetic to your experience, the treatment you're describing is unfair, but... that also sounds pretty racist.
I'd only roast you for misunderstanding the "problem" to be solved.
It's not that the societies are "low-trust" but that the cost of being caught for cheating is that you continue with the life already available to you or you win a golden ticket if you're not caught. It's a no-brainer.
There's no reason to not-cheat unless you absolutely don't have to and what's the maxim about good programmers, they're so lazy they'll figure out a work-around to save themselves some time? Even if it's stuff they know already? Once you're into the system there are mutual shared interests and political efforts that can support such a career.
You essentially just described the difference between low-trust and high-trust societies. In low-trust societies because minimal trust exists, violating trust has minimal consequences. With high-trust societies, losing trust has heavy consequences, because you've violated an expected social norm and it creates reputational damage.
Not endorsing cheating, but in the real world, everyone cheats. Somehow looking up answers in exams is considered cheating, but hiring your buddies (which is very prevalent in tech) for positions they aren’t the best candidates for is not. Everyone cheats, but somehow calling specific societies as low trust while ignoring similar behavior in others is not fair.
It’s the same philosophy of “it’s not bribing it’s lobbying.”
Having grown up in America and moved to Czechia for college I have to say that I was absolutely shocked by the level of cheating both by Czechs as well as those from "farther east" like Ukraine and Russia. Just brazen obvious sheeting like taking notes into exams and hiding them. Cooperating during exams. Even collaboration to distract the teacher during exams. When I was at college in the US getting caught cheating once meant an instant fail for the course. Twice meant you were kicked out of school and you'd have a cheating mark added to your credit transfer paper so you couldn't move your college credits elsewhere. In Czechia, getting caught cheating meant having to re-take the test. Nothing bad happened to cheaters and they cheated rampantly.
This contradicts what we read here about cheating being very often tolerated in higher education institutions in the US, because money.
Usually I try including at least a few links, but in this case I think anybody who has read these threads right here on HN should remember those numerous posts and discussions? I remember comments from educators who wanted to do something but the higher-ups prevented it, for example, or reversed the decision. Unfortunately I don't know what to search for to find these kinds of comments again.
> The amount of cheating was insane. He started academic dishonesty proceedings against many of the students but the department pressured him to "work it out."
As someone born and raised in Romania, I can 100% confirm what the above poster was saying for Romania as well. Even if cheating may be widespread through corruption and other means in the States, it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.
The worse penalty possible for cheating (IF you get caught and IF the teacher/professor even cares, which was not by any means universal) is getting a grade of 1 (out of 10) on that specific item (exam, project etc. ).
This is even true for the national country-wide exams you take in 8th and 12th grades: if you are caught cheating, you get a 1/10 on that specific exam, but can still take all the rest, and will be forced to re-take the one you cheated on in the next session.
The only thing treated more seriously were bachelor's/master's/PhD theses, where you could face plagiarism charges. But even this is mostly theoretical, especially for the bachelor's, since only some cursory verification was ever performed, at least at my university (one of the biggest ones in the capital).
> it is at least theoretically treated much more seriously.
My impression from reading HN, where the topic came up numerous times over the years, was that that is not so. See the link I presented as example, I saw a lot such stories, right here in the discussions, but also in some articles. Not just the US, I also remember similar anecdotes about management preventing punishment from Canada even when a professor initially tried to do something.
If it is not representative I apologize, I go by what I read mostly here, and it was a lot over the years.
It's just that I saw so many stories from or about educators who tried and it went like in that link I included, especially when many students were caught.
> Some who have tried say that administrators, fearful of lawsuits, don’t back them up
> “In the majority of cases of trivial cheating, I think most professors turn a blind eye,” says Donald L. McCabe, the associate provost for campus development at Rutgers University at Newark, who has studied the issue. “The number who do nothing is very small, but the number who do very little is very large.”
I did say theoretically. That in practice corruption and various power games make it difficult to apply the theory in reality is very different from there just not being any punishment in the rules at all (or only very weak punishment).
Of course, but the commenter I replied to made a specific statement, first sentence, making it sound to my reading - and I don't think I'm reading something into it that isn't meant to be there? - as if it's a lot less in the US. But even a little bit of searching, and every single time the topic comes up here, which usually is for higher education so I'm not making any statement about anything below, ends up with a lot of comments, and no opposition to them, saying there is a lot of cheating there.
> McCabe’s original research and subsequent follow-up studies show that more than 60 percent of university students freely admit to cheating in some form.
> The level of cheating in high school according to statistics is extremely high. One of the most thorough studies, carried out by Dr. Donald McCabe, reveals that about 95% of polled students (both undergraduates and graduates) admitted to having cheated in some form.
Cheating might be tolerated more in the US if the student is wealthy, which might be a US student or far more likely the scion of some family in a foreign country. It has not been tolerated anywhere I've attended though.
I'm gonna have to go with scarface on this one. While your statements could very well be true, it is dangerous to make cultural generalizations without the data to back it.
One thing I've noticed is that many Americans have a blind spot here. You can get away with a lot of corruption and dishonest behaviour if you're the right kind of American because admitting it would be to question the idea of honesty here.
That's usually why the first port of call when some corruption is detected is Finding What's Weird and the second is Not Like The Rest Of Us.
San Francisco's city government is hopelessly corrupt and visibly so for someone who has lived under other obviously corrupt governments. But that is not even apparent to faraway Republicans who are the only ones who will say it is.
But those people are similarly ignorant of the massive corruption of their own local government.
It has taught me a new path of success for corruption: that of hiding in plain sight among those of your identity.
There's a very well studied decline in trust in America over time. Despite your snark no one claimed we never cheated etc. It's just getting much worse
I wonder if Americans' history of seeing cheating as dishonorable grew from our roots in Puritanism, where principle always trumps pragmatism. If so, then perhaps our ongoing devaluation of principles (and our rising mistrust in others to act honorably) is caused by the erosion of those roots as the American middle class has fallen on harder times, concluding that "the rules of the game have changed" and the old mantra of guiding one's life by principle is now delivering diminishing returns. So when in Rome...
It's not Puritanism, but Judaeo-Christianity. In the Bible, God is always described as telling the truth, so any form of misrepresentation is moving yourself towards the opposite of God's character. Cheating is basically a form of misrepresenting yourself; commandment #9 prohibits false testimony about your neighbor, which presumably also includes false testimony about yourself. The New Testament also prohibits lying, as does the Talmud. In fact, the New Testament describes Satan as the father of lies, which presumably reflected Jewish traditions at the time. Imitating the devil would hardly be honorable for either Jews or Christians, and Paul even explicitly says we are to imitate Christ. (Since Paul was a rabbi applying the current Jewish thinking in the context of discovering that Messiah = Christ = God, presumably the Jewish thinking was that we should imitate God)
The Old Testament also offers an approach to dealing with rampant cheating in society: trust in God to provide you with what you need. It's not an exact match for classmates cheating, but David had to deal with a literal existential crisis by a king who believed falsehoods about him, and dealt with it by trusting God and refusing to kill the king (that is, using the king's methods to secure himself). Many of the psalms appear to record the emotional process he went through.
Does this correlate with the increase in polarization? I know Jonathan Haidt has spoken about his research on the increase in polarization is America.
If that correlation exists, it may point to an alternative hypothesis to the GP claim that the issue is rooted in those coming from "low trust" societies and due to an internal mechanism.
This gets back to my other statement where people seem to ignore Jim Crow laws and the segregated south. How much more “polarized” can people be than literally being forced by law to do everything separately?
His analysis was within the context of social media driving polarization, so why would you expect it to look at the Jim Crow era? It seems like you’re starting with a conclusion and working backwards.
It may be xenophobic, but whether it's a lie is separate from that and it may or may not be. Unpalatable assertions can still be true.
For what it's worth, "fake it till you make it" is far from being universally seen as positive, and (car) salesmen are seen as one of the most untrustworthy and least liked professions (just above telemarketers and members of congress). [1]
> if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”
Most Americans that I know don't consider those phrases to reflect positive values at all. They're used disparagingly against people who really think like that.
Well, we all live in bubbles, don't we? That's why it's interesting to have a glimpse into other people's bubbles, and be reminded that our own experiences are often not representative of the whole.
Fwiw I've usually seen "fake it till you make it" in 2 contexts:
1. Disciplines in which skill development requires overreaching beyond one's current skill level eg musical improvisation
2. In reference to confidence eg many software developers experience imposter syndrome and have to pretend to be more confident than they actually are in order to be taken seriously, even if they are the most skilled in the room
Maybe academic cheating is related to people pursuing a degree more like a passport to riches than a vocational pursuit.
I mean, the whole reason why people also lie in other areas. Which also explains why people of “low trust” societies might lie more rather than “it’s in the culture of those dirty foreigners”.
I guess “trust” was at an all time high when there were literally laws against Black people being in the same section as White people, sundown towns in the south and laws against black people marrying white people?
Not every facet of society is related to racism. Saying I prefer the days of a single income being enough to survive on doesn't mean I wish black's and women had less rights. It's an orthogonal point. Wages are gone because manufacturing moved overseas in the same time period, etc...
I assure you that “the good old days” weren’t so good for my still living parents growing up in the segregated south.
As far as “not everything being related to race”, tell that to my parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s when everything was related to their race there those were the good old days.
They literally weren’t “trusted” to drink out of the same water fountain, go to the same schools or swim in the same pool.
We are talking about “trust” receding in society. The majority didn’t “trust” the minority enough to even allow them to be a part of society. It’s only a different issue to you because your parents can wax poetically about the “good old days”
I’m not implying anything. I’m stating very explicitly that people who say trust is lower now than some mythical time in the past is the same time period when the US had laws explicitly targeting “others” because they didn’t trust Black people (Jim Crow laws, laws against miscegenation, redlining), Japanese (internment camps), etc.
The only people who long for “the good old days” when “trust” was high are those who benefited themselves or whose parents benefited from systematic and de jure discrimination.
The good old days when you could live off of one income came about because Europe was recovering from a war and we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.
Yeah, I mean one thing that's interesting about the world is that every country cheats, but we all cheat in our own ways. I don't think there's anyway to get around it.
That said, I don't really want American culture to continue down this "if the ends justify the means" trend that we've been on. We're not cut out for it! We'll get our lunch eaten.
America has been "going down the road" of ends justify the means since WW2. What exactly was the massacre in the Korean war and Vietnam war if not. And sanctions to starve citizens of numerous countries. Etc etc.
Agreed, and it's also hard to consider the US as on some kind of general decline from high trust to low trust. American honesty has always been highly contextual. All it takes is a look into how we treated written agreements with Native Americans to see how small the radius of this value extends. Native societies were "high trust" in the sense that they had no ability, at least initially, to comprehend that settlers would sign an agreement with the full knowledge that they would renege on it as soon as the conditions had favorably changed. This is much more in keeping with a game theory style decision making process than anything related to an adherence to a higher moral virture or whatever. Native peoples experienced this process one by one, and eventually none trusted the word of colonialists ever again.
High/low trust at root refers to how you behave to other members of your nation, not foreign peoples. Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations (e.g. who gets the land, resources), and all existing nations today continue to do so. Native American societies may have been high trust internally (within the tribe, clan, nation boundary) but certainly screwed over other Native American societies (e.g. the Haida and Tlingit practiced hereditary chattel slavery of foreign tribesmen for hundreds of years before European contact). What I'm getting at is that there effectively is no such thing as "high trust" in international relations so your example isn't cogent.
Point taken, but consider the context of where we are in this thread: discussing immigrants and foreign contract workers cheating in interviews and on their resumes for positions within the United States. Perhaps your point is more applicable to how the idea of high or low trust cannot apply to workers operating in a culture foreign to their own.
The example of inter tribal slavery doesn't actually apply to what I'm talking about. Slavery, and highly destructive, unprovoked raids which sometimes concluded with massacres of women and children were normal in the Americas. Is enslaving a member of another band or tribe a violation of trust? Is engaging in unprovoked war raids a violation of trust? These practices would not come as a surprise to anyone living within raiding territory of a warlike people. Trust can only come into play when a party to an agreement, whether tacit or explicit, has an opportunity to violate what was agreed upon.
Saying "Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations" conceals that there were actually vast differences in the way colonialist powers conducted themselves in relations with Native American tribes. The (at the time British) Canadian government honored treaties much more often and in better faith than US authorities.
When you're getting colonized, I don't know if it really matters whether the colonizers honor their promises more or less. Consider the Maori, the gold standard for a colonized people who managed to get a full treaty with the British very early on, even securing representation in government in the mid-1800s. Are they meaningfully any better off as a result of these agreements, relative to other indigenous groups? Not really, and in recent times they even seem to have slid back on many important welfare and quality of life metrics, despite changes in NZ policies towards Maoris that should have had the opposite effect. Sure the Maori may have built up "trust" in the colonizers' treaties, but since they were an out-group it didn't affect their day-to-day interactions, so they didn't reap the benefits that go with being part of the high trust society.
My point is that in-group relations is not the same as out-group relations. High trust is about how you treat members of your in-group. Enslaving foreign people is most certainly a "low trust" move (how can I possibly enter an agreement with you when I know you might just show up one day and enslave me?) but it's fully possible and consistent for the perpetrator to belong to a high trust society.
I think you'd be surprised by just how possible it would be to enter into a successful and good faith agreement with a warring tribe which has enslaved or massacred your people. Spanish colonists in New Mexico did so with the Comanche despite the Comanche holding hundreds of captive New Mexicans who they had kidnapped. How did this work? The New Mexicans honored their treaty, and the Comanche established a degree of personal trust with their governer, Juan Bautista de Anza. This treaty was signed in the wake of massacres on both sides, and the captives were not returned. The Comanche continued to raid and kidnap in other regions of New Spain after the treaty was signed. Part of the reason you might find something like this hard to believe is because of your own cultural attitudes about war and slavery, but these are not universal attitudes.
Your example of the Maori is perfectly analogous to what happened in Canada/ But regardless of how things turned out, why did the British honor treaties when they had no incentive to do so? How do you account for this difference in a world dominated by purely rational decision making when interacting with those outside of your culture?
Why did they honor treaties rather than just continuing with open conflict? The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. In general you only fight a war when a) you're being attacked or b) there is something to be gained by doing so that, in expectation, is more valuable than the cost of the war. If there'd had been mountains of gold in Canada to be won, or if the indigenous peoples had put up less of a fight (imposed less of a cost), you can bet the British would not have signed any treaties. Same with New Zealand.
Bretton Woods was an own goal by Europe because they couldn’t stop killing each other for centuries. America benefited because immigrants who leave are typically quite bright and willing to take risks.
The perfect storm of incompetence created the system we inherited from our forefathers. It benefits Americans, but maybe the wealth is also killing us due to massive obesity and sedentary lifestyles on top of a greedy litigious society.
My basic take is that low trust societies encourage cheating and dishonesty and think if you're honest and honorable that you're a naive rube asking to be taken advantage of. For my part, I've never cheated in any interview, in anything at school, and never lied on my resume, yet being in tech which is dominated by people who originate in low trust societies, I see how it becomes something insidious that creates extremely negative behavioral norms in corporate politics, where it's now acceptable for people to bald-face lie about project status, receipt of information, or the severity of an issue if it gets them ahead or makes someone else look bad and deflects the blame.
Luckily, my professor was right though, despite exposure to a lot of negative behaviors I don't like, don't respect, and don't endorse, I did excel and I continue to excel above my peers, especially those who cheated. Cheating ultimately cheats oneself, but it's very galling that it's now becoming accepted as okay behavior in American society due to cultural shifts aligned to low trust societies we do business with. The Blind app demographics make it unsurprising to see this there or that it's essentially universally supported in the comments there. I am honestly unsurprised that most of the comments on HN support it. There's absolutely an attitude of "lie now, and figure out how to make it not a lie before investors or customers notice" in the startup world as well. Frankly, it disappoints me deeply that so much our society has become one big grift, especially as someone who entered the tech industry when it was still dominated by honest nerds doing cool stuff.