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Comment by ilyt

3 years ago

> That's true but without assuming intent you end up blindly following rules.

Right but overly generic rules make that worse. And overly specific make a lot of work and allow stuff to still go thru cracks. It's hard problem to make following rules with intent but without rule-enforcers using it for their own whims

> Something struck me when first moved to UK from Turkey: Every rule in UK seemed to have an intent and that's why I think Turkey is full of rules which no one follows but in UK the rules are less numerous but followed. In Turkey, Turks like to think that the rules are not followed because the fines are too small or that the government is incompetent and can't enforce the fines. I disagree, I think Turkey is a chaotic society because rules are not built around intent. Did you know that up until (literally)yesterday live music after midnight was banned in Turkey as part of Covid-19 measures

If the culture of the country teaches you to follow the rules, people follow the rules

If the culture of the country teaches you rules are annoyance to go around or bribe around, well that happens.

I live in post soviet country (Poland) and got on the end of the slow and painful transformation from the latter to the former. For example ~15 years ago it was common knowledge that you need to bribe examiner if you want to pass driving license the first time. At the time it was somewhat probable, I passed at 3rd time with 2nd time failure being my arrogance but 1st being something absolutely minor that could be summed up as "I looked at right mirror with my eyes instead of theatrically moving my head right to signal to examiner I really looked at right side'.

And my step-mother, which is a terrible driver did pass via bribe at around same time.

Similar thing happens with MOT tests, usually bribed to ignore lack of working cat.

And the single out cases of bribing still happened, just government invested a lot of effort to fight it so it is no longer "the norm" accepted by the people as the way to live. Which on top of being a lot of effort takes generational change to really root in, back in my parent's young days you couldn't even have a car if you weren't either well connected (grandpa had Wartburg with sunroof option purely because he was in military and won few contests) or bribed the right people.

That sounds fantastic actually fighting everyday bribery is such a nice feeling. I spent some time in a country with corrupt officers it was a real life drain for me, it was why I could not live abroad.

The Wikipedia article is a little bit light on the bribery aspect, but there seems to have been considerable efforts made before 2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Poland