Comment by bdangubic
18 hours ago
> There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor.
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
18 hours ago
> There is a unique pride in being part of a community built around honor.
It has been 100(s) of years since community like this existed, now this is utopia
I definitely still see honor system pay boxes in the USA. Maybe not in big cities, but outside of them.
Disc golf courses, fire wood piles, that day’s chicken eggs in a wooden box on the side of the road.
I came to this country as an immigrant and one of the first memories I have was walking to the gas station to get the Sunday paper for my host father. I remember opening up the door and seeing tens of Sunday papers and was taken aback thinking how can this be, wouldn't someone just put in a quarter and take ALL of the Sunday papers home with her/him. In today's society (and especially if we are talking Princeton-like places) I do not believe honor-anything "works" anymore and am wondering just how small a place needs to be where this exists today...
just as a small recent-ish example, I live in a white-collar affluent area and this Halloween we took our daughter to her friend's neighborhood but left a dish full of candy outside with a sign to take a couple. we have a camera outside and the very first "group" of 3 kids (with two adults) that came took all of the candy that was there...
FWIW, I would expect this behavior more in white collar affluent areas more than the rural areas the GP comment is referring to.
Many people get into these positions of affluence by participating in competitions that repeatedly normalize that exact variety of deviance.
Honor-anything works when you create and maintain systems that normalize honorable behaviors and shame deviant behaviors (for any definition of honorable and deviant), and you can only measure peoples’ honor by the circumstances they’re given to prove themselves.
In bourgeois corners of the US, we’ve implicitly normalized deviance by removing the expectation for honor in competitive environments. “Win at any cost” (you don’t think the other team isn’t doing everything they can to get ahead, do you? How naïve!) has quietly replaced “be prepared” and “give it your best”.
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There are places today in the USA where the roadside stands don’t even have a lockbox, just a bowl of money.
We specifically don’t tell you where because we’d like to keep it that way.
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There is no benefit to taking all the newspapers out of the stack. What do you do next? Try and hawk them to people walking by? Candy though, you can eat all that candy.
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Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.
> I'm not that old
I'm not sure. Most HNers appear to be in their late 30s to early 40s, which is a massive generation gap.
Classes and incentive structures have changed for people who graduated in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s or early 2000s and neither would understand students who graduate in the mid-late 2020s.
ggp said 100s of years. I am certain that gp is not 100s of years old.
exactly this