The website I Paid A Bribe is a great great idea. It is enormously promising as a way of reducing corruption. India and China, the two biggest countries in the world, both have immense corruption problems.
I Paid A Bribe is so promising because it takes small bits of anger (mental energy) and aggregates them. Anger causes people to take the time necessary to complain. The aggregated results can be used to: 1. Focus correction. Anti-corruption efforts can start with the biggest offenders. 2. Embarrass offenders. 3. Help measure the effect of anti-corruption measures. Without long term records, those initiatives have great difficulty measuring effectiveness.
It is hard for most people to grasp the corruption of medical science, which connects I Paid a Bribe to what I usually write about. The corruption isn’t exactly on the surface: Only medical school professors take something close to bribes. (The pervasiveness of the problem is shown by the fact that all med schools let them do this or don’t enforce rules against it) The corruption consists of this: Some lines of research are more profitable (e.g., more grant money, more prestige) than other lines of research. That is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is that this is allowed to obscure honest investigation of which lines of research are the most beneficial. The most visible sign of the corruption is that the Nobel Prize in Medicine is usually given for research that hasn’t helped anyone. The 2009 award for telomere research was an egregious example. Even in China and India, you can find government officials who have helped people.
The anger or fear felt by someone asked to pay a bribe is mental energy. In the case of medical science, the corresponding mental energy is much greater — it is the suffering caused by a condition for which medical science has no cure or a poor cure. Depression, acne, autism, poor sleep, diabetes, obesity . . . the daily suffering caused by these and other health problems is staggering. I believe that self-experimentation is a way of doing something useful with that suffering. When aggregated via the internet, it is a way around the failure of mainstream medicine to deal with these problems.
Via Aleks Jakulin.
Excellent points, Seth. The propensity to report is related to the idea that few people who are satisfied with service they receive report it, but many who get poor service make a stink. I’m the same way! My motivation is more a function of my anger (as you point out), rather than the egregiousness of the infraction. Of course I realize it’s a waste of my energy staying angry (and it *likes* to be fed), so I wonder if the site helps cut that energy down (release) or not.