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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Exhibit A: Donald J Trump. Very high number of civil judgements against him (over 3000), indicating a highly unreliable person prone to con-artistry. While not having been criminally convicted (although he settled the TrumpU fraud case), the sheer weight of the judgements suggests with high confidence he is not to be trusted.

Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election? I'd argue they are materially relevant to voters. The same goes for his tax returns, and the private financial dealings of political candidates.

IMHO, if you run for public office, you deliberate opt-in to public scrutiny of your private financial and civil court history.

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>Do you think stories about the thousands of judgements against him should have been delisted from the public prior to the election?

Shotgun reaction (knee-jerk, better phrase probably): no but Trump is such an exigent outlier here because of his immense footprint in various financial endeavors. Apply the same scrutiny to every citizen who steps up even to serve on city council, taken to it's extreme conclusion and you have John Q. Public getting grilled over his financials because someone found out he accidentally bounced a rent check in 2001 when he was in college.

But that's also why I made the qualifier of someone with a fiduciary responsibility to certain public trusts. Trump clearly fits this as someone with vetted interests in a very large (private) corporation and other business interests.

Don't get me wrong here: I definitely agree and value a thorough review of a candidate's worthiness for office, I'm still incredulous about the path we have to go down when we start looking at an individual's finances as an indicator of public service to the extent of running for office.

Said a better way: I'm looking at the extremely long view of this and having reservations about our ability to remain objective on the matter. So if we scale back from the extreme conclusion of Mr. Public and his bounced rent check from 2001, what does the middle ground look like and what is the framework for how the logic ladder works over asking candidates running for public office to disclose their financial 'worthiness' (read: I'm using this separately from the obvious disclosures that one may already be morally obliged to turn over such as relations one's business may have to government entities they would invariably preside over) and you may end up convincing me to change my mind.

I definitely don't consider whether it individual was late on his credit card bills or got evicted for rent to be a strike against his worthiness for public office, in fact, it might even be a benefit in that he knows the problems of financial hardship and can empathize with the electorate.

That's why I mentioned [sic] "high networth" individuals in my original post. I weight failure to pay your small bills when you inherited millions or are worth billions are far more indicative of bad management skills or unreliability than someone who is poor missing payments.

That's why I mentioned [sic] "high networth" individuals in my original post.

I suppose you'll have to pardon my cynicism towards how exploitable the general public is, or rather, how exploitative 24 hour political coverage is, at large to be worrisome that this wont just end up in pronounced levels of Tall Poppy Syndrome spreading through the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

Edit: Let me clarify something before it gets confused, I am not suggesting that the sort of inquiry on finances you're proposing is itself an example of Tall Poppy, I am saying that left unchecked the sort of thinking that goes into "we need use financials to vet the worthiness our prospective politicians" could have the result of overcorrecting the inquiry of integrity and objectivity in office to many of the symptoms endemic to the Tall Poppy phenomenon.

Honestly, I don't think that ever becomes a problem in a sufficiently transparent and competitive democratic system. If there is true selection pressure, skill rises to the top. It also seems to me that if people are "superior" to others, they should be able to deal with what your link talks about.

It therefore to feels to me a lot like the pseudo-meritrocratic rationalizations of people privileged by birth,environment or genetics (like us on this website, statistically speaking) that don't want to learn how to deal with people who won't blindly accept their status. Yes, sometimes that is annoying, irrational, inefficient. But it is also important, because no matter how smart we are we might be wrong.

I think there is a difference between allegations and judgements. Judgements are ultimately a public record in the United States.

Stuff like credit records are different, but even then I think transparency goes a long way. Asking Google to forget your unpaid rent has some meaning, but it also doesn't meaningfully address the issue -- private entities will privately keep track of check and credit issues.

IMO, once you do something, the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the hit to your reputation. Obscuring it isn't necessarily helpful. Perhaps the real solution is figuring out how to stop applying harsh moral judgements for mistakes. If you bounced a check or were involved in a crime in 2001, and we're in 2018 and you don't have a pattern of misbehavior, someone should either not consider that long ago action or have to positively explain why that event was a factor in a decision process.

> Perhaps the real solution is figuring out how to stop applying harsh moral judgements for mistakes.

As Tversky and Kahneman showed, that is something that humans seem to find incredibly (maybe even intrinsically) difficult.

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