[inglor_cz]

On a somewhat related note, Egyptian science tends to suffer from a massive scientific misconduct (fraud) problem - see for example this paper by Egyptian authors, which covers the medical field:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.20.23286195v...

Maybe the attitude towards "truth vs. face" is similar in Egyptian governmental institutions.

Egypt in general is a low-trust society, scoring lower than India or Russia, though not much lower than usual in Africa.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/iab8r7/social_trus...

This indicates that lived experience of the Egyptians themselves, when it comes to trusting others, is somewhat bad.

[aprilthird2021]

Of course it is, it's a brutal military dictatorship where the last (and only) democratically elected leader was overthrown by the army and died in prison.

Those kinds of systems, where people are convinced their opinions and convictions don't matter, lead to problems like this

[dash2]

This might get the causality backward. Most high trust societies were high trust before, not after, they became democracies.

[aprilthird2021]

I think most democracies were founded as such and so the society and democracy were born at the same time

[inglor_cz]

Nope, democracies are usually much younger than the underlying societies.

For example, the vast majority of Europe is now democratic. 200 years ago, most of Europe was autocratic and even exceptions like the UK were at most very incomplete democracies with limited suffrage.

But the constituent nations and ethnicities are very much the same, even though political boundaries have shifted; an English, Polish or Spanish person can read 200 year old texts without much effort. There wasn't any seismic shift comparable to the collapse of the Roman world and the subsequent rearrangement of nations and ethnicities across the continent. Krakow is still Polish, Budapest is still Hungarian and Milan is still Italian.

Only in a few places like Breslau/Wroclaw there was a meaningful population shift.

[aprilthird2021]

But most democratic countries in the world are not in Europe. Most of them were born as democracies: India, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, USA, etc.

[dash2]

US society existed and was plausibly high-trust for more than 150 years before 1776.

[eadmund]

> Maybe the attitude towards "truth vs. face" is similar in Egyptian governmental institutions.

My initial instinct when reading the prologue was to think about that, and be proud that we’re not like that. But then I reflected a bit more, and wondered. When folks say something we dislike, do we consider that it may be true, or do we shut down the conversation?

I’m reminded of the response to any number of public controversies in my lifetime, when unpopular arguments did not result in compelling counter-arguments but instead in shout-downs.

[inglor_cz]

This is a good observation, but as usual, everything comes in degrees of severity.

To fabricate an implausible report about a plane crash which took more than 60 lives is a very deep institutional problem, let us hope that this won't become the planetary norm.

[aprilthird2021]

It's actually a shallow institutional problem. If the dictator wants the report to say one thing, it must, the end.