FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
15hr ago
Something like "the cost of reducing fraud to zero is too high to be worth it" would be more accurate
The two phrases scan as synonymous to me, no different from "men are taller than women" vs. "the average man is taller than the average woman".
FtttG
16hr ago
In the case of scams, all it means is that they have to put more effort into appearances of legitimacy.
I think we might be talking past each other. I've been using "high-trust society" and "high-trust country" kind of interchangeably, but I think more specificity is called for. What I'm really arguing (and what I take Davies to be arguing) is that fraud can only take place within a high-trust community. That is, a country might be low-trust on the whole, but there might be enclaves within that country in which the members enjoy a presumption of trust with one another (social clubs, religious communities, voluntary organisations etc.). It is within these communities in which fraud and scams will occur in countries which are otherwise low-trust. This, I think, is what you're getting at with "putting more effort into appearances of legitimacy": scam artists must consciously infiltrate these high-trust communities, and this may be more difficult in a low-trust country than in a high-trust one (as the members of a high-trust community within an otherwise low-trust country will be doubly suspicious of outsiders).
Fair point. I do, however, feel reasonably confident that even if we devoted 100% of a country's budget to preventing e.g. premature violent deaths of children in that country, we wouldn't be successful and the side effects unrelated to premature violent deaths of children would be disastrous.
Your smallpox example reminds me of an old post by Scott:
See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”
Eliminating a deadly microorganism is a piece of piss. Eliminating the fact that people will sometimes tell other people things that they know to be untrue, and be believed? I don't even know where you'd begin.
FtttG
16hr ago
shoplifting isn't theft, insurance covers it, the big stores expect it and price it in, and besides we're striking back against the big fatcats of capitalism
By definition, shoplifting isn't fraud, and hence isn't relevant to this debate.
FtttG
16hr ago
I think you really aren't understanding the argument I'm making. I'm not saying "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise there would be economic stagnation"; I'm saying "a certain amount of fraud is unavoidable, and the price we pay for a functioning economy". Claiming that the latter is equivalent to the former, or that the latter is an encouragement to defraud people, seems to me tantamount to saying "a small number of car accidents every year is an unavoidable byproduct of widespread car ownership" or "carbon emissions are an unavoidable byproduct of an electrified society". No one would say that by acknowledging that you can't create electricity without producing carbon dioxide, you are therefore encouraging the production of additional carbon dioxide - likewise with the argument I'm making.
FtttG
1d ago
But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
In the book, Dan Davies cites numerous examples in which fraud became common in a particular community (whether that's a religious affinity group or a website for trading drugs), the community dutifully responded by implementing anti-fraud protections, but because these protections imposed some kind of cost (typically monetary, but potentially also an opportunity cost in terms of time and effort), some of the people in the community elected not to use the anti-fraud protections and instead take their chances without - and because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time. There comes at a point at which the cost of protecting oneself against being defrauded exceeds the expected return.
Consider how much documentation you have to provide when applying for a mortgage. Now imagine if you had to go through that process every time you were buying or selling something through a webshop (e.g. eBay). With such a policy in place, it would be nearly impossible to defraud someone (or be defrauded) via this webshop: but because the process is so onerous, no one would use this website and it would go out of business, departing for competitors with less rigorous protections against fraud - which, inevitably, unavoidably means that some of the people who use the competitors' websites will get ripped off.
FtttG
1d ago
Aren't low-trust societies the ones riddled with fraud and corruption?
In the sense of people voluntarily parting with their money or goods in the expectation of being paid back at a later date, no, I think this is a common misconception. You can't defraud someone without an expectation of trust, which means that fraud only happens in societies in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which means that bad actors in low-trust societies are forced to resort to cruder methods (theft, armed robbery etc.) to extract money from their victims.
FtttG
1d ago
You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero".
yes_chad.png. See this sketch: there comes a point where the marginal cost of further investment in child protection is greater than the expected return, and those resources would be better allocated elsewhere. No one thinks that spending the entire annual budget to ensure that not a single child dies a premature violent death is a sensible way to allocate resources, which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business. Alternatively, a country in which child murder literally never happens probably curtails its citizens' liberties so aggressively that it would be profoundly undesirable to live there for other reasons.
Maybe you think this point is so trivial and obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but I actually don't think it is. During Covid, I encountered plenty of people who really did claim to believe that there was no amount of economic hardship they didn't think it was worthwhile enduring if it meant a few people in their eighties got to live an extra year or two.
FtttG
1d ago
I get the point about trust being necessary, but if everyone is so trusting they can be plucked like pigeons, then eventually there won't be any trust.
Yes, and as described in the book, this is exactly what happens without sufficient protections against fraud.
The optimum is to have as little fraud as possible. No fraud at all may be impossible to achieve, given human nature, but surely trying for "as close to zero as possible" is the better option than "eh, shit happens, let the fools who fall for scams be weeded out by natural selection, it's nature's way".
"as close to zero as possible" sounds pretty much like Dan Davies's preference for how much fraud there should be in an economy.
FtttG
1d ago
This hasn't been my experience coming from a low-trust society, where everyone quickly learns to keep their hand on their wallet, and grow extra eyes all around their head.
And in this society, if a stranger approached you, introduced themselves as an entrepreneur, and offered to let you in on the ground floor of their operation for a small loan of million dollars, would you consider taking them up on the offer? Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off. The only place someone would take them up on the offer is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which in turn means the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy: in other words, fraud is impossible in a low-trust society.
Did this happen, by any chance, because there was very little fraud in Montreal in years prior, and people were much less cautious with their money because their priors about trustworthiness were outdated? Did they start being more cautious about fraud specifically after it turned out that the expected cost of preempting fraud is lower than the expected cost of falling victim to it?
Of course, and the book catalogues many examples of boom-bust cycles of the type you're describing. A high-trust society (or subculture, or community) is founded -> scam artists get wind of this and exploit it for all the alpha it's worth -> after a few successful frauds, people start getting a lot more cautious and risk-averse -> realising that it's no longer a high-trust society, the scam artists depart for greener pastures. None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
No, and the book quite lucidly explains why this counterintuitive assertion is actually true. Fraud is only possible in a society in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy. Montreal was for years known as the scam capital of the world, specifically because the number of trusting investors eager to invest in promising new startups made it catnip for scam artists. By contrast, in a society where nobody trusts anyone else, people are famously unwilling to lend out their money, which results in low rates of fraud but also sluggish economic development.
FtttG
1d ago
Well, the reason for why "not zero" is due to inescapable facts about the human condition, so describing this situation as "optimal" seems entirely apt to me.
FtttG
1d ago
I disagree. I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud. Some amount of fraud is the price you pay for living in a high-trust society (and all the economic and social benefits that entails); a few iatrogenic deaths is the price you pay for a national healthcare system; a few murders is the price you pay for living in a free society etc.
The ideal or perfect amount of [bad thing] is zero. But we don't live in a perfect world, and it's pointless wasting our time on pie-in-the-sky fantasies of what it would be like if we did. As long as there is division of labour in a scarcity economy, people will need to trust each other to get anything done, and where there is trust there are opportunities for fraud.
FtttG
1d ago
In May, he hung up a poster advertising World Potato Day, saying that it fell on Thursday, May 30th. I very politely pointed out to him that May 30th falls on a Friday this year. I was legitimately annoyed about this - I'm not saying you have one job, but this responsibility of yours is a profoundly easy one, and you still managed to fuck it up?
FtttG
1d ago
What @Rov_Scam said, but with one pointer: as noted by someone else offering similar advice back when we were on Reddit, it's important to learn the dating app "meta" in the city in which you reside. In some cities Tinder is the "hookup" app and Hinge is the "serious relationship" app; in other cities, Tinder is the hookup and serious relationship app, and Hinge is unheard of. On a first pass my assumption is that Tinder is the hookup app and Hinge and Bumble are the serious relationship apps, but this may vary a lot from place to place. I met my girlfriend via Tinder, and I know at least three married couples who met via Tinder.
FtttG
1d ago
It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime
Can you give some examples of things which were described as war crimes but which actually weren't?
FtttG
1d ago
My mum was reading that a few months ago, and I teased her that she was reading a book by an admitted climate-change denier.
FtttG
1d ago
The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich. Just as fascinating as Scott's review of it made it sound: I'm less than halfway through it and I already feel like I've learned so much. I've quoted so many interesting anecdotes from it to my girlfriend that she wants to read it as soon as I'm finished.
FtttG
2d ago
Every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. For July, these included World Friendship Day (July 30th), Nelson Mandela's birthday (July 18th) and World Chocolate Day (today). There's also International Non-Binary People's Day, which it will not surprise you to learn made me roll my eyes (the aforementioned member of the HR team had only just taken down the innumerable pride flags festooning the office for the duration of June, but apparently we need an extra day outside of that just for the they/thems). But what interested me was that International Non-Binary People's Day falls on July 14th, the same day as Bastille Day. There's an implicit hierarchy here, wherein the HR department are tacitly insinuating that non-binary people deserve international commemoration in a way that French people don't.
FtttG
4d ago
100%, Cypher is a detransitioner and also depicted as a cowardly traitor: not a coincidence.
FtttG
5d ago
The Seinfeld is Unfunny effect.
I would say none of either.
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