Comment by epolanski
2 months ago
I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings.
Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".
While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw herself as the executor of the oldest survival of the fittest balancing act.
At the same time, as someone who follows places like WSB seeing people getting in life-ruining leverage just for the adrenaline of it, or even worse, just for internet karma always made me think of that scammer's words: this is just natural selection doing it's thing as it has been for billions of years. And there's no third party scamming them. They know what they risk, and will do it anyway.
The world is full of physical and non physical dangers, we are naturally programmed to push for self preservation and yet there are people that willingly and consciously decide to put it all on risk, how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing?
Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to the grocery store have to be stabbed"?
Some people are gullible, or trusting. This doesn't mean they don't have other gifts, or most of all good intentions. Applying an evolutionary pressure against people who can't fend off knife attackers is ultimately useless for human wellbeing
The real issue in the world isn't people not being smart enough to fend off attacks, but greed and ego
And besides, what is the root of such a 'idiot' person's deficiencies in the first place? Is it genetics? Or is it education, upbringing, early life traumas that stunt development?
Besides, the whole point of having fit genes in the first place is to bring about human happiness. If we use this to make people miserable it then shows that there is no substance to our perspective
> O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.
> ~ Bahá’u’lláh
There’s obviously a huge difference between a scam and a violent attack. The person being scammed doesn’t ever lose their agency and willingly participates. That’s very different from a knife attack, where the victim would leave at every moment if possible.
Informed consent is missing in both cases.
The person in the knife fight also doesn’t lose their agency. The choices they made just led to an outcome they didn’t expect.
This all ultimately boils down to "the attacks that I believe I'm immune to are okay, the attacks that I'm not immune to are not okay."
The victim in your knife attack had the opportunity to leave by never going to the grocery store. The fact they couldn't foresee that attack is solely because they lacked the information or cognitive ability to foresee it, just like an 80 IQ gambler with a Draftkings account lacks the information/cognitive ability to foresee the attack on him.
So many people walk around with the implicit ethical system that 80 IQers don't deserve to have a decent life in the modern world. That is obviously despicable once it's stated explicitly.
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> There’s obviously a huge difference between a scam and a violent attack.
I do not agree with that statement. You're just justifying anti-social behavior.
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It's always easy to think that until you will be the one being manipulated and scammed.
Scammers target people who can be easily manipulated so that they can mostly remove targets’ agency. The victim doesn’t know that it’s a scam, so why would they run?
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>Whats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to the grocery store have to be stabbed"?
Consent.
You're missing a key word: informed consent. Both are lacking that.
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Humans are slow, weak, eminently munchable.
Lions, tigers, bears, etc., can really chow down on humans.
The issue with humans, though, is they gang up, real good. Eat one (that others care about), and twenty come after you with belt-fed machine guns.
Psycopaths may consider themselves to be predators, and "suckers," prey, but they tend to suffer the same fate as maneater lions, if they eat the wrong prey.
There are hunters even for predators...
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Descriptively not obvious at all.
Shitty people always have ways to justify their behavior to themselves. One of the benefits of the market is it launders this justification so nobody has to feel guilty for the destruction it wreaks on human society.
Edit: Social Darwinism and justification of the private market economy are inextricably linked. I do think there is some merit to, well, divvying resources by merit, but our current world sees such an exacerbation of resource division the idea it reflects actual merit is absurd.
This is a position commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism." The same logic can get you to "drunk women out by themselves _have_ to be sexually assaulted" and so on. No, it's not OK to victimize people just because they're vulnerable. It's an absolutely odious caricature of moral reasoning.
I disagree with the comparison. A "drunk woman out by themselves" is, at the end of the day, just a person exercising their right to exist. A stock-market gambler, on the other hand, is literally betting on the bad decisions of whoever is on the other side of their trades. It's a predatory position to be in, and deserves a whole lot less sympathy.
That same logic says the rapist is betting on stupid women.
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Not at all. Money represents resources, and it’s objectively better for society for resources to be in the hands of people who are not fools, instead of those who are.
You sound foolish, I’m gonna need to take all your money. Don’t worry, I’m being objective.
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You can get like minded people and go roleplay feudalism with guns somewhere else, please leave people with empathy out of it.
PS: don't forget to document your inevitable failure, just like every libertarian "non-fools" community previously.
I like this
Does anyone have evidence that these so called “idiots” have fewer grandchildren as a result of being scammed? If not, this “natural selection” mechanism isn’t working
> And there's no third party scamming them.
Sure there is. Retail investors are prey for more sophisticated investors. Getting people on WSB to make bad financial decisions is cheap and easy. I would be astonished if it isn't thoroughly astroturfed by hedge funds and other financial professionals.
I can think of one such example where the populace emphatically said retail investors were getting screwed, and AFAIK, conclusive proof was never found.
The claim was that Citadel was frontrunning Robinhood's retail investor order flow, which Citadel's market making arm paid for. The masses claimed that this was an extreme conflict of interest, and Citadel "must" be scalping the retail investors. However, the suspected reality is that Citadel was merely providing a market making service that (a) Robinhood couldn't do as well as a non-core activity and (b) for cheaper. Here's a Matt Levine overview [0] from 2021.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/what-h...
Social Darwinism is the cornerstone of protofascists, their main moral justification, so I'm not surprised to see it comeback tbh.
> Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".
So all Americans in context of health insurance? All Italians in context of their byzantine bureaucracy and taxation system? All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems? All developed world in context of housing market? It turned into dog eat dog "eat the sucker" attitude. On top of the hierarchy we got really nasty predators, they look at YOU and see an idiot sucker.
Moreover, when this kind of attitude prevails, there are costs to the society at large. In a low-trust society, everyone needs to invest in walls around their house-compounds, and to avoid going out at night. You need to keep your wits about you to avoid scams and pickpockets -- mental energy that might otherwise go to other purposes. These small costs then compound across the whole of the society: There is less economic growth, there is less technological development. More individual wealth is required to maintain the same overall quality of life. Would you rather be a middle class person in 2024 or a medieval king? In those societies you're, at best, more like the medieval king. It's not as good.
The solution to these kinds of game theoretic issues is strong social norms, and punishment for violation. If this woman is scamming people, she needs to face consequences -- ideally within the official legal system, but perhaps also informally.
> All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems?
Can you please explain? You probably know something I don't
I don't know of a single case where a person actually got the retirement money they were promised along the way.
First demography of native populations, second the population from last decade's migration crisis don't seem to be contributing into the systems. Employed suckers think that 40% deduction from monthly paycheck is waiting there to help and save them in case of any troubles in the future or in the old age.
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Most of the social protections and regulations underpinning life in the 'developed world' came about due to the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. States knew that without a social safety net, availability of jobs and housing, national unity would be impossible to have, especially with an expansionist Soviet Union next door.
All of these lessons are being rapidly forgotten. Casino capitalism wrecked people's retirements in 2008. Almost 2 decades on, housing costs are out of control for millions of working people, because private equity can buy homes with cash at 0%, while families have to show all sorts of creditworthiness for the privilege of paying 6%.
On top of that, businesses that are already profitable (Google/FB, oil and gas, banks) are now charging even more because they can get away with it.
> how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing?
Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural selection has nothing to do with it.
It’s overly simplistic to say that if a person has reproduced, then they have ‘succeeded’ in the natural selection game.
There is a whole (potential) downstream genealogical tree branching off from each individual
Certainly, any person who reproduces has done “better” at the game than someone who has not reproduced at all. But that is still not quite enough.
If a parent reproduces, but none of their children themselves reproduce, then the parent has not actually succeeded in the game.
A gambling addict who can’t hold onto any money absolutely affects their downstream tree.
In theory yes, but given the birth rate demographics I don't think it's actually true. The families giving birth to the most children in the developed world are mostly either hyper-religious or poor, whether that's because it's generational or because they just immigrated from a developing country.
I think the kind of men (probably in their late 20s/early 30s onwards) that can afford to gamble on stock market apps aren't in the running to begin with.
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By this logic nobody wins, because humanity will go extinct eventually.
In reality the winners of natural selection are those who were born and are still alive. If life is a game, they are winners in the most literal sense.
We struggle for existence against entropy, not against other humans or animals.
Take a wider view - the people with economic power are generally the people who use it for economically sensible things. Someone who spends irrationally is going to end up with no money. This is a similar process to natural selection - because the unviable strategies are removed, everything that is around is using a viable strategy. This woman was forcing people with unviable financial beliefs (that led to them being easily scammed) to give up their ability to exert economic pressure. In that sense, the same processes as natural selection are at play and we can call it the same thing.
Although I don't buy the logic in a lot of edge cases, it is somewhat necessary that these tactics are legal. Diverting resources to people who waste them is ruinous.
No, the resources diverted to people with "unviable financial beliefs" were done so in a proper market-efficient way, and would have been spent in perfectly ordinary ways no different from the average person of modest means, if it weren't for the scams.
Diverting people's resources to unproductive, antisocial scammers based on arbitrary educational criteria is the only "ruinous" thing in this picture. They are the economic inefficiency.
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The purpose of sneering about "idiots" and inventing pseudoscientific gibberish about natural selection is to wash one's hands of moral responsibility for scamming naive young people, the elderly, or adults with psychiatric or cognitive disabilities. "It wasn't me robbing your college-age son out of a new car, that was just natural selection doing its thing! So long, losers!"
My mom was a very crappy person who strongly believed in the "sucker born every minute, separate a fool from his money" mantra. I think it's become a core American ideology.
There's a difference between a grandma losing money to a phone scam and this kind of "hustle economy" gambling.
I've talked to a lot of people who participate in this stuff, they always know the odds exactly. They're fully aware. It's a combination of greed, thrill and attention seeking that doesn't deserve sympathy. Everybody who participates in hawk tuah coin crypto rug pulls knows how stupid it is, they just think they're the smart ones fleecing everybody else. Those people deserve the "sucker born every minute" treatment. That is their worldview, they just think they're the exception.
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I would prefer clever people have resources instead of any of those groups you listed.
I have this preference even if I am not the one being clever (so, via the veil of ignorance).
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I've adopted the sucker born ever minute attitude since it's all I can do. These fools have the tenacity to be scammed at a rate faster than we can ever hope to do anything about and it's depressing otherwise. Society ends up bearing the cost.
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It absolutely does
I fail to notice anything natural about this selection.
Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.
That's where you make your fundamental mistake. We are not programmed for self preservation.
Inside us, there are different drives that shape our behaviour.
https://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this - If their victims weren't so stupid, they wouldnt be victims. (Often mixed with the "if I didnt exploit them, someone else would"). Its an excuse to rationalise and try to justify their bad behaviour.
NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, and they move and change and evolve at the same speed, natual selection changes at the speed of genetic mutations of large populations, we didnt have smartphones even 1 generation ago - so how the hell is natural selection supposed to adapt to that?
When you have an electronic device thats beaming in risky behaviour at millisecond latency, what's the difference than having a big pile of cocaine in the kitchen and then blaming the addicted person saying "Its just natural selection, that enourmous pile of drugs thats just sitting there - you took it willingly", this is hyperbole but its illustrating my point - immediate availabity of dangerous risky addictive behaviour is a problem that will seduce a lot of people that otherwise would not have had the problem.
Im definitly someone in favor of personal responsibility but "ne quid nimis" and this must be balanced by a strong culture with good leadership to help the people who cant do it by willpower alone, so saying "Its just natural selection" is pure sociopathic / empathy-less answer and is unacceptable in a world where we should be helping and guiding each other and not saying "sounds like a you problem" while cranking up the exploitation dial.
Yup. It’s just an excuse for their awful behavior.
>One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this
>NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems,
Human psychopaths essentially evolved (meaning they are generally hardwired) to exploit the niche of stupid/gullible people. You will see this in various species, i.e a parasite/host behavior. ( eg cookoo laying eggs in the nest of other birds).
No saying that it's a justification for psychopathy, but just stating the way things are.
Don't believe what you read on WSB. Most of those clowns are getting Internet karma points by making up stories, not by losing real money.
I can assure you that many of the posts there are real. If you have market data you can verify the transactions yourself.
Is the person from Naples, perchance?
No, her name is Wanna Marchi.
Now do drug-development.