Comment by throwup238
2 months ago
> 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.
2 months ago
> 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.
In that case it's just another symptom of the thing that is naturally selecting them
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.
Well sure but you could make similar complaints about a bacterial infection killing a human. It is still natural selection even if it is arbitrary, pointless or destructive.
> 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.
That is a pretty big leap.
There are plenty of ways, plenty of “unviable financial beliefs”, that can lead one to unwisely fritter away their resources without being exploited by a scammer.
You are basically asserting that most people who get scammed are otherwise Rational Agents who would invest their capital wisely, if not for the scammers deceiving them.
I would argue that, on the contrary, this set of people is very small.
Think of how many stories there are of people pursuing “investments”, or just directing their resources, into flat-out bullshit.
To pick some examples off the top of my head:
How much time, money, thought, effort (e.g. capital) has been wasted by people pursuing the Flat Earth theory? I would guess that there aren’t very many scammers involved in the Flat Earth movement. Most of the people involved are crackpot true believers.
As opposed to, say, homeopathy. Which certainly has a not-insignificant number of exploiters/scammers, people who know that it is bullshit but gladly exploit the uneducated.
Both of these movements involve a significant number of “uneducated” people spending their resources on a fantasy.
But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.
When the “uneducated” people give their resources to a scammer, it is usually ending up in the hands of someone who is at least somewhat economically rational. And those resources will be spent in more rational ways.
Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.
I’m not on the scammers’ side. I’m not saying they are good people. But it is not clear that “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.
Addiction takes over rationale. Everyone knows crack cocaine is bad. They know “the odds” too, yet they can’t stop.
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).
I would prefer kind, honorable, useful, people have them.
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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.
I mean you can also not scam these people
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It absolutely does