Links to Consider, 10/5
Meghan Daum on catty media; Ian Leslie on SBF's parents; Alex Tabarrok on PayPal's crypto stablecoin; Tove K on dating apps
In a post I somehow missed when it first appeared, Meghan Daum wrote,
when I’m being told that an event that happened before my very eyes—I was at the debate on Wednesday, sitting close to the front—was fundamentally the opposite of what I witnessed, I get enraged in that blinding hot way more often associated with personal betrayal. Being lied to is maddening. Being lied to under the guise of credentialed analysis is unforgivable.
Recall my comment, posted a week later:
He provides respectful remarks about the debate. In contrast, the mainstream media ignored it, or worse (LA Times, New York Magazine), gave the job of writing about it to snarky, bitchy columnists who mostly composed their stories prior to attending.
SBF gifted his parents $10 million, which, according to the suit, he plundered from an account containing customer funds. Ray argues that the parents knew exactly what was going on. In an email, Joe Bankman proposed a series of methods by which Sam could transfer the money from FTX to Joe and Barbara without paying tax.
…All human societies have used blame as a tool to control antisocial behaviour. It’s who we are. On the other side are those who believe the concept of blame should be considered a relic from a less enlightened, more religious and moralising age, before we learnt to analyse the structural forces which push people one way or another. This is the side that the article’s author comes down on. The article ends by arguing that, in America at least, the balance of society has tilted too far towards blame…
The author is, if you haven’t already guessed, Barbara Fried
PayPal customers can now transact in PayPal USD, a crypto stablecoin tied to the dollar. …Surprisingly, the crypto dollar is backed by safer assets, gives you better rights in the event of a bankruptcy and is more transparent.
In the grand scheme of things, isn’t “a crypto stablecoin tied to the dollar” an oxymoron? The best use case for crypto is if the dollar is no longer a reliable store of value. A coin backed by a basket of commodities would seem preferable.
And if the use case for crypto is as the monetary system in anarcho-capitalism, it would seem that praising the government regulatory structure surrounding it (read the rest of Alex’s post) is not inspiring.
dating apps fail to attract women. …Statistics from dating apps says little about what women value in men. Those statistics only say what women who are less uncomfortable with dating apps are doing on the dating apps.
The opportunity to act hypergamously might be exactly what pulls a certain part of women into male-dominated dating apps.
So neither the men nor the women go on dating apps primarily to find long-term partners. Relatively few women sign up.
In the old days, mothers used to tell daughters, “In order to find a prince, first you have to kiss a few frogs.” It seems that the dating apps select for males who are unregenerate frogs. Knowing that, daughters today know that in order to find a prince, you have to go somewhere other than dating apps. Those daughters who do go on dating apps receive an ego boost from being sought after by frogs. And they get to indulge in a preference for frogs that are tall.
substacks referenced above:
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Wasn't it the case that the plurality of new marriages were now formed from online dating? If that's the case, it likely isn't also the case that relatively few women are going to online dating.
My speculative hypotheses:
1. I very rarely see longitudinal or time based data about dating apps. I'd guess, however, there are lots of subsets. A small number of long-term serial daters and hookup artists. A large number of purely casual users. An unknown but probably largeish number of sporadic users who seek and find relationships, then leave. Because they're successful, they quickly disappear from the dataset.
2. The data "most relationships are formed online" coupled with "most women don't go online for relationships" dovetails nicely with the data that suggests large numbers of young people aren't dating at all, or even particularly interested.
I just finished "Number Go Up" by Zeke Faux on the whole crypto industry. It included significant interviews with SBF. Faux is an investigative reporter that specializes in financial scams, but the book started being written before SBF's fall.
Faux seemed to take SBFs philosophy seriously and asked him about it candidly. I'm going on my own memory of a single read through, but he pointed out the usual issues with utilitarianism.
1) If your utilitarian calculation says its OK to lie, cheat, steal, etc then you have license to trample any traditional moral code.
2) Citing reputation risk doesn't necessarily salvage #1, because there is always the chance that you could get away with it (this appears to be what SBF thought and what the author says is quite common in these scams).
3) It isn't explicitly stated in the book, but looking at his extensive review of SBFs personal habits its quite obvious that his lifestyle choices (drugs, sleep, relationships, diet, mannerisms, values) are the kind of thing that would make it very hard to calculate utility accurately (a hard enough task for the best of people in the best of circumstances).
4) After it all blows up he interview SBF who basically says that he got the utility calculation wrong (for what he feels seemed like decent reasons at the time). The idea that some things are incalculable and that he should understand his own flaws and vices might affect his calculations didn't seem to occur to him.
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As to stable coins the book actually starts as an investigation of the stable coin Tether. His conclusion is that the purpose of tether and other stable coins is to facilitate financial frauds. In fact the people at tether might have the safest business model because Tethers don't pay interest rates and treasuries are paying over 5% these days. So in affect Tether can collect a huge fee for helping to enable illegal transactions.
Whether Tether will survive he seems not to know (the people running it he feels are of low character and prone to scams, but if they could just satisfy themselves with 5% maybe they can get by).