The willingness of people to be deceived is why some financial regulations are necessary. Watching the house of cards of crypto coins and exchanges fail is a lesson. If you enable people to build castles in the sky with no foundation, they will do so. The best and brightest will even be suckers.
I shed no tears for hedge fund managers and investors who lost money on crypto. I shed no tears for retail investors who lost the crypto gamble. I will be angry if government secured financial assets are used to support the crypto casino. Furthermore, there is the real problem of the crypto system creating money out of thin air as virtual crypto assets are assigned a real valuation and used as collateral!
Yes, the central bank does the same - creating money out of thin air. I don't care for the central bank diluting my nation's currency. But I don't see the answer being private actors creating their own fake money and exchanging it for government backed currency. Isn't this like a criminal actor printing and passing around counterfeit bills? I don't think a civil society should tolerate this.
When I think of crypto I can't help thinking of the tulip bubble of centuries ago. When crypto started I asked my son about it and he said it was a pure tulip bubble and nothing really new. With nothing behind it, it is a pure gambling play; if you are not the "house, " you will lose.
This is very much in tune with your often noted idea that most folk mostly choose WHO to believe, more than specifics on what to believe.
My mother loved the movie, and I liked it, especially the song against: trouble, with a capital T, that rhymes with P, which stands for Pool. (your young men will be fritterin' away their noon time...) But I never quite believed in the magic thinking ability of the non-practice band to play. Great for the rom-com romance, but too unrealistic for me, even as a young boy.
Certainly most folks DO want to believe, especially in something good, and choose who to believe. I wish I had bought crypto early, low - glad I didn't buy high.
SBF seemed as believable as Steve Jobs. But I already believed I was too late for the early semi-ponzi crypto craze, so have mostly stopped following it.
The USA would be better, long term, with lower gov't spending - but so would most countries, yet most voters want more "free money", and believe more in politicians who promise them that.
I have not seen The Music Man, but definitely will be doing so soon. The less highbrow, more absurd, and too on the nose metaphorical movie in the same vein is Monty Python's Life of Brian. I personally think Life of Brian is the best metaphor for understanding social media. In the case of Life of Brian, Brian is made into the messiah by the mob who wants to believe.
"The process also involves a desire to believe. It seems that people want to be deceived. In fact, deception may be at the very heart of civilization."
In God's We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran there is a line that goes something like, "To successfully fool others you must first fool yourself."
Due diligence can be hard work. (In this case, less so - just look at the balance sheet!). People don’t like hard work. They assume someone else has done it if “the smart money” is in a trade/market. So they skip the hard work and then blame others for their laziness. (In this case fraud actually deserves some indignation.). The crazy part here is the layers of intellectual negligence. “This crypto casino stole customer funds!” is just a cover on top of “all of these non-Bitcoin tokens are an inherent Ponzi scheme to begin with.” Even if SBF/FTX didn’t overtly steal customer funds, it was already their underlying business model.
If you have a counter party you are a creditor, not an owner. Do the hard work to research these assets, then self custody. (If your answer is something besides Bitcoin, double check your work.)
I've never heard it described this way, but it's useful to think of beliefs as having a kind of bi-polar magnetism to people. Approach it from one side and it repels. The other attracts. Trying to push someone off a belief is almost impossible. When someone changes a belief on their own, it repels them.
Scams operate on this principle. Most people are rightly suspicious of get rich quick schemes, but the smarter the scammer, the better a job they do of cloaking the scam into something that looks reasonable and un-scamlike. Once people believe, the hook is set because very few people are gonna change their beliefs exogenously.
Although "dismal science" originally referred to economists' "dismal" opposition to slavery, it is still somewhat deserved in that even when we are recommending "optimal" policies the outcomes are still far less than utopia. Tradeoffs DO exist. Optimal policies often make invisible costs visible. Economics generally works against the normal human desire to be deceived.
Odds favor my position rather than any optimistic one for the Republicans. The trend for the last 60 years is that once a state votes for the Democrats 3 elections in a row after having been solidly Republican, it continues to vote for the Democrats after that. There are only a handful of tossup states, and those toss ups are no longer sufficient for the Republicans to win, and worse, states like AZ, GA, and NC are edging ever bluer over the last 20 years.
As for minorities- it always sounds like a good story that they might start voting for Republicans, but African-Americans continue to support Democrats at 90%+, while Trump in 2020 and Republicans this year did no better with Hispanics than George W. Bush did in 2000.
I will make the conditional prediction right now- Ron DeSantis is the nominee in 2024, and wins every state Trump won in 2020, plus AZ and GA, and loses the election anyway, against any Democrat.
If Trump is nominated again, he will repeat the 2020 outcome.
I watched a TV show the other day where one of the characters says of another (I'm paraphrasing) "He's a decent guy. He just got stuck at the intersection of greed and stupidity." Maybe it's just that simple.
I have a feeling that there might be a difference between personal/individual willingness to be deceived, and collective willingness. I'm sure they are related, and connected, but I also think they have to be looked at as not one thing, but the unfortunate synergy of both personal and collective bargains with reality. I'm thinking mostly about what appears, over the past several years, to be a sharp increase in the reliance on conspiracy theories and cult-like faith in easily-disproven "alternate truths." We are tribal animals, and whether we are conscious of it or not, we have a tendency to follow the crowd, and assume that the most popular belief must be the "right" one (eg., the emperor's clothes cliche). We are meant to live in smaller groups than we do these days, and most of us will look for a niche community to belong to, and that necessitates adopting that niche's dogma as the price of admission. When times are hard (as they are right now, more so and for more people, than say, 10 years ago), we are more likely to believe whatever will bring us small comfort - whether that be tidy and simple explanations for why things are so effed up, or false promises that things can get better if we follow the right leader, or even just someone to blame - at whom we can direct our frustrations, fear and resentment. It seems to be a consistent human tendency that we'd rather believe a ludicrous impossibility than admit that there are no easy answers. When we have leaders who encourage and reward that tendency, there's so many interesting untruths to choose from, it's like a Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet.
The willingness of people to be deceived is why some financial regulations are necessary. Watching the house of cards of crypto coins and exchanges fail is a lesson. If you enable people to build castles in the sky with no foundation, they will do so. The best and brightest will even be suckers.
I shed no tears for hedge fund managers and investors who lost money on crypto. I shed no tears for retail investors who lost the crypto gamble. I will be angry if government secured financial assets are used to support the crypto casino. Furthermore, there is the real problem of the crypto system creating money out of thin air as virtual crypto assets are assigned a real valuation and used as collateral!
Yes, the central bank does the same - creating money out of thin air. I don't care for the central bank diluting my nation's currency. But I don't see the answer being private actors creating their own fake money and exchanging it for government backed currency. Isn't this like a criminal actor printing and passing around counterfeit bills? I don't think a civil society should tolerate this.
When I think of crypto I can't help thinking of the tulip bubble of centuries ago. When crypto started I asked my son about it and he said it was a pure tulip bubble and nothing really new. With nothing behind it, it is a pure gambling play; if you are not the "house, " you will lose.
This is very much in tune with your often noted idea that most folk mostly choose WHO to believe, more than specifics on what to believe.
My mother loved the movie, and I liked it, especially the song against: trouble, with a capital T, that rhymes with P, which stands for Pool. (your young men will be fritterin' away their noon time...) But I never quite believed in the magic thinking ability of the non-practice band to play. Great for the rom-com romance, but too unrealistic for me, even as a young boy.
Certainly most folks DO want to believe, especially in something good, and choose who to believe. I wish I had bought crypto early, low - glad I didn't buy high.
SBF seemed as believable as Steve Jobs. But I already believed I was too late for the early semi-ponzi crypto craze, so have mostly stopped following it.
The USA would be better, long term, with lower gov't spending - but so would most countries, yet most voters want more "free money", and believe more in politicians who promise them that.
I have not seen The Music Man, but definitely will be doing so soon. The less highbrow, more absurd, and too on the nose metaphorical movie in the same vein is Monty Python's Life of Brian. I personally think Life of Brian is the best metaphor for understanding social media. In the case of Life of Brian, Brian is made into the messiah by the mob who wants to believe.
"The process also involves a desire to believe. It seems that people want to be deceived. In fact, deception may be at the very heart of civilization."
In God's We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran there is a line that goes something like, "To successfully fool others you must first fool yourself."
Due diligence can be hard work. (In this case, less so - just look at the balance sheet!). People don’t like hard work. They assume someone else has done it if “the smart money” is in a trade/market. So they skip the hard work and then blame others for their laziness. (In this case fraud actually deserves some indignation.). The crazy part here is the layers of intellectual negligence. “This crypto casino stole customer funds!” is just a cover on top of “all of these non-Bitcoin tokens are an inherent Ponzi scheme to begin with.” Even if SBF/FTX didn’t overtly steal customer funds, it was already their underlying business model.
If you have a counter party you are a creditor, not an owner. Do the hard work to research these assets, then self custody. (If your answer is something besides Bitcoin, double check your work.)
I've never heard it described this way, but it's useful to think of beliefs as having a kind of bi-polar magnetism to people. Approach it from one side and it repels. The other attracts. Trying to push someone off a belief is almost impossible. When someone changes a belief on their own, it repels them.
Scams operate on this principle. Most people are rightly suspicious of get rich quick schemes, but the smarter the scammer, the better a job they do of cloaking the scam into something that looks reasonable and un-scamlike. Once people believe, the hook is set because very few people are gonna change their beliefs exogenously.
Although "dismal science" originally referred to economists' "dismal" opposition to slavery, it is still somewhat deserved in that even when we are recommending "optimal" policies the outcomes are still far less than utopia. Tradeoffs DO exist. Optimal policies often make invisible costs visible. Economics generally works against the normal human desire to be deceived.
Odds favor my position rather than any optimistic one for the Republicans. The trend for the last 60 years is that once a state votes for the Democrats 3 elections in a row after having been solidly Republican, it continues to vote for the Democrats after that. There are only a handful of tossup states, and those toss ups are no longer sufficient for the Republicans to win, and worse, states like AZ, GA, and NC are edging ever bluer over the last 20 years.
As for minorities- it always sounds like a good story that they might start voting for Republicans, but African-Americans continue to support Democrats at 90%+, while Trump in 2020 and Republicans this year did no better with Hispanics than George W. Bush did in 2000.
I will make the conditional prediction right now- Ron DeSantis is the nominee in 2024, and wins every state Trump won in 2020, plus AZ and GA, and loses the election anyway, against any Democrat.
If Trump is nominated again, he will repeat the 2020 outcome.
I watched a TV show the other day where one of the characters says of another (I'm paraphrasing) "He's a decent guy. He just got stuck at the intersection of greed and stupidity." Maybe it's just that simple.
"Deception may be at the very heart of civilization." Agree! In fact I wrote a book which argues exactly that. http://ian-leslie.com/born-liars/
I have a feeling that there might be a difference between personal/individual willingness to be deceived, and collective willingness. I'm sure they are related, and connected, but I also think they have to be looked at as not one thing, but the unfortunate synergy of both personal and collective bargains with reality. I'm thinking mostly about what appears, over the past several years, to be a sharp increase in the reliance on conspiracy theories and cult-like faith in easily-disproven "alternate truths." We are tribal animals, and whether we are conscious of it or not, we have a tendency to follow the crowd, and assume that the most popular belief must be the "right" one (eg., the emperor's clothes cliche). We are meant to live in smaller groups than we do these days, and most of us will look for a niche community to belong to, and that necessitates adopting that niche's dogma as the price of admission. When times are hard (as they are right now, more so and for more people, than say, 10 years ago), we are more likely to believe whatever will bring us small comfort - whether that be tidy and simple explanations for why things are so effed up, or false promises that things can get better if we follow the right leader, or even just someone to blame - at whom we can direct our frustrations, fear and resentment. It seems to be a consistent human tendency that we'd rather believe a ludicrous impossibility than admit that there are no easy answers. When we have leaders who encourage and reward that tendency, there's so many interesting untruths to choose from, it's like a Vegas all-you-can-eat buffet.
Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn.
"It seems that people want to be deceived."
That is a fundamental truth.
And I also highly recommend "The Elephant in the Brain"- I read it just as the COVID panic took hold in Spring 2020.