[Note that I’m shifting the conversation some. The grandparent was about things like Give Directly, and this is mostly talking about large, rich companies like Theanos.]
One could look at this evidence and think:
Wow. These fraudulent endeavors ran for really a long time. And the fact that they got caught means that they are probabilisticly not the best executed scams. This stuff must be happening all around us!
Or a person might look at this evidence and think:
So it seems that scams are really quite rare: there are only a dozen or-so scandals like this every decade. And they collapsed in the end. This doesn’t seem like a big part of the world.
Because this is a situation involving hidden evidence, I’m not really sure how to distinguish between those worlds, except for something like a randomized audit: 0.001% of companies in the economy are randomly chosen for a detailed investigation, regardless of any allegations.
I would expect that we live in something closer to the second world, if for no other reason than that this world looks really rich, and that wealth has to be created by something other than outright scams (which is not to say that everyone isn’t also dabbling in misinformation).
I would be shocked if more than one of the S&P 500 companies was a scam on the level of Theanos. Does your world model predict that some of them are?
Coca-Cola produces something about as worthless as Theranos machines, substituting the experience of a thing for the thing itself, & is pretty blatant about it. The scams that “win” gerrymander our concept-boundaries to make it hard to see. Likewise Pepsi. JPMorgan Chase & Bank of America, in different ways, are scams structurally similar to Bernie Madoff but with a legitimate state subsidy to bail them out when they blow up. This is not an exhaustive list, just the first 4 that jumped out at me. Pharma is also mostly a scam these days, nearly all of the extant drugs that matter are already off-patent.
Also Facebook, but “scam” is less obviously the right category.
Somewhat confused by the coca-cola example. I don’t buy coke very often, but it seems usually worth it to me when I do buy it (in small amounts, since I do think it tastes pretty good). Is the claim that they are not providing any value some kind of assumption about my coherent extrapolated volition?
It was originally marketed as a health tonic, but its apparent curative properties were due to the powerful stimulant and analgesic cocaine, not any health-enhancing ingredients. Later the cocaine was taken out (but the “Coca” in the name retained), so now it fools the subconscious into thinking it’s healthful with—on different timescales—mass media advertising, caffeine, and refined sugar.
It’s less overtly a scam now, in large part because it has the endowment necessary to manipulate impressions more subtly at scale.
I mean, I agree that Coca Cola engages in marketing practices that try to fabricate associations that are not particularly truth-oriented, but that’s very different from the thing with Theranos.
I model Coca Cola mostly as damaging for my health, and model its short-term positive performance effects to be basically fully mediated via caffeine, but I still think it’s providing me value above and beyond those those benefits, and outweighing the costs in certain situations.
Theranos seems highly disanalogous, since I think almost no one who knew the actual extend of Theranos’ capabilities, and had accurate beliefs about its technologies, would give money to them. I have pretty confident bounds on the effects of coca-cola, and still decide to sometimes give them my money, and would be really highly surprised if there turns out to be a fact about coke that its internal executives are aware of (even subconsciously) that would drastically change that assessment for me, and it doesn’t seem like that’s what you are arguing for.
[Note that I’m shifting the conversation some. The grandparent was about things like Give Directly, and this is mostly talking about large, rich companies like Theanos.]
One could look at this evidence and think:
Or a person might look at this evidence and think:
Because this is a situation involving hidden evidence, I’m not really sure how to distinguish between those worlds, except for something like a randomized audit: 0.001% of companies in the economy are randomly chosen for a detailed investigation, regardless of any allegations.
I would expect that we live in something closer to the second world, if for no other reason than that this world looks really rich, and that wealth has to be created by something other than outright scams (which is not to say that everyone isn’t also dabbling in misinformation).
I would be shocked if more than one of the S&P 500 companies was a scam on the level of Theanos. Does your world model predict that some of them are?
Coca-Cola produces something about as worthless as Theranos machines, substituting the experience of a thing for the thing itself, & is pretty blatant about it. The scams that “win” gerrymander our concept-boundaries to make it hard to see. Likewise Pepsi. JPMorgan Chase & Bank of America, in different ways, are scams structurally similar to Bernie Madoff but with a legitimate state subsidy to bail them out when they blow up. This is not an exhaustive list, just the first 4 that jumped out at me. Pharma is also mostly a scam these days, nearly all of the extant drugs that matter are already off-patent.
Also Facebook, but “scam” is less obviously the right category.
Somewhat confused by the coca-cola example. I don’t buy coke very often, but it seems usually worth it to me when I do buy it (in small amounts, since I do think it tastes pretty good). Is the claim that they are not providing any value some kind of assumption about my coherent extrapolated volition?
It was originally marketed as a health tonic, but its apparent curative properties were due to the powerful stimulant and analgesic cocaine, not any health-enhancing ingredients. Later the cocaine was taken out (but the “Coca” in the name retained), so now it fools the subconscious into thinking it’s healthful with—on different timescales—mass media advertising, caffeine, and refined sugar.
It’s less overtly a scam now, in large part because it has the endowment necessary to manipulate impressions more subtly at scale.
I mean, I agree that Coca Cola engages in marketing practices that try to fabricate associations that are not particularly truth-oriented, but that’s very different from the thing with Theranos.
I model Coca Cola mostly as damaging for my health, and model its short-term positive performance effects to be basically fully mediated via caffeine, but I still think it’s providing me value above and beyond those those benefits, and outweighing the costs in certain situations.
Theranos seems highly disanalogous, since I think almost no one who knew the actual extend of Theranos’ capabilities, and had accurate beliefs about its technologies, would give money to them. I have pretty confident bounds on the effects of coca-cola, and still decide to sometimes give them my money, and would be really highly surprised if there turns out to be a fact about coke that its internal executives are aware of (even subconsciously) that would drastically change that assessment for me, and it doesn’t seem like that’s what you are arguing for.