aimed in a relatively broad sense at people who care about how well societies and groups of people function.
I don’t think allowing financial fraud is a thing current institutions mostly want? The difficulty is more in figuring out how to stop it without stopping legitimate activity as well (A lot of successful entrepreneurship will look kind of a lot like this, I think). If you are calling for normal speculative investment to be banned, it’s very likely not worth the loss of innovation. (It may make sense perhaps to be more strict about what level of falsehood leads to fraud prosecution, but I would keep it to banning false claims).
Sorry, I think I am failing to parse this comment. I agree that financial fraud is a thing people don’t want. This post is telling them about one dynamic that tends to cause a bunch of it. I agree that of course all the difficulty of stopping fraud lies in the difficulty of distinguishing fraud from non-fraud. This post tries to help you distinguish fraud from non-fraud, and e.g. the FAQ section addresses some specific ways in which the dynamic here can be distinguished from entrepreneurship and marketing.
You might disagree that this is possible, or have some other logical issue with the post, but I feel like you are largely just saying things that are true and said in the post, but then say “if you are calling for normal speculative investment to be banned”, which like, I am of course not doing and the post is not implying, and I feel like I have a bunch of paragraphs in there in clarifying that I am not calling for speculative investment to be banned.
facilitation of stag-hunt-like cooperation is really useful. Because cooperating to do stuff beyond the capabilities of individuals is useful but hard.
the dynamic you discuss in the post applies to stag hunt facilitation because their success depends on willingness of others to provide more resources (up to some point where they can generate more)
the difference between, e.g., Theranos and standard entrepreneurship does not lie in the dynamic you discuss in the post. It lies in how egregiously Elizabeth Holmes was lying relative to the standard level of misleadingness. (and of course, more honesty would be better...)
It would of course be very valuable to determine if a stag hunt will pay off or will fail! But the difference between the two does not lie in the dynamic you discuss in the post (which applies to both ultimately successful and unsuccessful stag hunts).
I don’t think allowing financial fraud is a thing current institutions mostly want? The difficulty is more in figuring out how to stop it without stopping legitimate activity as well (A lot of successful entrepreneurship will look kind of a lot like this, I think). If you are calling for normal speculative investment to be banned, it’s very likely not worth the loss of innovation. (It may make sense perhaps to be more strict about what level of falsehood leads to fraud prosecution, but I would keep it to banning false claims).
Sorry, I think I am failing to parse this comment. I agree that financial fraud is a thing people don’t want. This post is telling them about one dynamic that tends to cause a bunch of it. I agree that of course all the difficulty of stopping fraud lies in the difficulty of distinguishing fraud from non-fraud. This post tries to help you distinguish fraud from non-fraud, and e.g. the FAQ section addresses some specific ways in which the dynamic here can be distinguished from entrepreneurship and marketing.
You might disagree that this is possible, or have some other logical issue with the post, but I feel like you are largely just saying things that are true and said in the post, but then say “if you are calling for normal speculative investment to be banned”, which like, I am of course not doing and the post is not implying, and I feel like I have a bunch of paragraphs in there in clarifying that I am not calling for speculative investment to be banned.
In my view:
facilitation of stag-hunt-like cooperation is really useful. Because cooperating to do stuff beyond the capabilities of individuals is useful but hard.
the dynamic you discuss in the post applies to stag hunt facilitation because their success depends on willingness of others to provide more resources (up to some point where they can generate more)
the difference between, e.g., Theranos and standard entrepreneurship does not lie in the dynamic you discuss in the post. It lies in how egregiously Elizabeth Holmes was lying relative to the standard level of misleadingness. (and of course, more honesty would be better...)
It would of course be very valuable to determine if a stag hunt will pay off or will fail! But the difference between the two does not lie in the dynamic you discuss in the post (which applies to both ultimately successful and unsuccessful stag hunts).
Cool, that’s not a crazy view. I might engage with it more, but I feel like I understand where you are coming from now.