6 ms·
I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with
by epolanski 2y ago
I remember a controversial scamming figure in Italy that made millions by selling lucky numbers for lotteries or exploiting people's stupidity to part them with their life savings.
Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed".
While this figure was morally and ethically deplorable, it always made me think how her motto essentially implied that there was an element of pure natural selection happening and she saw herself as the executor of the oldest survival of the fittest balancing act.
At the same time, as someone who follows places like WSB seeing people getting in life-ruining leverage just for the adrenaline of it, or even worse, just for internet karma always made me think of that scammer's words: this is just natural selection doing it's thing as it has been for billions of years. And there's no third party scamming them. They know what they risk, and will do it anyway.
The world is full of physical and non physical dangers, we are naturally programmed to push for self preservation and yet there are people that willingly and consciously decide to put it all on risk, how can it be anything but natural selection doing it's thing?
- nradov 2y agoDon't believe what you read on WSB. Most of those clowns are getting Internet karma points by making up stories, not by losing real money.
- stevenhuang 2y agoI can assure you that many of the posts there are real. If you have market data you can verify the transactions yourself.
- throwup238 2y 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.
- dleary 2y agoIt’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.
- throwup238 2y agoIn 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.
- jammus 2y agoIn that case it's just another symptom of the thing that is naturally selecting them
- imtringued 2y agoBy 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.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoThe 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.
- sneak 2y agoI 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).
- tracerbulletx 2y agoI would prefer kind, honorable, useful, people have them.
- s5300 2y ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI'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.
- saagarjha 2y agoI mean you can also not scam these people
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 2y agoTake 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.
- blargey 2y agoNo, 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.
- roenxi 2y agoWell 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.
- dleary 2y ago> 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”.
- mouse_ 2y agoIt absolutely does
- User23 2y agoThis is a position commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism." The same logic can get you to "drunk women out by themselves _have_ to be sexually assaulted" and so on. No, it's not OK to victimize people just because they're vulnerable. It's an absolutely odious caricature of moral reasoning.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sneak 2y agoNot at all. Money represents resources, and it’s objectively better for society for resources to be in the hands of people who are not fools, instead of those who are.
- dwaltrip 2y agoYou sound foolish, I’m gonna need to take all your money. Don’t worry, I’m being objective.
- wisty 2y agoThe argument is that the objective test is whether you can actually convince anyone to hand over money.
- dwaltrip 2y agoNo, they are making a moral argument, and claiming their view is the objectively moral position. It’s “better for society” was the phrase.
- tedunangst 2y agoWe don't need to take money from the fools. They'll give it away.
- Yizahi 2y agoYou can get like minded people and go roleplay feudalism with guns somewhere else, please leave people with empathy out of it. PS: don't forget to document your inevitable failure, just like every libertarian "non-fools" community previously.
- malux85 2y agoOne of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this - If their victims weren't so stupid, they wouldnt be victims. (Often mixed with the "if I didnt exploit them, someone else would"). Its an excuse to rationalise and try to justify their bad behaviour. NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, and they move and change and evolve at the same speed, natual selection changes at the speed of genetic mutations of large populations, we didnt have smartphones even 1 generation ago - so how the hell is natural selection supposed to adapt to that? When you have an electronic device thats beaming in risky behaviour at millisecond latency, what's the difference than having a big pile of cocaine in the kitchen and then blaming the addicted person saying "Its just natural selection, that enourmous pile of drugs thats just sitting there - you took it willingly", this is hyperbole but its illustrating my point - immediate availabity of dangerous risky addictive behaviour is a problem that will seduce a lot of people that otherwise would not have had the problem. Im definitly someone in favor of personal responsibility but "ne quid nimis" and this must be balanced by a strong culture with good leadership to help the people who cant do it by willpower alone, so saying "Its just natural selection" is pure sociopathic / empathy-less answer and is unacceptable in a world where we should be helping and guiding each other and not saying "sounds like a you problem" while cranking up the exploitation dial.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago>One of the justifications that psycopaths and sociopaths use is exactly this >NATURAL selection is built to deal with NATURAL problems, Human psychopaths essentially evolved (meaning they are generally hardwired) to exploit the niche of stupid/gullible people. You will see this in various species, i.e a parasite/host behavior. ( eg cookoo laying eggs in the nest of other birds). No saying that it's a justification for psychopathy, but just stating the way things are.
- jdefr89 2y agoYup. It’s just an excuse for their awful behavior.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoHumans are slow, weak, eminently munchable. Lions, tigers, bears, etc., can really chow down on humans. The issue with humans, though, is they gang up, real good. Eat one (that others care about), and twenty come after you with belt-fed machine guns. Psycopaths may consider themselves to be predators, and "suckers," prey, but they tend to suffer the same fate as maneater lions, if they eat the wrong prey.
- hex3 2y ago[dead]
- threatofrain 2y agoDescriptively not obvious at all.
- codr7 2y agoThere are hunters even for predators...
- ants_everywhere 2y ago> And there's no third party scamming them. Sure there is. Retail investors are prey for more sophisticated investors. Getting people on WSB to make bad financial decisions is cheap and easy. I would be astonished if it isn't thoroughly astroturfed by hedge funds and other financial professionals.
- caminante 2y agoI can think of one such example where the populace emphatically said retail investors were getting screwed, and AFAIK, conclusive proof was never found. The claim was that Citadel was frontrunning Robinhood's retail investor order flow, which Citadel's market making arm paid for. The masses claimed that this was an extreme conflict of interest, and Citadel "must" be scalping the retail investors. However, the suspected reality is that Citadel was merely providing a market making service that (a) Robinhood couldn't do as well as a non-core activity and (b) for cheaper. Here's a Matt Levine overview [0] from 2021. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/what-happens-to-robinhood-if-the-sec-bans-payment-for-order-flow-kt0a5kjg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/what-h...
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoShitty people always have ways to justify their behavior to themselves. One of the benefits of the market is it launders this justification so nobody has to feel guilty for the destruction it wreaks on human society. Edit: Social Darwinism and justification of the private market economy are inextricably linked. I do think there is some merit to, well, divvying resources by merit, but our current world sees such an exacerbation of resource division the idea it reflects actual merit is absurd.
- delichon 2y agoThe ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer
- username135 2y agoI like this
- holtkam2 2y agoDoes anyone have evidence that these so called “idiots” have fewer grandchildren as a result of being scammed? If not, this “natural selection” mechanism isn’t working
- spoonfeeder006 2y agoWhats the difference between "idiots have to be scammed" vs "people who can't fend off a knife fighter while en route to the grocery store have to be stabbed"? Some people are gullible, or trusting. This doesn't mean they don't have other gifts, or most of all good intentions. Applying an evolutionary pressure against people who can't fend off knife attackers is ultimately useless for human wellbeing The real issue in the world isn't people not being smart enough to fend off attacks, but greed and ego And besides, what is the root of such a 'idiot' person's deficiencies in the first place? Is it genetics? Or is it education, upbringing, early life traumas that stunt development? Besides, the whole point of having fit genes in the first place is to bring about human happiness. If we use this to make people miserable it then shows that there is no substance to our perspective > O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory. > ~ Bahá’u’lláh
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- in-pursuit 2y agoThere’s obviously a huge difference between a scam and a violent attack. The person being scammed doesn’t ever lose their agency and willingly participates. That’s very different from a knife attack, where the victim would leave at every moment if possible.
- gcanyon 2y agoInformed consent is missing in both cases.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
- orwin 2y agoSocial Darwinism is the cornerstone of protofascists, their main moral justification, so I'm not surprised to see it comeback tbh.
- kentrado 2y agoThat's where you make your fundamental mistake. We are not programmed for self preservation. Inside us, there are different drives that shape our behaviour.
- dlkf 2y agoNow do drug-development.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoIs the person from Naples, perchance?
- epolanski 2y agoNo, her name is Wanna Marchi.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago> Her motto was "idiots _have_ to be scammed". So all Americans in context of health insurance? All Italians in context of their byzantine bureaucracy and taxation system? All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems? All developed world in context of housing market? It turned into dog eat dog "eat the sucker" attitude. On top of the hierarchy we got really nasty predators, they look at YOU and see an idiot sucker.
- jdmoreira 2y ago> All Europeans in context of social and retirement systems? Can you please explain? You probably know something I don't
- lifestyleguru 2y agoFirst demography of native populations, second the population from last decade's migration crisis don't seem to be contributing into the systems. Employed suckers think that 40% deduction from monthly paycheck is waiting there to help and save them in case of any troubles in the future or in the old age.
- jdmoreira 2y agoYeah, you probably into something. Very possible the social systems collapse at some point
- codr7 2y agoI don't know of a single case where a person actually got the retirement money they were promised along the way.
- rchaud 2y agoMost of the social protections and regulations underpinning life in the 'developed world' came about due to the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II. States knew that without a social safety net, availability of jobs and housing, national unity would be impossible to have, especially with an expansionist Soviet Union next door. All of these lessons are being rapidly forgotten. Casino capitalism wrecked people's retirements in 2008. Almost 2 decades on, housing costs are out of control for millions of working people, because private equity can buy homes with cash at 0%, while families have to show all sorts of creditworthiness for the privilege of paying 6%. On top of that, businesses that are already profitable (Google/FB, oil and gas, banks) are now charging even more because they can get away with it.
- jollyllama 2y agohttps://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html https://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
- thrance 2y agoI fail to notice anything natural about this selection.
- atulatul 2y agoExactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.