Undercapitalized

While out and around, I saw a woman holding a sign that read: "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." My first impulse was to chuckle to myself and wonder "What about over capitalism?" But then it occurred to me that despite having seen that aphorism on multiple occasions, I didn't actually know what was meant by it. So, when I returned home, I looked it up. As I now understand it, the saying is intended to convey the idea that in a capitalist system, some aspect of the production or supply chain for every good and service necessarily entails some sort of deliberate, unjustified, exploitation or harm to someone. Accordingly, purchasing and using any good or service that was unethically produced or transported cannot be ethical. So no consumption of anything in a capitalist system is ethical.

Personally, I think that this, like a lot of buzzwords, doesn't really engage with the reality of the situation. After all, one doesn't need to be a capitalist to take advantage of other people. One merely need to be broke enough to regard living up to one's ideal ethics as an unaffordable luxury. In that sense, I think that the knock on capitalism is a bit misguided. As I'm given to understand it, may people feel that capitalism leads to a society where people don't care for or support one another. As I experience the world, the causation is somewhat different... to the degree that people don't care for one another influences the degree to which whatever economic system is put in place results in exploitation and harm.

And, at least in the United States, what stands in the way of a just society where people feel a broad duty of care for others is a factionalism driven by feelings of poverty. People feel that they don't have enough to fulfill their entitlements and/or meet their daily needs, and so they prioritize getting what they can over advocating that others be well-treated. Or even altering their behavior to try and redress things. Wal-Mart, for instance, didn't drive small retailers out of business through illegal business practices... they used their ability to offer lower prices to lure price sensitive shoppers away. I like local retail, so I patronize them whenever possible, even though that results in higher costs... a stance that has lead to some amount of criticism. But if I'd rather not shop Amazon when I can support someone else, that extra cost is the price of admission.

Whether or not there is ethical consumption in the United States is not for me to decide. Personally, I'm disinclined to consider the ethics of my own actions solely in terms of the ethics of all previous links in the chain, given that I can't control most of them. My job, I think, is to always understand myself to be well-resourced enough to not feel the need to shift my costs onto others.

Honestly

I read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, The American Way of Killing. Put simply, it's an indictment of what Mr. Gladwell understands to be the fundamental dishonesty, as he puts it, that's baked into the discourse concerning guns, violence and crime here in the United States. And it's fine, for what it is. As a Canadian, Mr. Gladwell hopes to bring something of an outsider's perspective to the discussion, which he does.

When I bought the book, the manager at Barnes and Noble, who is an old acquaintance of mine, told me that The American Way of Killing lacks the neutrality of Mr. Gladwell's earlier books. Having only read Talking to Strangers, I can't say for certain that it's true, but I do note a difference in tone. Mainly because Mr. Gladwell seems angered by the whole business; I came away from The American Way of Killing with the sense that Mr. Gladwell felt that, even of the dishonesty in the discourse was not always intentional, it was always culpable, and Americans bore responsibility for it. Which I get.

But I think, in that regard, that perhaps it would have been worthwhile to delve more deeply into the fear, mistrust and tribalism that underlies the dishonesty. For example, I am of the opinion that people are motivated to support "assault weapon" bans not only out of misunderstanding the relative dangerousness of the weapons (and Mr. Gladwell does devote some page space to a deception that fuels that misunderstanding), but also because they understand the weapons as a means in which people bring lethal violence into places where it's not supposed to be. On the other side of the ledger, many conservative gun-rights activists come across as motivated by the tripartite nature of current conservative populism; their guns are a defense against both hostile élites taking over government to use it against them and the undeserving others who prefer robbery and theft to honest work.

In other words, for me, the problem is that old villain of mine, low (or nonexistent) social trust, and the prices that people are willing to impose on those they mistrust for their own sense of security. In the end, I didn't find The American Way of Killing to be a bad book; I certainly learned some interesting things from it. But I think that it views the dysfunction in the way Americans talk about guns, violence, crime et cetera as a cause, and not also as an effect. So I'm not sure that there's a good way to take any solutions away from it.

Dashing

 

This is Dash, the mascot cart of the local Costco where I tend to shop. While the current Costco carts are gray, the older ones were white, and when they were replaced, the employees of the store kept one, and they decorate it at intervals, depending on the time of year. It's currently in fall livery, but as football season really gets going, it will next likely show up in Seahawks colors.

Bad For Good

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments to Politico during an interview are stirring up controversy. I also disagree with how he laid things out, but perhaps for a different reason.

The fastest way to lose an argument is to unknowingly accept a hostile premise. And yeah, I think Mr. Altman screwed up. Because he doesn’t think big enough about what ubiquitous automation should be able to do for people. Here’s the comment that people have become riled up about:

“I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman told Decoded co-author and POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

And here’s something that he said a bit later in the interview:

“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”

For me, the problem is the assumption that the benefits of generative automation won’t be universally accessible seem to be baked into the statements. If there are parts of the world in which the best available use case for generative automation is perpetrating more effective theft or fraud against people with more resources than themselves, what, exactly, has the technology done for them? Given that a person who has a realistic opportunity to materially improve their lot in life via the “good stuff” the technology is purported to be bringing would prefer that to being bothered with the risks of perpetrating “bad stuff,” if someone lacks access to the ability succeed via doing “good stuff,” one can make the case the technology has failed them. Is pervasive automation worth the costs if it can’t make the pie bigger by increasing the size of everyone’s individual slices? Mr. Altman’s statements are based on a presumption that the technology can’t fundamentally alter the incentives of people. That it can’t create better, safer and more socially acceptable ways of looking out for one’s material well-being.

Of course, one can make the case that people will do “bad stuff” because they’re fundamentally bad people, and the tradeoff is going to be empowering them along with the fundamentally good people. Okay, then. But for the person who now finds themselves assailed by bad people consistently using generative automation in endless attempts to dispossess them of whatever “good stuff” they’re able to obtain for themselves (or that bad people incorrectly think they’ve obtained), how better off are they in the end? It’s not likely to be the case that the added benefits will necessarily cover the costs of required added security measures. So some people are going to be left holding the bag.

Sure, generative automation will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. But Mr. Altman’s statement seems to assume the fact that there are going to be people whose problems are either a) unaffected or b) made worse by the technology, and that this is a necessary trade-off. To me, that presupposes that the technology is simply incapable of creating enough abundance that the winners will be ready, willing and able to share with the losers, while still seeing themselves as winners. And if technology never manages to live up to the hype, that starting point may indicate that things won’t turn out as optimistically as might be hoped.

And “all the other bad things that will happen” is papering over a lot. If a person believes that creating a highly effective biological weapon is a solution to a known problem, either because they feel they have a direct use for one, or (to paraphrase Robert Frank) because it’s bad not to have bioweapons when the other side has bioweapons, then that is just as reasonable a potential outcome as major hacks, scams and other “misuse” of the technology. Because “misuse” is little more than a use case that an outside evaluator doesn’t like.

In the end, the world should not have to accept more major hacks, misuse of the technology, scams, et cetera, because one of “the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” should be the ability of people to not rely on these things to lead good lives.

Traded Away

(Note: There are some long quotes here from the original story, as I'd like to preserve the context for my analysis.)

So, to make a long story short, a now 35 year-old man who's only identified by a middle name, Thomas, was a problem gambler racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debts. After bankruptcy, he had himself added to his state's self-exclusion list, so he couldn't sign up with sports books again. NPR relates:

"Then one day, about two years later, I'm scrolling on Instagram and I came across an ad for Kalshi," said Thomas. "I was bored and thought this could be fun, and it ended up turning into something that wasn't fun at all."

You can guess what happened after that... more tens of thousands of debts piled up. Realizing that things were getting out of control...

"I asked a live agent to close my account. I have a gambling addiction and have been self-excluded from regulated gambling platforms for years," Thomas wrote the company in a chat feature of the app, according to a log of the conversation shared with NPR.

An automated response from Kalshi noted that "self-exclusion is a responsible trading safeguard designed to be irreversible." It offered other solutions: "Three different responsible risk-management actions can be taken: trading break, voluntary opt-out, and a personalized funding cap."

Thomas insisted he wanted to be banned from the app. Two days later, he also made three separate requests to Kalshi over email for his account to be permanently closed, correspondence he shared with NPR show.

Kalshi did eventually bar Thomas from betting.

NPR went to Kalshi for an explanation.

Dani Lever, a Kalshi spokeswoman, called Thomas "a cherry-picked case."

She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives."

At this point, I found myself wondering, if Ms. Lever claimed that Kalshi didn't have "predatory incentives" to keep Thomas on the platform, why not simply let him sign up for the self-exclusion list? If Kalshi didn't need his business, why the hoops to jump through?

"We've prioritized making Kalshi the safest venue for people to trade on," Kalshi's Lever said in a statement, pointing to features that nudge bettors to take a break, establish limits on what traders can deposit and partnerships with mental health counseling to assist problem traders.

But again, why not immediately allow people who understand that they have a problem to skip the rigamarole and go straight to self-exclusion? Sure, Kalshi isn't a traditional sports book; it's not the counterparty to the trades and wagers that customers make, so they don't have the same incentives to hang on to losing customers exclusively. But it seems that they want to hang on to all of their customers. So why didn't NPR ask about that?

Of course, there's little reason to expect that a company will voluntarily take actions that will damage its own business model and earnings potential. The point of businesses is to make other people's money into their owners' money as efficiently as possible, after all. And Kalshi regarding the NPR story as a hit-piece and not wanting to be fully cooperative and transparent makes perfect sense, given that. But to simply say that Thomas' story was "cherry picked" misses the point; of course the people who wreck their savings by burning through tens of thousands of dollars on multiple occasions are the outliers. If that were the average outcome, there would have been immense public pressure for legislators to become more involved, and people would have been running on it as a campaign issue. And if the stories are rare enough to be "cherry-picked" then it shouldn't be much of a problem for Kalshi to allow those customers to leave.

Because note that the question at issue here isn't why Kalshi didn't detect that Thomas had a problem and bar him from trading sports futures on the site; it's why they didn't immediately allow him to block himself from the site when he came to them and said he had a problem. If Kalshi didn't see Thomas never trading again on their platform as a problem, why decline to allow for immediate self-exclusion and redirect people to "nudges?"

Now, maybe NPR asked those questions, and Dani Lever from Kalshi blew them off. It wouldn't be the first time a company simply ignored questions where the answers wouldn't make them look as good as they wanted to. But in that case, include that in the story, so that the audience has the complete picture?

Granted, it's not difficult to decide that, for all of Kalshi's high-minded rhetoric about their incentives, they're hard up enough for revenue that they keenly feel the loss of every customer who decides they need to cut themselves off, and this explains their reluctance to take problem gamblers at their word. But that's an inference that could have been better supported, with a bit more digging.