https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Computer-Donn-B-Parker/dp/06841...
I would not say he had a master plan but was making it up to go along and figured he’d win big at the track one day and pay everyone back, (We had someone like that who stole $750k from our county’s bus operator because of gambling too.)
Boy if these people were cogs in the machine and probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility. The perp told the author of the book that he’d “learned his lesson” and that he came across as sincere but FBI agents told him that people like that (gambling addiction + embezzling) will reoffend almost always if given the chance. (One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.)
There was a case in Brazil recently where a medicine student in a top university embezzled from her graduation party funds (she was at the party committee) to invest in cryptocurrency, make profit and return the money to the fund keeping the profit. But she lost money on crypto. Then she tried to gamble (playing a lot of money on the lottery) to earn what she lost. Lost everything and got caught. Expelled by the university.
She had a lot of potential for upward mobility as a doctor from the most prestigious school in Brazil. Still did it.
Potential, and after couple more years of exhaustion and suffering (as graduating from a medical school is typically only first half of the journey)?
If potential far-away reward like this didn't discount to approximately 0 for most people, the world would've looked entirely different.
Which is all to say that she was right on the finish line before deciding to throw it all away.
Where do you get this notion?
If Brazil is anything like Argentina -- and I bet it is in this context -- the study and internship stages of doctor training are positively grueling. Many doctors in training do drugs to cope. They work long hours and make all sorts of mistakes. Many are in terrible moods. And patients and people can get really rude and impatient with them.
It can be a really thankless, grueling job. I wonder why people choose it at all.
My question was mostlt rethorical, more of a reflection on the difficult life they choose for themselves. But thankfully some people do think of others!
More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid - even the most seemingly dumb behavior tends to have a motivation that feels reasonable(ish) to the person doing it. I don't think playing Devil's advocate is misanthropic.
> To see it, who are there all these rubes who stay in middle school even though most people discount far-away reward to 0? High school?
Do you even remember middle/high school? Obviously, kids stay in it because the law mandates so, and tolerate it because they meet other kids there and have some degree of autonomy over their social life. Consequences and rewards are both immediate.
Compare with: "you need to learn because it will be useful for you in the future / will help you get good job", an argument that's well-known to work on nearly zero teenagers ever.
> College?
Mixed motivations, but the fact that social life gets taken up to 11 definitely doesn't hurt :).
It's easy to keep long-term motivations in mind when following the path towards distant reward keeps yielding smaller rewards along the way. Take that away, and people check out or burn out.
I would say that everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times. Being a smarter person is attaining greater competence at keeping the stupid in check.
Masterfully phrased :) i.e. you agree you were bored and looking for an interlocutor.
> Do you even remember middle/high school?
Yes.
> It's easy to keep long-term motivations in mind when following the path towards distant reward keeps yielding smaller rewards along the way. Take that away, and people check out or burn out.
Yeah I'm an economics college dropout from nowhere with a 2.8 GPA who couldn't make it to class. I flushed a 1560/1600 SAT and 173/180 LSAT down the toilet (read: Ivy League tier standardized test grades). I ended up working for Google as a SWE. How? After dropping out, I worked as a waiter, thought that rumored iSlate thing sounded pretty cool, and maybe I should make a restaurant app for it. Taught myself programming, launched after 2.5 years, sold it after 4, interviewed for Google expecting to fail.
To peer poster's point: everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times.
You learned your numbers at least mostly meant nothing, and seemingly learnt the valuable lesson of hardwork and luck (and a brain cell or two to rub together).
Maybe, someday you will be able to notice the rest of the drab populous, some of whom have no braincells, some that never learnt to work, or have never managed to have lady luck on their side, instead courting her cousins disease and malady, and you may regret your shortsighted and uninformed comment(s).
The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...
I'd say it's both. It's like a simple board game[0], where you race on a line of steps, and the line is littered with bonuses and penalties, and each turn you move along according to the roll of the dice. A couple lucky rolls, you can be half-way to finish line in few turns. A couple unlucky rolls, and you quit playing, or plain lose to your lucky friend. If you somehow avoid both the bonuses and penalties, well the line is long and the game is fucking dull and you'll probably get bored half-way.
(Bonus point for making the line into a loop, so the game can take arbitrarily long, and initial advantage grows superlinearly, making the game beyond boring, a source of real-life conflicts between friends and families. Yes, I believe that game is called Monopoly.)
--
[0] - Like the ones we used to play as kids, not the modern Board Games that Board Gamers love to play at social events and Board Game Cafes.
In the sense that you cannot willpower your way to a goal that requires a great deal of sustatined effort. You simply can't. People dont become olympic athletes by training hard so they can win. They become olympic athletes by training hard because they like training. They have friends there, and feel good at it, and get fulfillment from it, and found all sorts of little tricks to make it easier and not exact a psychological toll from them.
This all is to say, if you want to make a change in life, its not enough to try really hard. You have to set up structures, often social structures, to help it become fun.
To use an engine analogy, it's not enough to supply fuel for the engine to burn and do work; you also need lubrication for the moving parts and cooling for the whole assembly if you want the engine to keep going.
The thing that blew my mind was you can use non-monitary costs. E.g. if someone from an out group learns your language and your culture, that's a moderate investment. To recoup that, they need to make multiple transactions and are therefore less likely to cheat.
It's by no means a perfect metric - and it works much better in smaller, tribal settings - but it's still a fascinating analysis
Think of it as one of life's many filters - better such person didnt become a doctor, we wouldn't be talking about money being lost due to her stupidity.
Similar to how you can get criminal convictions expunged so it doesn't affect employment etc but any terms of the expungement still hold
Disclaimer: not only am I not a lawyer, I'm also incredibly lazy and haven't even Google searched right to be forgotten laws
There is a tension between protecting the innocent and the reformed from their past on one side, and protecting potential victims on the other.
Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds...
There some people who I've only tangentially heard about who, while not being charged with anything, definitely left a trail of broken promises, messes, blathering, whining, and excuses in their wake. Not that such people usually get called out by name in a blog post, but when they say "X is true" online and then someone else proves them wrong, I'd hope they can't use that law to just sweep their foolishness under the rug each time.
Some people need to have such things remembered, so others have an objective historical record, rather than only having subjective bluster to listen to.
Here in the US, we elect them to public office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Solutions_for_Winning...
which was run by politician Newt Gingrich which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012 and I must say it boggles my mind that he didn't think this would have an effect on "do I trust this guy to be President?" or even "do I want to donate to his campaign?"
Right now, at least, the Wikipedia article states that the law required him to leave the organisation. It doesn’t sound like it was insolvent when he left, just that without him it found it hard to get additional donations. It also sounds like it was evicted after it was dissolved, many months after he terminated his relationship with it.
Lacking any other details, it sounds strange to blame him for what happened after his required-by-law departure.
For the working class, it is a moral failure. Or in the case of student loans not allowed.
SBF also will probably end up being able to pay people back, but it's jail for him too.
Prospect theory predicts people are more likely to gamble to prevent a sure loss.
Contrarian counterposition: perhaps the problem rather is that so many people become easily bewitched by social skills? I do believe that even if there was no "right to be forgotten", such people would easily be capable of using their social skills to "wipe away" the warning signs of the criminal past.
We believe, in Europe, that it's better to have a criminal re-offend, than to have no criminal being given a second chance, and that's totally a choice and we can change our mind later anyway. But for now, we want to try it.
That attitude is touched on near the end.
One was a lawyer who defrauded his elderly clients and the other just only worked for his parents his whole life after getting kicked from university for cheating and then attached himself directly to the teat after they retired. Once his father died he took over the life of his mother as she was descending into Alzheimer's and looted her assets with the help of his brother before he was disbarred.
Both thought that everyone else was doing it too- it was just about not getting caught. They literally couldn't comprehend the idea that others weren't just hypocrites.
I read a book once [0] that claimed sociopaths (who come in more-boring flavors than just Hollywood villainy) have a similar confusion: Since certain norms aren't as intuitive/automatic, it's as if everyone else is secretly playing a game with a set of unspoken barely-explained rules.
Some of them end up concluding it's all a cynical manipulative scam, and everybody else is the same as themselves except absurdly dedicated to keeping up the fiction.
[0] "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout
That's exactly how I feel lol biggest reason why I minimize my interaction with most of the society
Anyway, I think that people in general assume that others behave in a way similar to theirs, which works if you're average, but doesn't if you're not. You can see this when two cultures with opposing attitudes meet: both of them think "obviously I'm normal, it's them who's acting weird".
See most people who use the phrase "virtue-signaling" pejoratively.
Companies have always done brand advertising - Marlboro cigarettes didn't truly care about independence, ruggedness or cowboys - they just wanted to be associated with those themes to sell more product - hence the "Marlboro Man". Clint Eastwood, on the other had, seems to personally buy into that image in earnest - so Clint Eastwood doesn't "virtue-signal" about ruggedness and the old west and anyone who accuses[1] him of that is doing so in bad faith.
The culture warriors pretend companies pandering is new, and they term the branding/pandering they don't like "virtue-signalling"
1. He has some pretty strong opinions on who ought to be in westerns that I believe are misguided. My disagreeing wirh him doesn't mean he is insincere/virtue-signaling to the Country-music-listening demographic.
I remember having this feeling hit me hard when I read the part of the Richard Feynman book when he calls a woman a selfish wh--- and that results in her adamantly wanting to sleep with him.[1]
If you can shuck the siren's call of the mob, you can sympathize with the incel and MGTOW crowd who felt they weren't taught the right model.
I've kind of taken it on as a life motto: "No cheat codes." If there's something that magically works, it deserves to be exposed so everyone can use it, and also learn why it works. That is, everyone deserves the same hack. Yes, even when it costs my information monopoly.
[1] Blog post summarizing it: https://geekfeminismdotorg.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/feynman-...
I've worked for/with a number of narcissistic sociopaths. They love to surround themselves with two types of people:
1. Loyal fawning adorers who give them narcissistic supply.
2. Other narcissistic sociopaths.
2 was a surprise to me when I figured it out. Why would they want to be around their competition?
Because they actually believe there are only those two types of people in the world. And Type 2 are "their tribe." Anybody who claims not to be one of those two (i.e. "Type 3") is obviously a lying hypocrite and is not to be trusted. We Type 3s make them very uneasy.
If you find Dracula lore amusing, it's astonishing how these 3 types map:
1. Humans (i.e. food)
2. Vampires
3. The Van Helsing family (i.e. vampire slayers)
I think it's an expression of the natural human tendency to think that our personal experiences and attitudes are representative of the mean.
To say that a victimless crime is wrong requires a more deontological approach to morality.
There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...
"Tащи с работы каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин, а не гость."
translating to:
"Grab every nail from work - you're the master here, not a guest."
essentially parroting the Soviet cliches about how proletariat was in charge etc.
Funny, but I have observed this with regards to lying.
The embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. Sometimes they get 'forced' to continue, the initial fraud case involved a fictitious vendor, or a subscription, or some other thing that is expected to be ongoing and would raise suspicious to suddenly stop.
In other cases I've seen the root cause just be straight up drugs and gambling addictions. An employee needs fast money, and probably need to hide it from family members, so a little embezzlement gets the job done. Then of course that never goes the way they intended, and they wind up doing it again and again until the whole thing implodes.
Altnernate anecdata (N=1): One person I knew intimately enough definitely used a perceived wrong as a pretext to start something they had been looking to do already because of other issues.
[0] https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...
This strikes me as the typical fraudster more than embezzler. Making up the gains versus having actual profits that they then steal. Madoff was a fraudster; Bankman-Fried more an embezzler.
At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.
Repeat offenses as a signal? Sure!
Therapist's recommendation? I'm skeptical. Their primary data is whatever the subject self-reports, and their secondary data is their somewhat subjective opinion on whether the subject has improved.
If the subject does not want to stop and they are smart enough to figure out how to embezzle or to get high enough to embezzle, there's very little chance that the therapist would see through them.
It's like EQ tests - the subject can make the test results say whatever they want the test results to say.
Your argument sounds tautological.
They ended up being arrested and convicted for stealing from the sports league, and they went to jail for a few months but they had some arrangement where they could leave every weekday morning to go to work and then return to jail in the evening.
Their arrest and conviction was well known by and within their employer (from which they were known to have embezzled the 50K) since they needed to request leave to show up to court and also because the local papers covered it extensively due to it impacting the sports league.
They were not fired, presumably because their employer did not want to run the risk of tarnishing its sterling reputation of properly managing its finances.
A huge proportion of drug addicts (and I suspect addicts of sex, gambling etc I'm just less familiar with those addictions) started taking their drugs because of how tough their life was. And even if you know that starting to take opiates or whatever drug of choice might not be a sensible plan long term, if you feel so bad that you'd rather kill yourself than live in your head sober, it's possible to actually want to keep using what you re addicted to because you don't believe that life without that drug can be any better.
I don't know how common this is, but anecdotally I've known two people who used high dose prescription painkillers (obtained illegal) to give them enough positive feelings to be able to work on their mental health problems, both who would've been described as problematically addicted by most medical professionals, but who managed to use the opiates to work on their core mental health issues until such a time that they felt ready to not need opiates, at which point they found it relatively easy to stop. Because as horrible as it is to get the withdrawals, it's actually not very last longing and it can be considerably less painful than the pain of having such severe mental health issues that you were desperate to kill yourself before you started the drug use, not because you started the drug use. (Of course there's also people who get addicted because they think it will be fun, and end up suicidal because of it. And I also wouldn't recommend using opiates to work on your mental health, because despite my two anecdotes I believe the almost universal knowledge in medical circles is that it's much more likely to worsen your mental health than to improve it.
[0] Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-Opposite-Addiction-Con...
I think this may be ahistorical, or at least vastly overstated. See Jeremy Kuzmarov’s research, published in “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs.”
If you're addicted because your life was roughly fine, but you discovered that a drug make you feel amazing, keep taking it too much, and get to the point where withdrawal is so painful that it's impossible to resist taking another dose to feel good again, then that's exactly how you describe it.
But if you're using heroin or whatever drug as a mental health treatment, e.g. because if you hadn't started using you would instead have killed yourself, then sure you'll still have the nasty withdrawals when you stop, but it's a totally different equation. For many addicts, taking illegal drugs is the only way to feel OK about life. Some of these people never manage to get clean, but the ones with this reason for addiction who do (or who try to) get clean, it can be surprisingly easy to deal with the withdrawals, because they're aware of how shit life was before they first started using the drug, and the idea that the rest of your life will be as shit as before you started using drugs can be a far more scary thought than someone who's life was basically good except for their getting hooked on a drug.
To quote one of the all-time great TV shows, and surely the best about authentic portrayals of drug users, dealers, and cops - The Wire - Waylon, a former addict and narcotics anonymous sponsor, says “Getting clean’s the easy part. And then comes life.” I guess that's true for both types of addict I've talked about, but it's even more true for the addicts who turned to drugs because they hated their lives than for people who had lovely lives until they accidentally got addicted to a drug that they thought was fun to try.
In this view, for example, people start using an addictive drug because it makes them feel good, but once addicted they use the drug in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
Going to rehab means to stop using, which brings withdrawal. I think this view explains why some addicted would only do it when they'll incur an even greater negative effect than withdrawal.
TIL I am addicted to flossing.
For example, therapy for issues stemming from learned helplessness are a counter example, as learned helplessness implies lacking a desire to make a change as they have already been conditioned to seeing it as impossible. The therapy involves building up that desire by having minor successes that end up breaking down the mental block which formed.
Well, that's my entire point: why use it as a metric or target? How do you tell if you achieved the objective when the target metric is unmeasurable?
When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal: when you've achieved the goal, when you've not achieved that goal, when you're making progress, when you're making it worse - those things are all subjective.
All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.
> All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.
What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm?
My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions.
Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical.
If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.
Conveniently forgetting that the people who perform brilliantly under actual adverse conditions have to be a lot better at the job, and work a lot harder, than someone who feels that they could hypothetically perform brilliantly under hypothetical ideal conditions.
I've never seen someone like this turn to embezzlement, but I've seen them aggrandize themselves into positions of respect through sheer confidence and then bounce from failure to failure, shifting blame to other people or external circumstances.
Many people have a sense that they are as good as they appear to be, when what gave them the edge over others is just pure luck. And perhaps their persuasive capabilities to make others do the hard work.
They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy. I mean this stuff is kinda robber-baron 101.
Sam Bankman Fried was smart, raised in the US and he had decent connections too, look where he ended up.
In fact, I never met a smart totally honest person in my generation who got rich.
Yeah but that requires actual real work embezzling is actually kind of mindless once the cycle is started. Stealing is usually easier,even if you disagree on that part. The embezzling still has one thing going, its almost always faster. Why would the embezzler work for 30-40 years to be rich when they can have a chance at retiring well before they are starting to age.
I once worked somewhere that was significantly embezzled. I knew the people that did it personally. I actually had this same discussion with other coworkers there. Yeah they could have made more money honestly. However what they did instead (by our estimates from various public evidence) bank around 50-60 mil and vanish before they were 35 years old. Still in good health and young enough to enjoy life.
> I mean, figure it out. An embezzler has to not only do his or her job well so that no one is looking over his or her shoulder but has to do their job so well that they can steal for months or years and it won’t show up.
Performance and pay aren't 1:1, and sometimes quite far from it. That imbalance or perceived imbalance could certainly drive some to embezzle. Bit of a just world fallacy there.