White collar criminal investigations and prosecutions have declined as counter-terrorism, drug, counter-espionage and politically motivated investigations have (greatly) increased. Is it reasonable to expect the majority of people to act virtuously when doing so puts them at great disadvantage in an effectively unregulated environment? This is what Liv Boree might call a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish.
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
Most people put their grocery carts back, stop at stop signs and lights at the middle of night on a lone road, and there's plenty of examples where people go out of their way to do the right thing. There's this common misconception that most people are act immorally but in reality the law is only written for the few. For a very clear example, I doubt murder rates would change were it not illegal. Most people don't want to kill and recognize it as intrinsically immoral. The problem is that we ignore normal behavior and this makes us overestimate abnormal behavior.
If murdering was legal, most people still wouldn’t murder. If murdering reliably earned 1 million dollars, then most _people_ still wouldn’t murder but most _money_ would be in the hands of killers
You're making me think what the price-demand elasticity curve for murder might look like ("Would you off someone for $100K? What if we told you they were a bad person"). Kind of like Bridget cold-calling in "The Last Seduction", making outrageous propositions in calm language.
Jumping from returning shopping carts to murder is a bit of a leap though. Sure most people wouldn't commit murder.
However, its much much easier for things like returning shopping carts become less common. How many stores have left San Francisco and Portland downtowns due to unabashed theft?
I agree that much of it also starts with leaders. If the top eschelon is busy with NIMBYism and gaming share prices to get theirs, it won't be long before normal folk start questioning doing the moral thing in order to get ahead.
I would wager most killings are retribution for some kind of wrong, simply by people who don’t believe in the justice system or whose rage overwhelms their fear of consequences. If murder were legal then that would be a blow to state legitimacy and also remove much of the reason not to take matters into your own hands.
The problem is that in this case there's an extraordinarily lucrative opportunity for anyone willing to take it, meaning even if most people would see this and think "I don't want to be that person" there'll still be people who will do this line of work, regardless how immoral it might be
Your point is parallel to the ideas surrounding the realism of altruism.
People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost. As the cost ramps up the calculation for a 'selfless' act is effectively inverted to bias self interest instead.
This is how you get the current state of the financial sector. Ironically altruism is so cynically dismissed that its actually used as a marketing strategy to pursue self interest, with no one bothering to disassemble it because no one believes thats the motivation anyway (see: subsidizing homeowners with bad credit using homeowners with good credit). Leaving the only people who do believe it functioning out of partisanship and lack of curiosity.
'Abnormal' behavior is exponential in its effects. Much like a fire, it only stops if contained. Thats why total laissez faire deregulation is naïve. Even if most people do the right thing, society is not silo'd from the minority who does the bad things.
> People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost.
Apparently in some communities (such as Germany) it is believed that people cannot be counted on to return the shopping cart properly unless the cart holds a small value coin hostage. So the tolerated cost of selfless acts isn't some human constant, even in developed societies like Germany where people have their basic needs met.
In fact it's even more complicated than that, because specific kinds of selfless acts have different degrees of perceived importance in different cultures. In some cultures, it's considered very important to feed your guests, even if that means the host has to go hungry. In other cultures, feeding your guests isn't important or expected, even from hosts with comfortable abundance.
This is one of the root problems of Western society today and I think it has its origin in the financial crisis. The perpetrators got off scott free everywhere (except Iceland) and everyone who wasn’t a banker ended up paying the price.
The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.
The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.
...a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish
It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.
Will they also redo the massive horrors relewsed on the world that Marxists did? Wait, FTX seems like a prime example.
Capitalism in itself is incomplete, I believe it requires a strong moral principle in a populous to work well. Trying to shoehorn that moral basis into capitalism as Marx did just results in a very destructive system.
Sure capitalism kills people, but not nearly the same order of magnitude. The worse cases of unbridled capitlaism killed far less than any one of worse cases of communism where we're talking to the tune of hundreds of millions. Then capitalism helped spawned things like the "green revolution" that prevented mass starvation across the globe since then.
The scientific consensus is that within a century unbridled capitalism will end up killing an order of magnitude more people than any other system ever did.
It’s like saying that Math kills people because Math is used to build bombs. Capitalism is an economic system, not a social system. There are human beings in charge of corporations doing the killing, polluting, and so on. Those individuals are responsible.
Except that fossil fuels aren't limited to capitalist countries. Even then accounting future potential deaths to an economic system is a bit meaningless compared to prior concrete and repeated history.
Much less there's no way we can accurately predict the death toll of something a century out -- in the 1960-70's it was "obvious" there would be billions dying of starvation. We could crack fusion power in a decade and use direct CO2 capture to reverse CO2 levels to pre-1850's level.
<< has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article
I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.
It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.
<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.
I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.
Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank. They were a “quant” and claimed to be using sophisticated algorithms to trade the market. In reality they were making gut based trades with fake software full of complicated derivatives trading algorithms. Fooled some of the most well paid people in the world
> Personally know someone that became in the top 50 people at a major USA bank.
Not top 50 people but I know someone from our group of teenagers/early-twenty-agers friends who just lied to get hired for a tech company in Belgium. He never went to uni but most of his friends did, so he knew a bit the who's who / hang out with these people and he faked a resume, lied (written down) about having a diploma in economics.
He started climbing the corporate ladder in that company (I think it was HP but I don't recall all the details of this story, it was a long time ago) then after something like 10 years, he started getting cocky and thought that now he could move to another company, boasting 10 years at the previous company and this or that title he had now.
Bad luck for him: the company he applied to did a background check and realized he had no diploma (I don't know how they found out? Is that public information? But they found out anyway).
They didn't just not hire him: they warned his current employer, the one he was working for since 10 years, that he applied lying about having a diploma.
He was fired on the spot [1].
I don't know if there's any moral to this but if you lie and your lie works, you better then keep a low profile for a very long time.
[1] Some are going to ask: "If he was good at his job, why fire him?"*. To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
> I don't know how they found out? Is that public information?
When I graduated college (UC Berkeley, very large public school in California) I had to go to the registrar to pick up my diploma since I graduated off cycle. In line in front of me was a guy who seemed to know the lady at the window well, and put down a piece of paper and said "got another list to check". The lady went into the back, so I asked the guy what he was doing.
He told me he worked for a background check company and was there about once a month with a list of names to verify graduation dates. He told me a lot of his work comes from government and big companies. He then suggested that if I was going to lie about graduating, make sure it was to a small company that can't afford background checks!
He also told me that almost every month there is at least one person who fails to have the degree they claim to have.
Dunno how long ago that was, but these days universities tell you that they're prohibited by law to disclose such information. In the US the applicable law is FERPA-- which was passed in 1974-- but there are similar rules in other countries. You might well have been witnessing a violation, it certainly happens.
The general difficulty in checking such things is part of why that form of fraud is so ubiquitous.
>Schools may disclose, without consent, "directory" information such as a student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, honors and awards, and dates of attendance. However, schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them.
I'm aware as I've argued it with a number of institutions. In my experience most do not and will not, and instead demand that that they receive consent specifically from the "student"... even for parties that were never students there and by the letter of the law ought be afforded no protection.
I had an employee who lied about a diploma in ~2015. It was pretty bold, he even included a student ID number. Eventually we just called the school's registrar's office and asked if we could verify a diploma. They asked for the name and then told us they had no record of a student by that name. I asked if they could tell us if the student ID number was realistic and was told that it wasn't even close to what their ID numbers looked like.
So it looks like your mileage may vary.
IIRC, providing false information about a diploma in California is a felony.
FERPA doesn’t apply when the person has a signed agreement to allow disclosure. Same way you can request that one college send your grades to another (for grad school apps for example).
Doing a background check is the same thing. It’s authorized by the student.
For my current job I had to get proof of my degree, institution and grade.
Thos was for a degree between 1999 and 2003.
They wanted info down to the month I started... I had no idea so just guessed a month in 1999... They got back to me to check what was up as they had determined I actually started in some other month...
They even wanted proof of what High school I went to.
>I don't know how they found out? Is that public information?
Verifying degree is extremely easy in most cases - the background check company will just call the registrar. It's probably done through an API nowadays.
>To me the answer is simple: you don't want a relationship (personal or with an employer/employee) based on a lie to begin with.
Personally, if I found out and they could actually do the work, I would let it pass. I'd consider it a white lie in that case.
I think it's more of a harm to society to use degrees as requirements when they aren't actually required. This too is lying, but you won't see companies facing penalties for putting a degree requirement when one isn't necessary for the job.
If you're looking at it from just a qualifications standpoint, then you're right. However, there's more to a person than their qualifications and skills. Judgment and character matter too.
If someone were to lie to my face and waited until I caught them before owning up to it, then giving them a pass tells the world that I'm A-OK with deceit as long as they deliver results.
...the poster values not being lied to their face. 10 years of work to check back on because someone was deceitful enough to lie to your face is a hell of a blast crater, and I'm not taking responsibility for having a flat out liar running rampant in my codebase.
If you don't have a degree, don't claim it. If you can still walk the walk, you've still got a chance. If you fail basic due diligence, you're telegraphing your integrity is in question.
> 10 years of work to check back on because someone was deceitful enough to lie to your face is a hell of a blast crater, and I'm not taking responsibility for having a flat out liar running rampant in my codebase.
Let's be honest, I don't think you would ever actually do that in real life ;)
That's what the interview process is for, theoretically. Possibly you have no idea what it's like being on the hiring side, having to work with oftentimes apathetic recruiters who are in charge of the hiring funnel, candidates who claim knowledge but don't have it, or even worse are cheating. The worst is hiring the wrong person as a year can go down the tube. Meanwhile my leadership chain wants me to hire fast. My time is finite, and I've got a lot of pressure on me. I do give people the benefit of the doubt. I don't care what school you have been to if you have the right skills and work experience, but I'd be lost without resumes to narrow the field.
They got fired and the whole trading operation collapsed. They never discovered the extent of the facade, but there were suspicions. The whole thing went on for 15 years. A major portfolio. By then he had enough to easily retire
Why would they be fired, if they were one of the top 50 people in the bank? From a pure profit perspective, if this guy was that good, did it really matter if he was using 'sophisticated algorithms' or not?
(I may have misunderstood your first comment. If so, please let me know.)
The interesting question is whether he developed any tacit skill or tacit knowledge that would explain his consistent success but would also be difficult to communicate or explain precisely because it's tacit, and therefore can only be described as listening to his gut. In the article, something like this is described:
I can tell she is going to say something else, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. She’s going to share with me how much time she has left. I can hear it in her pauses. After so many years working the phone, I’ve learned to pick out the nuances, the things being said behind what’s being said, entire life stories even, in a hesitation or vocal inflection, in blank moments in time.
It's difficult to explain what makes a pause have meaning or nuance, and yet, this guy may be able to interpret them consistently in a simple phone call without seeing facial expressions and body language. Tacit stuff is really tough to define and nail down. So it's easy to say gut feeling instead. But as tacit stuff finally gets clarified, defined, and explained, we're often able to see that tacit stuff is anything but a gut feeling.
College education sometimes kills some major talents so one could also imagine that people who avoided higher education might keep some rare talents distinguishing their performance from the others. Tiny chance but it might happen.
Are you aware of the old random stock pick fax scam?
You get some huge list of fax numbers. You pick some random penny stocks and fax each one a different random pick, telling them it's going to explode. Then you look and see which picks fail and you discard those numbers.
Eventually you get down to a small list of numbers they you've been consistently making amazingly prescient stock picks to for the last weeks/months... then you tell them all to invest in some dogcrap that you've cornered or ask them to buy your latest picks, or some other story to extract a lot of money from them.
The victims rubs your rabbit's foot and you cash in.
Thing is that the same scam can be performed in a decentralized manner, even by accident, just by having a lot of investment advisors some of whom get a consistently lucky run.
Say you have a room full of millions of people playing roulette. You have no knowledge of how they place bets but you know how roulette works. There's a wheel, 38 slots etc.
You watch all the players for a while and see that 1 player has won every single bet they've made 10 times in a row.
How much money would you be willing to give that person to bet for you?
Now imagine that you talk to this player and they reveal to you that actually they work for the company that made the roulette wheels and that they can control where the ball lands 99% of the time with the computer hidden in his shoe. They even show you the computer and do some example bets to prove it.
> Superforecasters do not predict the future with perfect accuracy: Bloomberg notes that they made a prediction of 23% for a leave vote in the month of the June 2016 Brexit referendum. On the other hand, the BBC notes that they accurately predicted Donald Trump's success in the 2016 Republican Party primaries.[11]
Is there any good documentation on superforecasters efficacy? Like with actual statistical measurements? Because the Wikipedia article is really dumb.
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical after just the first story in this article. It says it takes place in 2006. Why would this person spend an hour reading these names over the phone instead of emailing them? I could understand plausible deniability, but if the woman with cancer thought this guy was in the compliance office, surely she wouldn't be thinking he wants to sidestep compliance rules.
The whole thing smells extremely fishy, perhaps I'm just jaded be all the ever present grift online these days. And these con artists "coming clean" to write a book so they can bask in the glory of their exploits? STFU, you're a slimy douchebag, and your attempt to write a "true crime" book is even lamer.
I bought that book years ago, it was so stupid. It was like a naive teenager’s uninformed screed about how international trade, development and finance are intrinsically bad. I didn’t know about the fabulistic aspects of it, but that’s not surprising in the slightest.
Come to think of it, I think I still have it on a bookshelf somewhere. I should banish it to the same place I banish books that I’ve read because they seem interesting but are just right/wing agitprop (e.g., books that come to mind in this category were books about the over-expansion of the federal criminal code, the East German stasi and the dysfunctionality of San Francisco - I’m happy to have my perspective changed, but I don’t find that I’m very receptive to arguments that boil down to “your beliefs are stupid and that’s why these things are bad”).
Another notably stupid book that I bought was called “A History of the English Speaking Peoples” - I (foolishly) thought it was going to be about the remarkably resilient political systems and economies of US/UK/Can./Aus./NZ but it was basically a white supremacist tract. No thanks.
I don’t know if they are still married as is implied to have occurred around y2k but I suppose if one wanted some validation of his claims, she could be reached. After all, he does implicate her in his “dark gray” market doings. Her Twitter account took no effort to find.
I’m not dubious (or perhaps interested) enough to do any digging, but would be interested in learning if someone else does, having found the article an enjoyable read and kinda hoping as I read it that it was all true.
> Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls 'rusing', and taken it to a whole new level,”
Frank Abagnale is now believed to have lied about most of the cons he supposedly perpetrated. Is there any good reason to believe this Robert guy is more legit?
Maybe this guy did some social engineering at one time or another but the idea that he could get any employee at a Wall Street firm to spend an hour reciting the cell phone numbers of all their executives is a load of bullshit.
Well nowadays they might come as <put your favorite db/os/tool> account managers out there. I have seen one and then realized they are probably not account managers.
Honest question - is bonding over the nationality of ancestors really that big a deal in the US?
It seems to be a solid theme in this.
It just strikes me as odd that a nation with such a patriotic mentality define themselves as Welsh, Irish, Scottish etc because their great grandparents came from there. Besides, it’s a well established fact that if you can’t sing Yma o Hyd from start to finish, your Welsh credentials are confiscated.
Umm. Well, if you turn up for Mass on April 17 at St. Patrick's in downtown Washington, DC, you will see a number of users wearing sashes of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and when you leave, you will see some young women doing step dances before the door. (And if you continue on to bars with Irish names of one sort or another, you will find persons of many ethnic heritages drinking too much.)
Alexandria, Virginia, used to have Highland Games, in which descendants of (generally lowland) Scots will toss cabers and so on.
There are big Italian-themed feasts in New York.
The Germans I think were a bit daunted by a couple of world wars in the last century.
> until some tech industry folks created a little thing called LinkedIn that made publicly available much of the information I charged a lot of money for.
TLDR: he was selling org charts for wall street banks
I'm still reading the article, but "Rabbit Hole" is an interesting recent series on Paramount Plus if the idea of a show featuring corporate espionage is interesting to anyone. I think it's an under-featured mini genre given how many people work quite boring corporate jobs who could use something thrilling to fantasize about.
These days, it would seem that simple training of employees that requests such as these (if they are ever legitimate requests), should only come in over internal communication systems that effort is presumably put into keep only employees access to and would identify the employee using it.
Wouldn't be full proof, but would raise the bar significantly and increase the crime committed thereby reducing those who are willing to do it.
This is part of the training where I work. Some places even let people know to be careful when updating Linkedin, exactly because people are stalking it to find new people to lure into some ruse
it's pretty unbelievable that someone would be pulling in 7 figures just for providing a list of people that worked at a company. all of that information feels so public. his clients were really willing to pay so much to... poach the employees?
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.