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Comment by bdw5204 | Hacker News Reader

The optimal amount of crime in a society is non-zero because a society with zero crime would be a dystopian police state where innocent people sometimes get caught up in the justice system's net to make sure it catches all of the criminals.

The classic principle of Anglosphere common law is that its better to let 10 criminals get away with it than to convict 1 innocent person. The same idea applies to fraud because overzealous fraud prevention causes problems for legitimate users whose actions incorrectly get detected as possible fraud. The benefit to tolerating a low amount of fraud is that your product won't be hostile to your legitimate users. The benefit to tolerating a low amount of crime is that you will live in a free society rather than a dystopian tyranny. Freedom is good and it is worth giving up quite a bit of safety for the sake of being free.

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I said this somewhere else, but there’s 2 things at play here:

- A utopia where people don’t defect in prisoners dilemmas (most types of crimes like shoplifting: the store won’t have to hire loss prevention and cashiers, and you pay less for their reduced costs) is ideal, but:

- Such a utopia doesn’t and can’t exist because defection individually increases utility at the cost of everybody else. Hence cashiers, loss prevention, KYC, etc.

Thus the real world is a careful optimisation problem where we have to search for an equilibrium at which society as a whole benefits the most. People can argue all day about where this is, because the trade offs involved are non-obvious:

- More surveillance means, all else being equal, less crime, but police officers can defect too and only arrest minorities and use said surveillance for something else, etc.

The problem is walking through a very high-dimensional search space, and we humans are had at it. There’s no real solution though, because individual incentives don’t line up to solve it.

It's funny that you bring up the Prisoner's Dilemma:

Because its canonical formulation uses defection as a way for law enforcement to catch criminals.

Similarly, people who reliably cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas can run cartels and conspiracies much easier.

I’d argue that the optimal amount of crime is zero but the optimal amount of possibility of crime should be non-zero. That’s a necessary escape hatch out of a police state or authoritarian government. After all, the resistance against the Nazis was technically criminal at that time, even though now we’d all agree it was a good thing it occurred anyway.

It is especially important nowadays because unlike back then where technology was limited and surveilling 100% of the population was impossible, it is very much possible today and is already being done in certain places such as China.

I like this view: you take care of a lot of the conventional concern we while also some futuristic ones like Pre-Crime in Minority Report.

If you define crime as violating the anarchist non-aggression principle, then it makes more sense. The only problem is that the state would be the largest offender.

Nazi laws weren't moral, as it's not moral today to demand half of my profits or I go to jail.

You just picked your own idea of morality and decided to elevate it above others: you chose the "anarchist non-aggression principle" as somehow morally superior to other ideas about how crimes should be defined, and decided that with that definition, targeting zero crimes makes more sense.

But the whole point is that we will never universally agree on a morality because society's overall preferences shift over time. So targeting zero crimes never makes sense.

Exactly.

But patio’s argument is that since he works for the fraud department at Stripe payments, he wants fraud to exist so he can keep his cushy job.

Ask the police about the optimal amount of speeding tickets.

Exactly. Everybody seems to be throwing around the word "optimal" but not asking "optimal to whom?".

The article was kind of long-winded so I didn't read it all. But has a catchy title. So is the title about

a) Optimal amount of fraud to the society at large?

b) Optimal amount of fraud to the businesses which suffer a loss because of it?

c) Optimal amount of fraud to the customers of such businesses?

d) Optimal amount of fraud to the chief of fraud-prevention department?

e) Optimal amount of fraud to the fraudsters?

Does he mention this somewhere? Last time I spoke to him, he was working on Stripe Press, his interest in fraud and spam prevention long predates his work at Stripe.

repeating myself but

> ts better to let 10 criminals get away with it than to convict 1 innocent person.

is arguably false. it forgets that 10 criminals had 10 or more victims. If you optimize for the least number of victims then it's easily possible that convicting a few innocent people has a net positive in lowering the total number of victims including the victims of being wrongly convicted

to put it another way, perfect is the enemy of good. In this case if in pursuit of perfection of having zero wrongly convicted you end up causing more victims of criminals then you've arguably failed

Since perfect accuracy is impossible, you must choose a balance between precision and recall.

That’s debatable.

I also believe that it’s better to let 10 criminals get away with it than it is to wrongly convict 1 innocent person. And I’m fairly sure that all the innocent people who were unfortunate enough to go through the court system would agree with me.

Also, not every crime must have a victim. There are a million victimless crimes.

Yes, it’s also debatable whether those should even be crimes (in my opinion - no), but the argument that 1 crime = at least 1 victim is flat out false.

1 crime can easily be more than one vicitm.

also you too made the exact same error. you discounted the victims of the criminals. yes the 1 innocent wrongly convicted is bad but what about all the innocents that are victims of the criminals. You absolutely have to add those innocents to your total of how many innocents you helped

if you catch 10 serial killers and 1 happens to be innocent you still saved 9-18-27 lives in exchange for one innocent. If because of over zealousness of zero innocents being caught you only catch 5 serial killers you saved 1 extra life and forfeited 5 to 15 others

You arguably believe what I'm saying. no law enforcement can be perfect so it's guaranteed that innocent people will be mistakenly convicted. The only logical conclusion is if you truly believe there must be zero innocents convicted then you believe law enforcement should not exist since there will never be perfect law enforcement

> 1 crime can easily be more than one vicitm.

Yes, but 10000 crimes can also have 0 victims.

it doesn't forget that. it implies that you shouldn't optimize for the least number of victims. it's cool to disagree with that and think about why or why not, but please actually engage with the idea rather than just assuming they didn't think it through at all.

> The optimal amount of crime in a society is non-zero because a society with zero crime would be a dystopian police state where innocent people sometimes get caught up in the justice system's net to make sure it catches all of the criminals.

At this point you're just playing with the definition of crime. I would argue that it is criminal to deprive an innocent person of their freedom, and challenge that your proposed scenario is actually "zero crime".

Secondly, you talk of catching "all of the criminals". In a "zero crime" environment there are no criminals - by definition if there is a criminal, then a crime has been committed at some point.

All that said I agree with your larger point - the cost of freedom is that people are not constrained before the fact from committing crime, and that's a good thing on the whole.

i hope you’re trolling

do you see how with the framing your proposing it’s extremely difficult to reason? might even be impossible.

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