> 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.
Does it affect their reproductive chances? If not, then natural selection has nothing to do with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
> 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.
Are you saying that people in the first case are taking their money and burning it? Because if not I don’t see how you could make that statement without more research - if the flat earthers are printing books, selling videos, hosting conferences, going on “fact finding” missions, etc. then they’re generating economic value as well. Much less of it in absolute terms given the relative population sizes but you can’t just assume everyone is Scrooge McDuck sitting on a huge pile of money.
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.
I've talked to a lot of people who participate in this stuff, they always know the odds exactly. They're fully aware. It's a combination of greed, thrill and attention seeking that doesn't deserve sympathy. Everybody who participates in hawk tuah coin crypto rug pulls knows how stupid it is, they just think they're the smart ones fleecing everybody else. Those people deserve the "sucker born every minute" treatment. That is their worldview, they just think they're the exception.
I have this preference even if I am not the one being clever (so, via the veil of ignorance).