After 33 years teaching English and writing, I think I can say with authority that you're a talented writer: snappy prose style, clear structure of argumentation, writing on subjects worth analyzing with passion and precision. I enjoyed your posts, and look forward to more fine work in the future. Keep us posted!
(Also, I'd be remiss not to recommend his The Plain Person's Guide to Plain Text Social Science and other resources, at https://kieranhealy.org/resources/.)
Python is kind of terrible for visualization. There's a tweet from Francois Chollet where he calls matplotlib the worst piece of software that I'm the Python ecosystem, and I agree. But it's what most Python folks use.
I second doing visuals on R! That language is made for data analysis because it is vectorized (you can easily select and manipulate entire columns, rather having to iterate over each row). Visuals are pretty decent, though not perhaps as nice as Python/Stata, unless you use libraries (and there are plenty). I think if you give it a try, you will really like it!
Libraries in R that will really make your life easier!
ggplot - For data visualization. Custom colors, output, panels, etc.
stargazer - I use this for outputting model statistics (regression, logit, probit). Base R kinda sucks compared to Stata but with this library the neat output is comparable if not better!
dplyr and tidy - one word: *piping*. You can "chain" multiple operations on a data set (filtering, sorting, pivoting) and it makes data exploration so easy and convenient.
R definitely, if you’re big on visualization. Look at a Pluralsight subscription, YouTube, Reddit, DataCamp. Huge untapped need for data talent out there.
If you are going to be messing around in R, you will probably want to learn how to do data cleaning/manipulations. This is the best free resource for that: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
I'm pretty sympathetic with Marc's free speech stance, but there's something that I think isn't common knowledge outside of tech- even the very free speech places back when they did much less moderation did a *ton* of moderation to keep out spam and CSAM, which is extremely illegal to host. It is not possible to maintain a popular online space without that moderation work, which is a pretty fundamental problem with the common carrier model.
Speaking of common carriers, I do not wish to purchase a warranty and I am uninterested in staying at a Marriott hotel at this time. Please stop calling.
Thanks for noting that. I think they should definitely keep getting rid of CSAM, which is why I said legal speech! Why do you think that's a problem with the common carrier model? Why can't they just continue modding CSAM, and stop modding Racism?
Both spam and CSAM have a grey zone problem. There is an official database of CSAM image hashes that all the big providers use, but there is still the problem of novel images and hash evasion, so you still have to run a moderation team, and you still need to constantly be making the decision "is this CSAM or is this permissible porn?"
The infamous /r/jailbait is a good illustration of how this breaks down. Were the photos of underage girls in street clothes pornography? Probably not. Was gathering them in a single place with sexualized captions for a group leer deeply gross? Yes. If TV news and congress critters characterize it as child pornography, how wrong are they, and how much of your life do you want to spend defending that?
This is also how we got to trying to censor the lab leak hypothesis. Back when Twitter was young and governments didn't realize it had power, they could have Islamic State Official dunking on the CIA in it's mentions and it was just a weird sign of the times. But Twitter is now recognized as important, so they have more rules imposed, and have to deal with government influence campaigns.
People like to think of influence campaigns as "find and block the bots", but it's not that simple. There are bots, there are official representatives, there are sponsored voices. The United States is very good at this- this is what the National Endowment for Democracy does- but everyone else does it too. One of the big lessons of 2016 was that stopping sources wasn't enough to stop misinformation, so... Here we are on the other side, with Twitter, Facebook etc trying decide which ideas need to be put back in the bottle.
Spam is also filled with grey. Chaos agents like Ye Olde GNAA spamming slurs? Definitely spam, ban 'em, no one wants to have to wade through that. Viagra bots? Easy. But what about marketing blogs? Or podcasts that act as conduits for other people's marketing? You can't ban Fresh Air though, people like that. So everyone makes a bunch of judgement calls and draws the line in different places.
The internet is also just... A fundamentally different beast than phones. Phones are point to point and private. You can do that on the internet, but most of our debates are about public broadcast on the internet. Racists may call each other on the phone, but you can't count the number of times they use a slur, publish a paper, and cause a firestorm- all of that communication is illegible to the academic surveillance state. I think we're stuck with arbitrary norms and a weaponized, partisan Overton window. There's no law that could be written that would ever strike the right balance or make people happy- we just have to middle through pretending "I know it when I see it" is guidance.
Hi Marc! Thanks for your work here, I've enjoyed your posts.
I'd like you to consider that the reason you "don’t think [pre-speech-restrictions Reddit] was that bad" is that you're not a member of a marginalized group. Women, particularly Black women, fat women, and politically feminist women, found their subreddits brigaded by members of now-banned subreddits on a regular basis, making their own subreddits functionally unusable and/or creating a ton of work for volunteer moderators. My Reddit account is 15 years old and I can tell you things are much much better now than they were 6 years ago.
No rules whatsoever will often lead to spaces becoming dominated by the worst people. Finding the right balance is really, really hard, and will never satisfy everyone.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
I read most of the article, then looked at the date: 2017. The reality is that the polarization has gotten so much worse since then and the illiberal nature on the left has gotten truly frightening. It’s kind of quaint that the commencement speech was anti-Trump. Today it would be about the violence and illegitimacy of white people. Look at this speech at medical ground rounds at Yale : https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
Well I am a Jew, and I do remember a great deal of anti-Semitism on the platform. Make no mistake -- it's horrible that people have to see racism/sexism/etc anywhere. But why do we endure it if it's on a street corner but not on the internet equivalent? My point was that it's equally troubling whether on the street corner or on a subreddit, which is not to say it's not troubling, but I think the best remedy is to try to avoid it and have a good day regardless.
Been on Reddit for about 12 years now, and this largely tracks with my own experience. I remember when the "Chimpire" and /r/fatpeoplehate inundated much of the site with an endless stream of vitriol and hatred. Reddit's 2015 ban on those subs finally made the site usable again.
Related to the crypto complaint above, I also think that “everything is permitted” is better understood as “let the strongest or most organized dominate”.
There’s a real problem in my mind about how deregulated speech plays into the hands of government and criminal propaganda strategies- they can fund a bunch of trolls to functionally make sure nobody can talk about whatever matters to them, and the response is just, “hey, free speech”.
Hi Marc. I enjoyed this final post. Smart to lay out two positions where you disagree with Matt. It makes for an interesting comments section. Plus, crypto gets all the clicks these days. Well done and good luck in the future.
Crypto isn’t a useful currency until I can buy groceries with it and not worry about it’s value spiking the next week. Until then, it’s just a weird and environmentally iffy investment vehicle.
I went to a sandwich shop the other day in Keene, NH and they took bitcoin. I thought it was weird. Fundamentally, I think you're right. BTC is an investment vehicle with a use in evading governments. It's not going to be a widely used currency in America, I think, because of the unstable price
Right - so - if it's primary use is invading governments, I think I have to push back on some of your thinking on it.
Should left-leaning folk be more skeptical of state power? Absolutely!
But ... is the solution to stuff we don't like about state power to create at technology that makes a huge end-run around the state? Seems like a poor substitute for the hard work of fixing what the state is doing.
I'm not anti crypto per se, but I think that what some people expect of crypto is a fantasy.
Kind of reminds me of the seasteading movement a bit.
They seem to believe that if there are powers in the world doing things you don't like, or restricting your freedoms in ways you can't tolerate, that you can avoid conflict with these powers, and simply evade them by moving somewhere else.
In other words, "Exit" vs "Voice", to use that dichotomy.
I think some people want to use crypto a little like virtual reality, and "exit" "upwards" into a kind of virtual space.
But our real physical world, which as far as we know is base reality, underlies all this. Any virtual reality we could create would rely on real physical computers in the real world, which would come under the control ultimately of whoever controlled the territory in which they were located.
It's similar with bitcoin. Yes, it's decentralized. But you'll need the internet to access or use it. And the internet is composed of real physical world infrastructure. Russia has been looking at being able to separate "their" internet from the world's internet.
Yes you can store bitcoin offline, but to actually make a transaction, you need to be able to communicate across the world.
Also, if you want to use bitcoin or other cyrpto to buy physical goods in the real world, that'll need to be legal where you live, and it might not be.
Otherwise you'll find yourself in the same situation as a mobster who has to launder his ill gotten cash gains through front businesses to convert them into real, legal, usable money in a bank account.
I think the evasion of weed and gambling laws is pretty sympathetic (prostitution more of a gray area—just because it’s difficult to distinguish between voluntary sex work and trafficking, exploitation, etc doesn’t mean we should err on the side of decriminalization, given the human stakes involved). However, crypto isn’t just being used to pay for criminal activity, but to extort for it, as we just saw with the Colonial Pipeline thing. That seems like an issue the government has a clear interest in cracking down on.
Regarding moderation, as someone who was involved on the margins of blogging in the 2000s, I think forbidding platforms from moderating posts would be an infringement of its own. It takes only a small number of committed trolls or misanthropes to ruin an online space, even aside from issues of incitement and harassment.
Those disagreements aside, thanks for your work for SB! And on a personal note, I am also a poker player in LA, so if you’d ever want to make a trip to Commerce or the Bike or something, reply to this with some way I could reach out.
As someone who has been reading MY's writing for several decades, I want to thank you for the many thousands of typos that I did not read in his Slow Boring columns. The general level of clarity was higher, too, so you were doing more than mere spell-checking.
This, though:
"Some people think Matt is racist (I think that’s unlikely..."
Did you mean to sound that agnostic about whether Matt's a racist? By unlikely you mean e.g., "I put the odds of Matt's being a racist no higher than 20%"? 'Cause, that's not really a ringing endorsement. Reminds me of Matt's own hilarious Vox piece on Ted Cruz, which could be summarized as:
"Some people think that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer (I think that's unlikely...."
So I'm guessing that you meant to express skepticism about something else, e.g. whether he'd be censored under a more restrictive regime?
Anyhow -- thanks for all of the graphs, as well as all of the much-improved 'graphs, and best of luck with your next endeavors.
"Some people use crypto for cybercrime, but I’d just fund the cybercrime police rather than eliminate people’s investments and ability to send each other money easily without government control."
I think the cybercrime situation is much worse than this sentence implies and probably much worse than most people are aware of. I would describe the current state of cybercrime as _complete and total lawlessness_. The problem isn't that we're not funding "cyber police", it's that we have no idea what any kind of proper defense against criminal assaults on normal people would look like.
My company was attacked by a Vietnamese software piracy gang. We were _lucky_ in that this is some of the least sophisticated cybercrime you'll run into. My boss spoke to the FBI - not because he could get them on the phone but because they had contacted him for unrelated reasons. He was told that if the value of the loss was less than $10M and it didn't touch one of their agenda items (basically: terrorism) they weren't going to touch it.
Imagine living in a world where a brick and mortar family owned business can be robbed, lose $9M of inventory, and the police go "we're not going to even open a case, this is too small for us."
So...maybe the cyberpolice are under-funded. But what would they have done? The attack originated in Viet Nam (where we think the perps were), but they fenced the goods to a very sketchy company based in Hong Kong that's incorporated under Polish law. (Polish law provides them some odd protections that make going after them even more annoying than you'd normally expect.)
We did what everyone has to do in the current situation: we defended our selves (basically, wasted our internal resources on putting up a bunch of anti-crime defensive stuff, taking away from making our product better) and kept our mouth shut because everyone's nervous to spook customers (who might already have low trust in e-commerce).
Had we not defended our selves, our credit card processors would have cut us off from the finance system like a gangrene-infected leg and we'd have taken an even bigger financial hit. Imagine a grocery where, because someone held it up and robbed the register, Visa pulls their terminals.
My point is not to play the world's tiniest violin for the company I work for - it's just to point out that (1) cybercrime is going on all the time and (2) is massively under the radar and thus hasnt' gotten the kind of "tough on crime" political response that physical crime would get and (3) is hugely helped by crypto-currencies that allow international cybercriminals to avoid state power.
It was hard enough to fight them because the tech flows over international borders, but now that they have a payment system that functions, it's really open season.
The classic progressive complaint about crypto is the environmental footprint, which is arguably down-stream of our inability to price pollution, but is still a fact on the ground in 2021. I'd argue that cybercrime should also be a big complaint, is arguably down-stream from our inability to crack down on illegal online behavior across national borders, but is also a fact on the ground in 2021.
Great work, Marc. Your takes are hot, they're quick, and most importantly they display an openness to human variety that is ever-more-lacking in left-leaning spaces. (Used to be that's basically what defined left-leaning spaces...) Just because something is gross - or dangerous, or unhealthy - doesn't mean it should be illegal. And just because something crosses the line into actually damaging society, doesn't mean that banning it is the most effective or moral response. Don't lose that openness to variety, that instinct to allow room for things you find distasteful. The world needs it more than ever.
Dear Marc,
After 33 years teaching English and writing, I think I can say with authority that you're a talented writer: snappy prose style, clear structure of argumentation, writing on subjects worth analyzing with passion and precision. I enjoyed your posts, and look forward to more fine work in the future. Keep us posted!
Thanks Kevin!
If you make your figures with Python or R, most people will be too insecure to criticize them.
Have a good place to learn this stuff online? Would love to learn some viz with R or webscraping (and data stuff) with Python
Kieran Healy's book, Data Visualization, covers R and ggplot. It's also available online at https://socviz.co/.
(Also, I'd be remiss not to recommend his The Plain Person's Guide to Plain Text Social Science and other resources, at https://kieranhealy.org/resources/.)
Python is kind of terrible for visualization. There's a tweet from Francois Chollet where he calls matplotlib the worst piece of software that I'm the Python ecosystem, and I agree. But it's what most Python folks use.
I second doing visuals on R! That language is made for data analysis because it is vectorized (you can easily select and manipulate entire columns, rather having to iterate over each row). Visuals are pretty decent, though not perhaps as nice as Python/Stata, unless you use libraries (and there are plenty). I think if you give it a try, you will really like it!
Tutorials
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/r/index.htm
YouTube channel of dude who demos how to do things in R, especially if you come from Stata
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnrk6zX2TK9QfkmIMOY4JWQ
Forecasting with R
https://otexts.com/fpp2/
Libraries in R that will really make your life easier!
ggplot - For data visualization. Custom colors, output, panels, etc.
stargazer - I use this for outputting model statistics (regression, logit, probit). Base R kinda sucks compared to Stata but with this library the neat output is comparable if not better!
dplyr and tidy - one word: *piping*. You can "chain" multiple operations on a data set (filtering, sorting, pivoting) and it makes data exploration so easy and convenient.
R definitely, if you’re big on visualization. Look at a Pluralsight subscription, YouTube, Reddit, DataCamp. Huge untapped need for data talent out there.
If you are going to be messing around in R, you will probably want to learn how to do data cleaning/manipulations. This is the best free resource for that: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
I recommend running Python in a Jupyter notebook via Docker. RStudio for R is also super easy to set up.
Took me a while to figure out how to do this so just message me if you want some quick start tips, happy to help!
Hey, don't give away our secrets.
I've always used grace or gnuplot to make plots, but my students all prefer python. At least we all can mock the Excel crowd.
Excel foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr
(I can’t learn new things.)
You killed it Marc. I enjoyed your writing and wish you success and fulfillment.
Thanks John!
I'm pretty sympathetic with Marc's free speech stance, but there's something that I think isn't common knowledge outside of tech- even the very free speech places back when they did much less moderation did a *ton* of moderation to keep out spam and CSAM, which is extremely illegal to host. It is not possible to maintain a popular online space without that moderation work, which is a pretty fundamental problem with the common carrier model.
Speaking of common carriers, I do not wish to purchase a warranty and I am uninterested in staying at a Marriott hotel at this time. Please stop calling.
Thanks for noting that. I think they should definitely keep getting rid of CSAM, which is why I said legal speech! Why do you think that's a problem with the common carrier model? Why can't they just continue modding CSAM, and stop modding Racism?
Both spam and CSAM have a grey zone problem. There is an official database of CSAM image hashes that all the big providers use, but there is still the problem of novel images and hash evasion, so you still have to run a moderation team, and you still need to constantly be making the decision "is this CSAM or is this permissible porn?"
The infamous /r/jailbait is a good illustration of how this breaks down. Were the photos of underage girls in street clothes pornography? Probably not. Was gathering them in a single place with sexualized captions for a group leer deeply gross? Yes. If TV news and congress critters characterize it as child pornography, how wrong are they, and how much of your life do you want to spend defending that?
This is also how we got to trying to censor the lab leak hypothesis. Back when Twitter was young and governments didn't realize it had power, they could have Islamic State Official dunking on the CIA in it's mentions and it was just a weird sign of the times. But Twitter is now recognized as important, so they have more rules imposed, and have to deal with government influence campaigns.
People like to think of influence campaigns as "find and block the bots", but it's not that simple. There are bots, there are official representatives, there are sponsored voices. The United States is very good at this- this is what the National Endowment for Democracy does- but everyone else does it too. One of the big lessons of 2016 was that stopping sources wasn't enough to stop misinformation, so... Here we are on the other side, with Twitter, Facebook etc trying decide which ideas need to be put back in the bottle.
Spam is also filled with grey. Chaos agents like Ye Olde GNAA spamming slurs? Definitely spam, ban 'em, no one wants to have to wade through that. Viagra bots? Easy. But what about marketing blogs? Or podcasts that act as conduits for other people's marketing? You can't ban Fresh Air though, people like that. So everyone makes a bunch of judgement calls and draws the line in different places.
The internet is also just... A fundamentally different beast than phones. Phones are point to point and private. You can do that on the internet, but most of our debates are about public broadcast on the internet. Racists may call each other on the phone, but you can't count the number of times they use a slur, publish a paper, and cause a firestorm- all of that communication is illegible to the academic surveillance state. I think we're stuck with arbitrary norms and a weaponized, partisan Overton window. There's no law that could be written that would ever strike the right balance or make people happy- we just have to middle through pretending "I know it when I see it" is guidance.
Thanks for this. Really interesting and a great aid in understanding some of the difficulties in this space.
Three cheers for Marc!
Hi Marc! Thanks for your work here, I've enjoyed your posts.
I'd like you to consider that the reason you "don’t think [pre-speech-restrictions Reddit] was that bad" is that you're not a member of a marginalized group. Women, particularly Black women, fat women, and politically feminist women, found their subreddits brigaded by members of now-banned subreddits on a regular basis, making their own subreddits functionally unusable and/or creating a ton of work for volunteer moderators. My Reddit account is 15 years old and I can tell you things are much much better now than they were 6 years ago.
No rules whatsoever will often lead to spaces becoming dominated by the worst people. Finding the right balance is really, really hard, and will never satisfy everyone.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
I read most of the article, then looked at the date: 2017. The reality is that the polarization has gotten so much worse since then and the illiberal nature on the left has gotten truly frightening. It’s kind of quaint that the commencement speech was anti-Trump. Today it would be about the violence and illegitimacy of white people. Look at this speech at medical ground rounds at Yale : https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
Well I am a Jew, and I do remember a great deal of anti-Semitism on the platform. Make no mistake -- it's horrible that people have to see racism/sexism/etc anywhere. But why do we endure it if it's on a street corner but not on the internet equivalent? My point was that it's equally troubling whether on the street corner or on a subreddit, which is not to say it's not troubling, but I think the best remedy is to try to avoid it and have a good day regardless.
Been on Reddit for about 12 years now, and this largely tracks with my own experience. I remember when the "Chimpire" and /r/fatpeoplehate inundated much of the site with an endless stream of vitriol and hatred. Reddit's 2015 ban on those subs finally made the site usable again.
Related to the crypto complaint above, I also think that “everything is permitted” is better understood as “let the strongest or most organized dominate”.
There’s a real problem in my mind about how deregulated speech plays into the hands of government and criminal propaganda strategies- they can fund a bunch of trolls to functionally make sure nobody can talk about whatever matters to them, and the response is just, “hey, free speech”.
I side with Marc vs Matt on both positions.
People on Twitter or generally Douche bags. I like your chart.
It would be great if you hung around the comments.
Where and what you are you going to school for?
I go to Dartmouth, and I study economics and history. I'll be around, and thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Do you get to keep the snazzy AUTHOR badge? :)
Was wondering this too.
Dartmouth is too cold.
My nephew goes there lol
Hi Marc. I enjoyed this final post. Smart to lay out two positions where you disagree with Matt. It makes for an interesting comments section. Plus, crypto gets all the clicks these days. Well done and good luck in the future.
Crypto isn’t a useful currency until I can buy groceries with it and not worry about it’s value spiking the next week. Until then, it’s just a weird and environmentally iffy investment vehicle.
I went to a sandwich shop the other day in Keene, NH and they took bitcoin. I thought it was weird. Fundamentally, I think you're right. BTC is an investment vehicle with a use in evading governments. It's not going to be a widely used currency in America, I think, because of the unstable price
Right - so - if it's primary use is invading governments, I think I have to push back on some of your thinking on it.
Should left-leaning folk be more skeptical of state power? Absolutely!
But ... is the solution to stuff we don't like about state power to create at technology that makes a huge end-run around the state? Seems like a poor substitute for the hard work of fixing what the state is doing.
I'm not anti crypto per se, but I think that what some people expect of crypto is a fantasy.
Kind of reminds me of the seasteading movement a bit.
They seem to believe that if there are powers in the world doing things you don't like, or restricting your freedoms in ways you can't tolerate, that you can avoid conflict with these powers, and simply evade them by moving somewhere else.
In other words, "Exit" vs "Voice", to use that dichotomy.
I think some people want to use crypto a little like virtual reality, and "exit" "upwards" into a kind of virtual space.
But our real physical world, which as far as we know is base reality, underlies all this. Any virtual reality we could create would rely on real physical computers in the real world, which would come under the control ultimately of whoever controlled the territory in which they were located.
It's similar with bitcoin. Yes, it's decentralized. But you'll need the internet to access or use it. And the internet is composed of real physical world infrastructure. Russia has been looking at being able to separate "their" internet from the world's internet.
Yes you can store bitcoin offline, but to actually make a transaction, you need to be able to communicate across the world.
Also, if you want to use bitcoin or other cyrpto to buy physical goods in the real world, that'll need to be legal where you live, and it might not be.
Otherwise you'll find yourself in the same situation as a mobster who has to launder his ill gotten cash gains through front businesses to convert them into real, legal, usable money in a bank account.
It wouldn't be $20 on a transaction this tiny. Might not even be a fee at all
Does this mean there is an open internship position with Slow Boring
I think the evasion of weed and gambling laws is pretty sympathetic (prostitution more of a gray area—just because it’s difficult to distinguish between voluntary sex work and trafficking, exploitation, etc doesn’t mean we should err on the side of decriminalization, given the human stakes involved). However, crypto isn’t just being used to pay for criminal activity, but to extort for it, as we just saw with the Colonial Pipeline thing. That seems like an issue the government has a clear interest in cracking down on.
Regarding moderation, as someone who was involved on the margins of blogging in the 2000s, I think forbidding platforms from moderating posts would be an infringement of its own. It takes only a small number of committed trolls or misanthropes to ruin an online space, even aside from issues of incitement and harassment.
Those disagreements aside, thanks for your work for SB! And on a personal note, I am also a poker player in LA, so if you’d ever want to make a trip to Commerce or the Bike or something, reply to this with some way I could reach out.
Dear Marc,
As someone who has been reading MY's writing for several decades, I want to thank you for the many thousands of typos that I did not read in his Slow Boring columns. The general level of clarity was higher, too, so you were doing more than mere spell-checking.
This, though:
"Some people think Matt is racist (I think that’s unlikely..."
Did you mean to sound that agnostic about whether Matt's a racist? By unlikely you mean e.g., "I put the odds of Matt's being a racist no higher than 20%"? 'Cause, that's not really a ringing endorsement. Reminds me of Matt's own hilarious Vox piece on Ted Cruz, which could be summarized as:
"Some people think that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer (I think that's unlikely...."
So I'm guessing that you meant to express skepticism about something else, e.g. whether he'd be censored under a more restrictive regime?
Anyhow -- thanks for all of the graphs, as well as all of the much-improved 'graphs, and best of luck with your next endeavors.
I took it as ironic understatement, and/or saying that these issues are slippery because they’re resistant to objective proof.
Marc, best of luck in your next endeavor!
I want to nitpick one detail of your hot takes:
"Some people use crypto for cybercrime, but I’d just fund the cybercrime police rather than eliminate people’s investments and ability to send each other money easily without government control."
I think the cybercrime situation is much worse than this sentence implies and probably much worse than most people are aware of. I would describe the current state of cybercrime as _complete and total lawlessness_. The problem isn't that we're not funding "cyber police", it's that we have no idea what any kind of proper defense against criminal assaults on normal people would look like.
My company was attacked by a Vietnamese software piracy gang. We were _lucky_ in that this is some of the least sophisticated cybercrime you'll run into. My boss spoke to the FBI - not because he could get them on the phone but because they had contacted him for unrelated reasons. He was told that if the value of the loss was less than $10M and it didn't touch one of their agenda items (basically: terrorism) they weren't going to touch it.
Imagine living in a world where a brick and mortar family owned business can be robbed, lose $9M of inventory, and the police go "we're not going to even open a case, this is too small for us."
So...maybe the cyberpolice are under-funded. But what would they have done? The attack originated in Viet Nam (where we think the perps were), but they fenced the goods to a very sketchy company based in Hong Kong that's incorporated under Polish law. (Polish law provides them some odd protections that make going after them even more annoying than you'd normally expect.)
We did what everyone has to do in the current situation: we defended our selves (basically, wasted our internal resources on putting up a bunch of anti-crime defensive stuff, taking away from making our product better) and kept our mouth shut because everyone's nervous to spook customers (who might already have low trust in e-commerce).
Had we not defended our selves, our credit card processors would have cut us off from the finance system like a gangrene-infected leg and we'd have taken an even bigger financial hit. Imagine a grocery where, because someone held it up and robbed the register, Visa pulls their terminals.
My point is not to play the world's tiniest violin for the company I work for - it's just to point out that (1) cybercrime is going on all the time and (2) is massively under the radar and thus hasnt' gotten the kind of "tough on crime" political response that physical crime would get and (3) is hugely helped by crypto-currencies that allow international cybercriminals to avoid state power.
It was hard enough to fight them because the tech flows over international borders, but now that they have a payment system that functions, it's really open season.
The classic progressive complaint about crypto is the environmental footprint, which is arguably down-stream of our inability to price pollution, but is still a fact on the ground in 2021. I'd argue that cybercrime should also be a big complaint, is arguably down-stream from our inability to crack down on illegal online behavior across national borders, but is also a fact on the ground in 2021.
Very interesting. As a crypto skeptic, I've long said the only* major application of cryptocurrency was to enable cybercrime and ransomware.
That said, thank you to Marc as well for addressing the other side of the argument. That's what makes this site worthwhile. Wishing you the best.
*I've also heard some decent arguments that it helps with remittances to some countries. Still undecided about this.
Great work, Marc. Your takes are hot, they're quick, and most importantly they display an openness to human variety that is ever-more-lacking in left-leaning spaces. (Used to be that's basically what defined left-leaning spaces...) Just because something is gross - or dangerous, or unhealthy - doesn't mean it should be illegal. And just because something crosses the line into actually damaging society, doesn't mean that banning it is the most effective or moral response. Don't lose that openness to variety, that instinct to allow room for things you find distasteful. The world needs it more than ever.
Thank you for all your work here Marc, I fleshing this excellent post! Wishing you all the best in your future endeavors.
And thank you Marc!