Viral "Outrageous Quote" and "Outrageous Paraphrase" Stories

Here’s the thing about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Carson and other people who get savaged for saying dumb or offensive things. I don’t know how mad I should be at these guys, because everyone says dumb and offensive things all the time. If a plain vanilla Democrat, or Republican, or moderate, were to sit down with me and carefully explain his worldview, this person would inevitably spew a lot of non-truths, half-truths, and morally outrageous ideas about the use of government power. Some of these statements would deeply offend my intelligence, and others would deeply offend my moral sensibilities. I should say "do"  instead of "would" because this kind of unserious garbage shows up on my Facebook feed all the time.

You want to confiscate the wealth of private citizens and use it to fund your half-baked, hare-brained social programs? I find your casual acceptance of theft morally offensive. The empirical record of social programs like the one you champion is probably weak and you’re probably woefully ignorant of it. These kinds of ideas are generally offensive to me on two counts.

You want to imprison people for buying and selling chemical substances that you disapprove of? I find your implicit assumption that the government owns our bodies extremely offensive. The historical record of drug prohibition is one of failure, despite paying enormous costs. Once again, a common idea is offensive to me on many levels.

I could multiply these examples many-fold. People are too flippant about important topics like immigration restrictions, foreign wars, economic "stimulus" programs, socialized medicine, socialized education, socialized retirement plans, and pretty much everything else the government does.

Everyone does this a little. Everyone carries around these half-assed ideas that they’ve never really thought about, but which are extremely offensive or idiotic when examined in the light of day. And everyone says speculative things that they don’t really believe while free-balling during a good bull-session. I’m not going to walk around in a constant state of outrage, denouncing people left and right for a normal human activity. I'm not going to speculate on what is Milo's real motive or what he really believes when he says something stupid, admits it was stupid, apologizes, and tells us he actually believes something completely opposite. I'm going to assume he's telling the truth. I'm no Milo fan, I just think everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt. I've caught myself saying things I don't actually believe and making arguments I don't find convincing in far-out bull-sessions. I reserve the right to repudiate these things afterwards, just as I reserve the right to indulge some wild speculation in the heat of the  moment. 

Suppose the Privacy Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Consider two axes that quantify the world we live in: weak vs strong privacy and permissive vs puritanical standards of judging people. If we have strong privacy, puritanical standards of judgment are acceptable because we can keep private all those things that we don’t want our neighbors to know about. If we have weak privacy, the puritanical standard would be intolerable because everyone would be judging every offhand comment you make and every behind-closed-doors action you take with other consenting adults. Puritanical standards require strong privacy. A permissive world allows for either strong or weak privacy. It’s nice to know you can keep a secret (strong privacy), but in a permissive world nobody’s judging you anyway.

But consider that the privacy genie might be out of the bottle. Perhaps everything you say is said within range of a microphone, speech-to-text software converts it to a text file and time-stamps and location-stamps everything that’s said, and your enemies can scour the record (or simply text-search your entire history of speech) for something incriminating. All these technologies already exist. The microphone is your smart phone, or possibly even someone else’s smartphone. Time- and location-stamping are simple enough, and speech-to-text software is already pretty sophisticated and getting better all the time. Perhaps some social justice warriors are trying to sick the vengeance of the internet on you for some dumb comment you made years ago. Or maybe someone is suing you and trying to cast you in a bad light. Or someone wants to blackmail you over all the cynical remarks you make about your employer. The ammunition is lying out there in the master log of every conversation you’ve ever had.

Or consider that someone hacks your Fitbit and sees a bunch of rapid wrist-motions followed by hand-washing and then a sudden decrease in heart-rate. We mostly assume that everyone does these things, but for some reason it’s incriminating for the whole world to know about a specific instance of it.

There is likely no way to stop these eventualities, other than going full Luddite and halting all technological progress. A few stop-gap privacy laws can forestall the inevitable, perhaps, but there’s no reasonable way to stop it. (Privacy laws, you say? I’ll just go on the dark web and buy your full spoken word record, logged with ubiquitous malware infecting most smartphones. You only use a closed-platform Apple phone, you say? What about all the people who sit near you? Can you vouch for their phones?) We can’t legislate our way out of this problem, but we can adopt cultural norms that make it easier to live with. We could adopt a norm that it’s sleazy to scour someone’s private life for incriminating quotes and statements. We can learn to cool our jets when an out-of-context quote upsets our delicate sensibilities. I imagine a conversation like the following:

Person 1: “Did you see what [disgraced celebrity] said! Isn’t that disgusting!”
Person 2: “People say stuff like that all the time. Here is data on 300 million people’s full speech history proving it. A proclivity to say such things doesn't meaningfully correlate with any kind of anti-social behavior, either. It's just dumb stuff people say during a good bull-session.”
Person 1: "Oh, it looks like your right. I should learn to chill the fuck out, huh?"
Person 2: "Let's look up your history while we're on here..."
Person 1: "No, no. I'll be good."
Person 2: "You'll stop bringing shit like this to me, then?"
Person 1: "I'll stop."

This world of zero privacy might seem scary and creepy. But I would hope that sensibilities change to adapt to it. When someone claims that a quote is being taken out of context, the record is right there to prove it. (Then again, that's true today and the outraged crusaders don't care to add in the readily available, easily searchable context.) If someone says, "So what, people say stuff like that all the time," there would be an open record of millions of people to verify this claim. We could check whether a quote is truly representative of a person's thinking, or whether more frequent and more recent statements by the same person contradict it. Eventually we wouldn't even be tempted to check these things, because we'd realize there is a high base-rate for cynical or offensive language in private conversation and that it doesn't meaningfully correlate with a person's overall virtue. We'd learn to dismiss these "outrageous quote" stories (even "outrageous paraphrase" stories) because we know someone with bad intentions went fishing for dirt. Once that becomes a common understanding, those viral outrageous quote stories will stop happening. And then we can all move on with our lives. I'm not advocating for zero privacy or trying to get you to like it. I find it really creepy myself. Honestly I don't fully trust my fellow creatures to adopt the appropriate norms to deal with this world. But assuming the zero privacy world is inevitable, I want to strongly advocate for a "be less judgmental" norm.

Licensing Drug Users

In previous posts, I argued that you can simply tax drugs rather than prohibiting them. However severe you want the deterrent to be, a tax is strictly speaking a better policy than outright prohibition. Too many people are still using drugs, you say? Well, ramp up the tax and watch demand fall. (“They will just go to the black market like they do today?” Gee, it’s a good thing prohibition stops that from happening.)

I anticipated an objection to this argument. Perhaps prohibition doesn’t simply increase the cost per unit of the prohibited substance, same as a tax does. It throws up large fixed costs to acquiring the drugs in the first place. The user first needs to find a dealer. He needs to consider, categorically, whether it’s worth the legal risk and effort of finding a supplier. He needs to go to bumpin’ parties or shady parts of town to make his hookup. He can’t just waltz into the local convenience mart and buy some. So in this sense, prohibition achieves something that a taxation regime does not: the user faces a high fixed cost to drug use (in addition to a per-unit “tax” that prohibition achieves by making the drugs more expensive). But this fixed cost really only needs to be paid once (or only once in a while). It’s kind of like the “activation energy” for a chemical reaction. Once overcome, you’re good to go.

The answer to this objection: license drug users. Make them go to a few special classes before they can, say, use heroin. Once they have been thoroughly lectured about things like dosage, safety, and treatment of overdoses, they get a special card and can use drugs with impunity. Unlike the time wasted searching for an illegal dealer, the time spent in drug safety classes would actually have a social benefit. Users of potentially dangerous substances can learn how to avoid an overdose, which drugs to avoid in combination, which drugs to use with a “spotter” who can call for help if needed, which antidote to have on hand, etc. Age, illness, and multi-drug use are huge risk factors for overdose; informing users of these risks would be a lot more effective than a general deterrence policy.

The licensing regime would be better targeted than the current prohibition regime. It would hit poor, marginally employed drug users in a way that "illegal market search costs" don't. These people probably know a lot of other drug users and can easily find a source if they just ask a few people in their social network. These are the problematic drug users that drug policy should be trying to address. Middle- and upper-class, educated users with careers and families are less likely to develop bad habits because they have more to lose. Their lifestyle has a built-in deterrent considering that a problematic drug habit can destroy their career or tear apart their family. The current regime is probably prohibitive for these folks because they often don't have the "shady" criminal element in their social networks. In other words, the current regime (general drug prohibition) is targeted to the potential drug users who we don't really need to worry about and misses the people who are most likely to cause problems. I'm speaking entirely in relative terms, of course. Nobody is totally "safe" and nobody is 100% likely to have problems, but different populations surely face different degrees of risk here.

User licensing would be paternalistic in the extreme, but it’s infinitely more sensible than prohibition. It still achieves the result of getting rid of the black market, with all the associated problems of violence and adulterated drugs and unnecessary poisonings. (It would mostly get rid of the black market, anyway. If there were still a small residual illegal market, so what? That would still be a massive improvement.) It would surely decrease the overall number of overdoses assuming the drug classes gave relevant safety information; today drug buyers get no such help.

Incidentally, some economists have already had this idea. See Emily Skarbek’s piece at Econlog here and a research paper (gated) here. It’s a fine idea and needs to be expanded upon.

Don’t misunderstand me as saying that punitive taxes and user licensing are the best possible policy. I think something much closer to total laissez-faire would actually be preferable. If drug prohibition were repealed and user licensing and drug taxation implemented, I would probably start arguing for their gradual repeal. Maybe not all at once, but make the user licensing less and less onerous over time, and gradually reduce the drug tax to the ordinary rate of sales tax. But my speculation on optimum policy is neither here nor there. In this post, I’m merely pointing out that everything drug prohibition seeks to accomplish can be achieved more humanely in a regime of full legalization. A tax on legal drug is a continuously adjustable dial that can be used to “dial down” drug use if it’s a problem, and user licensing is a big fixed “barrier to entry” to potential new users. If the black market comes roaring back, you can dial down the taxes and make the licensing less onerous. Prohibition, on the other hand, is not an adjustable dial. It’s a hammer. You can’t simply dial it up or down if it’s not working right, and it guarantees that 100% of the market will be a black market (as opposed to a much smaller proportion as we see with cigarettes and alcohol). We can accomplish all the deterrent effects of drug prohibition without all the associated problems: black market violence, failed narco-states in Central and South America, blood-borne diseases in intravenous drug users, adulterated drugs, wildly and unpredictably fluctuating drug purity, wasted law enforcement resources, diminished respect for the rule of law, disruption of families due to prison time, harassed motorists and pedestrians, etc., etc., etc. These are sensible policy tweaks. We should implement them in the short term and consider scaling them down in the longer term.  

There Are Adequate Borders Inside Our Borders

I’m an advocate for extremely liberalized immigration policy. I’m hesitant about the using term “open borders” only because I don’t want anyone to assume I’ve signed on to someone else’s notion of open borders. But, yeah, I believe in mostly open borders. People who are dodgy about immigration think that an open immigration policy will swamp us with massive mobs of “the great unwashed.” All kinds of people will come here, the thinking goes, and degrade out culture, pollute our political institutions, take from our social safety net, and generally bother us at every turn. I want to argue that there is nothing to worry about.

For most of your day, you are ensconced in very exclusive private institutions. If you go to work, you are one among many employees who have been thoroughly vetted to work there. You probably spend most of your non-work hours at home. Here, you have an even more exclusive policy than you do at work. Even very good friends who have been thoroughly screened can only enter your palace for very limited times on your say-so. You surely have a locking door on your home, perhaps an even more sophisticated alarm system. Or maybe you live in an apartment complex with outside doors that are locked to non-residents, or a gated community that performs the same function for full-sized houses. Perhaps you go shopping for groceries and other necessities every week or so. Here you are protected by a store that, while far less selective than your employer or your home, will still throw out people who are rowdy or offensive to the other customers. If you go to a private club in your leisure time (as I do for jiujitsu class and as many parents do for their children’s after-school athletics and other activities), you are once again being protected by a private organization’s exclusivity policy, and you can extract yourself from anything that’s not exclusive enough to your liking. Without quite realizing it, you've constructed useful borders to keep undesirable people out of your life, and every institution you belong to helps you build these borders.

Even putting aside legal barriers to entry, think about what an immigrant needs to do to come here. He needs to convince an employer that he’s a good worker. He needs to convince a landlord to rent to him, or convince a bank to loan him the money to buy a house. You can’t just come here and sort of wander around and exist. You have to somehow connect yourself to the world through your housing and employment arrangements. To do that, you have to convince a few people who are already here that you’re worth dealing with. Merely getting into the country doesn't guarantee clear sailing. There are all kinds of border checks you have to pass once you get here, and if you fail them you don't get to work or acquire shelter or buy stuff. 

Public property is a different matter. I'll grant that you are legitimately exposed when you travel on public property, because it is nearly impossible to exclude "undesirables." Anyone can enter public property. When you drive on public roads or enter public parks or walk on public sidewalks or shop in stores located on public squares, you expose yourself to people who haven't gone through any exclusionary vetting. Presumably if traffic safety becomes a serious issue, that can be solved with more thorough patrols of public roads and lower tolerance for reckless driving. And if crime becomes a problem in public places, it shouldn't be too difficult to increase the number of police officers patrolling those areas on foot. Granted you can't just preemptively exclude "undesirable" people from public property, you can certainly make them behave themselves by actively policing criminal behavior. Not that I think our public spaces will be swamped with "undesirables." I think this worry is totally overblown, but I felt a need to address it because there aren't enforceable borders around public spaces like there are for private spaces.

Incidentally, this is a kind of argument against public property. It's possible that some public spaces would better serve the public if they were made into private spaces, managed to maximize value for the users. Gatherings of rowdy teenagers can be told to "move along;" groups of brash, cat-calling men can be ushered out. People who aggressively panhandle can be banned from the premises. (I mean "aggressively panhandle" in a manner that invades people's personal space, which can be very frightening if you're walking alone.) Many people have an instant revulsion to the suggestion that we privatize anything currently owned by the government, but don't overlook this useful tool for dealing with social problems. Private spaces can be more thoroughly policed (or less thoroughly policed, if the public policing is excessive and obnoxious) than public spaces.

I suspect the discussion in the previous two paragraphs will be repulsive to some, because on a careless reading it looks like I'm arguing that immigrants in public spaces should be policed more thoroughly than everyone else. If that was your impression,please re-read, because you missed the point. My point was rather that it's more merciful to let them enter the country, conditional on their being more thoroughly scrutinized by police and private security, than to not let them come here at all. My overall point with this post is that problems of social decay and social disruption within immigrant communities (once again, a vastly overblown problem) can be solved or are already solved with private property. Or rather, if private property doesn't fully solve these problems, it at least keeps them from touching you. If there are "icky" people who you want to cordon off because you don't want to deal with them, you can mostly have your way. But I'd rather people do their own dirty work. Form your own exclusive private club or exclusive homeowners association. If you don't like the people you work with then quit, or suck it up and recognize that your co-workers have accepted these "undesirables" as colleagues. If people want to indulge anti-immigrant prejudices in their private lives, I don't really have a problem with that. But I don't want to be conscripted to enforce someone else's bigotry. Excluding immigrants shouldn't be public policy. It should be a privately enforced policy, and those people with anti-immigrant prejudices should personally pay the price of enforcing it. If an immigrant makes it here, it's because someone (an employer, a landlord, a spouse, a university) has accepted them. If you don't want to accept that person, that's fine, but you don't have the right to veto the decisions of those who have.

It's not the borders around the country that are keeping us safe and comfortable. It's mostly the borders within our borders that protect us.

Privacy and Social Media Activity

Consider two examples of using someone’s social media profile “against” them.

First Example. I know you through several mutual acquaintances. You have overheard that I’m looking to invest in the local restaurant industry. You corner me at a party and pitch me your plan to start a fancy new restaurant. However, I have formed a negative opinion of you because of your brash behavior on social media. Frequent, gratuitous use of profanity, references to alcohol consumption, and unrestrained emotional outbursts have given me an impression of your personality, and I don’t care for what I see. I politely decline to bankroll your business, even though I fully intend to break into the restaurant industry when the right opportunity comes along.

Second Example. I’m a bank, and you come to me for a small business loan for your restaurant idea. The bank’s corporate home office has come up with a “social media score” based on some predictive modeling. I’m not sure how the model works, and I don’t know what a “bad score” means. All I know is that certain social media behaviors in certain combination are useful for predicting loan repayment rates. (In fact, even the data scientists who built the predictive model don’t know for sure what features of your online behavior are driving the results. It’s a very “black box”, data-goes-in-predictions-come-out sort of process. But the predictions are accurate even when tested on new data not used to build the model.)  After reviewing your score, I decide that you are a bad risk. I don’t approve your loan.

Does the second example seem worse than the first? Does it seem like a worse invasion of your privacy for the bank to turn you down than for your acquaintance to do the same? I think most people have an intuitive aversion to the second example but not the first, but it’s not clear why there is a difference. In both cases someone is judging your credit-worthiness based on information they can obtain about you. You might say that the first case is more acceptable because someone is judging someone else as a person; the second case is unacceptable because a computer algorithm, incapable of making a nuanced judgement of your character, is rating you based on easily obtainable data. But I think this intuition actually gets it backwards. The impersonal algorithm is more predictive and is making a more disciplined, better validated  estimate of your default likelihood; the human is the one who is being capricious.

Or perhaps the bank has an obligation to give you a loan because it’s a bank, but the human is making a private investment decision and can deny an investment on a whim. But this isn’t right because the bank has an obligation to its account-holders and investors to reject high-risk loans. If your friend who rejected your restaurant idea also has a savings account at the bank where you applied for the business load, he’d expect the bank to show the same judgment that he showed in person. The bank is just an intermediary for a bunch of small private investors. It can make riskier loans than its account-holders would make individually because of its size and risk-pooling effects, but it should have the same objective estimates of loan risk as its individual account holders would have if they were fully informed. As an intermediary it should be saying, “I should do what my investors would do if they knew what I know.” If the bank acquires an obligation to approve loans by nature of being a bank, it must also acquire an equivalent obligation to disapprove bad loans. 

I think that some people are just creeped out by the idea of someone doing data-mining on their social media profile. They imagine that an expletive-filled rant or unflattering pic from the wrong party will ruin a job opportunity or loan application. But it’s helpful to think about what a person would do with the same information. Lots of people see your social media posts and form judgments about you based on these, and I dare say most of these judgments are probably pretty accurate. Even the negative ones. I think you really can make a judgment about someone’s temperament, intelligence, and maturity by looking at their social media posts. (Clearly this can go wrong, too, I’m just saying that it’s more accurate than your “Don’t judge me!” impulse allows for.) If all this information meaningfully informs your friends as they form judgments about you, why should it suddenly become irrelevant when judging your credit risk or suitability for some particular job? People like to think they have an unrestrained right to privacy, but they don’t. Someone starting a long-term relationship with you, as a friend, lover, banker, employer, employee, landlord, or tenant, has a right to know what kind of risk they are taking on board. We like to think we have the right to present an edited profile to the world when it suits us, but if all that nasty stuff is relevant to predicting your future behavior, people who deal with you have a right to know about it.

Imagine you are trying to hire a nanny to watch your child, and applicants insist that you make your hiring decision based on edited reports of their personal histories. You would want all available, relevant information to assess the risk this person poses to your child. I'll bet you'd snoop. I'll bet you'd Google these candidates and check their Facebook profiles if they aren't private. In fact, I'll bet you'd snoop for a decision with far lower stakes than the hiring of a nanny, or for that matter the approval of a loan or approving a tenant to rent one of your properties. And if you found something incriminating, I'm guessing you wouldn't feel bad about your snooping. 

So what do we do with these battling intuitions? Should we close our eyes and pretend pertinent information doesn't exist? Or should we use all relevant information in important decision making? Whatever we do, we should have some kind of meaningful definition of "privacy" when discussing privacy concerns. It's hard to assert that a "right" exists, such as the right to privacy, if we aren't all clear on what exactly that right means.

Edit: Don't take any of this me advocating for some official government policy for or against privacy rights. Consider the possibility that the privacy genie might be out of the bottle, and perhaps there's nothing that government can do about it. 

Curious Patterns in Traffic to My Blog

I can see some rough summary statistics of my readers, including counts from each country, counts by entry source (facebook vs. mobile vs something else), counts by internet browser, etc.  Nothing specific to any single viewer, just sums of various traffic sources. Anyway, it raises some interesting questions.

 Like…who is reading my blog in Russia?!? Are you a bunch of spammers/hackers? Or are hacker/crypto-libertarians reading my blog through proxies on the Tor browser (proxies that somehow route through Russia) while they are buying drugs on the dark web? (Please, oh please, be the latter!) And why am I seeing spikes in traffic to my blog at four o’clock in the fucking morning? The most obvious explanation is some kind of spammer looking for ways to exploit my blog, and 4 in the morning is daytime in Russia. But every time I see this I hope it’s a cryptography-obsessed anarchocapitalist reading my blog into the wee hours of the morning (you know, waiting for the crack to wear off), perhaps obsessively clicking the “refresh” icon every few minutes to see if I published a new post.

If I have a few readers who are living out the ethos of the crypto-hacker anarchocapitalist, surfing the web until five in the morning, I salute you! Thanks for reading. Keep doing good work out there!

Drug-related "Externalities" Are Mostly Internalized

In an earlier post, I argued that the "drug use leads to externalities" argument is wrong. I think I was mostly right, but my conclusion was stated too strongly.

I was reasoning from the example of a perfect tax on pollution. The purpose of the tax is to make the polluter feel the total social cost of his pollution. If you are allowed to pollute tax free, you will pollute more than the optimum amount. But the optimum amount of pollution isn't zero. We all want automobiles and cheap transport and indoor heating and cooling and consumer goods and all the other things that entail some amount of industrial pollution and burnt fossil fuels. So you don't outright ban pollution but you don't let people pollute without limit. You set a tax that deters pollution to the optimum level. (Perhaps the tax is used to fund clean-up or to compensate the victims of the pollution, or perhaps the deterrent effect of the tax is its sole purpose.)

My argument is that the anti-social behaviors that are supposedly caused by drugs are already illegal.(This is beside the point, but that causal link is incredibly speculative and highly dubious; the vast majority of drug users aren't criminals and those who are have personal problems that began prior to any drug use.) If there's a small chance that taking a hit of crack will turn you into a killer, that cost has already been baked into the total cost of using the drug. The externalities of drug use have already been internalized.

Well, it turns out that's a little too strong. In the case of a pollution deterring tax, you can use the revenue to compensate the victims. In the case of a legal penalty (like jail time for assault, theft, murder, etc.), there is no revenue. The cost of the penalty is something that is simply lost to society, whereas a tax is transferred from one party to another. Someone can pollute all he wants in the efficient pollution tax regime and never do any harm. But if someone goes on a crime spree to support his drug habit, there is a net loss to society that never really gets repaid.

While it's an exaggeration to say that drug-related externalities are fully internalized, I think it's fair to say they are mostly internalized. If we could do a better job of getting criminals to compensate their victims, it'd be closer to the efficient pollution tax example.