Collectivism is when an individual claims to be all of
a community, and thus benefitting him individually is beneficial to
everyone. E.g. if you empty your wallet into his, everyone becomes richer.
Spade language is important because it makes stupid lies sound stupid, and collectivism is always a stupid lie.
If you both really did get richer by paying him, he would be able to pay you for the privilege, out of the profits, and emptying your wallet into his should end up with more money in your wallet. He wouldn't have to appeal to [[collectivism]], he could appeal to your self-interest. This obvious scam is a scam precisely because it doesn't work that way. Indeed moderns have this whole [investment] thing where you do this the non-scam way. Nobody has to justify stocks or bonds based on collectivist reasoning.
If it's collectivist and not obviously a scam, that means it's not obvious.
If it has to be justified using collectivism, it is unjustifiable, and they're confessing.
7 comments:
'you both really did get rich by paying him' is probably best modelled by advertising, which in videogames and anime are called "collabs".
i don't think stocks is a good example, ~no one was interested in stocks before IRAs/401ks because it's a zero sum game, SP500 basically moved horizontally until 1970s when government classified stocks 'for retirement' (i.e. you can't really sell) as a non-salary "benefit" like they did healthcare previously.
Collectivism being about conflating an individual with a community sounds like what the man scamming people with collectivist predispositions wants his target to believe, but the reason why those people are vulnerable is that they already believed that if everybody does what is best for themselves, everybody in the group is worse off, and thus perceiving doing what is best for oneself as a kind of freeloading. Basically imagine any group of people who all derive a benefit from what they do together and can't do apart, all having substantial difficulty in discerning whose contribution is worth how much exactly, such that if some guy screws up, everybody loses, and when some guy does a great job, everybody benefits. Despite having difficulty telling peoples contributions apart, they know each from the results of his own work that more effort and attention give better results. Therefore they try to convince each other that "If we all put in the effort, we all benefit",despite benefits from the effort of each being spread over many.
What i was doing here was to try to get at where do people who fall for the scam described in the post come from, why do such people exist. And maybe thats because the collectivist attitude of doing best for the group and asking questions later could have been beneficial sometime in the past. I mean surely such a vulnerability should have disappeared due to those who have it going extinct absent some sort of countervailing effect. And it used to be that who people lived around was often mostly somewhat related, and possibly that doing what is best for yourself did not make as much of a difference as today due to being counteracted by the surrounding society?
Yeah only the rich were interested in stocks.
Hey wait.
It's true that stocks per se is a weak example of investment, especially post-401k. I'm not going to write a phd dissertation to defend against gotchas, it would be twenty times longer than the rest of the post.
Yeah the poor don't get into stocks until the win was guaranteed due to the tax writeoffs.
The contribution-measurement problem was solved so long ago money is written into the hominid genome.
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Folk get the idea that doing what's best for yourself is bad for the collective because you can't con an honest man, and consequently scammers always sound absolutely retarded. They're just lying in an attempt to eat without working. The idea is popular because treachery is popular.
The labor contribution measurement has to be complete by other means by the time money comes into play. And previous pay likely have just reflected remotely accessible information such as college degrees and years of experience, which is not quite the same as quality of labor. Accordingly it is necessary to be able to judge the quality of labour independently of the market, in order to tell whether someone is worth having, at the market price of their labor, or better than others to retain. Money measures cost (prices! ) and the buyer has to figure out the value of each purchase alone or get scammed (because "high price must be good", not so!). Market prices inform because somebody somewhere measures the value (or laborer contribution) without looking to the market for clues. Thus regardless of money being in the 0human genome or collectivism being a scam due to psychological egoism being true, money doesn't seem to be a laborer contribution measurement device, it only compares costs. Note that I do not argue for or like collectivism.
I don't think doing things that are bad for ones colleagues is profitable either.
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