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Comment by apacheCamel | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure why, but reading this article just made me feel pretty ill. How does someone (multiple someones?) have the moral ability to do these kinds of things? I seriously can't believe the whole stack, from AirBNB to the scammer, just let these kinds of things go. At the end, where the author states she will continue to use AirBNB because it is cheaper kind of rubs me the wrong way. For a company to allow such slimy things to happen with minimal recourse would just turn me off from them forever. And the scammer? To just rip people off, knowingly ruin peoples vacations (and other things, but I imagine mostly vacations) because "money" is just ridiculous. These kinds of stories just hurt me. I wish people were better, but I know these types of people won't stop scamming.

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There's a weird fundamental flaw in social groups which is this:

1. Trusting trustworthy people increases efficiency. The less checking and verification you have to do, the less redundant work there is and the more easily things go.

2. As the number of trustworthy people in a group increases, the value of choosing to trust a random person increases. The odds get greater that they will be trustworthy, letting you reap the greater efficiency of trusting them.

3. As the number of trusting people in a group increases, the relative value of malice increases. The more likely a con artist is to be trusted, the more likely they are to be successful at their goal.

So there's this weird trust graph where as you approach 100% trustworthiness, you also approach 100% exploitability. The group gradually turns itself into a honeypot. So the stable equilibrium point is somewhere less of 100%.

That makes sense but I guess the question is why? If things work and people are happy with a system, why do the opposite and ruin it? I know it isn't an easy question to answer and could really be anything, but sometimes I really just want to sit down with them and find out why. It is fascinating stuff, but it hurts to think about sometimes. Just because the value of becoming a scammer goes up, doesn't mean we should embrace it.

I think this question essentially boils down to: "why do people commit crimes" and that's not something that has one easy answer

You can drive the number closer to 100% by making sure to have strong revenge on malice and a high probability that the revenge hits the right person.

In practice that means trust people once you have confirmed identity and if you’re in a trustworthy legislation.

> a high probability that the revenge hits the right person.

This is also fundamentally hard, though. As the ratio of trustworthy people increases, the odds of false positives necessarily increase too.

I am not shocked. Ate you shocked that fb profits from mayhem? No because we know the character of the founder. Airbnb also has no moral character thus it's users also know they can profit from morally corrupt practices.

Just as you said, the whole stack is corrupt. There will be more of this to come.

They profit by knowingly breaking the law. They are criminals.

It is appalling that this can happen in a country built on a system of laws.

I guess I can still be shocked because I still want and believe people can do the "good thing", whatever that good thing is. I can be pessimistic about a lot of things, but sometimes I just want things to be better. I don't know, I want to help fix things but I feel pretty helpless sometimes.

I feel you. Deeply. Some people can do the good thing: good people. And they do all the time. Surround yourself by them. The bad things they do are mistakes. They fix those or try. They apologize.

Bad people only do good things as a means to an end. Usually that end, they believe, will benefit them, and sometimes it does in the short term, but long term, no. The bad things they do are intentional. You can only predict their behavior with statistics. It's not worth it. They never apologize. They say, "You are too sensitive. It's just a joke." But it's not.

Stay good, my friend. Good people will find you. You will find them. They are out there, but they, like me, hide.

Shame is a very good immoral deterrent for the eager to deceive. Imagine knowing your future progeny are ashamed they come from grifters? (Quite astonishing people don’t make the connection that we are alive now on a world stage.)

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