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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

You're mixing up reversible transactions and court system. If someone defrauds you in an irreversible transaction, you can still sue that person for damages if you know who they are. Similarly if someone defrauds you in reversible transactions, you can't just wave a wand and get your money back. You can sue them if you know who they are, or you can request a reversal from your bank/cc provider (may or may not be honored) but you're not completely safe. Most fraud happens in fiat and there are real victims out here.

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> Most fraud happens in fiat and there are real victims out here.

We had multiple threads about base rate error on HN just yesterday!

Most financial activity happens in fiat, and so of course it stands to reason that most fraud is also done in fiat. The real question is whether the legitimate-to-fraudulent ratio is higher in cryptocurrencies than in fiat.

See also: the "Chinese Robbers" fallacy[1] -- just because you can find a ton of examples of fiat fraud, doesn't imply its worse -- without context it only implies its the most common form of currency.

[1]:https://www.lesswrong.com/s/XsMTxdQ6fprAQMoKi/p/DSzpr8Y9299j...

Yes, that's called "base rate neglect" or "base rate bias."

In a twist of irony, you can see another example of it in the distribution of terms reinvented by internet rationalists :-)

It's certainly under the category of base rate bias but it's a specific subcategory (think of it as the rhombuses and squares relationship). In this case the term is used to focus on the fact that it's not just one example here (or two or three), you can provide thousands of examples of currency fraud and the fallacy is still a fallacy

> Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype.

"Base rate" appears multiple times in that article and is a pretty core concept in the rationalist movement. Memorably illustrating a concept is not the same thing as not knowing the technical term.

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