On initially reading it, I found it quite interesting, but over time it’s come to shape my thinking much more than I expected.
Robin has correctly pointed out that blackmail is just a special case of free trade between apparently consenting adults, which tends to be pretty good, and you need quite a strong argument for making the law interfere with that. He also points out that it creates good incentives not to do things that you wouldn’t want people finding out about.
However Zvi’s point is that this is an incredibly strong incentive for someone to ruin your life and create information that you are not willing to make public (e.g. private photos, manipulate you into a minor illegality that would be very damaging for your reputation, embarrassing information about your relatives, etc) and then take you for all you’re worth.
(Especially combined with asymmetric justice, most people are already interacting with things they’d be judged on if it were made very public, and all you’d have to do is look into their lives and threaten to make some part of it immensely public. Just take photos of any not obviously poor person walking past a homeless person, or publish a one-sided story from someone they had a conflict / falling-out with, or whatever.)
Essentially, making blackmail illegal largely removes the financial apparatus for people to do immense harm to you in the interest of taking all of your resources. We have built immensely powerful incentive systems with financial markets, and the law against blackmail says “If you think of a way to extort someone for all of their money by threatening to destroy their life/reputation, you will not be able to be rewarded using our core currency of exchange.” And this backpropagates helpfully into not incentivising the destruction attempts in the first place.
This also fed into my understanding of Petrov Day. I previously had conceived of Petrov Day as being about punishing unilateral action, but on reflection I don’t really want to stigmatize unilateral action, it’s often good and virtuous. What I want to stigmatize is “putting horribly-negative-sum outcomes on the table”, which is what lead to the cold war, and I want people to take responsibility for not using extortion in negotiation. You should never create the ability to wipe out another country in order to gain power over them. You shouldn’t attempt to use the ability to take down LessWrong in order to get money. Of course, most sacred values can be overcome at some quantity of secular value, but the point is that it is sacred and should be considered a deep schelling point. The important part of the cold war was never really whether the two countries would actually destroy each other, it was that they had raced to create the ability to wipe each other out at the push of a few buttons. Petrov took responsibility for the part he had to play there, and wouldn’t engage in that sort of game.
All the bolded parts of the essay are the most important parts for me, and I strongly recommend including this in the book. I expect to vote at it with somewhere between +5 to +9.
On initially reading it, I found it quite interesting, but over time it’s come to shape my thinking much more than I expected.
Robin has correctly pointed out that blackmail is just a special case of free trade between apparently consenting adults, which tends to be pretty good, and you need quite a strong argument for making the law interfere with that. He also points out that it creates good incentives not to do things that you wouldn’t want people finding out about.
However Zvi’s point is that this is an incredibly strong incentive for someone to ruin your life and create information that you are not willing to make public (e.g. private photos, manipulate you into a minor illegality that would be very damaging for your reputation, embarrassing information about your relatives, etc) and then take you for all you’re worth.
(Especially combined with asymmetric justice, most people are already interacting with things they’d be judged on if it were made very public, and all you’d have to do is look into their lives and threaten to make some part of it immensely public. Just take photos of any not obviously poor person walking past a homeless person, or publish a one-sided story from someone they had a conflict / falling-out with, or whatever.)
Essentially, making blackmail illegal largely removes the financial apparatus for people to do immense harm to you in the interest of taking all of your resources. We have built immensely powerful incentive systems with financial markets, and the law against blackmail says “If you think of a way to extort someone for all of their money by threatening to destroy their life/reputation, you will not be able to be rewarded using our core currency of exchange.” And this backpropagates helpfully into not incentivising the destruction attempts in the first place.
This also fed into my understanding of Petrov Day. I previously had conceived of Petrov Day as being about punishing unilateral action, but on reflection I don’t really want to stigmatize unilateral action, it’s often good and virtuous. What I want to stigmatize is “putting horribly-negative-sum outcomes on the table”, which is what lead to the cold war, and I want people to take responsibility for not using extortion in negotiation. You should never create the ability to wipe out another country in order to gain power over them. You shouldn’t attempt to use the ability to take down LessWrong in order to get money. Of course, most sacred values can be overcome at some quantity of secular value, but the point is that it is sacred and should be considered a deep schelling point. The important part of the cold war was never really whether the two countries would actually destroy each other, it was that they had raced to create the ability to wipe each other out at the push of a few buttons. Petrov took responsibility for the part he had to play there, and wouldn’t engage in that sort of game.
All the bolded parts of the essay are the most important parts for me, and I strongly recommend including this in the book. I expect to vote at it with somewhere between +5 to +9.