There are lots of other reasons to publish such information as well—it’s hard to say whether a blackmail incident is paying to reduce the baseline chance, or paying to maintain the baseline chance. Does your intuition change if this framing changes? I think we may be at the limit of discussing the topic generally, and specific examples will be necessary to decide which features are most salient.
To be more vivid but a bit uncharitable, this is like saying that throwing knives at people is okay because people already occasionally cut themselves with knives.
Gossip (throwing knives at people, in your analogy) is ALREADY LEGAL. The disagreement is whether it’s OK to ask someone to pay for you to refrain from doing so. If you’re visiting a knife-throwing range, is it OK to be asked to pay a fee for people to stop throwing knives so you can safely walk on their property?
There are lots of other reasons to publish such information as well - it’s hard to say whether a blackmail incident is paying to reduce the baseline chance, or paying to maintain the baseline chance. Does your intuition change if this framing changes? I think we may be at the limit of discussing the topic generally, and specific examples will be necessary to decide which features are most salient.
Hm. I agree. Given that my intuitions now oppose each other (“incentives to threaten things make things happen” vs “this provides an alternative to gossip and will absorb information”), I’ve reached the limit of my vague and general arguments.
I’m not sure what you mean by specific examples, though. I can think of ways to operationalize and test this, but not ways to clarify the discussion without additional external information. If you see a way to move forward, then I’m ears.
Gossip (throwing knives at people, in your analogy) is ALREADY LEGAL. The disagreement is whether it’s OK to ask someone to pay for you to refrain from doing so. If you’re visiting a knife-throwing range, is it OK to be asked to pay a fee for people to stop throwing knives so you can safely walk on their property?
The analogy wasn’t mean to be stretched that far! It was just a surface analogy, responding to something you might not actually have said. I thought you were saying “since information might get out anyway, information-getting-out isn’t an additional cost of blackmail,” which ignores the possibility of quantitative changes. But now I think you’re making a subtler argument: “You can’t take the rate of released blackmail as the direct cost of blackmail being legal; you have to compare to the gossip rate in worlds where blackmail is illegal. It’s the delta that matters, and the delta might be insignificant or negative.” Is this what you’re saying?
I’m not sure what you mean by specific examples, though. I can think of ways to operationalize and test this, but not ways to clarify the discussion without additional external information. If you see a way to move forward, then I’m ears.
I think it’d be instructive to come up with a few scenarios that strongly categorize into “permitted” and “violation” of your intuitive norms, and try to figure out what the points of contention are. For myself, I can’t come up with a compelling one where the blackmail is the important part of the crime—there are cases where I’d like to outlaw bad information behaviors (publishing, withholding, misleading, and violations in pursuit of), but I can think of none which are OK without money and not OK with money.
For me, this generalizes—if all sub-actions are permitted, then the sum of them is permitted.
I’m not sure how this fits into this schema, but there was an argument I found fairly compelling about how-to-think-about-copyright-infringement awhile back, which goes:
if you drop a feather on me, that does not hurt me even slightly and in fact is maybe even enjoyable. If you drop 700 tons of feathers on me, I will suffocate and die. It’s reasonable for the thing that makes something bad, and worth making illegal, is scale. If I borrow my friend’s book the world is clearly better off. If nobody ever buys a copy of that book again the world is not clearly better off. Maybe it is, maybe not. But it’s clearly a very different situation.
(This is not an argument for any particular position on how to handle copyright infringement, just that the situation actually warrants thought)
So, part of the deal with adding-money-to-blackmail is that it enables and incentivizes scale in a way that non-money-facilitated-gossip doesn’t.
I think the analogy is too distant to be evidence. The feather problem isn’t one of scale—it’d be fine if almost everyone had a feather dropped on them, it’s one of concentration—it’s harmful if too many are on the same person/place. And I’m not sure how that translates to this case.
The thing Zvi pointed at in the essay: if there are blackmail industries, and if the average person has to spend their life carefully not exposing anything vulnerable because being blackmailed is a live option they have to live in fear of, the world gets worse in a way that is more than the sum of the parts of each individual person getting blackmailed,
Actually, that’s a good point—there are a fair few similarities between blackmail and insider trading. It’s not clear to me that insider trading should be prohibited in general—it seems like it’s just a mechanism for the price to adjust to the truth. That’s what markets are best at, right?
There are activities adjacent to insider trading which should be illegal—manipulation, spying, information obfuscation. And it’s probably easier to detect and prosecute insider trading than the problematic behaviors themselves.
I wonder how much correlation there is between people who think blackmail per se should be legal (though not some activities commonly associated with it is), and those who think insider trading, prostitution, and other prohibited transactions for allowed behaviors should be legal.
There are lots of other reasons to publish such information as well—it’s hard to say whether a blackmail incident is paying to reduce the baseline chance, or paying to maintain the baseline chance. Does your intuition change if this framing changes? I think we may be at the limit of discussing the topic generally, and specific examples will be necessary to decide which features are most salient.
Gossip (throwing knives at people, in your analogy) is ALREADY LEGAL. The disagreement is whether it’s OK to ask someone to pay for you to refrain from doing so. If you’re visiting a knife-throwing range, is it OK to be asked to pay a fee for people to stop throwing knives so you can safely walk on their property?
Hm. I agree. Given that my intuitions now oppose each other (“incentives to threaten things make things happen” vs “this provides an alternative to gossip and will absorb information”), I’ve reached the limit of my vague and general arguments.
I’m not sure what you mean by specific examples, though. I can think of ways to operationalize and test this, but not ways to clarify the discussion without additional external information. If you see a way to move forward, then I’m ears.
The analogy wasn’t mean to be stretched that far! It was just a surface analogy, responding to something you might not actually have said. I thought you were saying “since information might get out anyway, information-getting-out isn’t an additional cost of blackmail,” which ignores the possibility of quantitative changes. But now I think you’re making a subtler argument: “You can’t take the rate of released blackmail as the direct cost of blackmail being legal; you have to compare to the gossip rate in worlds where blackmail is illegal. It’s the delta that matters, and the delta might be insignificant or negative.” Is this what you’re saying?
I think it’d be instructive to come up with a few scenarios that strongly categorize into “permitted” and “violation” of your intuitive norms, and try to figure out what the points of contention are. For myself, I can’t come up with a compelling one where the blackmail is the important part of the crime—there are cases where I’d like to outlaw bad information behaviors (publishing, withholding, misleading, and violations in pursuit of), but I can think of none which are OK without money and not OK with money.
For me, this generalizes—if all sub-actions are permitted, then the sum of them is permitted.
I’m not sure how this fits into this schema, but there was an argument I found fairly compelling about how-to-think-about-copyright-infringement awhile back, which goes:
(This is not an argument for any particular position on how to handle copyright infringement, just that the situation actually warrants thought)
So, part of the deal with adding-money-to-blackmail is that it enables and incentivizes scale in a way that non-money-facilitated-gossip doesn’t.
I think the analogy is too distant to be evidence. The feather problem isn’t one of scale—it’d be fine if almost everyone had a feather dropped on them, it’s one of concentration—it’s harmful if too many are on the same person/place. And I’m not sure how that translates to this case.
The thing Zvi pointed at in the essay: if there are blackmail industries, and if the average person has to spend their life carefully not exposing anything vulnerable because being blackmailed is a live option they have to live in fear of, the world gets worse in a way that is more than the sum of the parts of each individual person getting blackmailed,
There’s got to be a ton of exceptions to that. For instance, insider trading.
Actually, that’s a good point—there are a fair few similarities between blackmail and insider trading. It’s not clear to me that insider trading should be prohibited in general—it seems like it’s just a mechanism for the price to adjust to the truth. That’s what markets are best at, right?
There are activities adjacent to insider trading which should be illegal—manipulation, spying, information obfuscation. And it’s probably easier to detect and prosecute insider trading than the problematic behaviors themselves.
I wonder how much correlation there is between people who think blackmail per se should be legal (though not some activities commonly associated with it is), and those who think insider trading, prostitution, and other prohibited transactions for allowed behaviors should be legal.
I was mainly making the point that insider trading is an illegal activity compounded of legal activities.
Insider trading isn’t just a market adjustment, it is also an unfair advantage.