I don’t actually know the extent to which Bernie Madoff actually was conscious that he was lying to people. What I do know is that he ran a pyramid scheme. The dynamics happen regardless of how conscious they are. (In fact, they often work through keeping things unconscious)
Bernie Madoff plead guilty to running a pyramid scheme. As part of his guilty plea he admitted that he stopped trading in the 1990s and had been paying returns out of capital since then.
I think this is an important point to make, since the implicit lesson I’m reading here is that there’s no difference between giving false information intentionally (“lying”) and giving false information unintentionally (“being wrong”). I would caution that that is a dangerous road to go down, as it just leads to people being silent. I would much rather receive optimistic estimates from AI advocates than receive no estimates at all. I can correct for systematic biases in data. I cannot correct for the absence of data.
Of course there’s an important difference between lying and being wrong. It’s a question of knowledge states. Unconscious lying is a case when someone says something they unconsciously know to be false/unlikely.
If the estimates are biased, you can end up with worse beliefs than you would by just using an uninformative prior. Perhaps some are savvy enough to know about the biases involved (in part because of people like me writing posts like the one I wrote), but others aren’t, and get tricked into having worse beliefs than if they had used an uninformative prior.
I am not trying to punish people, I am trying to make agent-based models.
(Regarding Madoff, what you present is suggestive, but it doesn’t prove that he was conscious that he had no plans to trade and was deceiving his investors. We don’t really know what he was conscious of and what he wasn’t.)
Bernie Madoff plead guilty to running a pyramid scheme. As part of his guilty plea he admitted that he stopped trading in the 1990s and had been paying returns out of capital since then.
I think this is an important point to make, since the implicit lesson I’m reading here is that there’s no difference between giving false information intentionally (“lying”) and giving false information unintentionally (“being wrong”). I would caution that that is a dangerous road to go down, as it just leads to people being silent. I would much rather receive optimistic estimates from AI advocates than receive no estimates at all. I can correct for systematic biases in data. I cannot correct for the absence of data.
Of course there’s an important difference between lying and being wrong. It’s a question of knowledge states. Unconscious lying is a case when someone says something they unconsciously know to be false/unlikely.
If the estimates are biased, you can end up with worse beliefs than you would by just using an uninformative prior. Perhaps some are savvy enough to know about the biases involved (in part because of people like me writing posts like the one I wrote), but others aren’t, and get tricked into having worse beliefs than if they had used an uninformative prior.
I am not trying to punish people, I am trying to make agent-based models.
(Regarding Madoff, what you present is suggestive, but it doesn’t prove that he was conscious that he had no plans to trade and was deceiving his investors. We don’t really know what he was conscious of and what he wasn’t.)