Blackmailers are privateers in the war on hypocrisy
Allowing blackmail seems prima facie good to me, since it's a tax on covert illicit behavior. Zvi seems to think, to the contrary, that it's prima facie bad.
Robin Hanson argued: If there exists some information about someone that, if revealed, would cause people to coordinate to punish them, then it's good for this information to be revealed because on average it's good for such people to be punished. Blackmail rewards people for investigating covert illicit behavior that would otherwise remain undetected, and correspondingly punishes the people engaging in that behavior.
Zvi offered two interesting arguments against this, which I'll address one at a time.
The argument against leverage
First, Zvi responded that blackmail is obviously bad because it creates the incentive to pressure people into covertly behaving in ways that would get them in trouble if revealed, in order to to have leverage over them - which can then be used to force more covert bad behavior for yet more leverage. When done at scale, this can lead to both large amounts of bad behavior which would not have otherwise occurred, and large levels of extraction.
People can get away with subtle and indirect blackmail already. But so long as it's technically illegal, repeated leveraged blackmail at scale is not a feasible strategy; a large firm specializing in blackmail would quickly become unpopular, and the target of regulatory scrutiny.
This argument assumes a prior state where some agents already have enough leverage over most people to force them to engage in mildly illicit behavior. But any agent in a position to do that could easily use their leverage to force their victim to extract some sort of perfectly legal further leverage, such as borrowing at a high rate of interest, or making their lifestyle depend increasingly on some core bottleneck controlled by the extortionist. This too constrains the victim to do what the extortionist says, lest they default on their obligation and lose everything. This argument against blackmail is not specific to blackmail, but seems instead to be a general consideration against capitalism, privatization, and doing business at scale - since these empower positive feedback loops of rent-seeking behavior.
The argument against information
Zvi also offers an argument that is more purely targeted against blackmail. Even without leveraged schemes to manufacture ever-increasing amounts of illicit behavior as the raw material for blackmail, allowing blackmailers to go into business at scale would increase the total amount of blackmail performed, extracting large amounts of wealth from people doing perfectly ordinary illicit things. Most of us do things that we would be punished for if they were revealed, and it can't be good to take money away from nearly everyone, so we shouldn't legalize blackmail.
Crucially, Zvi treats revealing the information as a net harm here. It's even worse, on his model, than extracting money from the victim; it's a deadweight loss, harm inflicted on the victim with no corresponding benefit to the blackmailer.
This argument fails in a more interesting way, since it denies the fundamental premise of Hanson's argument: that we benefit both from finding out about illicit acts, and by punishing them. Zvi instead seems to think that if society as a whole were better-informed about what people were doing, it would in general on average make worse decisions, by punishing more people who ought not to be punished.
Licit blackmail at scale wouldn't just punish people for hypocrisy - it would reveal the underlying rate of hypocrisy. Soon, everyone would know that it's an ordinary part of life to pay off blackmailers. People would have a general idea what sort of behavior is blackmailable, because the behavior of the occasional person who refuses to pay would be revealed.
In a society that's trying at all to do a sensible thing, we should expect two things to happen in response to this situation. First, by effectively taxing illicit behavior, we should expect get less of it. Second, once people find out how common certain kinds of illicit behavior are, we should expect the penalties to be reduced.
Zvi counts both of these as costs, not benefits. But for more reliable punishment of and more frequent revelation of illicit behavior to be harmful, society has to be trying to get the wrong answer.
If you think that people are worse off when better informed - if our society is that perverse - then it's not clear what we're doing when we pretend to offer consequentialist arguments on policy decisions like whether to legalize blackmail. The general consideration that you expect people to make better decisions when better informed doesn't apply here.
Hoping for or against justice
Zvi's argument isn't analytically rigorous - it appeals to an implied shared feeling about blackmail. He doesn't articulate a clear model of how the relevant parts of the system work, and then show that in equilibrium, the harms caused by legalizing blackmail outweigh its benefits. He doesn't even assess its benefits. He just tells a vivid story about some possible costs it could impose.
I notice I'm inclined to do the opposite - focus on ways blackmail repairs problems. I think this reflects two very different perspectives on how justice relates to hypocrisy (though I'm used to seeing Zvi on my side on this issue and am still a bit surprised we seem to be disagreeing here).
In the traditional Latin mass, judgment day is described as a catastrophe from which the singer seeks refuge:
Dies irae, dies illa Solvet saeclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus, Quando judex est venturus, Cuncta stricte discussurus!
Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulcra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum.
Mors stupebit et natura, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura.
Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur.
Judex ergo cum sedebit, Quidquid latet apparebit. Nil inultum remanebit.
Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? Quem patronum rogaturus, Cum vix justus sit securus?
Here's an approximate translation:
The day of wrath, that day shall dissolve the world in ashes, testifies David with the Sibyl.
What trembling there will be When the judge shall come to weigh everything strictly!
The wondrous trumpet scattering sound Across the graves of all the regions Calls all before the throne.
Death and nature shall be stupefied When Creation arises Responsive to the Judge.
A written book shall be proffered In which all is contained Whereby the world shall be judged
When the judge takes his seat all that is hidden shall appear Nothing will remain unavenged.
What shall I, a wretch, say then? To which patron shall I appeal When even the just man is barely secure?
The Jewish liturgy about divine judgment is quite different. Every week, at the beginning of the Sabbath, Jews around the world sing Psalms a collection of psalms focused on the idea that the world is rejoicing because God is finally coming to judge it.
From Psalm 96:
Say among the nations that the Lord reigns: the world shall so be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the peoples with uprightnesses. Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and its fullness. Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it: then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy. Before the Lord: for he comes, for he comes to judge the land: he shall judge the world with justice, and the peoples in his faithfulness.
From Psalm 98:
Melodize to the Lord with harp; with harp, and melodic voice. With the trumpets, and the voice of the horn, shout before the king, the Lord. Let the sea roar, and its fullness; the world, and those who dwell in it. Rivers shall clap their hands; together, the mountains shall sing for joy. Before the Lord: for he comes, for he comes to judge the land: he shall judge the world with justice, and the peoples in his faithfulness.
In one of these outlooks, humans can't behave well enough to stand up to pure justice, so we should put off the day of judgment for as long as we can, and seek protection. In the other, the world is groaning under the accumulated weight of hypocrisy and sin, and only the reconciliation of accounts can free us; in constant flux due to ever-shifting stories, which can only be stabilized by a true judge.
We can't reconcile accounts if that means punishing all bad behavior according to the current hypocritical regime's schedule of punishments. But a true reconciliation also means adjusting the punishments to a level where we'd be happy, not sad, to see them applied consistently. (Sometimes the correct punishment is nothing beyond the accounting itself.)
In worlds where hypocrisy is normal, honesty is punished, since the most honest people will tend to reveal deprecatory information others might conceal, and be punished for it. We get less of what we punish. But honesty isn't just a weird quirk - it's the only way to get to the stars.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman
44 Comments
It's possible that people can reach that level of depravity, but not likely IMHO that they have. That said, I am very interested in the prospect of eliminating the idea of just punishment completely and establishing it as a given that justice can never be anything other than the creation of common knowledge. Of course, the common knowledge that you had historically killed a bunch of people and a group of strangers reviewing your behavor expect it to be repeated would be likely to be pretty costly, and to result in future killings being prevented, but that prevention wouldn't be just, and it would be just to create common knowledge about that preventing.
You might think that our society's intuitions about what is shameworthy are off here, and I think so too, but that doesn't alter the necessity of dealing with them.
Allowing blackmail within a group weakens that group's ability to resist outside control, and this is a very big deal. It's kind of disappointing that, this late in the conversation about blackmail, no one seems to have spotted this!
I noticed when you disagreed with me so strongly, as I was drafting my post and looking for feedback, that I was quite surprised by your reaction. I couldn't figure out how you were getting where you were going. Now I understand much better, as it is clear we are thinking about these things very differently. The way that my cases are summarized and presented here does not represent at all the model I have in my head, which could of course largely be my fault for poor presentation. But if you felt that I held these positions as you describe them - I'd be confused by that, too.
Anyway, a full response in print would almost certainly take far longer than I have today, so I'll stop there and/or give you a call.
You are treating 'society' as the relevant scale. This is wrong. Society is certainly extremely perverse and authoritarian. Crime and other forms of 'illicit' behavior are not the fundamental problems facing the United States and similar societies. The fundamental problems are caused by licit behavior! Examples include: drug laws, bad economic regulation, restrictions on housing supply, overseas wars. At the margin improving enforcement of norms, at a societal scale, makes things worse not better. It seems impossible to get drugs legalized. Your model suggests that norms will imrpove if people are well informed about the frequency of currently illicit behavior but this seems like a weak effect. People already seem well aware that drug use is common but we are only now getting legal pot!
Me saying this is not a self defeating arugment because while society is extremely perverse and authoritarian not all subsets are. On this blog I am happy to say I have used hard drugs, dated multiple people and engaged in BDSM. I am certainly not willing to say this in many contexts. Luckily the rationality community is not particularly perverse.
Jim's point about enforcing norms of different subgroups is also basically correct.
Incentivising blackmail over legal behaviour is only of the glaring problems. The other is that blackmail only works (at revealing information) if it fails (at eliciting payment).
If you believe your arguments that this blackmail would be good behavior, go do it, and report back the positive results.
If you don’t want to do that, then why not? Could it be that you are mistaken somewhere if you think from the terms of putting this into actual practice?
I would like more explanation of why you aren’t, if you are willing to answer. Being unwilling to do immediate unilateral disarmament at least needs more explanation if you are proposing the pro-blackmail change as an incremental shift. Why not do small amounts of blackmail them? Illustrate to the community the good that comes from this and establish it as the norm of a community you can influence by demonstration instead of abstract blogging? Or, decide how many of your friends you would need to convince to be pro-blackmail to feel you had a sufficient collective action on a sub community solves, and do it then?
I think you won’t, because blackmail is morally abhorrent. And this is for the reasons others have pointed out, of norms differences causing an exploitable deference/control to the most restrictive powerful population subset, the fact that people value privacy over some intimate things especially regarding sex, etc, but...
most notably, the worst part is that by plain incentives, blackmailers are actually on the side of *destroying* true information, either by lies or omission. This is so obvious to me that I feel you must have some very weird blind spot due to being non typically very moral, and having trouble putting yourself in the mindset of a blackmailing. Blackmailers profit when information is *not* revealed, because their target paid them off. Blackmailers are incentivized to lie about whether they will even follow through on a revelation threat, because if they are forced to make a revelation, they have both (a) made no profit and (b) opened a communication channel that can trace them for punishment, in societies where blackmail is punished, or even in societies you imagine where it is not, they are now open to retaliation! They do better to default on their threat, as individual blackmailers are unlikely to care about the viability of blackmail game theory in general, and their victims unlikely to be related. Further, blackmailers are incentivized to falsehood by exaggerations by attempting to deepen any perception of illicit behavior, not to do accurate reporting. You can blackmail almost equally well someone who has done illicit behavior or _someone who is convinced you can convince others of illicit behavior_ even if they were not actually guilty. Because social reality is a thing, and that’s what they are trying to protect against destruction. This is all terrible from the point of someone trying to seek truth! Unless I’m missing something huge, you are, and I would really like to know what’s going on.
This is the revenge porn dilemma. Publishing true info about my (legal, moral) sex life can unfairly endanger or harm me, and we are all better off if such publications don't happen and sex/nudity is somewhat shrouded in secrecy.
Trivially, information puts people in better positions to make decisions. If it doesn't, it logically has to be due to their perverse behaviors.
It seems self-evident that we are all MASSIVELY worse off because sexuality is somewhat shrouded in secrecy. If we don't agree on that point, not regarding what happens on the margins, but regarding global policy, I simply consider you to be part of rape culture and possibly it would be immoral to blackmail you rather than simply exposing you unconditionally.
Blackmail isn't morally abhorrent. Infra-marginal shifts towards locally better conditions within perverse systems, are morally abhorrent.
Your comment is expressed with such hostility I'm not sure I should engage, but I'll give it a shot...
Publicizing private info about sexuality is dangerous. The mild, everyday version of this is that women get hit on more when more is known about their sex lives. For more extreme versions, read any article about revenge porn or "outing" sexual minorities. It's hard for me to understand Ben's/Robin Hanson's point about blackmail because they don't seem to address this.
You probably are thinking of examples where sharing more info about sex is good--e.g., publicizing rape is a necessary step towards prosecuting rape, and sex ed is probably good--but that doesn't alter the point that spreading private info about sex is often bad, which is one big example of why blackmail is bad.
Maybe we could also recognise that the nett harm if the first could outweigh the nett benefit of the second.
If some practice is horrendously unethical yet seen as acceptable and common, I can't really blackmail anyone with it. Most people wouldn't even bother hiding it in the first place. I can only execute blackmail with something that provokes social shame or public retribution, and that works whether the material is actually unethical or not.
So instead of targeting unethical behavior, blackmail targets behavior that is shamed or reviled by public consensus. And yes, there's some overlap, there are a lot of genuinely bad things that also happen to be publically disliked, but I don't think the overlap is anywhere near tight enough to really trust blackmail as a moral enforcement mechanism.
(I'd actually expect that legalizing blackmail would make the mismatch worse, as it would increase the incentive to mess with public norms. There'd be an even bigger payoff for trying to normalize one's own ethical transgressions, or for stigmatizing ethically-neutral behaviors one might have interest in preventing.)
Possibly some of the squick reactions to the pro-blackmail line of argument are because that line of argument suggests a weak distinction between shameful and evil, at least when shameful is defined according to the right community. This sets off the alarm bell for the "blood-covered Lawful Good Paladin of righteous slaughter" trope. I don't believe this of you, just the argument for blackmail, here and elsewhere, did give me a squick reaction for that sort of reason.
That's because it's not really a moral enforcement mechanism, it's a conventionality enforcement mechanism.
The case for blackmail only seems good if we really, really, trust public opinion to be consistently moral now and remain consistently moral in the future.
It seems like you're just restating the position that enhanced ability to detect and punish norm-violations would be bad, without offering any particular evidence or model that suggests that I should think that this is the case, OR engaging with the implications of what else has to be true if this is true.
So the more resistance we encounter explaining away X relative to the communication and cognitive cost, and the more you expect people who did X but not Y to be harmed by the release of related personal detailed info, the weaker the explanation "X is evidence of norm violation Y" is.
I want to point out that factually this is wrong. We are fast approaching a world where every word spoken by every human ever is likely to end up sold somewhere on the dark web.
My whole website focusses on this one question of privacy. I’m currently inclined towards accepting more transparency than privacy. I’d love to have an extended discussion with you on this.
Repeated leveraged blackmail, which leverages some assets acquired within a lawful system of account, is not feasible over an extended period of time, if it is illegal from the perspective of that system of account.
Outside of a lawful system of account, it's a little less clear what blackmail even means.
I think the internet is going to homogenise the norms we judge each other by. Instead of many communities with their own norms there will be more global norms. I’m unsure if there will be global norms or a unique set of norms for each nuclear power and its allies. A major reason being that the leadership of the nuclear power can deliberately shut down high attention social media that promotes an alternate viewpoint and the majority might vote in such a leader. Religious moralities and liberalism are likely contenders.
The process of truth seeking can take centuries to make progress when matters such as religion or social dark matter such as sex are being discussed.
The secure software thing is a secondary factor. The primary factor is people always have incentives to steal each others information, not always money. Secure software being hard just means that people who try stealing it often succeed. Offence beats defence here.