Arbitrage

As I start writing long-form a few of my “core themes”, those that inform how I think about everything, start showing up. One of those themes, which was left implicit in yesterday’s post but which I’ll now make explicit, is that of “arbitrage”. 

Yesterday we discussed magic, and magicians, and how what they do works precisely because people think it ought not to: how what distinguishes magicians is that they specialize in a set of  skills that have in common only that they’re both possible and most people think they’re not. How people thinking they’re not possible or “not a thing” makes it so they don’t track those areas at all, which allows those skills to be used against them.

Now this kind of thing, where your misguided belief about how the world works or what is possible creates an opportunity for someone else to exploit, is what I mean by “arbitrage”.

With magic and magicians this arbitrage went one way: you think it’s not possible, it actually is, RIP you. But it can go the other way too: you believe something is possible, or is the case, but it isn’t, and that’s what gets used against you. 

Both are, ultimately, instances of incorrect beliefs. 

These incorrect beliefs can arise via two ways.

One is “natural” or “organic”. The “no harm, no foul” way: you were innocently or mistakenly given wrong info, or you thought you saw something but it was actually something else, or your interpretation of events was a tiny bit off, or some bias in the way your cognitive machinery works made you go haywire, or there was a miscommunication, or or or. 

The other, more relevant to arbitrage, is “purposefully caused” incorrect beliefs. This is the gf who’s cheating on you but hides it because she doesn’t want you to leave her, the politician who couldn’t care less about you but needs to believe they do to get your vote, the makers of Unhealthy Food #321 that need you to believe it’s Healthy, Actually so that you’ll buy it. 

And this kind can be even more subtle: bullshitters don’t want you to develop a specific incorrect belief as much as they don’t care about you developing correct beliefs, magicians don’t need to actively convince you that there’s nothing to magic but “tricks” and “illusions”, just to leave that ambient social belief unquestioned, etc.

What I’m getting at is this: the specific reasons someone might want you to have incorrect beliefs are legion, but fundamentally it’s just that they want to create an arbitrage opportunity for themselves.

And that is what we will use this “foundational concept” to explore in the future: the deliberate cultivation of incorrect beliefs in you with the intent of creating arbitrage opportunities.