Alex Kirshner shares this ridiculous story about some incompetent thieves. As Kirshner put it:
Intentionally writing a bad check with the goal of stealing money is one of the most obvious frauds imaginable, and even better, it’s a fraud against an ultrapowerful bank that has the customer’s name, address, and Social Security number.
The interesting part is that the dumb idea—write a bad check and use it to draw money out of your own bank account apparently became (briefly) very popular because it was suggested to people on some TikTok accounts.
I’d heard about TikTok but was never quite sure what it was, so I looked it up on wikipedia:
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese counterpart is Douyin,[a][3] is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. . . .
I don’t quite see how this differs from Youtube, but I guess that there’s a big enough market to support two video sharing services.
The story interested me as an example of how people can say the most ridiculous things, but if they say them with brash confidence, people will believe them.
Remember the claim that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each? Or that claim that the replication rate in psychology is statistically indistinguishable from 100%. Those are the kind of things that are ludicrous on their face. Some of the other silly claims we’ve seen over the years—beauty-and-sex ratios, himmicanes, ESP, etc.—they’re implausible but they could be true, maybe? The errors are unambiguous but subtle. The $100,000 thing and the 100% thing are funny because, as Orwell would say, only an intellectual could be so thick-headed as to believe them.
But, the idea that you can make money by depositing fake checks to your own bank account . . . it’s hard to imagine a scam that’s stupider than that. Absolutely amazing. I’m sure that TikTok and Youtube are full of things that are even worse. Seems like a good opening for Wolfram Research!
For reference, more Americans use TikTok on a given day than read at least one book per year. There are twice as many daily active TikTok users in the United States as there are are Netflix subscribers, eight times as many as subscribers to all newspapers combined, and six times as many as cigarette smokers. Being unsure what TikTok is is something like having only vaguely heard of “television” or “golf”.
Jesse:
Interesting! Well, I never claimed to be a man of the people. On the plus side, I do know what television and golf are, and I’ve watched television–a lot of it, in fact. On the minus side, I’ve never played macro-golf.
‘I don’t quite see how this differs from Youtube, but I guess that there’s a big enough market to support two video sharing services.’
Despite being a member of Gen Z myself, I know embarrassingly little about TikTok. But this much is clear: TikTok and YouTube are not competitors per se. TikTok videos tend to be much, much shorter than YouTube videos. They have an algorithm that reminds me of Facebook, showing content that is meant to be engaging. Traditionally, TikTok’s Silicon Valley competitors have been Instagram (owned by Meta) and, to a much lesser extent, YouTube Shorts (owned by Google).
I think YouTube has a more serious reputation these days: You can go there to watch documentaries, historical footage, recorded interviews and, of course, learn about everything from statistics to how to fix your car. There is of course also entertainment on YouTube. TikTok’s focus is even more on entertainment. It is also used for messaging, e.g. from politicians to potential voters, from brands to specific customers, and so on. TikTok is very censored in some ways (it’s not going to become OnlyFans any time soon, if you get my drift), but very uncensored in other ways. The censorship process is not transparent, nor is the process of what content is promoted.
Disinformation, like people trying to cheat their own bank, can easily go viral. It is a breeding ground for misinformation and conspiracy theories, and it gives a voice to the most unreflecting members of our society. It certainly has entertainment value, but lawmakers have zeroed in on this platform for years for good reasons.
Lawmakers have zeroed in on it because they want to control the news. No other reason other than loss of (political) control. It is also a violation of free speech to ban it.
Sounds like the “Chase infinite money glitch” where tiktok’ers were telling everyone you could get “free money” from Chase by withdrawing money from bad checks because Chase had made the funds available before the check had cleared.
Tiktok’ers would often film themselves doing it and post it on tiktok.
Although to be fair, they may have gotten the idea from the Federal Reserve, amiright! amiright!?
The funny part of this is that this is more of a story about visibility and people lying on social media than of a novel widespread fraud. Various methods of passing bad checks have existed for decades and there are plenty of gray/black market internet separate from the stuff most people see talking about this sort of stuff. The double-funny bit is that a lot of these are efforts to sell people tricks on how to do crimes with fake how-to guides. So a lot of viral videos of people doing check fruad is faked because the actual fraud is selling someone a useless how-to-commit-check-fraud-guide. The “Chase Infinite Money Glitch” was just a small bit of normal activity in these areas going viral and with stolen content, copycats, and hate-watching spreading a weird corner of the internet to the broader public.
A good overview of the sort of stuff that is hanging around on 404 Media (https://www.404media.co/instagram-ads-illegal-content-drugs-guns-hackers/).
Wow–how horrible.
TikTok vs YouTube is a bit like the difference between Twitter/X and blogging. Both are about posting stuff. But there’s a very different emphasis on specific details of the process, which leads to a divergence in market and audience and application.
Is this any stupider then a world where a lot of people think D Trump deserved to be re elected because he was a business man who understood the problems of small business owners, and would be able to “fix” the economy
Ezra:
I think it’s different. A lot of people voted for Trump because he’s the Republican candidate and they thought he’d be the most effective choice to achieve the goal of stopping the Democrats from doing lots of crazy stuff.
Agreed that it’s stupid and obviously so, but is it really dumber than the internet saying there are 172 genders (or whatever)?
Anon:
There’s a difference between people believing something you might think is silly (believing in ghosts, or believing that Moses parted the Red Sea, believing that UFOs are space aliens, or believing there are 172 genders, or whatever) and people directly hurting themselves financially by writing bad checks.
Andrew writes, “There’s a difference between people believing something you might think is silly (believing in ghosts, or believing that Moses parted the Red Sea,”
Or, is it just a typo:
“Why did Moses part the Red Sea?
Moses parting the Red Sea: analysis Everyone knows the story of Moses parting the Red Sea so that he and the Israelites can escape the Egyptians. Except that this isn’t what the Bible says. The original Hebrew text instead states that Moses parted the waters of Yam Sūph, which is Hebrew for ‘sea of reeds’. It was a Reed Sea rather than the Red Sea.”
Reed or Red, you tend to sea (see) what you want to hear.
Paul:
You might as well ask if the Cyclops really was one-eyed or whether he was a dude with an eyepatch. Or if the aliens who abducted somebody in that UFO really had green skin or whether they were just wearing skintight green clothing. Or whether those Mormon tablets were really made out of gold. Or how it is that so many nuggets of kryptonite ended up reaching planet Earth. Once you have a legend, it can be interpreted in many ways–that’s the nature of legends, indeed it could be said to be one of their strengths, that they can be adapted for different purposes.
Andrew, it turns out “how it is that so many nuggets of kryptonite ended up reaching planet Earth” is actually an interesting lesson in not assuming a random distribution behind an observation. One supplied explanation is that there’s many, I can’t say “people”, call it “entities”, in the whole galaxy who do not want to fight Superman directly, but will happily make sure any kryptonite they know about ends up on Earth, or as close to Earth as they can manage. That is, there is an extremely strong social effect on the eventual distribution over time.
I might really regret saying this, but oh well. The meaning of such terms as “sex” and “gender” (as well as whether it’s even possible to make such a distinction) have endlessly been debated, but the classic distinction is that “sex” is a biological category (whatever that entails) and “gender” a cultural one (again, whatever that entails). I find the very question “How many genders are there?” to be nonsensical if you mean “gender” in the cultural sense. Do you really think it’s possible to say there are precisely $n$ ways in which what it means to be a woman or a man might vary culturally?
(I think this question is relevant for a blog like this because measurement error is a recurring theme, and I don’t think it’s just ideology for social scientists to question whether there’s a great deal of heterogeneity that gets missed if you just ask respondents to check a box for “sex/gender” on a survey question)
> the classic distinction
“Classic” as “in the last few decades”. One century ago gender was just “Sex, male or female. [Obs. or Colloq.]” (among other things).
I sometimes wonder about whether it’s good or bad to state certain things, or discuss certain things. I have come to the conclusion that it might be good to sometimes state or discuss certain things, even though it might seem or be hard to talk about certain things involving certain people at certain times or concerning certain topics. I really don’t want to discuss the topic of sex and gender any further than I already have. I’d much rather watch some TV, and even that is something I don’t really enjoy or do anymore. Anyway…
“Live from New York: it’s Saturday Night!
Tonight’s episode has been made possible by academia, social media, and specific sections of social science. We thank their efforts for making this all possible.
Start of sketch: Show several different doctors over the last decades helping to give birth to babies and saying things like “It’s a boy”, and “Congratulations, it’s a girl”.
Some nice music is playing in the background, until all of a sudden the sound of a record scratch, or vehicle coming to a halt, can be heard. This introduces the following scene of a gender-studies student storming into the office of a doctor in present time.
Gender-studies student: [Storms into the office of the doctor, purple hair in a mess, breathing heavily] Doctor I want you to stop guessing whether the baby is a boy or a girl immediately after the mother gives birth. You don’t know the gender! Stop being so ignorant, and be more respectful, and be more inclusive.
Doctor: Uhm, why are you storming into my office and shouting at me?! I am using the words “boy” and “girl” to refer to the biological sex of the baby, which is what we have done for a long time now.
Gender-studies student: That’s the problem, just because you heteronormative, privileged, patriarchical folks have done something for a long time doesn’t mean it’s just or valid or fair! Stop assuming or guessing the gender of the baby!! Do you know that there are 238 genders? Be more inclusive!?
Doctor: Uhm, do you want me to start using any of the 236 other options? Do you want me to say: “Congratulations, it’s a baby non-binary!”. That would truly be guessing! What kind of nonsense is this. I am talking about the biological sex of the baby. What do you think I am talking about when I, for instance, say: “Congratulations, it’s a baby girl”.
Even in your usage and understanding of the words “biological sex” and “gender” this is absurd. What do you think is more likely: that I am using the words “boy” and “girl” to refer to the biological sex of the baby or that I am making a guess concerning the gender of the baby which according to you can not be inferred from looking at physical features, can change and develop over time, and apparently has way more than the two options of “boy” and “girl?
Gender-studies student: Stop being so ignorant! Be more respectful! Be more inclusive!? I demand that you stop assuming the gender of the baby!
Doctor: [Shakes head and sighs] Uhm, would it be okay if I, according to you, stop “assuming” or “guessing” the gender of the baby but only say something about the biological sex of the baby?
Gender-studies student: Look, I am not some dictator telling you what you should say or which specific words you should use. I just want you to stop being so offensive and be more inclusive. You can say anything you want about the biological sex, just don’t assume the gender of the baby!?
Doctor: Uhm, according to the dictionary “male” and “female” are the words to describe the biological sex of humans. And according to the dictionary “boy” refers to a “male child” and “girl” refers to a “female child”. So from now on I will only use the word “boy” to refer to the biological sex when a male child is born and the word “girl” to refer to the biological sex when a female child is born.
Gender-studies student: [Scoffs, breathes heavily, fixes purple hair] Fine, just don’t assume my gender or that of a baby that’s just been born!? [Storms out of the doctor’s office]
End of sketch: Show puzzled face of the doctor. Doctor shakes head. Doctor sighs. Doctor goes back to work behind the desk. The end.
yes fair enough and it is a bit of a minefield subject.
I would just say that assigning the distinction of “gender” as being a cultural one is a little misleading (although I agree that this is often how “gender” is framed). It can lead to the impression that transgender individuals are making a choice with respect to a gender they identify with because they prefer the cultural role of the sex that they were not assigned at birth. In fact it seems that (at least many) transgender individuals feel themselves strongly and fundamentally to be female (though assigned as male as birth) and vice versa. There is also some evidence that gender dysmorphia has some biological correlates.
There’s a very nice French documentary (Petite Fille) that portrays the circumstances of a young child with gender dysmorphia that is an instructive watch especially as an antidote to the brutal appropriations associated with the “culture war” aspects of this subject.
Totally agree with you about the nonsense around numbers of genders. It’s actually the biological sex category that is rather less binary than one might think.
my post above was in response to Joe
Yeah, I regret it. @Anonymous. This discussion is tangential to the post, so I won’t belabour the point. But I think there’s plenty of situations where an “obvious” distinction breaks down as soon as you look closely at it. It’s often extremely difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that lets in everything one wants included in a category and excludes everything one doesn’t. Look at the problems with sex verification over the years and the different methods that have been used for it. So you don’t have to be a gender studies student to say that determining biological sex is often not as easy to determine as common-sense might suggest.
@Chris. Sorry if the simplification was problematic. I don’t think it’s really possible to express all the nuances that are involved.
“So you don’t have to be a gender studies student to say that determining biological sex is often not as easy to determine as common-sense might suggest. ”
Well, maybe you have to be. Or maybe it’s more likely to say or think that, or to propose changing customs or language or definitions when you are a gender studies student.
A non-gender studies student might more likely say or think that determining biological sex is very likely or most often easy to determine by a doctor at birth by inspecting certain things.
Unfortunately while that mostly works it doesn’t always. And it is the rare cases where this doesn’t work that are the most problematic and likely to require some consideration and empathy.
And of course apparent biological sex (or even biological sex without the “apparent”) doesn’t necessarily equate to “gender” which is largely the reason for the noise around this subject.
btw, I’m not sure this is the most appropriate forum for this discussion although Joe above did highlight the relevance wrt to “sex/gender” tick boxes on survey questionnaires. But I feel like you’re framing the discussion in a different direction.
Youall might be interested in our recent paper, He, she, they: Using sex and gender in survey adjustment.
“Youall might be interested in our recent paper, He, she, they: Using sex and gender in survey adjustment.”
I guess the title “She might also adjust, so we might as well: Using sex and gender in a survey adjustment” was already taken?
Yes sex is simple, like 98% of the time, and then its quite complicated the rest… XXY, androgen insensitivity, and blahblahblah.
Gender is also simple, 98% of the time, and then its complicated.
In a world of 8B people there are maybe more transgender/nonbinary/people than there are citizens of any one european country. So maybe we could just not be horrible to them by trivializing their life situation? I personally know of one transgender statistician who won’t read this blog because of how often this issue comes up in a trivializing way. The Cis community has all the power here. Its quite unbecoming to use it to make the trans community feel rejected.
Anon:
I like the title of our paper. If you want to have a different title, you can write your own paper.
“So maybe we could just not be horrible to them by trivializing their life situation?”
For what it’s worth:
I am not trivializing anything or anyone or any situation in my view. I have sympathy for those who I think deserve it, which may include people who identify as whatever. It’s just that I think certain things concerning this all are done sub-optimally. Most importantly perhaps it seems that one can’t even talk about things without being accused of being X, Y, or Z, or without someone stating they are hurt or offended or whatever. I am expressing my views a bit, in a certain way. That you, or other readers or not-readers anymore, would maybe like me to think or state things differently is your (and perhaps part of the) problem.
“Anon:
I like the title of our paper. If you want to have a different title, you can write your own paper.”
Perhaps it’s most important what one thinks of ones own behavior or writing. That also ties in nicely with one paper I might write titled:
“Is it more important that I think I am making something better, or that I am actually making something better: A psychological approach to social scientist’s proposals”
Another paper I might write is titled:
“He, She, They: Using established scientists as co-authors can (implicitly) promote and validate possibly sub-optimal ideas and proposals”
> Yes sex is simple, like 98% of the time
More like 99.9% of the time.
Anon:
If you think there’s something sub-optimal about our paper, say what it is. It’s just polluting the comment thread if you just throw around these attitude statements with no specifics. If you want to do that sort of thing, this blog is not the place for it. You can do it on places such twitter, 4chan, etc. that are ideal for this sort of nonspecific expression of attitudes.
This blog is a rare place on the internet where we can have good discussions on social science and technical issues, along with fun conversations about music, books, etc. Repeated vague comments expressing displeasure with the world . . . that’s fine, there are lots of places on social media for that, just not here.
Anon2:
It depends on how you define it. From wikipedia: “The portion of the population that is intersex has been reported differently depending on which definition of intersex is used and which conditions are included. Estimates range from 0.018% (one in 5,500 births) to 1.7%. The difference centers on whether conditions in which chromosomal sex matches a phenotypic sex which is clearly identifiable as male or female, such as late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (1.5 percentage points) and Klinefelter syndrome, should be counted as intersex.”
Dear Andrew,
This is what you do a lot, at least it seems to me you do:
1) When someone says something you don’t agree with or it seems to trigger something you come with your “go to twitter or 4chan” reply.
I don’t do twitter or 4chan or social media or politics or whatever.
2) You say something about someone, for instance that they express displeasure with the world repeatedly but you do the same thing in my view.
You talk about things you don’t like I think, no? You repeatedly mention that dead horse flogging thing when you mention a certain topic for the Nth time, no? Is that not repeating things in several ways?
Now, I don’t mind this all. In fact I can almost predict the moment when a comment like that might appear in the comment section by you. It’s just that you might find it useful to know or be aware of the possibility that the other person might not think or imply the things you might think they think or imply.
It’s all good, no worries.
There are people who love the freedom to be themselves and to let other people be themselves, and then there are people who see the restrictive structure of society and think “if only society were just as restrictive and oppressive but more of my people were in control”
I have little sympathy for the people who see a world full of “cops” and their response is to want to replace them with their own chosen group of cops.
If that’s what you’re referring to then I have sympathy for your view. But at the same time, when the default is to suppress trans folks, someone has to stand up for them. Unfortunately its often the people who seem to think that if they were only put in a position of authority they’d be “one of the good ones”.
So my view is this, maybe if the thing you’re complaining about is the restrictive attitude of “the X police” focus on the “policing” and less on the X.
Here’s another comment that would be predictable to you if you knew how to read:
Please learn to read
He’s suggesting that you should go there, not implying that you already do.
Anon:
Commenter “somebody” explained it well. I think that twitter or 4chan would be a better place for you to express your discontent with the world. You’ll get more interaction there. Annoying me and blog readers here might be fun, but, given the level of your comments, I think you can get a lot more out of interactions on opinion-based social media, the sort of place where people express attitudes and do likes and dislikes or whatever.
Regarding my dead-horse flogging: Yes, I think it’s fine to return to old topics. And when I do so, I either bring up new specifics or link to old specifics. My problem with your comments is not that you are returning to old topics but that you are adding zero to the discussion, actually negative because we’re wasting time here.
At this point, other commenters might suggest that I not respond at all, which could be fine too, but I think it can be valuable to explain my reasoning. We have many constructive comments–and it’s constructive when you and others express your specific disagreements with things that I and others have posted. What’s not helpful is vague expressions of discontent. Again, I recommend you check out some other social media outlets that are better suited to that sort of thing.
hmmm… I did suggest above that this wasn’t the place to have this discussion and it has become rather distressingly predictable.
At some point inferences about the personalities of posters on a thread become more interesting than the discussion itself. On a recent thread about inherent personality/philosophy traits that might distinguish individuals on the left and on the right, I suggested that along with things like susceptibility to conspiracy theorising, attitudes to authority, inherent empathy etc. might also be an ability to be comfortable with uncertainty.
The latter does seem to be a bit of a dividing quality. Those on the right do seem to prefer certainties (e.g. sex and gender are absolutely binary). Individuals on the left are more comfortable with uncertainty and are more likely to allow, for example, that issues around abortion can be rather nuanced. My view [Warning: possible stereotype ahead!] is that scientists tend to be on the left of the political spectrum since they really have to be comfortable with uncertainty (it’s the environment that they inhabit) and are “trained” to consider multiple potential contributions to arguments and observations.
BTW, the “numbers” thing in relation to intersex, gender dysphoria is rather a motivated red herring. If, as Andrew discovered on Wikipedia, the proportion of individuals born intersex is 1 in 5000, that’s no different as a measure of the inherent genetic variability in the human population than the numbers of individuals born with cystic fibrosis or potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias or all sorts of other genetic variations. It’s all part of the broad diversity of human kind.
> It depends on how you define it.
Why stop there?
“Understanding intersex as including PCOS–which affects 6-10% of all adults with ovaries–would make the rate of intersex differences much higher.”
FWIW, since watching the documentary Paris is Burning back in the day, I’ve been reflecting on whether there’s a clear line between self-definition and gender identity. That movie left me with the impression there isn’t a sharp divide, and that insisting rigid distinctions might stem from less exposure to diverse experiences. I now question why people find it important to make a sharp distinction. I suspect it’s because seeing gender as self-expression can challenge people’s confidence in how they define themselves; What’s the impact if gender is inherently subjective and not a function of an objective, external reality? Watch that movie and see if it shifts your view.
> Or that claim that the replication rate in psychology is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.
Can we please get a debate between you and Gary King about this? You are both really, really smart and, as best I can tell, you agree about almost all methodological issues. And yet, on this topic, you think he is being mockably idiotic. Who is right?
D:
I think that “100%” line was written not by King but by a Harvard publicist. Regarding the actual claim, I think Brian Nosek and Elizabeth Gilbert explained the situation well (see here) so no debate will be necessary. Regarding how King got sucked into this one: I don’t know, but my conjecture is he had the naive view that Gilbert was a psychology expert (after all, Gilbert is a bigshot Harvard professor! He’s appeared on TV! He’s published in Psychological Science!) and so he believed it when Gilbert told him that all this social psychology research was solid. It’s kinda like what happened with some of the episodes of Freakonomics: too much trust in the academic experts can lead people to say stupid things. Or, in this case, to not check the stupid things written by publicists. King may very well regret that nobody checked the “100%” claim but at this point he might feel it’s better to leave the whole embarrassing episode in the past. But I don’t know; that’s just my conjecture. As to Daniel Gilbert: let me just say that causal inference is confusing, and he has a track record of being overconfident about causal claims coming from experimental evidence.