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AdeleneDawner comments on Applied Optimal Philanthropy: How to Donate $100 to SIAI for Free - Less Wrong
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That's a good question, and one that I don't have a very good answer to, but here's the answer I do have:
Banks and some other institutions - generally ones that deal with money in some way - use SSNs to track people. This appears to be government-approved, and I assume that there are significant safeguards in place to reduce or eliminate the chance of bank employees using peoples' SSNs for anything other than what they're supposed to.
Even so, smart humans will be cautious about what banks they use, sticking to ones that have good reputations or at least have been around for several years without any reports of misconduct. I perceive ING as a trustworthy institution to give my SSN to (though I haven't opened an account with them); they've been around for nearly two decades, I know or know of several people who have used them with no problems, and I haven't seen any news reports about misconduct on their part.
You, on the other hand, don't have a government-approved reason for wanting my SSN (and I suspect that if I let you use it, and the government found out, I would get in trouble, for fraud or something similar), there are no safeguards in place to stop you from using it for other things, and I have no reason to trust that you wouldn't use it for other things, some of which could be very harmful to me.
Thanks for the explanation. But what would I do that would harm you? You told me a week or so ago that you like paperclips, so even if I used the SSN to produce paperclips, what's the problem?
Several of the things you could do with mu SSN would appear in the official records relating to me as socially unacceptable things that I had done, and given how those records are used, that could lead to, for example, me becoming homeless - which would probably lead to me being dead. That's more important to me than paperclips in almost any quantity or situation. (And the situations in which a large quantity of paperclips would be useful enough to me to make a difference in that are ones that I expect you wouldn't approve of - most obviously, if you were to give me enough paperclips that I could sell those paperclips for enough money to buy a house and live comfortably for several decades, I might be willing to trade access to my SSN for that, but it's entirely predictable that anyone who would be interested in buying that quantity of paperclips from me would want to melt them down and use the metal for something else.)
I understand now, at least at a general level. Thanks for explaining that. I don't want you to die.
That's good to hear.
(You still can't have my SSN, though.)
And you can't have the safe zone access codes. Not that that would be enough to break in, anyway.
Because you're not a paperclip maximizer, you're a human being who continues to think that mock naivete is hilarious.