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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you search well enough I think that you can find for most products that somewhere on the internet a person calls it a scam.
How about specifically an illegal scam? The way scam is used doesn't always imply illegal.
Do you have any ideas about how we can define this in a useful way?
I don't think it's useful to make decisions based on whether or not a random person on the internet calls something a scam or an illegal scam.
When it comes to a financial investment it makes sense to ask: "If they advertise those returns and those returns are real, why doesn't some smart bank simply invest money into the vehicle?" "The deal still seem to look good even if they company would reduce the rates of return, so why don't they reduce the rates to make more profit for themselves?"
For a lot of other products: "What do trustworthy knowledgable people say about the product?" "Who can I ask?"
I'm not using this as a decision maker end-all, I'm using it to define the reference class to get a prior. All those questions are calculated afterwards. I'm trying to define the "too-good" category, not define something that would discriminate between scams and non-scams.
I think it's a poor reference class.
The core question isn't whether something is too good to be true, but whether it's reasonable that an opportunity like that exists without information being hidden from you.