How to avoid being suckered.

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How to avoid being suckered.

Lying, deceit, cons, frauds and confidence tricks all have one thing in common. They need to replace one thing with another. There's no other way it can be done.

It is in fact very easy to never be fooled by anyone again. The car salesman or refinance agent, the priest or the teacher, the Secretary of State or the lowliest vagabond, God himself, or the devil personified, they all have to do it the same way or not do it at all.

Obviously, people attempting to make a living by swindling others don't much like this fact, and so they try their best to obfuscate it. Incidentally, there's only two ways to hide something. Not three, nor four. Just two.

First, they can try hide it in the woods. That's an expression. It means, you take one thing, and find a bunch of other things that from a distance sorta look similar, and put it among them. You've hid it in the woods.

So, going this way, they point out that language itself relies heavily on replacing one thing with another. This is true, word definitions aren't a hierarchy, but a circular scheme, in which every word is a function of all the others. Then there's comparison, and simile, and metaphor.

So the swindler will take one lie, and hide it among a large pile of words. That's the first way.

Secondly, they can try and hide it in the parts. That's when you take something, cut it to bits, and then say, no, officer, I'm not carrying a gun. I'm merely carrying a gun barrel, a gun stock, a lock, a magazine and six separate bullets.

Going the second way, they hack things to pieces, and try to pass them as innocuous. The swindler will take one lie, break it into small pieces, and then proceed to prove the individual pieces. Sometimes the pieces can be proven, and sometimes they can't, but invariably they will be hid in a large pile of facts.

This works best if he somehow manages to ensure that different people review the different pieces, and it's the bread and butter of the better lawyer. In fact, they only teach it in lawyer grad school.

Sometimes, the more perseverant trickster will use both, in various combinations. But mixing arsenic and cyanide in varying proportion doesn't make different drinks. It just makes poison.

To protect yourself from the first way, just look at the words. Do they mean the same thing all through, or do they change meaning halfway ? Which words switch meaning, and why ? Look here :

Napoleon was a great general. Great generals are forewarned. To be forewarned is to have an extra pair of arms. So Napoleon had four arms. Four is an odd number of arms for a man to have. The only both odd and even number is infinity. Napoleon had an infinite number of arms.

Computers don't see what's wrong with that logic, because computers don't comprehend human language. But we do, and so we notice that odd means strange the first time, and divisible by two the second time. It switched.

And we know what metaphor is, which computers do not, and so we know that the extra pair of arms you get being forewarned isn't the same thing as the pair of arms you play basketball with.

If you consistently look for words that changed meaning, and for figures of speech that switched scope, you will always spot the odd wood in the woods.

To protect yourself from the second way, just look at the treatment given facts. Of the large pile of facts, are the most important facts getting the most attention, and then the less important less attention ? Or is the speaker showing a strange fondness for some particular facts out of the pile, that don't seem to be the more important by themselves (but are for him, cause he has a little plan for them) ?

And could you guess what the plan would be ? Look here :

We're going to prove that you can can cure headaches with a hammer. Get one thousand people with a headache, crack each of them once over the head, and tell them whoever doesn't feel better is getting a second dose just to make sure.

Then we publish the reports of those cases where the people had enough sense to tell the person that just smacked them over the head with a hammer whatever that person seemed to want to hear.

These published reports happen to be facts, in the pile of facts. It's just that somehow more important facts of the same pile seem to have received no treatment, or not nearly enough treatment compared to their importance.

This is just a silly example that could never happen, you say ? Of course. However, in 2000, only 5% of studies published in complementary or alternative health journals were negative (Schmidt K, Pittler M, Ernst E. "Bias in alternative medicine is still rife but is diminishing". BMJ 2001; 323: 1071).

Just remember to check the woods and the piles, and nobody's ever putting one past you again.

And since we're about to part, a little about the swindlers themselves. Much like the carpenter always has splinters in his fingers, and the fisherman always smells of fish, con men end up touched by the very nature of cons.

It's a wretched profession, because no con will ever be any good if the conman doesn't pour his mind and soul into it, and they can never get either back like they used to be.

So the average bunco will carry, like toilet paper on his shoe, the signs of his sad art. Because scamming relies on replacing things, the scammer will always be fascinated with movement, fluency, they'll claim they're like air, or water. That sort of stfluff.

Reality never seems quite good enough to them, anymore, and they can't enjoy eating an apple, or digging a garden. The flimflam artist finds himself slowly going blind to this world, and relying on others to convey it to him. Through his scams and misrepresentations, he'd like most to obtain a shard of the original world back, but fail that, he'll take a shard of proof that nobody else sees it either.

Many people see reality, and many people don't. The first usually love it, and work with it, and this feeds back into clear seeing, and so forms a circle that reinforces itself. See it, like it, educate yourself, see it clearer, like it more. And so they end up scientists and doctors and writers and whatnot.

The latter usually fear it, and run away from it. This also forms a circle, that also reinforces itself. Run from reality, make up reasons to justify your running, see reality even less, comprehend it even less than that, make up more reasons. And so these people end up uneducated, afraid, lonely and desperate.

This is why you never see hustlers among physicists and astronomers, but always among psychics and astrologists. It's a sad covenant of the blind, one blinded himself willingly, the other ended up blind, and they huddle together in the dark, and tell each other stories.

About reality, and about physics, and about astronomy.

This article produced 10 crocodile tears.

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