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Comment by Joe-Z | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The other day I was carrying 2 relatively heavy boxes (furniture; I just moved into a new place) and suddenly a guy comes up to me and asks if he can help me. At first I was kind of flabbergasted, but after a second I was like 'he's just trying to be nice' and gave him one of the boxes. We carried it until we arrived at my apartment complex and had a nice chat along the way. When we arrived we exchanged numbers, since I learned he was new in the city and looking to meet new people and improve his language skills.

If my mum knew about this she'd probably think I'm crazy, being afraid of someone running off with her stuff. But in the end I think "trust-by-default" is a good way of going about life and meeting new people. Also, there's still gut-feeling. Maybe I'm an outlier there but I'm pretty quick in determining if someone is being sincere or just sweet-talking me to get what he/she wants.

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> Maybe I'm an outlier there but I'm pretty quick in determining if someone is being sincere or just sweet-talking me to get what he/she wants.

Personally, I feel the same way. But it's illogical. What data do you have that you're good at ferreting the genuine from the not?

Millions and millions of interactions accumulating into a well-oiled intuition.

Mostly likely that he has not been completely duped yet. That has the effect of quickly realigning your trust meter.

That may realign it, but it doesn't mean you're good at it. Maybe Joe-Z fails in the other direction, writes off tons of people as untrustworthy (incorrectly) for no reason, and hasn't realized it.

>writing off tons of people as untrustwothy...

I think that‘s what most people do. I‘m actually waiting for me to be „completely duped“ one time and deliberately exposing myself to this risk. However, my experience so far has lead me to believe: Most people are really nice and the few that aren‘t shouldn‘t really be tainting your interactions with others that you just happen to not know yet.

I of course don‘t have data to back this up. But, I think, a lot of it comes down to how you approach these sorts of situations. According to my experience, how open you are - and stay - in kind-of-sketchy situations will get you a long way in dealing with people that others might have just written off as „someone trying to scam me“.

That actually reminded me of a really cool poscast episode I listened to this week:

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance

(A guy trying to get to the bottom of an indian call-center scam, leading to all sorts of pleasant interactions along the way)

The second part of that episode is in no way pleasant - in particular when they met the two scammers at the bar. Their flippancy could have very easily led to a much worse ending than it did.

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/103-long-distance-part...

I know, I know... I wasn‘t referring to this part as being pleasant :)

This is an interesting point, and is basically the premise of online dating apps/websites - it's better to trust that things have a chance of working out rather than not trying.

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