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Comment by noahc | Hacker News Reader

I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school.

To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize detectability.

The biggest take away from this is that I realized that social interactions have formulas and you can take advantage of those formulas. You can also find shortcuts to the formula or make certain parts of the formula more important or less important based on context.

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I am hoping you are hinting that this story is an exact replica of that behavior... pulling off a social formula, on a slightly bigger scale. Even if you are not, having gone through a similar phase back in early years with that exact same motivation, I am!

This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.

I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.

Thanks for making that explicit. My point was that the context (story) she used makes it so we want to believe her. In the same way I could setup a context that makes you want to believe and ignore irregularities.

I would expect that the journalist as a filter makes this even more likely. The journalist would then ignore irregularities or dull them in the story presenting the most consistent pieces in the story, not the least.

I would say one advantage that I had, is I could test responses, over and over again. But that is always what allowed me to basically have a formula that would result in 95%+ conversion on the phishing attacks. The other 5% often times where do gooders trying to tell me not to be in chat rooms or to warn me about pedos.

Thanks for the explanation. I suspect most people downvoted you because they didn't understand your motivation.

I particularly liked your comment about finding formulas for social interactions. Have you tried looking for work at a social startup? From what I have heard of Facebook's culture, you would fit right in.

i didn't downvote, but regardless of the motivation it's still just a little creepy

This sounds like Transactional Analysis, it's an interesting read on Wikipedia

I think the link is just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/transactional_analysis if that's wrong I apologize, I'm typing this from my phone

Have you analyzed and documented the formulas you mention? This would be a first step into formalizing and eventually monetizing your experiences.

I don't have the logs, so it would be based more on memory than anything else. It'd be less than scientific, and I went into Yahoo Chat rooms 6 months ago to see if they had changed and it is much less fruitful now with the population being mostly made up of bots.

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