Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
(Actually, I think it uses all the principles 1 through 7)!
https://www.vanishingincmagic.com/stage-and-parlor-magic/the...
> Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
The crucial thing people tend to miss: Attacks scale. They can be automated. Your blog may not be worth the trouble hacking it, but hacking thousands of private blogs and abusing them for spam and only having to work out the attack once is.
In the pilot episode he says something to the effect of, "It's not magic. It's never magic. People just can't imagine, or can't be bothered to do this much bloody work"
Deep domain expertise, with plodding, methodical deliberative thinking until he finds a solution.
No flashy mental superpowers, just patience, trial-and-error and lateral thinking.
I mean, even Scotty from Star Trek verifiably beat Trump's ghost writer to the punch on that wisdom by years and it was already an ancient idea before that.
Are you an art thief and is your Van Gough in transit worth $1.5mil? Be pretty dumb not to spend $1mil to recover it for your team of 3, then, right? But nobody does. And nobody spends $1mil to protect said artwork. It's like we collectively agree that official valuations are BS.
I am now curious if there is a formalization of this idea of variable value which seems to be a function of some kind of friction/work requirement. And I imagine is a function of scale relative to the context.
What I mean is, if you're an auction house or a major museum, with an operating budget in the $100Ms or more, at some point it is at least cognitively simpler (if not prudent) to accept a certain amount of shrinkage/fraud/loss etc., which you might prevent with even minimal effort, because the minimal effort is too costly in some other way. Cognitively. Administratively. Whatever.
I remember learning from relatives who had worked in the FBI that their had been in their day thresholds for what level of check fraud merited investigation. Below a certain level it was not a good use of limited resources to waste time chasing it.
This has an interesting follow-on effect, that it was worth consistent effort to obscure that actuality and promote belief in a much more comprehensively aware and interested (and competent) FBI than existed, because that was itself effective in discouraging a certain amount of crime. "Not worth the risk" is miscalculated when you overestimate the risk. And you have little ability to test the system.
I find this interesting because it is a reminder that e.g. value is not BS, exactly; but it's multidimensionally contingent and contextual. Which I guess you can see in other places all the time but this is an interesting angle.
Not least because it suggests where to look for rich veins of "arbitrage," the places you can exploit differences in relative value.
A la Superman III!
If the reward is $1M. If it's $10m then 10% is worth it. $1B? Why are the many, many billionaires around the world not making this kind of play?
As the other commenter points out the expected value of the heist of a $1.5M painting is a lot less than $1M for potential thieves.
Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28379347 - Sept 2021 (3 comments)
Teller Reveals His Secrets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18627594 - Dec 2018 (3 comments)
Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14211242 - April 2017 (144 comments)
Teller Reveals His Secrets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3632821 - Feb 2012 (36 comments)
Since then I've traveled all over the world studying with Master Magicians. Lovely to see the article again, I haven't read it since.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/619/the-magic-show
Explains the significance of Penn's ball kick at the end.
I wonder if you could glean information about the traffic patterns of a site by how much a link from a single social media site influences a list like that?
https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/nov/20/man-ball-hoop-be...
Exploit pattern recognition - This is the big one, of course
It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing. - Yeah you're probably not laughing when you come across a cookie banner, but you might be distracted by something else, like your desire to get to that recipe, how-to answer, etc., or maybe a huge pop up ad.
Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth - good luck trying to change your cookie settings after you've set them
If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely - it's really a misleading choice with how these banners are designed.
etc.
Or maybe "Teller (magician (of duo Penn & Teller (known from Fool Me (a British TV show)))) reveals his secrets"
Just because you would have preferred a story of a bank teller… and had it been this way, another one like you would have complained that it's not about the famous magician.
Language is ambiguous. "Teller" is his name, there is no conceit in the headline.
And as long as there is no conceit, your accusation is out of place.
> Would you really have preferred "Teller (magician) reveals his secrets"?
> Language is ambiguous. "Teller" is his name, there is no conceit in the headline.
I'm an old fart.
Because stumbling across something that surprises us as isn't what we first expected is good.
If semantic precision was the goal, using the original titles wouldn't be mandated, but prohibited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller_(magician)
TIL: Penn & Teller met as painters at art school!
I'm still of the opinion that the title is misleading, but I accept that most people think differently than myself. That's been a common thread my entire life )) I think that a popular technology company even made a slogan out of it.
"Ah, I see Teller is a well known pop culture figure. My mistake." would be a more appropriate way to respond. Searching "Teller" on Google outputs the magician as the first four results. It's not like it's some super small name.
Be nice, I'm sure it took some genuine effort on OP's part not to tell you that they don't even own a TV.
I accept that it makes me a weirdo. I just don't like the passiveness of the TV, but I really did not mean any insult to yupper32. He can enjoy whatever medium he likes.
I may be more familiar with his work than the average person because of his connection to my high school. But saying the title was "clickbait" (as if there is some large contingent of people that were hoping to hear the secrets of bank tellers) is a little much.
What's much more interesting about your comment is that is evidence of some of the points Teller makes in his piece. You were totally misdirected. You were sure of one pattern when another one was being used. You walked away, indignant and in disbelief.
> What's much more interesting about your comment is that is evidence of some of
> the points Teller makes in his piece. You were totally misdirected.
it is not like the title was "learn this clever trick from Einstein" and then you figure out the Einstein in the article is a dog.
2. If not, what incredible secrets were you hoping to learn from a bank teller?
We, from The Society, greatly appreciate your comment. Please keep up the good work and take this in jest.
Imagine something like:
"newly revealed documents show Edward Teller was a Soviet asset"