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Comment by vundercind | Hacker News Reader

This kind of shit is why I think a “defense against the dark arts” class should be standard in high school. It should cover, among other things:

1) How cults recruit and retain members. How to recognized it and tell them to fuck off before they get their hooks in you. Ditto MLMs, et c.

2) How to lie with statistics.

3) All the stuff from Cialdini’s Persuasion

I intend to give my kids such a course at home, since schools don’t do it.

Really, I think schools would have trouble adding such a course. I think too many families are involved in one part or another of all that, and would agitate to end it.

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I'm not convinced it would help that much. One of the main reasons cult recruitment tactics are so effective is that they are also the mechanisms of wholesome human connection. If you universally reject people reaching out to you in these ways you will reject most good faith connections as well. And especially the retention techniques. Cults abuse the forces of social cohesion, but even being aware of that you are still bound by those forces. You will still feel the pain of rejection, the primordial terror of being cast out of your ingroup.

And I suspect it is similar to addiction, where having knowledge of the risk factors and mechanisms is at best a partial protection, at worst false confidence. Just as doctors and social workers become addicted to drugs, people who know how MLMs and cults work still join MLMs and cults.

The only personal-level skills that protect you are deep life shit like being honest and self aware about your own periods of loneliness, pain, vulnerability and being able to identify what is and isn't good for you at those points. You're not effectively teaching that in a high school class I don't think.

Especially for cults. None of them walk up to you and say "we're a cult". They start out with positive interactions. Usually they find someone who needs help and seem to be offering something positive. It's not until later that they slowly start creeping in the more dangerous aspects like control and isolation.

It's a lot like an abusive romantic relationship. Most people aren't getting punched on the first date, instead they're interacting with someone who seems wonderful.

I think practicing scenarios and developing fallback heuristics and patterns could help. You don’t need to think when you have a rule to fall back on (“I never, ever buy anything from a salesman who approaches me unsolicited, period, end of story”) and a lot of people just need practice saying no and “being rude” (when someone else is in fact already being rude, by trying to get you to do something that’s a bad idea)

I agree with that, especially against MLMs and direct scams, that sort of practice is probably very valuable. It gets harder with the more straightforward social-spiritual stuff, and the most effective MLMs blur into those I think.

But yeah, I'm not saying you can't learn & practice techniques to reduce the risk of these things. Mostly just that the false positives of those techniques can have real costs too, and thinking you're immune is itself a risk factor.

Yeah, I’m under no illusions one could eliminate this stuff via education, but scams and scam-adjacent behavior part people from so incredibly much money every year that even reducing that 10% or 20% would be a pretty big deal.

Is there any good book on 1?

Gaslighting: recognize manipulative and emotionally abusive people—and break free (2018) by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis PhD.

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