How con artists trick your mind

Ah, but my favourite from that article: "You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties(No. 7—Choice is not freedom)."

Great book. btw the Dalai Lama giving flowers at the airport was a great example.

Because sales and marketing are mostly about scamming people, period. Sure, there are people who are honest about their products and services, but it seems to be an extreme minority. And why we as the society are willing to be lied in the face by advertisers and salesmen is beyond me.

The "time principle" isn't just used in scams designed to separate you from your money. It's also used in religious and political propaganda -- after presenting a dubious chain of evidence or argumentation, quickly jumping to a call to action and hyping up the need to decide now. Sometimes it's not even a call to action that creates time pressure; it's simply a second argument that tangentially relates to the first. If you're trying to listen to the new argument you're no longer thinking critically about the prior one.

And politics. It's happening right now.

There is currently a bit of a debate in Canada as to whether we should be joining the US and its allies in fighting the Islamic State, and all three of these are being heavily deployed by those in favour:

1) we must act now! 2) experts agree! 3) every decent person agrees IS must be stopped!

There hasn't been any deployment of physically attractive accomplices, although I guess that's pretty much what the Liberal's use of Justin Trudeau in opposition amounts to.

The difficulty is that none of these are actual arguments in favour of the proposed strategy. I am generally opposed to military intervention--because it rarely works and it kills people and costs enormous amounts of money and rarely works--but can see there may be a case to be made here. Unfortunately, by using what are widely recognized as scammer's tactics, the government has alienated itself from any evidence-based support (this would not be a first, for this government nor any of its predecessors.)

It would be lovely to see the actual merits of the mission debated, but it is clear that both the opposition and the government are interested only in deploying scammer's tactics in support of their favoured side.

Yeah, every door to door sales person is always a handsome guy or hot chick pushing limited time offers. Inevitably I catch on to the scam by just listening to what their numbers are.

"Most of your neighbours have already signed up," okay... and?

"It's a limited time offer, so we need to know by the end of the week at the latest."

Does it expose the methods of exploitation using any of the convenient Acrobat bugs?

Umm, is this a recurrent problem for you? How many times have you been conned?

I have the same issue with 2nd hand items on the web. Always trying to find unrealistic prices, then praying for it to not be a busted. Often ends in 'well I wanted to see' hindsight justification.

> We have to deal with human nature as it is, not as we wish it to be

Yes, exactly. Security professionals should be forced to write this out in longhand about 100 times every week, just so they don't forget.

I know many people who have used computers for 20 or 30 years, but who are still "clueless" in my "computer nerd" opinion. That's because normal users just want to use computers as a tool to solve problems they're interested in. Normal people are interested in the destination, computer nerds are interested in the journey.

The problem is their (and others) attitude that

> ...the authority principle, for example, is actually very helpful for surviving peacefully in human society

Is it really? But isn't unquestioning obedience to authority the key ingredient to war, corruption and genocide? Maybe trust in authority is necessary in children but adults need to accept the responsibility to think for themselves.

I think they meant "it's no guarantee against..."