Confidence Games & Pyramid Schemes, There's One Born Every Nanosecond Options Rating

[Jonny Cache]

I'm Re-view-ing the Sit-u-a-tion …

'Cause there's something fishy goin' on here — my nose tells me that much — and just because I don't know what it is yet — especially because I don't know what it is yet — it is necessary to speculate on the various sorts of games that might be in the mix.

So I want to extract a generic theme that arose in another line of inquiry, and abstract it from the specifics of that particular case, because I think there's a bigger picture, however dimly lit, to keep in sight here.

I started thinking along these lines a few weeks back when I saw yet another story on the local news about some Senior Citizen of the Griftedest Generation who sent $20,000 in cold hard cash by Featheral Xpress to some address in Phoenix because some guy on the phone said she had won $10 million from Publishers' Shearinghouse, and, like she said, "But he sounded so convincing on the phone". I was right in the middle of exclaiming — Wow !!! Just how gullible can some folks be !? — when I reflected for a moment on how much of my time and effort I had been conned into x-spending on Wikipedia, all for the sake of a really good line.

Since that time I've been contemplating the ways that the Wikipedia-Citizendium game seems very much like some kind of Intellectual Pyramid Scheme. A couple of distinguishing marks — if you'll excuse the expression — of a long-lasting pyramid scheme are these: (1) a steady influx of newbies who have yet to tumble to the game, and (2) a mechanism to efflux from the system and to render harmless the marks who have started to ask too many questions.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

A Very Shiny Glossary — Terms of Artful Dodgery

• "Confidence Game", Everything_2
• Maurer, D.W. (1940), "The Argot of Confidence Men", American Speech, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr 1940), pp. 113-123

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

Incidental Musement

Alas! I babel on, but find no petard with umph enuff to hoist these fardels off my baktrian's bak … and there are times when even free association fails to trump the trick … so here's a factoid of desultory diversion to wile away the mean time —

My German Lit professor in college was fond of observing that the German edition of Reader's Digest was then called Das Beste. He was quite certain that some wag at the German publishing house had chosen this name in deliberate allusion to Goethe's aperçu, a saying that would have been all too familar to the ordinary German, who is spoon-fed Goethe from an early age in the same way that English-speaking children have Shakespeare dinned into them long before they are old enough to understand what the Hecuba the Bard was talking about.

That was such a fine metaphor for Wikipedia that I once used Goethe's quip as an epigraph for the Wikipedia's article "Lie-to-children". Guess what happened? Yes, even Das Beste was far too good for them.

What this illustrates rather perfectly is the point where the Wikipedia way turns from non-elitism to anti-knowledge and anti-learning.

They call it "the gift of knowledge" —

There's a double meaning in that.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: