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]

The secret spring of the confidence game is an unmet need of the mark, the catch being that the need is unmeetable, mostly on account of its deriving from infantile fantasies.

Human beings are such simple critters at root that the whole vast sea of their insatiabilities boils down in the penultimate analysis to these few possibilities:

• Love
• Power
• Wealth

Things like Fame are an obvious disguise for Love — you could argue that Wealth is not desired for its own sake but for the sake of the Power that it brings, and you could probably argue the reverse just as well — but this short list is a convenient stopping place for now.

The confidence man — somehow political correctness seems out of place in this demesne — takes the mark into his confidence, and confides in him, beyond all hope of (reasonable) expectations, a confidential way of meeting his unmeetable need.

And for the chase of that will-o-th-wisp, the mark will incrementally and exponentially sacrifice all of his real assets.

That is no manifesto, that much we know …

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

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: