Popping The Bubbles

At this very moment, someone is playing us all for fools. That's right, whether we want to admit it or not, we are being tricked, conned, duped, hoodwinked, hyped, bamboozled, hornswoggled, or worse even... simply lied to. I hate to see this sort of thing happen to us so please take a moment and read this post and maybe together we can learn to watch for and avoid this sort of thing... before things really get out of hand and we forget how to trust each other entirely.

Don't Trust Me

Let me tell you my objective right here up front; I care about awareness and I believe that the more aware of things we are, meaning both ourselves and what's happening around us, the higher quality of decisions we can make. I want to encourage you to look more critically at what you're being shown and told, and maybe to help you better understand why we are all prone to being fooled.

The first step on the road to getting better at seeing through the BS is to accept that we do indeed have a problem. I promise to be nice about this. Really, I'm only bringing this up because I care. If you stick with me through this post, by the end of it I imagine you'll not only be more skeptical of any information you are given in the future, but also about who is giving it to you and why (hint: usually because they want your money).

A Lie as Old as Time

Let's be be clear about one thing: people have been lying to each other for fun and profit since before we were even people... and there's no way they're going to simply give it up without a fight. The trick here isn't to somehow force people to stop lying, but rather to enable ourselves to see through their lies more effectively so that we are less likely to be tricked by them.

And let's be honest with ourselves... we are people too and we don't always communicate with 100% honesty. This isn’t about the little fibs or lies of convenience, though, I'm talking about the big ones... the lies that damage our self-worth, rip apart our relationships and have the potential to undermine our belief in each other and our shared values.

As I said above, it's not about finding and rehabilitating the liars, it's about being aware of them and of what they're pushing into your mind about how things are and how they should be. And that is the key element of awareness... to let go of the ideal of how we think the world should be and how people ought to behave and embrace things for how they are as we find them. By doing so we arm ourselves against being conned by taking away the most powerful tool that con "artists" have... our own desire to believe... and enable ourselves to remain grounded in reality and make decisions based on the information of ourt senses, not what the liars wish us to see.

The Mechanical Turk

To get a better sense of how convincing a demonstration of something that’s obviously absurd can be, let's look at an example of one very unique con that stands out from the past and then relate it to some modern cons using the same basic model.

The Mechanical Turk appeared to be a complex machine that could play chess against a human opponent but turned out to be nothing more than a small man in a box operating an elaborate mechanism. Crafted by a very clever Hungarian inventor in 1770 to impress the Queen of Austria (men showing off to women is, without a doubt, the source of some of the most colorful of all lies ever told) it fooled people for 84 years with the trick only being revealed following the inventor's death and after the machine itself had been destroyed in a fire (both of which were accidents, I am sure).

These days, a "Mechanical Turk" refers to any sort of con or hoax where someone shows you an amazing technological achievement which appears to be legit but which is, in truth, being utterly and completely faked by one or more regular people acting behind the scenes.

It's a near-miraculous assertion to say that some random tinkerer could replicate one of the most complex of all human endeavors with a device made out of bits of wood and brass. The idea that people believed for over eighty years that this machine actually could play chess, something we imagine anyone with even a room-temperature IQ would have immediately known to be impossible, is hard to grasp. Yet there they were. And here we are.

I Want to Believe

Why do we fall for claims which, like the Mechanical Turk in its time, seem impossible to the eyes of the average person? There's probably a number of reasons, one being that there are some things that we just imagine nobody would lie about. And then there are the amazing videos and demos of things that just look too real to be faked. And of course when we're surrounded by other people getting attention by hyping the latest thing, it's hard to not get swept up in the crowd of the faithful. But the most compelling reason, as I said above, that we believe in things that would otherwise seem impossible is that we choose to believe in them.

Whether it's out of a desire to possess unique knowledge, the hope of receiving windfall financial benefits, or just wanting to have the bragging rights that we were there first, when it comes to accepting cons and scams as truth, we are usually willing participants in our own hoodwinkery... and here I will assert that the reason we want to believe is because that belief benefits us in some way.

Being tricked can be fun at parties and magic shows, but it seems that what we need to do here is recognize our own motivations and decide that there are realms where taking our rational minds off the hook and embracing magic and wonderment, such as spending the day at Disney Land, is just fine... and other realms, like science, business and public policy, where it's simply not acceptable.

And when it comes to believing in things that have the potential to effect us directly in undesirable ways... like donating money to scammers, investing in ponzi schemes or committing ourselves to programs or ideals that have no chance of producing the magical results they're promising, we really have to stop and think about whether we're truly being tricked by some villain or rather by our own blind desires.

What's The Solution?

The sad truth is that there's no way we're going to be able to solve this problem using a top-down approach. You can't legislate honesty... no amount of regulation is going to prevent people from lying, cheating and stealing from investors, customers and the public. And even if you tried, the truth is that the government can't manage to prevent companies from doing stuff that is provably deadly, so it's absurd to think it can protect us from mere lies and scams. And when you consider the amount of public funds that have been given to some scam businesses lately, it's pretty clear that government can't even protect itself from being conned.

So what can we do? We can protect ourselves by learning to identify and marginalize liars, cheaters and scammers and stop doing business with them. In order to do that, we have to stop wanting to believe incredible claims, stop chasing impossible profits, and stop engaging with the irresponsible liars and con "artists" who are offering them to us.

Fool Me Three Times, Can't Get Fooled Again

Unfortunately, though, our appetite for being fooled seems to be limitless. Contrary to Former President Bush Jr.'s now-infamous quote, you can absolutely get fooled again... again and again... and we've been fooled a lot. Want some examples? Let's look at a few major "tech innovations" that have been hyped into the public consciousness and then revealed to be deliberate hoaxes in just the past year or so:

Distributed Finance - How many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency (at current market prices) was "invested" in short-term, high-yield distributed finance cons like FTX, Celsius, Terra/Luna and Voyager Digital before they were discovered to be scams? Individuals from all walks of life, hoping to cash in on the crypto craze, deposited their tokens into what they were lead to believe were safe accounts only to find that those funds had been fraudulently invested, misappropriated or outright stolen by the fund owners.

Amazon Go Stores - Amazon claimed they had created a revolutionary technology that would allow you to walk into a shop, pick up whatever you want and simply walk out without having to interact with a clerk or automated point-of-sale system. It was supposed to be powered by a combination of wireless inventory tracking and advanced machine learning. Turns out it was a bunch of low-paid humans in a digital sweatshop in India doing the calculations by hand based on reviewing camera footage.

Tesla Full Self Driving - Tesla has been promoting their expensive Ai-powered driverless car functionality as a way not only to take the human factor out of driving but also to turn their electric cars into a profitable autonomous taxi service for anyone who owns one.

Tesla promoted faked videos showing a car driving itself and even claimed the same software was being used in videos of humanoid robots doing simple repetitive tasks, which were also faked. Musk still calls this feature "Full Self-Drive" despite being legally barred in California from doing so.

Personal AI Devices (Rabbit, AIPin, Limitless, etc) - There have been easily a half-dozen consumer products promoted in the past few months alone which purported to put advanced AI capability into a palm-sized or even "Star Trek communicator" styled device. Numerous technology demos have been produced showing these devices performing advanced functions tying together online data sources with calendar, note taking and personal automation tools... and at least two of them have come to market. None of them do anything at all like what they claimed to do.

The Rabbit in particular turns out to be the brainchild of an individual already implicated in a complex cryptocurrency scam. Announced at CES in 2024 and receiving over 20,000 pre-order sales, it's extremely limited functionality and serious security issues have caused a considerable backlash which is likely to lead to investigation and potential criminal charges.

Cognition Labs Introduces "Devon", the World's First AI Developer - In a recent article, our friends at Medium are at it once again pushing the lie that a Generative AI was able to autonomously pick a job off the site Upwork and complete a coding project (setting up a development environment) which included fixing some bugs introduced by human programmers in order to "make some money". As Jake Skywalker once famously said "Every single word you just said is false."

As it turns out, the Generative AI was not autonomous, the job was cherry picked and "Devon" didn't fix human code errors, it embarked on some six hour detour creating its own bugs which it then attempted to fix. And in the video claiming you could "watch it make money" no money was actually made. The company behind Devon used this video to secure a $2B company evaluation yet a mid-tier human programmer commenting on the "media event" claims to have been able to do the same job in 35 minutes using just handful of standard commands.

Crocodile Tears

So what if a bunch of people lost a bunch of money... serves them right, huh? Well some of that lost money, as it turns out, was retirement and pension funds and some of it was public money (your tax dollars). Even for the people who lost their own money, there is still tragedy in the idea that those investments could have gone to something that actually produced value and made the world a better place. Now all that collected wealth has been turned into Lambos and mega-yachts for a handful of brigands, in the best case, and simply evaporated into nothing in the worst.

And that's leaving out major scams and hoaxes from the slightly more distant past such as Theranos, Nikola Motors and the Las Vegas Hyperloop... as well as a few which have yet to be revealed (I'm looking at you, Starship).

A Sliver of Light in the Darkness

It's interesting to note that celebrity, politican and influencer endorsements have played heavily into these and many other, similar scams, The videos, posts and ongoing conversations about civic leaders wasting public funds on self-aggrandizing "monorail scams", pop-culture icons getting rich off the losses of their fans and ignorant investors taking financial advice from even more ignorant pop stars and online personalities indicates that we may be reaching a point where the public's trust in its heroes and institutions is at an all-time low.

The good news is that this erosion of the people's trust in public servants and high-profile sporting and entertainment figures is perhaps increasing people's appetite for holding scammers accountable for their actions, both socially and legally, while opening the door for newly skeptical people to look for better methods to make better choices.

Building a Better Skeptic

So here we've come to the point. It's easy to look at these scams in hindsight and say that anyone with a room-temperature IQ should have seen through them, yet millions of people and many more millions of dollars over the last few years apparently have not realized the truth until it was too late.

So how can you spot scams and cons BEFORE you get taken in by them? Here is a short list of things to remember to be a more effective skeptic. Next time you see a flashy 3D demo, see a breathless story about a "revolutionary new technology" or see a video with someone telling you how you can put a Lambo in your garage by buying their coaching program or implores you to call now as the offer is limited, maybe keep some of these things in mind:

1) Every picture or video includes a camera you can't see.

Whether it's a social media post, a high-budget production or a piece of journalism, whenever you're seeing a picture or a clip of video, there's someone holding a camera and choosing where to point it and what to include (and exclude) from its view. If there's more than one angle, there are multiple cameras and, perhaps, multiple takes... plus direction, editing and post production. Your very first thought when you see a produced image should be "Where is the camera and who is holding it?" then think about that person's possible motivations for doing so.

2) The more flashy the computer rendering, the less likely the thing is to be real.

3D renderings are great for product designs and movies but if someone tells you they've just invented an entirely new mode of transportation and shows you a fancy computer generated image of this fantastic new thing, you can almost bet that the higher the quality of the rendering, the less likely the thing is to ever exist. Before you believe something... and especially before you invest your time, effort, money or reputation in a thing, insist on seeing it for yourself. Money spent on flashy demos is money not being spent on development. Insist on the evidence of your own senses and use those senses to figure out if what you're being shown bears any resemblance to reality.

3) Vague words are vague on purpose.

The easiest way for a bad creative writer to cheat is to show you two things happening on the screen then leave it up to you to "fill in the blanks" and make it make sense for them. If someone gives you a "simple three step process" to success and leaves the middle step blank, their intent is for you to fill in that blank with your own expectations and desires. Instead of doing the work for them, insist that people define their terms, speak clearly about their ideas, beliefs and intentions and make a strong, logical and rational case for the thing they want you to care about. If you fill in the blanks with your own wishes, you'll have nobody but yourself to blame for when those wishes don't come true.

4) Fear of missing out is a trap.

People often use FOMO to play on people's emotional reaction to scarcity. Not only are most "limited time offers" not limited at all, but in fact they're usually an indication that someone is stuck with something they want you to take off their hands. Whether it's last Sunday's donuts or the latest cryptocurrency, the more a sales person tries to play on your fears, the harder you should imagine them trying to push that thing on to you and the more curious you should be about why. With a few notable exceptions, you can generally trust that anything worth having is worth waiting for and if enough people truly want a thing, someone will step into the market to make more of it.

5) Cuteness is also a trap.

In case you're unfamiliar with the word neoteny, it refers to the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Things that are cute, helpless, make high pitched sounds or have unusually large heads and eyes relative to their bodies (like babies do) can be called neotenous... commonly referred to as "cute". Products and brand marks that incorporate such designs are playing on your emotional responses to want to love and cherish those items. If you want to make rational decisions like an adult, don't allow people to play on your emotions... and the response to favor cuteness is pretty much second to the fear of loss.

6) Nothing is free.

And here we arrive at the biggest tell of all. We'd like to believe that there are people out there creating and building valuable products and services for us out of the goodness of their hearts and their belief in the advancement of humanity but the harsh reality is that nothing is truly free. If someone is trying to give you something for nothing, whether it's an airdropped NFT or 2 for 1 happy hour drinks or zero percent interest for 90 days, it's not because they like you and are being generous, it's because they know that getting you involved today will generate money for them in the future. With the possibility of some extremely rare exceptions, whenever a person speaks or acts, there is money involved. If you want to understand their motivations and expectations, follow the trail of that money.

The Final Word

Well there's your healthy dose of skepticism for the day. The famous comedian George Carlin once remarked that on the day he was born, he heard a shoe hit the floor... and he's been waiting for the other one to drop ever since. Be mindful of your environment and of the actions of the people in it and stop "trusting" people to do what you think they ought to be doing. Watch, listen and learn how things work, accept reality and make your decisions according to it... we'll all be better off if you do.