Another good site to send people off to is http://www.vmyths.com/, which has some good stuff about how to spot a virus hoax, along with a searchable collection of computer security hoaxes, past and present (it amazes me how often old virus hoaxes manage to come back to life again, often years later!).
I like what a friend of mine said best, “Half of the people are idiots.”
I’d say that estimate is way low.
I’ve gotten mail like that, mostly from female office workers, and yes I’ve felt reluctant to correct people in fear of backlash…
Now if I don’t want to bother with that, I just reply with the snopes article about the poor little boy who was born without a body. (He’s so poor his replacement body is a burlap bag of leaves). That always relieves my stress. 
BTW, the thing that always bugs me about that “half of people are dumber than the average person” is that it’s wrong! Half are less smart than the median, but not the mean value. Imagine 9 people with a 100 IQ, and one guy with 90. Average value is 99, but 9/10 of the sample population are smarter than that.
Back when I used to chat a lot, I met someone online who was a notorious forwarder. Well, so was one of her friends who I didn’t know. All of a sudden, I’m getting huge amounts of forwards every day - the worst day I think there were around 25 of them. Anything from glurge to the “forward this to 25 people and you’ll get a gift certificate” thing.
Me being ever so kind and gentle and sick of the forwards…I hit “reply all” (yes, on purpose) and simply said “who are you and why are you sending me this crap?”. Solved that problem. 
Ice Wolf just taking scribbled notes, chuckling. 
What amazes me is this type that starts out full of religious love and blessings, but then they lay a Curse on you if you don’t forward it.
It’s bad religion along with everything else. I wouldn’t see that problem if they put in the blessings and money for forwarding it, and left off the curse.
If they included the curse and left out the religion, it would still be ugly, just less hypocritical. Hey, they could leave out the good fortune and just say, “If you don’t forward this you will get leprosy and suffer while you watch your entire family go to prison and/or die in agony”.
The NM cookie recipe is old as the hills. Yes, those hill over there.
I still have a hard copy of it given to me by my mother years ago when I was just a wee lad. It must have been 25 years ago. I was at her office as she was typing it up on one of those old-timey typewriter machines.
You can’t go making up your own IQ distributions to dispute this point (or any other point based on statistical theory for that matter). IQ is fairly well normally distributed like most traits (think a bell curve). This means that the mean and the median are going to be close to the same value. The little quip might have some minor problems if we really analyze it but the basic point is true by definition.
Here is my counterpoint:
Imagine a classroom of 10 people. The teacher gives an IQ test to all ten. She is despondent when she fines out that 9 are imbeciles with an IQ of 80. She is teaching a bunch of idiots. She cries because she desperately needed to get an average classroom score of 100 so that her class isn’t designated as a special needs class and made to sit at the short table in the cafeteria. But wait! She still has one student left. It’s Shagnasty. She looks at his IQ score and low and behold, it is 280. Hooray! Her class does have an average score of 100 and they can sit where they want.
That’s because your distribution is skewed. A perfect Gaussian distribution has the same mean and median values. Human intelligence is assumed to be like that. Things like wealth distribution are not, and the mode and median values are used to see how badly skewed the curve is.
I actually happen to have a large scar over one of my kidneys. Whenever the kidney theft/ice tub story gets thrown about by some particularly gullible person, I’ll show them my scar and tell them I woke up in a tub full of ice with it.
Sometimes I think I’m going to hell for that trick.
Yeah, I’m aware that given the large sample population such a trait is likely to have a normal distribution… but usually when I’ve heard this I’m certain the speaker isn’t taking this into account.
I’ve been thinking on the possible reasons why most sendees would be, as has been remarked, female office workers. My hypothesis is that the office worker part is due to the fact that they’d be the largest demographic with computer access and regular e-mail. The female bit I’m thinking is because the men don’t care enough to forward glurge whether they believe it or not. Any other suggestions?
It’s not that people are stupid it’s that they’re lazy. Why waste the time to look it up when you could just tell someone it later and get told if it’s true or not. Of course you end up looking stupid but it’s to your friends so who cares.
Murphy’s law “The hardest way is always the easiest.”
People are idiots- never forget that. I’ve forbidden people from sending me this shit and yelled about it numerous times, and at my old company where I was the IT director, workers got disciplinary action for any and all junkmail forwards. We had regular educational sessions about Internet hoaxes, virus hoaxes. proper ways to avoid a virus, and how to look up urban legends. I don’t know if it made a difference to the world, but it did to them.
Let’s all keep in mind that the word “average” can refer to a mean, median, or mode, depending on the motive of the person using the word.
Umm, no pestie.
Otherwise, I could easily describe your post above as “helpful” and “accurate” even though my motive was to describe it as just the opposite. Words have actual meanings, not poorly defined boundaries that each person is then able to take and apply in any way in which they see fit.
I don’t know if there’s any significance to it, but without my waging any type of war against it, the amount of this stuff that I get is but a small fraction of what it was 4 or 5 years ago. And, if anything, many more people have one of my email addresses now than did then. There has been an upsurge in some spam, but just plain glurge is down.
One of my mother’s friends told her the “biscuit brains” story the other day. The friend heard the story in church when the preacher included it in his sermon. (Don’t ask me what “biscuit brains” had to do with the Bible. My mother’s friend belongs to a weird denomination.) My mother was immediately suspicious of the story. She asked me later if the story was an urban legend. I assured her that it was. I don’t have much respect for that denomination, and now I have even less respect for them.
One of the pathetic things about urban legends is that sometimes when debunkers try to rebut them, they end up spreading the legend instead. Years ago, when I was in high school, there was an article in the local newspaper about urban legends. One of the urban legends mentioned in the article was the one about JFK being alive and in a coma in a secret room at Parkland Hospital. The next day, one of my classmates came in very happy and excited. “Did you hear the news? President Kennedy is alive. Someday he’s going to recover and come back and be President again.” How did she know this? “I read it in the newspaper.” This classmate was a nice girl, but she wasn’t the brightest bulb on the grocery store shelf.
This one comes with a $2.1 million price tag and some criminal charges.