Cons work at being a con. This is their profession. they can be very convincing.
and, to elaborate on what my illustrious (well, when he’s wearing that jacket) friend Fenris has said, not only can smart people be conned, but it’s not always that they’re trying to ‘get something for nothing’ or ‘are gullible’.
There was a couple I knew who are pros. As far as I know, their forays into legitimate labor are few and far between. They’ve lived their entire adult lives on the proceeds of their conning people out of money.
One especially good one (and I won’t describe it fully), relied on people’s tendancy to want to help some one.
Another friend of mine nearly got swindled big time by a guy (who later appeared on that crime show with Robert Stack??) simply 'cause she was trying to meet some one and have a relationship. He was very skilled, had swindled a significant number of intelligent, middle class single women, most of whom were professionals in the community. She was lucky, all he managed to do w/her was to steal a check and forge her signature etc. First she found out about it was a warrant issued for her to appear in criminal court 5 states away.
As was noted earlier, arguing for “stupid people to get screwed”, is taking a pro-anarchist stance. The irony of course is that no anarchist society could ever dream of having such specialized peices of (thought and form) technology which make these cons easy to pull. Part of the ‘social contract’ is that we trade trust for mutual benefit. You trust that your best freind won’t kill you everyday, that someone didn’t slip some cyanide in the processing machine for your favorite canned good; you trust that weights and measures are accurately rendered. Nobody is specialized enough on every topic to not fall for an area of non-transparent corruptability, where it seems logical to assume that the transparency is there. If everyone had to measure all their items from a grocer; run atomic spectral analysis on all goods, and study all aspects of engineering for products and ideas - both past and cutting edge present (to keep the ‘virus updates’ current); society would crash. Lack of trust costs too much energy. What these cons are taking advantage of is the perma-fight-or-flight state that individuals give up to live in a social structure. Con artists very skills are harnessed from that very social structure; and to that degree, they are utilizing the benefits of an ideology they do not espouse by violating that trust necessary to maintain the ideological structure. They are basically hacking the code, yet do not honor that those who hack the code do not possess the constitution to develop anything the code represents. In a society, the ‘hackers’ should be placed in an atmosphere and environment that is the result of their ideology. Those who offer trust are the pillars of the society we stand with; without them, we’d be spending so much time looking for berries; that’d we’d be no better off than any of the other non self-recursive lifeforms on this earth. When cons hit a larger spectrum, the same damage to society occurs… fighting for oil when we have batteries that run 1000mpg; and solar technology that makes their recharge sustainable. Cons are all about omission; their very success depends on you not being a specialist, or not having come across (or simply forgetting) the detection and protection for that specific ‘virus’. People do get wealthy off of cons and will play counter-intelligence games to make you feel guilty or stupid for being a member of society and what that represents.
In short; only a society has laws
Conning is ‘hacking’ the laws or implicit trust not coded into law yet (undetected exploit)
Con artists can’t even develop their art in the very society they’d develop… basically they should be sent to a deserted island; dropped food and shot by surveylance if they try to form social contracts with other individuals. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”, as they say. Well… that’s what cons do for a living; they violate the trust necessary to form a society. As such, they are not members of society, but vultures on it. Society certainly should protect those who sacrifice their trust for the mutual benefit of its members; and banish those who seek to attack or destroy it.
If she overcharged people, prosecute her. If she charged the wrong people, prosecute her. If she charged the right people, but added extra minutes, prosecute her.
But claiming you’re from Jamaica when you’re not isn’t illegal. Fleecing people for psychic readings isn’t illegal. It’s for entertainment only, right?
If someone calls up for a reading and gets a reading, nothing illegal has occurred. Stupid is as stupid does.
[hijack] I am going to make a bit of a defense of people playing the lottery here. If you press most intelligent, well-educated people on why they think it is stupid to play the lottery, they say that it takes in more than it pays out so you will be expected to lose money. However, this argument is fallacious when applied at the level of large jackpots: Unless you are very wealthy to start with, you ain’t going to play it enough to realize this expectation value.
In other words, the lottery is a scheme whereby lots of people put money in for a small possibility of getting a heck of a lot out. Lots of people lose a little bit of money while a few gain a lot. You can argue whether it is wise to do this or not but not really on the basis of expectation values. Personally, I wouldn’t even play it if it was paying out more than people were putting in. However, some people may feel that throwing away a few bucks that they would otherwise squander in some other silly way for the very small possibility of getting lots of bucks is worth it and I don’t think you can prove mathematically that it is not.
A few caveats: (1) I think people who play with the hope of coming out ahead by winning the small prizes are being foolish because for these they probably play it enough that the expectation value means something. (2) I also think people who play it with an inflated perception of what the odds actually are or that they can somehow better the odds by playing their anniversary date or whatever are of course being foolish.
By the way, insurance is much the same deal…Your expectation value is that you are going to lose money but you buy it anyway because you feel that paying some small amount of money to protect against a catostrophic event is worth it. (This is, ironically, why it makes more sense to get insurance for unlikely events than for likely ones…Buying the extended warrantees is not usually a wise investment because they make a killing on them and the probability of appliances breaking is high enough that you will probably end up vaguely in the range of the expectation value over your lifetime of appliance buying.)