Psychology Today, as discussed by Bruce, provides insight into the mind of cons and the practice of fraud:
My laboratory studies of college students have shown that two percent of them are “unconditional nonreciprocators.” That’s a mouthful! This means that when they are trusted they don’t return money to person who trusted them (these experiments are described in my post on neuroeconomics). What do we really call these people in my lab? Bastards. Yup, not folks that you would want to have a cup of coffee with. These people are deceptive, don’t stay in relationships long, and enjoy taking advantage of others. Psychologically, they resemble sociopaths. Bastards are dangerous because they have learned how to simulate trustworthiness. My research has demonstrated that they have highly dysregulated THOMASes [The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System].
The author emphasizes that two percent is not bad since that means a large majority of people therefore are not bastards. He also turns to literature for historic prose on living with fraud:
Russian playwright Anton Chekov said “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.” I’d say that’s about right-just watch for the occasional con.
Occasional is higher than two percent, seems to me. What percentage would Chekov have guessed? Does the percentage go up in later age groups?
A 2002 paper called Trust among strangers is based on a game that simulates the opportunity for reciprocation and charts the probabilities.
While looking through the years of photos for an album of Twilight, I came across this one of an evening cloud formation. It was taken with a small digital camera out the window of my truck on the way home from a 4×4 camping and fishing trip on the Rubicon trail.
In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and color are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.
The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
the sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine.
You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon’s wind,
and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.
You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.
“Euphoria,” a science-based, self-help art film about the authentic pursuit of happiness, is presented by Creative Alliance and Senator Theatre. The film begins by asking “are you happy?” and takes off on a journey through the American landscape—the one that surrounds us and the one inside us. Synchronized swimmers inhabit an underwater jungle of neurons; Teddy Bears hover in arcs of electricity, and real people share how their lives have been transformed by pursuing what is meaningful and engaging to them.
A montage of visual metaphors, profiles and scientific fact, feature-length Euphoria is not a documentary in the truest sense, and its narrative arc is as loose and loopy as can be.
Nor does Euphoria attempt to terrify viewers in the tradition of the 1936 cult film Reefer Madness and other memorable media scare tactics.
Instead, Euphoria, through scientific, historical and cultural inquiry, makes the point that the “pursuit of meaning and engagement looks like a good idea,” says Boot, the film’s director and screenwriter. Its message, though, is not revealed in any one scene or sentence. It arrives by way of a non-stop accrual of symbols, questions and thoughts over the course of the 80-minute film.
More euphoria = less need for security…unless of course pursuit of euphoria is incompatible with concepts such as common law, which just brings us back to the need for those who get euphoria from designing security controls.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
