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fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014 - Less Wrong
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Apparently one reason that the famous "419 Scam" spammers write such illiterate and instantly-recognizable spam email is that this serves to filter out all but the most gullible recipients. By writing badly and unconvincingly, they ensure that more of the people who actually respond are gullible enough to be pulled in to the scam. Because it's cheap to send out millions of copies of a spam email, they have a strong incentive to minimize the number of responses that aren't good leads.
Are there other cases where someone might do a deliberately bad job at convincing people of a falsehood, in order to filter for the most gullible or susceptible marks?
Cults!
It is also not unknown for someone with something genuine to teach to actively filter out those not capable of learning it.
There's a rhetorical technique called "dubitatio" - where you deliberately act unsure, less skilled or less intelligent in order to make yourself sound more credible. E.g. "Although I'm just a simple man unused to public speaking I think...." Obviously it depends on the audience you're appealing to, it works best with people who mistrust skilled orators
(George W Bush did this a lot, his famous 'Bushisms' were almost all deliberate, and playe to a base who distrusted 'elites' and made him sound more honest and down to earth.)
Phil Hartman's SNL character Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman ..."
Sounds like the evil twin of the Socratic Method.
If that's true, than I would propose a strategy against spammers.
Build a computer that automatically replies to every mail and tries to drag out the conversation as long as possible. Perfect enviroment for turing tests.
Do you think someone already tried to route all their email through cleverbot?
Academia? A lot of scientific writing has the feeling of being dliberately written to be hard to understand.
There's a style of scamming that involves seeming incompetent, such that a clever but insufficiently clever target decides that they can scam you back. This obviously backfires.