The scarier thought is how often we're manipulated that way when people don't bungle their jobs. The few heuristics we use to identify such mischief are trivially misled (for example, establishing plausibility by posting on inconsequential other topics (at least on LW that incurs a measurable cognitive footprint, which is however not the case on, say, Reddit), and then there's always Poe's law to consider). Shills man, shills everywhere!

As they dictum goes, just cuz you're paranoid ...

Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's apparent paranoid delusions of being under FBI surveillance ... only eventually it turned out he actually was. Well, at least if my family keep playing their roles well enough, from a functional blackbox perspective the distinction may not matter that much anyways. I wonder how they got the children to be such good actors, though. Mind chip implants?

As an aside, it's kind of curious that Prof. Tsipursky does his, let's say "social engineering", under his real name.

Anyways, good entertainment. Though on this forum, it's more of a guilty pleasure (drama is but a weed in our garth of rationality).

Since this thread is meant for gratitude, I'm grateful for you sharing your opinion, but would like to avoid discussing this here. As I indicated earlier, the only people who we pay are folks who volunteer about 2/3-3/4 of their time because they want to grow mentally stronger. I'll ask them to hold further comments until the newbies section is ready in LW 2.0