Why Being Vulnerable to Fraud Isn't Bad

Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

Our world positively teems with swindlers, ripoff artists, and con-men. From ordinary curbside Three-Card Monte to charming, narcissistic domestic abusers, to Ponzi schemers and Wall Street market riggers, the confidence game exudes from society’s very pores. Psychologist turned journalist Maria Konnikova wants to unpack what makes us susceptible to con artists, a journey that leads through all human psychology, sometimes vulnerable to diversions and cow paths.

Konnikova’s first book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, dealt with how crime fighters organize thoughts, observe reality, and undermine criminal mentality. This book essentially addresses the same issues from the opposite angle: how criminals create situations that need busting. Konnikova’s conclusions may seem surprising, until we consider them further. Vulnerability to confidence artists and other professional chiselers actually means our psyches are healthy.

Confidence artists work with an encyclopedic understanding of human psychology with which research scientists are only now catching up. They recognize common traits, like our tendency to see others as similar to ourselves, our illusion of control, and our unwillingness to think badly about ourselves. These traits aren’t weaknesses; without them, we’d be functionally paralyzed. Effective swindlers work by turning our best characteristics and human capabilities against us.

We must recognize, therefore, that making ourselves insusceptible to cons isn’t actually desirable. Fraudsters prey on traits that open us to community, family, and fiscal reward. As Konnikova writes: “The same thing that can underlie success can also make you all the more vulnerable to the grifter’s wares. We are predisposed to trust.” With swindles, as with propaganda, those who think themselves most immune are, actually, most vulnerable.

The answer lies in understanding ourselves and the swindlers better. They don’t see us like we see ourselves. They don’t want to. We must cultivate complex understanding of different human thought patterns, and a stronger sense of ourselves. Konnikova again: “It's not that the confidence artist is inherently psychopathic, caring nothing about the fates of others. It's that, to him, we aren't worthy of consideration as human beings; we are targets, not unique people.”

Maria Konnikova

All isn’t bleak. Throughout most of this book, Konnikova suggests it’s difficult to prevent con-games without isolating ourselves and descending into cynicism. In the later chapters, though, she reverses the trend, showing how skilled, self-aware people can resist flim-flam artists’ techniques. Not hypothetically, either: she shows how real people, cult busters and cultural anthropologists and police, have maintained their sanity when confronted by seemingly insurmountable double-dealing. Resistance is possible.

As Konnikova writes, psychologists once believed humans achieved maturity when they were able to see themselves objectively. We now know that isn’t true. Humans naturally see the world through rose-colored glasses; if we didn’t think the best of ourselves, other people, and the future, we’d be unable to move. Even the bleakest pessimists think more positively than they probably realize. We must sustain such positivity to sustain forward movement.

The solution, then, is to test everything. Know who you are, what you want, and others will find it difficult to warp your identity. Understand the ways swindlers misuse your best tendencies, and you’ll have better luck distinguishing friendliness from abuse. No technique, Konnikova admits, is foolproof; even professional fraud busters sometimes get over their heads. But you have the capacity to withstand grifters.

This book’s release at the beginning of an election season certainly isn’t coincidental. The techniques Konnikova describes—make yourself look friendly and approachable, tell audiences an engaging story, start targets on tiny commitments so they’ll double down later—exactly reflect the techniques long used in demagoguery and electioneering. Journalist Sasha Issenberg has described previously how election managers use exacting scientific advances to improve upon what candidates have long done intuitively.

As Konnikova explains confidence artists’ psychological techniques, her focus expands to include much about recent discoveries in psychology and behavioral economics. She wants readers to emerge with as thorough an understanding of human minds as the fraud merchants enjoy. This sometimes makes her technique sprawling (this book runs over 300 pages plus back matter, unusually long for its genre). Reading Konnikova sometimes requires especial concentration and focus.

She richly rewards those who stick with her narrative, though. I’ve recently seen one friend lose rafts to shady investments and two others get burned by charming, narcissistic romantic partners. Even if we never vote for crooks, invest with Bernie Madoff, or buy salvation sellers’ wares, the potential for confidence games still surrounds us. Konnikova provides needed tools for self-awareness, clear boundaries, and bold self-defense. Swindles are inevitable; victimhood isn’t.

The Parts of the Building That You Never See

Painted masonry chiseled out above the line of the future suspended ceiling,
to accommodate future electrical conduit for fluorescent lighting

Late in his book Little Rice, NYU professor Clay Shirky describes an apparently common sight for Western visitors in China: even in foreign-owned luxury hotels, like Sheraton, lightswitch plates are often attached cockeyed. Wallpaper is hung slightly out of alignment. Drywall has visible unpatched seams. Shirky presents these design quirks as proof that the Chinese aren’t willing to go that extra mile to ensure visible quality. Not like us Westerners.

I read Shirky’s book while working construction, building a public works project, a new municipal high school. Writing my review, I ignored his implicit dig, knowing most readers won’t understand the significance. For many people, buildings emerge whole from the ground, like corn. Indeed, many people, mistaking the machines tipping precast concrete wall panels into place for the entire construction process, blithely ask: Why isn’t that building done yet? Then they wonder why I blocked them on Facebook.

But as we enter the home stretch on this school, I’m noticing some traits around the building that deserve some greater level of comment. I’ve noticed cinder-block walls, already painstakingly erected, painted, and enclosed within the building, being broken back out with chisels to run heating ducts and electrical conduit. I’ve seen parking lots partially paved, then abandoned literally for months. I’ve seen how sloppy Western construction really is, below the surface.

Trash wedged between two pieces of completed cinder block wall, probably by the masons.
Right after this picture was taken, we placed straight wood trim along the wall edge.
Roofers will cover this trim with insulation and rubber, and the trash will probably remain
hidden inside the walls for the life of the building.

Remember that scene in Witness, where Harrison Ford joins the Amish community in raising a neighbor’s barn? Audiences largely agree that’s the movie’s most touching moment, when Ford has learned to share and cooperate. It shows him becoming open to community in ways city life openly discourages. Alongside dancing with Kelly McGillis in the garage, that scene probably did more effective outreach than the Amish have attempted in two centuries.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t represent how construction gets done nowadays. Getting the neighbors together to raise a timber-frame horse barn makes perfect sense, but most Americans are unwilling to live Amish-style lives. We demand electricity, central heat, cable TV and Internet access, and more. And public buildings like schools go further, requiring science labs, gymnasiums, and other specialized facilities. Do you know how to wire a computer lab?

Me neither. And neither do most people. Construction today is a highly specialized process, subdivided among numerous subcontractors. As a result, this workplace is undoubtedly the most segregated job I’ve ever had. Not only are tasks strictly allocated among companies (and turf wars as hotly contested as drug territory), but there’s often severe racial division among task categories: the brickmasons are overwhelmingly black. Concrete workers are mainly Hispanic. Welders are largely white.

And each group, in pursuit of their separate tasks, largely ignores how their tasks step on other workers’ toes. I work directly for the general contractor, and my job is largely to ensure the subcontractors have whatever they need to do their jobs. This means I often spend days, even entire weeks, doing tasks subcontractors wouldn’t notice unless they weren’t done, like building safety rails or sweeping floors. I’m basically the jobsite’s invisible man. So I’ve seen things other workers might rather ignore.

I’ve seen, for instance, how many workers regard the entire jobsite as their general ashtray, garbage receptacle, spittoon, and in extremis, urinal. I’ve swept up strangers’ tobacco loogies, removed their piss bottles, and gathered empty McDonald’s cups they just tossed aside. For me, that’s become an emblem for just how inexact the construction process really is. That’s what Clay Shirky misses: those cattywampus lightswitch plates only make visible what Western construction workers try to hide.

Once you have the opportunity to witness a building’s creation from within, you realize just how intricate the process really is. Especially when deadlines loom, workers prorate what levels of precision really merit their time. Laying cinder blocks involves extremely precise measurements, so masons accept if blocks sometimes look uneven. Moving electrical conduit involves moving PVC, wire, and connectors very long distances through blind avenues to remarkably exact destinations, so if doing so involves walloping off chunks of masonry, who cares.

When we view construction projects like this from outside, it’s easy to complain that the process isn’t already done. It’s easy to poke fun if we notice workers apparently lounging, and grumble about “our tax dollars at work.” But there’s an exchange. What appears slow from outside actually progresses lickety-split, because doing it correctly involves more steps than you realize. Your building is remarkably complex, and more intricate than you realize. So if your switch plates are lopsided, how dare you complain?

Vinyl heating ducts run from a rented furnace through temporary partition walls into a
half-completed gymnasium. I was the only one who saw this. That is, several people looked
right at it, but I'm pretty sure I was the only one who actually saw it. And now I can't unsee it.

The Human Hole in Our Economy

Back in my teaching days, I made one-on-one meetings with my students mandatory. I had as many as six such sessions per semester, a very time-consuming process, especially for an adjunct, nominally a part-time worker. However, I believe they helped both me and my students. The one semester where I focused exclusively on lecturing, I didn’t enjoy the process, and my students’ writing suggests they didn’t learn much either. We both benefitted from just talking.

I remembered this experience when two essays crossed my desk almost simultaneously this week. The first, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, exhorts American universities (and, implicitly, elementary and high schools) to reduce hiring of educational consultants, lay off non-classroom administrators, and use the savings to hire new classroom teachers. The demand has grown familiar recently. University tuition has ballooned while teacher pay has declined, mainly behind paying expensive administrators to criticize from on high.

The second essay, from Salon, discussed the author’s experience clerking a bookstore counter during the Christmas rush. The author describes customers thanking her profusely for her nearly instantaneous ability to find books on flimsy descriptions. She also describes customers turning abusive when made to stand in line, threatening to take their business to Amazon. Essentially these customers attempt to hold the author’s job hostage unless clerks behave as compliantly as one of Earth’s biggest websites.

These two essays, considered independently, simply rehash complaints we’ve heard endlessly. Teachers want to teach, and resent non-classroom pundits prescribing their curricular methods. Physical bookstores have that human touch, but customers have lost their appreciation. Ho hum. But together, a theme develops: whether in humane endeavors like education, or for-profit commerce, the best results are outgrowths of human relationships. And relationships are something we, abetted by new technology, are writing out of our daily lives.

My belief that bookstores and paper books still matter is already well documented. My unscientific opinions have been validated recently by declines in ebook sales relative to print volumes. But we’re seeing forces beyond one commodity being pushed into new territory. We have more stuff available, but opportunities for discovery are significantly narrowed, with costs we’re only beginning to recognize. The consequences of moving American commerce online have been severely misstated, to put it mildly.

Just one example: as more people book airline flights and hotel rooms directly, America’s travel agencies flake off our economy like dandruff. But the supposed savings from “cutting the middleman” scarcely exist. UCLA tech guru Shlomo Benartzi writes that any savings gets more than absorbed by the increased costs vendors pay for simple visibility on aggregators like Kayak and Expedia. More than half your hotel bill today goes into advertizing, triple about fifteen years ago.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’d never encourage readers to abandon ecommerce altogether. Where I live, savvy book shopping requires Amazon and other retailers. My town has two mall bookstores; visiting quirky indie bookshops and record stores would require hours-long drives to Lincoln, Denver, or Kansas City, at great economic and environmental costs. Online retailers (and the much-maligned mall bookstores) make books, and other specialty commodities, available to residents in outlying areas underserved by big-city capitalism.

However, this doesn’t change the greatest drawback to Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and other online retailers, that they’re ultimately passive. Though one could make proactive choices to seek boundary-busting content from these providers, most people don’t. We (including me) drift along the current of what’s available, selecting what we know we already like. Having done this to media consumption, some would do the same to education. Passivity isn’t a virus; it’s being propagated like a seed.

The irony that the two essays which inspired this response reached me through the Internet, possibly the most passive mass medium currently available, isn’t lost on me. But in receiving these sources, I chose to absorb their message. I chose to have a relationship with them, and by extension with their authors, a choice available with all media, however passive. That choice exists for everyone. We need only to consciously make that choice, every day.

We don’t send youth into school to convey information into their heads; we send youth into schools to be changed. We also read books for similar reasons. We can, if we choose, be changed by movies, music, and arguably by television. But we do that only by having a relationship with others. Maybe it’s face-to-face in teacher conferences. Maybe it’s vicariously, through media others create. But relationships matter. We mustn’t let electronics replace these relationships.

Star War-To-End-All-Wars

Kylo Ren and his infantry, immediately after destroying a civilian village

This Essay Contains Spoilers!

In the opening scenes of the newest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, a stormtrooper division commanded by black-clad villain Kylo Ren fails to find their desired target in an isolated desert village. Frustrated, Ren orders his stormtroopers to destroy the village and all the villagers. Watching one stormtrooper unload his flamethrower into a ramshackle hut, I realized where I’ve seen footage like this before.

It looks disturbingly like the after pictures at My Lai

Star Wars has long utilized World War II imagery to propel the Empire’s unquestioned evil, and the Rebellion’s manifest virtue. Arising, as it did, after America’s ignominious collapse into mission drift during Vietnam, George Lucas could only recapture the ethos of the Flash Gordon serials he loved by ignoring much American postwar history. Moral ambiguity might feel more realistic, but Lucas wasn’t seeking reality; he sought mythology.

But since the original Star Wars trilogy, America’s subsequent experiences with strategically questionable wars and rudderless missions have colored our mythology of warfare. Right-wing critics charged Lucas’ prequel trilogy with fomenting anti-Bush Administration sentiment, an opinion not worth disputing now that even most Republicans agree Operation Iraqi Freedom was poor judgment at best. Vietnam isn’t a blip Americans can overlook anymore.

Serious scholars have even called World War II into question. Historian Howard Zinn, who attended Columbia University on the GI Bill, recounts having flown bombing missions over occupied France. He describes having strafed a village of 1,400 French citizens, occupied citizens of an Allied country, to roust a nest of forty Nazis. One recalls the famous AP quote about Bển Tre, that “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

And, oops, we’re back in Vietnam again. Or did we ever really leave?

Rey and Finn fleeing the Luftwaffe—erm, I mean TIE fighters—strafing their squatter camp

Thus the renegade Stormtrooper Finn’s moral struggle during that opening scene, his refusal to open fire into a mass of unarmed civilians, isn’t enough. Layperson moralists have long insisted that if just one American soldier had refused Lieutenant Calley’s order to fire, righteousness would’ve spread like contagion. But would it? The problem wasn’t My Lai in isolation. America has suffered severe mission drift beyond one military conflict.

America’s reliance on international military force in furtherance of domestic agendas has undoubtedly enhanced American political stability. Despite rumors of Daesh incursions, nobody legitimately threatens America at home anymore. Anybody who would seriously threaten America today had better have multiple tactical thermonuclear weapons. Anything less only risks angering the giant.

This unquestioned might requires a trade-off, however. America’s military prowess means every challenge has military solutions. Though our military took time off following V-J Day, we stuck right in again; we haven’t gone twelve straight months without a shooting conflict with someone, somewhere, since 1948. Though we disclaim international territorial ambition, the fact is, America’s military machine works so well, it’s become our first diplomatic tool.

Thus, even though enough time has passed for Han and Leia’s son to reach adulthood, our classic protagonists remain trapped in a neverending war cycle. They could’ve passed comfortably into government positions within the Republic (as the did in the now non-canon novels), but instead, remain leaders of the Resistance, dwelling illegally deep behind enemy lines. As the movie unfolds, we discover many Rebel leaders retain essentially Rebellious mindsets.

Can a galaxy ever know peace, truly lasting peace, if its leaders and icons know only warfare? Well, that’s a loaded question: what does knowing warfare mean? Our classic protagonists cut their teeth on epoch-making war. Somehow, those who grew up knowing peace have never ascended to leadership. When General Organa and Admiral Ackbar remain leaders, never relinquishing power to coming generations, war must almost inevitably remain the standard option.

Passing the baton of conflict onto the next generation

But extending our American metaphor, bequeathing power to new generations won’t necessarily solve much. 2016’s last serious Presidential candidate with military experience, Senator Lindsey Graham, has left the race. But Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and others verbally jockey to prove they’re the candidate most serious about crushing America’s opponents. As British scholar Christopher Coker insists, war remains a cheap way to bind peoples together into a nation.

Science fiction always represents the era which created it. From Flash Gordon’s Aryan hero standing strong against a slant-eyed Fascist, to the Terminator’s fear that humans have created our own destruction, effective sci-fi lets us witness ourselves through a mythological lens. And in America today, our greatest fear is that we’ve created war without planning for peace. Like the Resistance, we fear “victory” is only retooling for the next battle.

The Luddite Buys a Do-Funny

To say I have mixed feelings about Jeff Bezos,
the genius behind my new Kindle Fire, is an
understatement

I'm composing this essay entirely on my new tablet, as a test of personal endurance. I never much asked for a tablet, because I never particularly took them seriously. I already have two laptops and a desktop, so what profit did a tablet offer? Besides, I'm a clumsy two-thumb typist; simple text messages can take me hours to compose.

Yet I was given this tablet for Christmas, and it seems rude to not at least try. It behooves me to remember that I haven't always been the most receptive technology audience. The household I grew up in refused to embrace new tech until we believed the makers had run all the bugs out—a process often so slow that my parents never purchased dial-up Internet until it was already obsolete. My sister describes herself, with evident pride, as "a Luddite," even though she bought her tablet a year before I received mine.

Back in my teaching days, I was the first member of my English department to get a Kindle. The technology was still new and strange, and many colleagues cooed over it like I'd introduced my baby. But I quickly got frustrated with the slow-turning pages, the sluggish download speeds,the easily damaged keys. I suppose I still have that Kindle, somewhere. If I look for it.

Besides,I never particularly enjoyed reading from it. Reading, for me, has always been a multi-sensory experience. Books have differed not only by their content, but by their weight, color, aroma (associated often with their age), even their size. Simple mass distinguishes hardcovers from paperbacks. You don't read books interchangeably, because you don't hold them identically.

My early Kindle sanded all such distinctions away. Everything I downloaded had the same page size, line spacing, font, smell. Only the content separated one book from another. Before long, I found myself using my Kindle to download books where information mattered but aesthetics didn't, or where timeliness held a premium. Where I hoped to enjoy a book, I bought (and still prefer to buy) the paper book.

But it's difficult to resist tech's forward march. I bought a smartphone, not for calling or texting purposes, but for the streaming media players, so I could enjoy music beyond the uniform corporate blandness broadcast over small-town airwaves. Then I connected Amazon streaming video to my phone, because why not. Then I saw a new novella advertised by a favorite author, for some ridiculous price in hardback, or three bucks on Kindle.

And kaboom, I downloaded the free reader app.

Because sometimes the content really does matter. Because sometimes getting the words before your eyes, without counting the price of dead trees or burning hydrocarbons, makes a difference. Because my desire to open myself to other people's experience through the medium of words trumps my desire for ideological purity.

I still prefer paper books, just as I still prefer typing on an external keyboard (autocorrect is driving me nuts). And I'm not alone. Shlomo Benartzi cites studies going back to the 1980s showing that readers who read off screens understand, recall, or even finish less than when reading off paper. Back during those Apple  IIe days, researchers assumed low-quality 8-bit graphics impeded comprehension; but that remains true into the present, when many smartphone and tablet screens have better graphic resolution than most paper books.

Benartzi attributes this continued retention deficit to modern screens being too easily readable. When our eyes move fluidly over the content, we invest too little effort to trigger memory retention. I disagree. As Marshall MacLuhan wrote, the medium is the message; books and screens are just different. When I turn paper pages, the content remains, but turning a digital page returns the content to the primordial byte soup from which it emerged. I pre-consciously believe this, even if my rational brain knows otherwise.

That's why my new tablet will never replace books, because they do different things. They create unique experience in unique ways that have divergent effects upon my life. My laptop's word processor, my old IBM Selectric, and my mom's manual Remington all do the same thing in different ways. My tablet and my paper books enter my brain divergently, to different consequences.

But nevertheless, I've come to appreciate the virtues of networked access. My tablet isn't a substitute for books, but it's a parallel. Having access to content maybe lacks books' aesthetic pleasure, but sometimes, the trade-off is acceptable. Advancing technology needn't mean leaving tradition behind, just expanding the choices available moving forward.