
Why Americans Get Conned Again and Again - panarky
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/americans-con-fraud-balleisen/535281/?single_page=true
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thehardsphere
This is kind of a boring ad for a book. The book itself may actually be an
interesting history of fraud in America but, eh. There isn't really as much
insight here as you may expect from the title.

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panarky
I'd like to know if there's a correlation between the percentage of devout
religious people and the incidence of fraud.

When people are raised to believe fantastical things without evidence, they're
probably less able to reason from first principles about offers that are too
good to be true.

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beaconstudios
I don't think people believing fantastical notions without evidence is purely
constrained to the religious. There are plenty of pseudo-religious belief
systems within atheist thought circles - mostly consisting of political and
philosophical conceptions (as well as the ever-pervasive scientism). And after
all, isn't that what a religion is anyway? Most religious people I've met
don't believe the bible in a completely literal sense.

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thehardsphere
Studies have shown that regardless of whether or not people start as religious
or not, they hold irrational beliefs at same rate as other people with their
level of education.

The real interesting thing is that the irrational things that non-religious
people believe in tend to satisfy the same psychological needs as religious
beliefs. The Illuminati secretly ruling the world provides the comfort to
people with an external locus of control that _someone is in charge and they
have a plan,_ just like God (or the Devil or whoever). The fact that most
people are sheep who can't see the Illuminati's schemes but a few special
people can reinforces the idea that some of us are special people, just like
how the Israelites were chosen. Etc.

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beaconstudios
yep, we may live in an age and a culture where religion is rejected as
irrational but our brain circuitry for faith and existentialism is still
there. We all have deities whether they are conventional (God, Allah, etc),
political (the invisible hand of the free market, social progress,
individualism), spiritual (new-age-ism, karma, universal consciousness) or
pseudo-scientific (utopianism, scientism, singularitarianism). We all feel a
need to believe in something higher than ourselves and if it isn't an
archetypal expression of our cultural values and lessons (i.e. a religion)
then it'll be some other way to answer the hard questions of life like what is
good, what matters, what should I aim for and so on.

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Aron
I kind of guessed when I clicked it would be about Trump. Fuck off.

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thehardsphere
That's the thing; it isn’t really about Trump. Trump is just mentioned
gratuitously by the reviewer in order to make a history book "seem current."

It's pretty sleazy.

