(continued from: “Told Ya So”)
“Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realised the wisdom of strategy.” -Miyamoto Musashi
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There are, as I’ve stated before, a number of professions and trades that require projecting possible future scenarios through analysis, working with leads and circumstances, and going where the data and evidence takes you (whether it supports your hypothesis or not.) There is a process involved when determining the inner workings to a system that may have pre-determined parts and forked outcomes and trying to determine the best course of actions to take to reach an outcome closest to “best case scenario” for the interested parties or clients or even just to be informative.
On the flipside there are people who make suggestions that they know “something” is coming, and maybe a time frame in which this “thing” will occur… maybe it’s a month away or two. A month is a very long period (with the oncoming deluge of media) to go without some local, national, or global incident to make note of.
Sometimes the latter is poaching and plagiarizing the work of the former in order to better their odds of making an accurate prediction.
One key difference is that somebody doing an honest predictive analysis will admit a margin of error while someone just pretending to be in the know doesn’t have margin of error in their lexicon. They have no need to understand what a margin of error is because they will never admit they were wrong. The all-knowing promise maker will never give you any real projection of what to expect. You will ALWAYS get a knowing wink, or some vague communication by them that all will soon be revealed and the hypothesis, if fact based, will seldom be backed up with even a morsel of the information on which their conclusion has been drawn even if someone else HAS done the exploratory groundwork and made a case for their circumstantial or solid evidence.
Though some may prophesize emptyhandedly there are other faux analysts who will come with a great deal of “data” that they must then translate to the layman. On social media spaces this is generally where competitive brands or politics are involved. You may have notice them graphing user networks. The data may be unmanipulated, but the translations and explainers often use words to coerce the reader to develop a desired conclusion. Unlike actual scientific researchers these “data analysts” may use “adversarial” as an adjective to explain a data pattern without explaining why it is. They may infer that one condition is a sure sign of contemptibility. They may use a false statement or a dishonest hypothesis. (false statement: ex. “If X is an adversary and uses an ai generated avatar, all avatars generated by that ai application must either be adversarial or belong to those related to X”). Any type of sustained scrutiny is bad for these sorts of scam artists. They will often resort to undermining anyone who questions them before they will ever answer genuine questions about their work.
Still another form of this is what I refer to as the “wonderless skeptic”. While I encourage a healthy amount of skepticism, ignoring circumstantial evidence and being afraid to ask questions when something looks suspicious is not honest skepticism. Being curious and speculating on things before you test them is called forming a hypothesis. Often that hypothesis is formed on empirical observation. Some people even test that hypothesis, sometimes multiple times in controlled settings. Those people are not “conspiracy theorists”, they are scientists.
To denigrate somebody because they formed a hypothesis based on context that you aren’t willing to factcheck is called undermining… it’s not skepticism or academic undertaking… it’s social undermining.
A great example of this kind of confidence trick is the false equivocation by far-right white supremacist pundits and their controlled, populist, opposition. Which is steeped in counter intellectual terms like “Blue Anon” to falsely equivocate actual public corruption reporting with conspiracy theories in order to protect their antidemocratic, pro terroristic views.
“The phrase {blue anon} is a play on the name of the radical conspiracy theory QAnon, whose supporters believe that Donald Trump is secretly battling a cabal of satanic pedophiles. The group were among those who stormed the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.” - Ewan Palmer, Newsweek.
While each of these types of inauthentic know-it-alls will count on their audience’s lack of knowledge about most of their chosen topics and motives can range from book sales to production credits and fame or even may be part of some larger public relations operation to gild the public perception, or silence critics of, an individual
A premonitory tease-weasel will assert you can “bet your ass” (and your reputation) that (wink, wink) it’s going to be more exciting than JFC slicing bread. Just you wait and see. They’ve got some big things in the works no matter how plagiaristic it may seem, if and when that moment comes you can certainly expect the uninformed prophet to take immediate and absolute credit for any and all research and even may insist that they created the outcome by adding a finger to the scale.
Whatever the motive, each of these types of grifts will always accept responsibility and credit for the favorable outcomes and mostly claim they saw the unfavorable ones all along. Because of the grandiose and charismatic nature of some of these grifters and professional looking product of some, they often will have a cult-like following and can lend credibility to a yet lower rung of grifter. Like a grifter reef with grifter vegetation and tiny grifter invertebrates crawling all through it.
I chose this following article based on two things. The story of the rain maker involves a massive amount of people and rather than secrecy it takes a bit of background production in order to convince the townsfolk in a manner that would make it very hard, in 1894, for anyone to ask the proper questions or disprove what the rainmaker was selling. Secondly, this is an example of taking advantage of a community that is in crisis and quite literally praying for rain.
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"In 1894 the citizens of Callaway were somewhat confused," the account read. "They had hired a 'rain-maker' to produce moisture in their community, and then, after it had rained, they were not certain that the man was actually responsible for the downpour. Some persons believed that his rainmaking efforts only coincided with those of Mother Nature's and did not think he was entitled to payment."
In the dry "dirty thirties," workers from the Nebraska Writer's Project researched earlier attempts at rainmaking. In the Callaway case, "the rainmaker arrived on July 6, 1894, with a wagon-load of rainmaking apparatus which he assembled in a vacant building. 'The rainmaking machine is a very innocent-looking affair and somewhat disappointing at the first glance,' remarks the Callaway Courier of that date, 'but as the stuff that does the mischief is inside, the true inwardness of the contraption is not visible to the naked eye.' The machine consisted of two ten-gallon earthenware crocks, one of which was referred to as 'the thundermug,' the other as 'the lightning-mug.' Each had a cover from which extended a four-inch pipe. Certain chemicals were placed in the crocks and the machine began its magic function.
"Gaseous fumes poured from the pipes and went swirling off to the north where they
appeared to gather into a huge black cloud. The rainmaker informed his curious and hopeful audience that if the cloud brought rain within five days, the experiment was a success. If not, then there was something wrong with the atmosphere.
"For five days the mugs spouted their fumes over the region and then ceased. That night the joyous people witnessed a good soaking rain. The rainmaker was regarded as a genius."
The more cynical in the community suspected the rainmaker's "genius" was nothing more than good luck. The editor of the Courier sniffed, "The rain was no different from showers which have fallen on this vicinity weekly, since the first of June. The rain would have fallen anyway, even if the rainmaker and his jugs were thousands of miles away."
Still, a deal was a deal. And one of the great advantages of the rainmaker's scam was that no one could prove who or what made it rain!” - Nebraska State Historical Society. “Should We Pay the Rainmaker”
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To clarify what someone has posted on Wikipedia, about the “Rainmaker”, I disagree with the examples I found given below. And I will explain in brackets that begin with two asterisks ** after you’ve had a chance to read that portion of the entry:
(from wikipedia list of confidence tricks, rainmaking)
“Rainmaking is a simple scam in which the trickster promises to use their power or influence over a complex system to make it do something favourable for the mark.”
**[that first part I agree with, this second area is where it begins to get dicey]
“Classically this was promising to make it rain but more modern examples include getting someone's app 'featured' on an app store, obtaining pass marks in a university entrance exam, obtaining a job, or a politician implying that they can use their influence to get a contract awarded to the mark.”
**[Since the above analogies do not seem to cite any specific examples of their own it is impossible to tell whether they are referring to bribery or unethical and possibly illegal “kickback schemes”. The author may have been referring to other types of coercive and unethical propositions or offers, of which examples might include professors offering better grades or bosses offering raises in exchange for a date or some other favor or bribe]
The trickster has no actual influence on the outcome, but if the favorable outcome happens anyway, they will then claim credit. If the event does not happen of course then the trickster may be able to claim that they need more money until it finally does”
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This last part is just right… and for modern versions of this scam the advertising, rumors, and pseudoscientific (quackery) explanations must be salted into the public narrative whereas coercive offers from bribery to blackmail often rely on keeping the secret for as long as possible.
Stay Curious. -TedMD
Next: Like An Open Book. - by Ted MD - The Diagnosis (substack.com)