[dredmorbius]

This reminds me of an old folk tale of the trickster and the rich man.

A king passing through a town finds a man about to be punished for fraud. He intercedes and asks what the matter is. The trickster says in his defence, "I ask people for things, and they give then to me". The king is incredulous but poses a challenge: "You must ask and receive money from the richest man in town." The trickster agrees, but being short on assets, requests a loan. The king obliges, and the trickster arranges (eliding details) to induce the town's richest resident to provide him with a wealth of goods. He returns to the king two days later with evidence in tow. The king is impressed by this demonstration, at which the trickster notes that he'd actually met the conditions 48 hours earlier when the king, wealthier than the town's richest resident, had offered him a loan.

There's something to those old stories.

(I'm not positive of the source but believe it's included in Idries Shah's World Tales.)

[kyllo]

A much lower-brow version of the same joke, from the movie Dumb and Dumber:

    Lloyd: I'll bet you twenty dollars I can get you gambling before the day is out!

    Harry: No!

    Lloyd: I'll give you three to one odds.

    Harry: No.

    Lloyd: Five to one.

    Harry: No.

    Lloyd: Ten to one?

    Harry: You're on!

    Lloyd: I'm gonna get ya!

    Harry: Nu uh!

    Lloyd: I don't know how but I'm gonna get ya.

[mitchtbaum]

That seems to have worked because the king had an unmanageable level of overconfidence, whereas this worked because they already had mutual trust[0]. Advice from a friend passes easily through the "harm test" heuristic filter which takes place immediately after hearing any untrusted (doubted) person advising one to change course (and potentially other places if someone learns they need to apply it there too).

By mixing in advanced machinery, our innate heuristics like harm measurement need many more dimensions of analysis. Hackers, in tune with modern machines, recognize this as a blunder since we have seen trust misused with secrets in machines before; still how can a "[s]cientist and security researcher" and "farmer and shoe-repair-man with a handheld" alike learn to recognize wider effects of their machine-enabled actions?

0: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3ASc00bzT%20to%3ADefuseSec...

[dredmorbius]

Hrm. Not in Shah's World Tales, though I still recommend that as well.