[vundercind]

I think practicing scenarios and developing fallback heuristics and patterns could help. You don’t need to think when you have a rule to fall back on (“I never, ever buy anything from a salesman who approaches me unsolicited, period, end of story”) and a lot of people just need practice saying no and “being rude” (when someone else is in fact already being rude, by trying to get you to do something that’s a bad idea)

[giraffe_lady]

I agree with that, especially against MLMs and direct scams, that sort of practice is probably very valuable. It gets harder with the more straightforward social-spiritual stuff, and the most effective MLMs blur into those I think.

But yeah, I'm not saying you can't learn & practice techniques to reduce the risk of these things. Mostly just that the false positives of those techniques can have real costs too, and thinking you're immune is itself a risk factor.

[vundercind]

Yeah, I’m under no illusions one could eliminate this stuff via education, but scams and scam-adjacent behavior part people from so incredibly much money every year that even reducing that 10% or 20% would be a pretty big deal.