The longer you believe in the con, the harder it is to admit you’ve been scammed

I said yesterday I was relieved the forecast for my area predicted a high of 95F and my thermometer barely cracked 80F. That didn’t happen today. The prediction for today was 92F and my thermometer registered 90F. Last week I reported on a story by Mark Sumner of Daily Kos that said the COVID death rate for white Americans had risen higher than the death rate for black Americans, reversing a trend from early in the pandemic. Wrote Sumner about what he wrote:

However, that article was wrong. So was the source article. Both fell prey to a statistical phenomenon known as Simpson’s Paradox, in which “an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears, or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations.” I was wrong, both in my interpretation of the data, and in the commentary I drew from this conclusion. And in both cases, I forgot one of the most serious dictums of any form of journalism: Beware the story that is too friendly to your own beliefs. ... This article was incorrect on its core assumptions. You have a right to expect better. Apologies.

This willingness to admit errors and to explain why they are errors is a big reason why I trust Daily Kos as a primary news source. Yes, I quoted and linked to Sumner’s previous article. So I’m posting this correction. Here’s another example of why I trust Kos. It is again by Sumner and he discussed a new cancer drug and why he is skepical. He didn’t simply praise it and go on to another story. A week ago the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of how well that drug treated a specific form of cancer. There was “100% response” – in all of the patients their tumors were completely eradicated. That’s great! News outlets touted this is a cure for cancer. Sumner explained why that designation is premature: The study had only 12 patients. All that can be determined from a study that small is that a larger study is worthwhile. It was tried on patients with one particular form of cancer. The study is too small to understand side effects and how serious they may be. One side effect might be autoimmune diseases. If it works – if indeed it can be shown effective on a lot more patients, on other types of cancers, and without side effects worse than radiation and chemo – then it can be proclaimed as the new cancer wonder drug. We’d even praise it if it worked only for this one type of cancer. But we don’t know that yet. Joan McCarter of Kos reported Sen. Bernie Sanders held a debate with Sen. Lindsay Graham a couple days ago. Sanders said America spends twice as much on health care than other major countries. The reason is insurance companies are ripping off the system. McCarter wrote:

That’s socialism, said Graham. “And it’s not going to fix America. We are not a socialist nation. There is a better way, I promise you this.”

So if government provides a service that’s socialism and therefore bad. If there is a corporate layer that rips off the government and the citizens then it’s cool. As for Graham’s better way: Gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And, if Republicans retake the Senate, Graham, as head of the Senate Budget Committee, would be in a very good position to make that happen. This is part of a fight among Senate Republicans. The issue at the center of the fight isn’t the cuts, as devastating as they would be to millions of Americans. It’s that several senators insist on talking about the cuts before the midterm elections. I had written that five Republican candidates for governor on Michigan were removed from the primary ballot because they hired a company to gather signatures and too many of those signatures were fraudulent. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported there is a campaign in Nebraska to gather signatures to put a proposal on the November ballot to require voters to have an ID. Yeah, that’s a law adopted in many other states that suppresses black voters. So, yeah, a Republican effort. This campaign in Nebraska hired the same company that turned in fraudulent signatures in Michigan. Well, we don’t know if they’re fraudulent yet. But there have been so many complaints about the people gathering signatures (and being paid to do it) that law enforcement has started to investigate and the state Attorney General has heard about it. The primary complaint is they can’t explain what the proposal is about or they are lying about it. Sager wrote about Sen. Carol Blood, a Democratic nominee for governor.

“We have real fraud taking place in the streets in order to prevent fraud that is not happening in Nebraska. … It is a weird dichotomy,” Blood said.

If you were the victim of a con would you tell anyone about it? If you were well snookered and ripped off, would your pride let you admit it? What if it wasn’t a monetary con but a political one? What if the con was so complete you invested your identity into what the con artist told you? What if admitting you were conned meant expulsion from your tribe? Dartagnan of the Kos community explores those ideas. That’s why many followers of the nasty guy can’t admit their faith in him was misplaced or wrong:

That is a personal indictment of their own intelligence and self-worth, as well as an indictment of the people in whom they most commonly put their faith (usually friends and family); for that reason, their errors can never be acknowledged. The fact that those who presume to challenge their self-worth are their political opponents makes such an acknowledgment doubly impossible under any circumstances. ... Trump uses every opportunity to tell his supporters that such assertions [that the election was stolen] are the product of a “left-wing mob,” which stokes the same visceral fight-or-flight response in which Fox News regularly traffics. But the real kicker is the cloying implication that his supporters have special knowledge, that they’re smart, danger! And every assertion to the contrary by Democrats is simply perceived as an attack on their intelligence. “Of course the election was stolen, my tribe and a hundred social media sites confirm this,” they insist. And it makes no difference how much evidence is produced to the contrary.

This brings to mind something I had heard several years ago. A con man will frequently convince the mark that they as a team are conning someone else. Such as what Putin did to the nasty guy. Because the con man warns his marks what the official legal or Democratic response will be and defines what those responses are supposed to mean, when they happen the mark feels vindicated – my side was right. Dartagnan discussed why many “religious” people embrace the Big Lie:

An attack on Trump is viewed as an implicit attack on their faith, for which they’ve invested (some of them literally) practically everything they own. Their entire self-worth is predicated on the implicit assumption that they, and they alone, are “right.” In fact, that’s the comforting attraction of many religions: the need to be proven right. And as a corollary, anything espoused by “godless” Democrats—no matter how objectively rational—must be wrong.

Maria Konnikova has written books about how scams work. In a 2019 interview with NPR she said:

One of the things you realize when, you know, you study con artists is that we're conning ourselves all the time about who we are, about our stories. And con artists just pick up on that. They figure out how we're conning ourselves. That's one of the reasons why we're so susceptible.

Elizabeth Winkler, writing for Quartz in 2016 noted:

The longer you believe in the con, the harder it is to admit you’ve been scammed.

In a post of two weeks ago Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that Adam Tritt, an Advanced Placement English teacher at a high school in Brevard, Florida, is running a “banned book drive” to buy copies of books banned or challenged in Florida so students can read them over the summer. At the time of the post Tritt had raised $5,000. Moms for Liberty, a local chapter of a conservative group working to get books banned, is furious. They took to Facebook to claim Tritt was a sex offender, a “groomer,” and a provider of pornographic books. Those moms, in their fury, included a link to the fundraiser. Perhaps that put the link in front of more eyes and made donating a bit easier?