Stats for nerds
4recommend
7mentions
5people
2008–2020years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you, like me, hate cheating and being cheated, you should really read the mentioned book "How to Cheat at Everything". Another book that I recommend is "The Big Con" by David W. Maurer. And if you are one of the few people who have never seen "The Sting" you should watch it now. It is one of the best movies ever and you may learn one or two things about cheating.
Edit: I just found that the book has become really expensive. It used to be 19 US$.
- Not being stupid is no defense against being conned. On the contrary, a truly stupid mark isn't going to understand the scheme; an intelligent person will immediately see the way they stand to benefit. It's the willingness to cheat that gets you in trouble.
Check out The Big Con by David Maurer
- If this subject interests you, I cannot recommend highly enough David Maurer's classic book "The Big Con," (https://www.amazon.com/Big-Con-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/03854...) published in 1940.
Its subject is the early 20th century confidence man rather than that of the 19th, but it's full of rich detail both on the types of cons that were being run in that era and the personalities of the people who ran them. And its prose is so well-crafted that it reads like a contemporary book, despite being more than 75 years old now. It's such a fun book to read.
- Highly recommended reading if you are ever tempted to take advantage of an apparent scam in progress: David Maurer's The Big Con, the hundred-year-old story of swindlers who stole tons of money by setting up fake stock scams, then luring bystanders into placing side bets on the scams-in-progress.
(This is the book that inspired the 1973 movie The Sting, but it's nonfiction.)
People still fall for the classic cons. Don't be one of those people.
- Wow, further evidence that the most important tech book I ever read was Maurer's The Big Con:
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Con-Story-Confidence-Man/dp/038549...
I keep waiting for an enterprising Nigerian journalist to write the 419-scammer version of this book.
- All MLMs are scams. I hate using the term pyramid schemes, because if you use that term all of the MLM apologists will start cranking out very long-winded philosophical definitions of pyramid schemes that obscure the true point.
The MLM "model" can be summarized thusly:
- 1. Give people pretty good business advice from a host of good business books
- 2. Give people a very positive exciting environment
- 3. Give people literally the WORST job ever created with a product that cannot exist on its own in the marketplace if it wasn't being artificially propped up by hundreds of thousands of distributors
MLMs are scams. And no matter how much they try to attack other industries by saying how unethical they are, or how much they lie about their products, that can never and will never absolve them for the damage they have done to so many lives.
ALSO: something else you'll notice is that people who've been involved with MLMs might recall them fondly. This is just a defense mechanism (an extremely understandable one) to prevent having to view oneself as being duped. I think it's a shame though because we'll all be duped or scammed to some degree in our life, no need to change the past. Anyway reading "The Big Con" by David Maurer right now, a book by a sociologist about con-men in the 1940s. It's the basis for the movie "The Sting", and its remarkable how many people in the book are conned but refuse to believe it, and even years later still think their guy is out there, about to return their money at any time with 20x the profit or whatever.
EDIT: Also it is nearly impossible to look this stuff up on Google. MLM people have so carpet bombed the search sites the first 30 or so links will be links to Youtube videos with titles like "Is XYZ company a scam??" that find of course it's not. Occasionally a random legitimate news article will leak through. Otherwise they've literally walled the world off from anti-MLM information.
