This tactic is pretty common to get you into a possible MLM scheme. It happened twice to me, and once to my wife. They'll strike up a conversation with you while shopping by commenting on a nice article of clothing or something about you, which leads into a convo about where you work, etc.
They're so personable that you're thinking oh nice, I have a new friend and agree to have coffee. Then the second steps and on as the author mentions happens where they start to ask personal questions like if you're happy in life, what would it be like to not have any debt, retire early, etc.
This all happens over two-three meetings where they then start to talk about they have a group or mentor they work with that can get you going with your life goals.
We never made it into the actual meet the group / mentor part as we knew at this point something felt scammy about it and broke off contact after that.
My assumption based on experience is that any stranger who strikes up a conversation with me is either mentally unstable or is looking to get something from me.
I've also had plenty of terrible experiences with strangers trying to talk to me. But I think it's wrong to build a policy from that: I've also had plenty of great conversations with complete strangers, some of them in contexts where I'd be considered "captive" if I wasn't a willing participant (airplanes, trains, etc.).
IMO, serendipitous conversations are a key part of a healthy society. Few things have as strong of a humanizing effect.
> Few things have as strong of a humanizing effect.
This, unfortunately, is EXACTLY what high pressure religions/cults/MLMs use to their advantage.
I was a mormon missionary and one of the things we were taught to look out for is things to humanize ourselves. Literally "If you see toys in the yard, ask them about their kids. Are they washing a car? Ask if you can help. Was there a death in the family? Talk to them about mormon heaven." etc.
The key, here, was all about conversion. You find an opening and then try and wedge yourself in (with the ultimate goal of getting a new convert, because you are "saving" them).
Other cults are certainly worse (NEVER go to a "private" meeting!), but it's something to realize. Cults are successful because they try and use genuine humanizing effects to bring in new members.
My experience with cults is that they’re not effective, they simply focus on the minority who are open to their line.
They even try to sound crazy, to discourage well-adapted people.
Like a Nigerian scammer who deliberately uses bad grammar so the only responders are people with dementia.
My experience with cults comes from being part of a large, mainstream church that had cooky and predatory groups operating at the margins of the congregation.
They would target new members who had severe issues: drug abuse, mental illness, having been trafficked.
I’m not sure if the Mormons have anything similar. I read about extreme fundamentalist Mormon groups, but they don’t seem to be recruiting mentally ill/drug addicted mainstream Mormons.
You’re right, but it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Many people drive cars. Some people kill others with theirs, sometimes intentionally. We should not then assume every person driving a car is on the warpath.
I agree, I'm mostly advocating caution. Just like if you see a car swerving around in front of you, you might want to slow down and avoid. Sure, they might have just swatted a fly or something, but they also might be drunk.
The issue is that cult interactions are crafted to specifically play on social norms. They are HIGHLY manipulative. I'm not saying that you should assume everyone is a manipulator, but you should at least have a little caution while talking to strangers.
I had a college roommate that invited me out to pizza with him and another roommate. I accepted (what could be more normal) and he drove. It was a fucking "pesticide salesman" pitch. That was the last semester I roomed with them.
I think most people have too much caution when talking to strangers for the first time. I think one should be careful when taking things further - maybe meet in public for the first few meetings, so you can easily make excuses and walk away if things turn weird. This also makes recruitment much more expensive for these kind of sales / recruitment tactics,
In my college, one of the more common MLM type things was getting recruited to travel to another state and do door to door sales of alarms and pesticides. With all the hallmark "You'll make a billion dollars!" types sketchiness. All structured as a standard MLM.
To be fair, at least some of that is the streets, not the drivers.
I was in Boston a while back and I came to a crossroads. There was no stop sign, no light, nothing. I eventually just had to... go. I got to my hotel and I asked about it, and the concierge was like, "oh, its just like that". I asked how people are supposed to know to stop (or not to) and he replied, "you just know". It baffled me because _clearly_ you don't just know.. because I was there and I didn't know. What happens if two people just drive through the intersection at the same time.
I get it that crossroads exist like this in the open nowhere. But... in a city? It was mind-boggling to me. Plus... the street layout in Boston was done by throwing pounds spaghetti at a wall and then trying to match the pattern that stuck.
If you know the rules of the road then there is no ambiguity about which car has the right of way at such an intersection. But most people do not know these rules, and therefore are mystified when there’s no light or sign telling them how to drive.
Exactly. It's all about having a mental model of how other people will probably behave.
In Boston, even though everyone drove aggressive, they were predictable. So I felt fine.
Whereas in San Fran, while not as aggressive, other drivers were just random. So I was terrified.
I'm older now, with much reduced acuity and reaction times. My recent visit to El Paso was the most nervous driving experience that I remember. Way worse than LA. I felt like a dog trying to paddle upstream, surrounded by river otters playing.
Given the confusion a lot of people have with the situation, it is absolutely ridiculous not have signs at such an intersection in a city. Arguing that people "should know" is pointless when the end result of not having signs is just going to be more accidents.
I agree that even in a small city like Boston it’s reckless to have uncontrolled intersections, precisely because people don’t know the rules of the road.
My comment was a response to ‘I asked how people are supposed to know to stop (or not to) and he replied, "you just know". It baffled me because _clearly_ you don't just know.. because I was there and I didn't know.’
When I got my license in New York I studied for the written test from a booklet that the DMV gave out. This exact situation was in there. It’s not complicated. But you’re right, there will be accidents, because, even though there are still driving tests, people drive around with “red means stop, green means go” as the only rule that’s stuck in their heads. At least in the US.
I did a bunch of driving in France and what struck me most was the near complete absence of stoplights and even stop signs. Where I was, admittedly smaller places, big intersections are usually roundabouts, and smaller ones have a yield sign or follow "priorité a droit" which is basically a 4-way yield where you yield to the person on the right.
I don't know the traffic accidents stats, but overall the system really does rely on people knowing the rules as opposed to signalization, and it (mostly) seemed to cut down on time spent waiting.
>I was in Boston a while back and I came to a crossroads. There was no stop sign, no light, nothing. I eventually just had to... go. I got to my hotel and I asked about it, and the concierge was like, "oh, its just like that". I asked how people are supposed to know to stop (or not to) and he replied, "you just know". It baffled me because _clearly_ you don't just know.. because I was there and I didn't know. What happens if two people just drive through the intersection at the same time.
You got there without incident didn't you?
Those sorts of intersections get treated like N-way rolling stops in practice. If there's someone who'll obviously be there first everyone adjusts speed so everyone can roll it without stopping. If multiple vehicles arrive at the same time negotiations ensue.
Does US have different rules about intersections of "equal" roads?
In Europe you give way to the car to your right and that's it. In the rare case where there's a car going in every possible direction, you just honk it out or light signal until one goes first.
The US doesn't really have those basic rules of the road the way most of Europe does. There are essentially no intersections that are not controlled at all by either specific signs or lights. Often, if one road outranks the other, and you're on the lesser road, they will have a stop sign for you and then reinforce it with "CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP".
For example, in the UK, roundabouts will be perhaps signposted as coming up - but when you get there, you just yield to the cars already in it, because that's the base law. In the US, roundabouts are less common, and they have a yield sign at every entrance.
Boston is, however, a deviation. Many roads date to the founding of the city and are much like older European cities in terms of layout, but lack any modern signposting.
(1) A person commits the offense of failure to yield the right of way at an uncontrolled intersection if the person is operating a motor vehicle that is approaching an uncontrolled highway intersection and the person does not look out for and give right of way to any driver on the right simultaneously approaching a given point, regardless of which driver first reaches and enters the intersection.
There are a lot of state laws that resemble each other, but there are often subtle differences. My point is that there is no overarching coordination other than maybe AASHTO (which can only make recommendations), and legislators are often only interested in the highway department if there's a contract they can steer to a friend.
> This is wild, are you telling me that the United States has no concept of the four-way stop?
The US has the concept, but it's not (in California, at least) the default rule for an uncontrolled intersection. For a regular uncontrolled intersection, it is treated as a four-way yield, only a blind intersection (one with less than 100 foot visibility in any direction in the last 100 feet of approach) is treated as a four-way stop.
I love my city but I can see how this would be true for non-Bostonians. If Boston is your home you do just know, in the sense that you know other drivers may not know or care so you are on the lookout for them. You just curse those drivers when you think the've done the wrong thing and move on.
Still have to say though that this is less of an issue recently. Many fewer missing traffic signs than there used to be. I don't care for it :)
On the other hand, the normally vicious Boston cops have true kindness by not enforcing any traffic laws. I remember a cop car pulling over to let us pass one time when my then gf drove the wrong way* down a one way street.
And a friend was stopped when driving on the wrong side of mass ave (a divided road with a barrier). The cop stopped us, give us both a stern talking to, and then let us go on our merry way.
* She is a physicist and her defense to me was “I was only driving in one direction”
A looong time ago, after the business part of a phone interview, I was chatting with a recruiter who'd moved from Boston to South Florida and he asked me 'Is traffic ...different... here?'
I gave him Dave Barry's explanation: "Everyone here drives according to the rules of their country of origin."
Which reminds me of Sao Paulo. I've never seen more aggressive driving or been gladder that I wasn't driving than in Sao Paulo.
> Other cults are certainly worse (NEVER go to a "private" meeting!)
I’ve had friends joke about going into the scientology temple in Hollywood as a joke. I always warn against it; cult recruiters are practiced and you are not.
I expect people to have sufficient cognitive capacities by the time they are 18 to choose their religion. Even earlier if you know English and have access to the internet. Although financial dependence on one’s family could require putting on a show.
Do you expect people to have sufficient cognitive capacities by the time they are 18 to choose their language? ¿Hablas español?
One could very well argue "yes", but first and foremost speaking the language of their offline communities is pretty likely, if only through sheer inertia and a lack of concrete reasons to question that choice.
At 18, one stands a very good chance of having spent one's entire life roughly within the confines of a single monoculture and it's morals, social pressures, religion, language, etc etc etc. - quite possibly with contact intentionally limited by one's parents (not all of us were blessed/cursed with unrestricted, unmonitored, and unfiltered internet access, and many parents do a lot of meddling when it comes to friends and other social connections as well.)
It's often shortly after, when said people go to college, that they experience their first true culture shock. To the point where some communities will outright discourage college (pressuring boys to inherit a trade, or girls to marry and become homemakers), or at least discourage going out-of-state, pressuring children to stay closer where they can be - if not controlled - at least kept in a similar social environment, where they obstensibly won't "lose their way", where they can be more readily influenced.
Not saying one can't break away at 18, but for many people, the question isn't "Why [become a mormon missionary]?" but "Why break with tradition, family, friends, and one's entire support network, just to skip a little missionary work?"
It really doesn't work like that. As proof of the large barrier to entry, look at the number of people who follow the religion they were raised with. The rational decision is "These people I know and trust have this belief, so maybe they are right".
A rational decision is still a choice, and I do not find it accurate to label it as "being born into". However, there is religion (assumptions held by someone in their mind) and religion (behavior that allows one to be part of a certain tribe). I can see the latter not being described as a choice if the person is dependent on the tribe.
> However, there is religion (assumptions held by someone in their mind)
If your entire community holds the same assumptions (or at least publicly claims to), and you haven't been exposed to meaningful dissent and opposing viewpoints to challenge those assumptions, one is likely to uphold the same assumptions without ever having meaningfully questioned them, or ever having made any kind of active "decision" about said assumptions.
To take a non-religious example, many of us grew up being taught and believing there were 9 planets in our solar system, and most of us accepted that without ever having meaningfully questioned the taxonomical decisions going into what exactly defines a "planet" versus smaller planetoids and how different Pluto might be from Ceres. We were born into a culture that seeded our assumptions, and we had no great need or reason to overturn them.
This doesn't mean we can't break away from the culture we were born into given sufficient resources and/or reason (one can form dissenting opinions, one can move, ...) but it often explains default behavior, and what one might chose if they don't even realize they're making a choice, if only through inaction.
Context is definitely important. If I'm in a situation where I'm obviously just trying to get some work done in a coffee shop, I'd going to be very skeptical of a stranger who insists on striking up a conversation with me. It's just too pushy and frankly kind of creepy.
However, I've also done some backpacking on the Appalachian Trail several years ago, and it's far more socially acceptable to start up a conversation with random people you meet along the way. It's understood that we're all strangers but we have a shared goal of hiking the trail, and what else are we going to do when we stop for the night other than chat a bit with the other people in the area?
Had almost nothing but positive experiences speaking with random people while hiking, except for one nutcase (trail name was Mountain Lion) who was carrying a firearm and disclosed to me that he was kicked out of the military for mental health reasons (got to appreciate his honesty, though). I made sure to put as much distance between the two of us ASAP. Later found out he ran out of food, tried to steal from other people, and had to get airlifted out after getting injured. Good times.
Certainly; context accounts for a lot. I wouldn't wish Mountain Lion on anyone :-)
I think what it boils down to for me is this: the world is full of loons. If we don't allow ourselves to be open to spontaneous interactions, the average spontaneous interaction we have is more likely to be one involving a loon. Those memories also tend to be more salient because of their negativity, so we need to be intentional in remembering all of the lesser but positive experiences we've had with strangers.
a lot of those are actually a 3rd party sales/marketing company that is paid a commission of something like 20-30% of each signup. If you pressure them enough they'll admit they they are not W2/T4 employess of the charity they're pushing.
the vancouver area was plagued with the "because I'm a girl" charity muggers for years downtown
Helsinki was lousy with them when I was there a few years ago. Between the train station and my hotel, a 10 minute walk at most, every intersection had them.
I had one accost me and launch into her long spiel without me being able to stop her. When she finally paused to ask me something, I had to tell her I didn't speak Finnish.
(Of course she spoke english but didn't press after that. And now that I think of it, and on-topic I had a similar thing happen with mormons pitching me in German in the Köln area. When they found out I couldn't understand them, they - as Americans - switched to English and we had an interesting conversation between strangers about why we were all there. They did not try to further sell me on the religion other than some very fleeting "if you're interested" as we parted. Overall it was actually interesting to meet them. Maybe it would have been different if I'd got the German pitch, we had a few really awkward approaches from these kind of religions people (evangelizers?) in university that were not as pleasant, I don't know what faith though. )
Every time I’ve rented a muscle car, I’ve had guys - it’s always guys - come up to me to talk about it. I guess you buy certain performance cars, you are joining a sort of fraternity. Something to consider in the whole when you’re shopping for one, I suppose.
Hah, I can relate to that. It is like being part of some secret club. Do you get the thumbs up from other drivers? Are you giving out thumbs up?
I bought a somewhat rarer car a year ago and it has been a similar experience. It feels very wholesome sometimes. Like as a nerdy guy sharing a thumbs up and a smile with someone who by all appearances is full-on gangster and very much far opposite on everything. But there's a common interest in cars and suddenly it doesn't matter as much. There is a lesson in there somewhere about judging people by their appearance.
My neighbor approached me so often, and/or yelled from across the street, about my 90s gas guzzler that one day I was so frustrated I waved him off shook my head and went inside.
I just couldn’t deal with it again and it’s one of the rudest things I’ve probably ever done. I feel bad but it was an entirely unconscious reaction. I know almost nothing about cars and I really don’t care about them at all.
He moved shortly after (hopefully unrelated lol), so nothing more ever came of that.
He mostly wanted to talk about his own muscle car. But my car was the entry point as an assumed mutual interest. He would come over and just start talking and I mostly had no idea what he was talking about and even said as much.
Definitely one of my favourite things about living in America is the willingness of people to talk. Only London beats it in my opinion, despite so many people claiming that it is British to mind your own business.
For me, it's Japan which surprises most people I tell that to, if you've ever watched midnight dinner, it's what happens in small dinners/izakayas, you go there by yourself and people will start talking to you.
You're not wrong, especially if you live in NYC or most of California. But this is a cultural thing.
Roberto Benigni type people are real, they might just not be around where you live. Consider moving. Whether you move away or towards where these sort of characters congregate is of course entirely up to you.
If you would like to know which places to seek out/avoid feel free to chime in.
P.S. - Please don't go to Rome and expect it to be filled with Benignis.
Best part about Austin outdoor culture is the random friendly conversations, met a dude who founded arcade fire like 6 months ago just because we we're talking about places to eat.
It's just part of Austin's hippy music fest heritage and is the best part.
Yes. I have found people in New York City to be generally enjoyable and willing to help. The same was true in Southern California, where I lived for years. My Chinese wife was blown away at how helpful Americans tend to be.
Yes, when my cousin came to visit me she was terrified that her family would be gunned down in the street.
You can’t tell from the news but Americans are generally friendly and helpful in person. The Borat film was supposed to show how deranged Americans are but the half I watched was all about people trying to be nice to him despite his antics.
> The Borat film was supposed to show how deranged Americans are but the half I watched was all about people trying to be nice to him despite his antics.
Parents bringing their kids to playgrounds, that have not much to do except talking to other parents. Being at a playground with their own kid filters out most mentally unstable or interested parties.
Very easy to strike conversations if kids have the same age. Lots of opportunities for new and sane friendships, with who you can then double-date when their kid come home to play with yours.
Having a kid really expanded my social circle. Im a shutin hermit and she is a social butterfly and makes friends in seconds, so she probably knows 100x more people in our community than I do. So I frequently have to stand there hanging around with stranger parents because my kid is suddenly best friends with their kid. These interactions have grown to the point where we have a “local dads” poker night and all we have to do with each other is our kids’ social circles. It’s actually kind of wholesome.
There is a selection bias at ski resorts. And plenty of the interactions are a single serving, so comparatively safe. I presume you can still get an elevator/lift pitch.
Yeah, I do this. I don't like just passing time on a phone like many seem to, so anytime I get bored(lines, DMV, airport, airplane) I'll strike up conversation. Then again maybe I'm just a bit mentally unstable...
I personally love when people do that. I'm a homeschooling stay at home father, so I don't have a wide or close social circle; I thrive on those casual conversations.
The sad thing is that -- this is how I met almost all my friends. Through random conversations. I agree that random convos at work/school are much less likely to be MLM, but I always wonder about what i'm missing when I filter too much.
My best friend from college -- 25 years still -- is someone I met on line, waiting for lunch.
I get pretty annoyed with MLM sales pitches, but I dont think we should close ourselves off to the world with strict policies on social interactions.
That sounds like a miserable way to live. Do you have the same assumptions when others engage you in conversation over the internet, or is it only in person?
Only in person. I live in a major US city. When I was younger I would freely engage anyone who spoke with me. But I found myself in situations where I would be in physical danger sometimes being screamed at sometimes threatened after what began as a seemingly innocuous interaction. And I also got sick of people trying to sell me things or get money from me.
I remember in my late teens some guy on the street saying “Hey man! I like your shirt!” My Jimi Hendrix shirt? He must like Jimi Hendrix too. So I started talking with him and in a few minutes he was asking for money. Weeks later I’m wearing a different shirt and I hear “Hey man! I like your shirt!”
Once on a commuter train a guy struck up a conversation with me about a book I was reading. It was an interesting conversation. We kept talking as we exited the train and kept talking on the platform as all the other commuters went to their cars and drove away. Now he’s getting kind of excited and raising his voice. And I’m now aware of how large he is and how we are the only two people left at the station. I managed to politely get out of there.
Over and over again this kind of thing would happen until I just made a policy to not engage.
That sounds sad. You remind me of a friend (probably on the spectrum), that is too open/polite and just doesn’t know how to filter out abusive people.
Unfortunately, the good people that are really really worth talking to, can often read that you are closing yourself off, so they politely won’t interact with you. The “bad” people will ignore your social cues. Perhaps there is a certain amount of channeling.
Most women (and plenty of men too) have been on the receiving end of excessive unwanted attention at some point in their lives, and they learn how to read genuine worthwhile friendly approaches, versus predatory unwanted approaches. Spot your friends with that skill, and then try to learn from them?
The friends I know that have the skill end up meeting worthwhile people in most any situation they are in; even in predatory environments.
Location makes some difference, of course. I have travelled a lot, and some countries or towns everybody is trying to grift, while other places everyone is genuinely open and friendly. Or pubs where everyone is welcoming without pressure, versus other pubs where everyone is trying to use or scam you. Your own context makes a difference: if you are with dogs or kids, more people will default to thinking you are okay (modulo other cues) etcetera.
Disclaimer: I’m not great at the above, but I try to learn to improve. The friends I know who are great at the above get awesome opportunities - they also tend to be good people themselves. It is like a secret split in society where kind people recognise each other via unobvious protocols. If you don’t know the protocols, then you end up grouped with users and grifters, which is self-reinforcing and hard to change.
When we get unsolicited communication over phone, text, email, IM, etc., we consider it spam. It's almost always someone trying to get you to give money to them or their interest group.
As someone who spends most of their day online, it's not hard at all to see why I might start thinking that way about in-person communication from people I don't know.
This might be a regional/cultural difference. In my city in a flyover state, any stranger who tries to talk to you beyond small talk is almost certainly going to try to sell you something. (Obviously, outside of socialization contexts such as bars, clubs, meetups, etc)
On the internet I would be even more wary, as anonymity or pseudo anonymity allows degenerates you would normally never interact with to grace your life with their presence.
Some of the people I have met online make the two wackos the author met look like saints in comparison.
It depends on context. If I meet someone because of a common interest or thing we are doing (we are at the gym, I recognize them as a regular, and say hi, or whatever) then yes I'll have some light conversation.
A totally random person walking up to me and starting to talk? No, that's weird and I'm immediately at yellow alert at minimum, if not searching for the nearest exit.
To be fair, rarely do people have an accurate grasp on what normality is. Just the breadth of human experience is impossible to capture much less experience and process, not to mention the experience of people that is never expressed (I may be having a bad week, but I wouldn't express it, much less share it openly with coworkers)
> To be fair, rarely do people have an accurate grasp on what normality is.
Well said. I’ve been thinking about this idea for a very long time. Like another user said above, the negativity bias has a large role to play here. I live in a small town and talking with strangers is considered normal and healthy.
Maybe this is false nostalgia, but I feel like this is more true post smartphones than pre-smartphones. More people will just pop out their phones and check their messages/mail/play a game rather than talk to people around them; a fair amount of casual interactions were bored people stuck waiting in the same place.
This is a bad assumption. I often do this because I’m an extrovert and find other people interesting/fascinating, but want nothing from you and, to my knowledge, am not mentally unstable. :)
To be fair, I don’t lead with “have you ever done therapy?” or “what does it mean to be alive?” haha
For me it depends on what kind of conversation it is. I'll gladly exchange pleasantries with strangers and even have brief conversations when it's clear what the boundaries are--for example, someone in line behind me at the supermarket, where it's understood that as soon as I've checked out, I'm leaving.
Where I draw the line is when strangers try to push a conversation beyond clear boundaries, or try to push a conversation in a situation where the boundaries aren't clear and they can try to manipulate them. That's what would have put me off in the "First Contact" episode in the article.
For me it probably also helps that I'm an introvert and I have no problem just ending a conversation and going back to whatever I was doing. For example, at the point where the woman started asking follow-up questions, I would have said something like "I'm not really familiar with those places, sorry", and gone back to what I was doing.
In the U.S., its part of their culture that striking up a conversation with a total stranger is normal. It just looks weird to the rest of the world, but I think it works out in their favor.
This has been my observation as well, and this is why I look at compliments with great cynicism, and why I do not give compliments or strike up conversations. And if I do want something from someone, I state those intentions early so they don’t think my conversation is a ruse.
>This has been my observation as well, and this is why I look at compliments with great cynicism, and why I do not give compliments or strike up conversations. And if I do want something from someone, I state those intentions early so they don’t think my conversation is a ruse.
Please don't take this as a jab at you as it certainly isn't intended to be.
That said, you express a really transactional view of human interactions. That seems to be a sad way to view the rest of your fellow humans.
Transactional interactions are a normal part of life but, at least for me, I will interact with people, including strangers, because I like interacting with people, not because I want something from them.
Obviously, when transacting with a cashier, a shopkeeper, a waiter, etc. it's transactional.
But in other circumstances, and even sometimes in those circumstances (if that's not inconveniencing them) I will engage others without any expectations or intent to manipulate or use those folks.
Sure, there are folks out there who will engage with you because they want something from you. In my experience, however (and I've lived most of my life in NYC and travelled quite a bit around the US and less around the world) most people are decent, kind people who aren't out to get something from you or trying to scam you.
Today I said “beautiful day out” to some guy who looked maybe homeless. He immediately offered me a beer, which was nice, but I declined as I had 4 kids to watch at the beach.
It turned out we went to the same college (Berkeley) and he graduated a year before I started. He was on the football team and knew my old roommate, who was also on the team.
He definitely was a bit weird. Visiting SF from Alaska after his wife’s death, but totally friendly and not creepy. Interesting enough that I felt like I had a story to tell without being creeped out. It’s been a long two years, and I missed these sorts of small interactions with people very different than me.
> My assumption based on experience is that any stranger who strikes up a conversation with me is either mentally unstable or is looking to get something from me.
I operate under this assumption any time I'm somewhere in a big city, unless I'm attending an event where people are specifically mixed together and expected to talk to each other (professional conference, etc)
in a small town of 200-300 people/very rural area, I take a different approach of course
What a remarkably unhealthy perspective. Yet engaged in communication here. My first thought was you must be American, but that could just as easily be quite a number of places and cultures across continents. In Israel personal boundaries are quite different and it's common to engage those around you in conversation. I wouldn't correlate mental stability with social norms--frankly I associate health with social engagement, so the opposite.
How would you rate your social intuition? I would rate mine as moderate, undermined by anxious traits, but it's typically pretty obvious when someone is unstable/potentially dangerous or panhandling. I live in a major US metro and somewhat routinely talk briefly with people I encounter in a low-stakes way.
Or it might be just a typical American. in Europe they are rare, but over in the states or on airports you are constantly small-talked about nothing. And then you can easily torpedo this small talk by actually being honest. that's what they are not used to at all.
I got a new job and now I have to take the lift up to my office. I regularly take the lift and have at least once a day some random chat for the duration of the lift tour.
Not all strangers are that bad and(but?) this is Germany!
it's so unfortunate. I am an immigrant that left my birth country quite young, but I still remember couple of good friends. Out of around 7 friends whom I remembered their name and details enough that I later track them down online, only 1 replied, the rest all said they've been burnt heaps through the years by scammers etc. And that was it.
Yeah potentially an MLM, religion or cult. The initial introduction has parallels to "flirty fishing" [1] and "love bombing" [2] which are known cult tactics. The extreme end of that is sexpionage but the early side of that is finding a single male that may have some money or influence and using that to corral them into their group, whatever that group it. This is extremely common in espionage as well if anyone works in highly sensitive or technical areas.
I was a member of the L-5 Society (spaceflight enthusiasts) back in the day. There was a guy who came to our meetings who we were pretty sure was an actual Russian agent. He kept asking what we knew about US military space programs (we knew nothing that wasn't in the newspapers) while pressing buttons in his briefcase. We found it amusing.
yes, but what I mean is there's the non zero possibility that some part of the background investigation did send a person to try to get your opinion on Iran, not a data leak, but an actual TLA-adjacent person.
This exact thing happened to me while I was in self checkout at my local grocery store, and I found myself having the most awkward conversation about my life, goals, and this vague concept of "mentorship". I kept explaining that there are people I look up to and those people will give me advice on things, and I work for more reasons to make money, but the conversation was just very uncomfortable and bizarre.
It took me a while to put my experience in perspective, or even explain it, but after a while I found out there are several of these mentorship/get rich schemes roughly based around the ideas in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" that involve basically recruiting strangers to form an MLM like downline. The basic pitch is: "If you had all the money in the world what would you do? [insert conversation here about what you'd do] We can give that to you if you follow us!". Obviously I'm not going to follow someone who fell for that!
Fortunately, I abruptly left this conversation mid-sentence because I was started to get freaked out by intrusiveness of it all. Very weird, and definitely an exploit on peoples willingness to be accommodating and friendly to strangers.
I had a guy do something similar to me. He was hanging out with some of my friends and shared the last name of two brothers we knew, so I figured he was their cousin or something.
Eventually he invited me out to some fancy bar with the secret intention of trying to get me to invest in his wacky financial bullshit, which was immediately obvious after about five minutes of conversation. He kept asking about my investments and I kept giving him completely contradictory answers as he kept buying me drinks, pretending to agree with me, and telling me about some "zero risk" opportunities. Eventually when he started trying to press me for a more direct answer, I was like "nah not interested" and left, got a free meal out of it on top of the free drinks lol.
Later I brought up the experience to a couple of my friends who were around when I met him and they weren't sure who he was either, apparently he was unrelated to the other guys. Never saw him again.
He was for sure. I'll always wonder if he noticed I was deliberately answering his questions inconsistently or just thought I was a massively confused mark.
I'm part of the way through Better Call Saul, so I'm sure I'll run into it eventually.
I had a guy twenty years ago ask me to join their stock scheme. The plot went something like this - someone (at the top I presume) would start a company, sell stock, we (pawns I guess) would buy stock in that company, which would indicate a higher demand meaning increased stock value, and we would by extension all be richer! Zero risk, fool proof, badabing badaboom.
It's kind of funny when recruitment happens in a much clumsier fashion, like when I was in college there was a clean-cut sweaty guy hanging out next to the pharmacy counter, and he kept looking at me and fidgeting. Finally, when I walked a little closer and glanced at him for some direct eye contact, he blurted out, "Do you want to go to church with me?!?"
At the time I thought it was creepy - years later I'm like... aww, poor kid. He must have been so nervous!
Similar story here. One of my first jobs—still in high school–was working at an office supply chain. There was this really cute girl who was just hired. One night, as I was facing all the shelves in my section, she approaches me with this look in her eye like she had been working up the courage to talk to me.
She clearly had something very important to say. I was very interested, of course! She was a hottie.
"I have something to ask you...", she started, nervous and flirty-like. Is this what it's like to be hit on?, I'm thinking.
"...have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? You know He loves you very much."
I've never before or since been whiplashed like that. I smiled politely, lied about my acceptance of Him and made an excuse to move somewhere else. Had I been thirstier, I might have joined the church just for her :)
I went to one of the MLM get-you-hooked events in a hotel ballroom. I knew what it was and was just curious what it would look like and an old high school classmate was trying to loop me in. It wasn't really cultish, just a bunch of people who didn't really understand business trying to scam you into selling their crap.
I came here to add the MLM angle too. It happened to me about 25 years ago, when I was working at Radio Shack during college. I'm actually only remembering some of this now.
I was pretty good at sales, especially with older people, as I truly listened and tried to bridge the gap between a person's needs and what we sold, and without being too pushy.
An older couple came in and asked me about (at the time) the Compaq computers that we sold. He was in a wheelchair and smelled vaguely of urine. They were sweet and asked a lot of questions about the computers and what they could do, which I was happy to oblige. It was feeling like a real solid sale potential since we had talked for so long and they had asked so many questions.
After a bit, they offered me a business card and mentioned that they too were in the sales business. We agreed to meet sometime. I don't recall if I met just the two of them a second time or we moved straight to the third guy, but he was invited along. He was a bit older than me, dressed "fancy" but in a sort of shabby way, i.e. a three-piece suit that he seemed to have gotten at a thrift store. He had thick glasses and an air of desperation about him that I could recognize even as a naive kid. I think we met at a Wendy's.
He soon brought up Amway. I don't remember how I got out of things, but I do remember everyone all around being pissed and implying or outright saying that I had wasted their time. But honestly, I wasn't interested. I truly wanted to continue working at Radio Shack while working on my side businesses and getting through school. I had enough going on.
Haha I had almost the exact experience with Amway.
A co-worker and casual friend had gotten involved with it (which I did not know). He called me one day and asked if I could meet him at Wendys to talk about "an opportunity" and I said sure. When I got there, he was with some guy I had never seen and they started pushing Amway. I listened and though they pressured me to get on board said I would think about it and left.
Strictly speaking, the two are different. A pyramid scheme doesn't involve the production or sale of actual goods or services, you're literally just rewarded for bringing other people in. An MLM will usually have a product that it sells in addition to rewarding recruitment. Theoretically, in an MLM, you can make money just by selling products.
MLMs are usually shady but are technically legal. Pyramid schemes are always illegal.
In other words, an MLM is adding toothpicks to a pyramid scheme to make it legal. The products are never worth the price and if you can make money by just selling them you don't need the MLM.
I got sucked into a cult-like church in my 20s. It's like a drug when you're feeling down in life. I'm more attuned to this level of bullshit now. But not everyone is which is why these tactics work.
I'll still engage if a stranger talks to me and try to be affable but will maintain a healthy level of distrust. Because sometimes people just like to chat with a stranger in hopes of friendship. Have a friend who made friends with the lead singer of a somewhat popular indie band. Didn't even know who he was until after several months of hanging out :D
There's a ton of wisdom in this. Seriously. Humour is a social
lubricant and barometer/test signal.
To the OP: Interesting and enjoyable story. You already said your gut
instinct alarm bells were set to red alert, but you were not following
them. Why? What did you hope get out of this interaction that let it
go to four rounds? There's one phrase that sticks out from a training
on social engineering we had here recently - "you can't con an honest
person". And that means a person who is honest with themself. All
this time you are thinking about "what did they want?" Maybe the
question you should be asking is what did I want? To get back to
work. But you didn't.
If the answer is really "nothing" then a genuine friendship might be
in the offing. Otherwise, one or both of you is playing a game. Test
that by pushing away - not just politely playing within the polite
parameters of normalcy - a good con artist will already have those
exists mapped out. Chuck in an unexpected dirty or ridiculous
joke. Humour throws a swerve-ball that should reset the power
relationship. If you get back "psychoanalysis" instead of a belly
laugh, take a walk.
I encountered this once and was just sooooo confused when they got to the part about how the mentor had helped them make all this money and achieve all these life goals. I was like, “and so now you’re…hustling people at a Starbucks in Vacaville?”
Another tactic they'll try is to get to you as a captive audience, such as on a ferry, bus ride, in an airport waiting area during a long layover, etc. If they're on the same vacation package you'll need to be firm about avoiding them.
Happened to me too, met them in some shop, met later at a coffee shop nearby. Thought I was making a friend and my heart sank when they mentioned their "mentor", then I knew I had been tricked. I was pissed and profoundly disappointed in myself. I just started talking and talking. I don't even remember what I said, I just didn't shut up. But, they couldn't leave because I was so nice. It was a strange intuitive reaction, it wasn't a conscious decision. It's like I pinned them down with words until I had had enough, wasting their time. The funny thing was, they got it. They didn't want to follow up, they had my number; but, never reached out again, they just wanted out of there. Whenever anyone of these people approaches me I do the same thing, I just start talking, having fun with it too. Just burning time taking about 3d printing or whatever random stuff I think of. Anytime they try to take control of the conversation... "oh wow that makes me think of..."
I once had someone I knew from college reach out a couple of years after we'd graduated with the premise of catching up and talking about "some stuff he was working on." I had no prior knowledge of MLM, but only a few minutes into our conversation, it was immediately clear to me that he was using some kind of rehearsed language, and my skepticism was raised.
At some point, it segued into talk of financial independence and envisioning what that would look like for me, and it was suddenly clear to me what the psychological intent of the exercise was. I politely heard him out, suggested I'd get back to him once I'd had some time to think it over, and did so the next day, obviously declining.
I was invited to an MLM recruitment meeting once when I was barely out of school. To me the whole thing seemed very obvious. I could see how it would make some people money, but I knew I wasn't the type of person who could naturally pull that off.
I told them as much privately and I wasn't bothered by it again.
The cookies they offered were delicious though.
Now that I'm older I wonder if being part of that would've taught me some of that charisma the people there exuded. They just seemed so likable and I wish I could at least emulate that.
It probably would do the opposite - MLMs teach you to turn every single interaction with another human being a sales pitch. People tend to be really put off by that.
that's exactly what I was thinking. A long time ago an older couple involved my then gf and I in conversations. I can't recall exactly how we met. At some point I said something like, "that sounds like amway or something"... and the husband admitted, well yes it was amway.
I once went to discuss "business opportunity" with someone, sounded odd but I was fresh freelancer and would take any work. Right away I knew it was about me and business was mlm. The guy emphasized how we are selling vitamins. I was like great, vitamins is indeed big biz but online world is bit of a winner take all, how much does it cost and then asked him to search similar product on Amazon. Behold half the price. Enjoyed watching him fold and act dumb
> Again, I was tempted to cut off contact, but I asked some friends and again they all said I was insane and imagining things. Determined to prove that I was capable of normal human interaction, I carried on.
It sounds to me like the author approached these interactions from a place of insecurity, which is exactly what ultra-manipulative types look for in a target. If you don't have a clear idea of what someone wants from you when they ask for your time, it's on you to speak up for yourself and get that clarity. You don't have anything to prove by deciding to continue talking to people that don't seem interested in developing a genuine relationship.
> But they walked into that cafe, looked around, and decided I was the easy prey.
Given that the author agreed to meet with them four times with an open mind, I'd say that the recruiters found a pretty good target, even if it was ultimately fruitless.
This is a good set of observations. Do not act from a position of weakness. Do not take a job from a position of weakness. Do not embark on a new relationship from a position of weakness. Sadly, in such situations we are unable to see that we are in such a position, or we believe that whatever opportunity in front of us in the moment is the only one we will likely get (for the foreseeable). Not only does the mind play tricks, but various predatory parties will take advantage of people in such a position.
Yeah cruel though it is, I would need to see a photo of the author if I were going to concur with his surprise that he was selected as a target. If he looks like the typical young computer nerd (while literally typing on a laptop in the café mind you), these people are thinking okay jackpot: no life[0], no girlfriend[1], plenty of money[2], book-smart[3] but not street-smart[4], and probably other things their finely-tuned spidey-sense can pick up that mine can't because I'm not a fucking sociopath.
[0] so social contact makes a good lure
[1] so sex makes a good lure
[2] juicier target
[3] which means he can almost talk himself into anything
[4] less likely to recognize he's being conned/manipulated
I don't know. Sounds like they put as much energy into the exchange as they wanted and cut it off when it crossed their line. And they got a pretty fun story out of it.
I didn't say that the author didn't much too much or too little energy into the exchange, but I do firmly believe they chose to continue with those people out of a misplaced need to prove that they could talk to strangers. Those are exactly the kinds of people who fall victim to these tricks.
As someone who used to work in financial services and has interacted with many of these kinds of people before, it struck me as odd that at the beginning of the story, the author doesn't even list "they want me to give them money" as a possible reason for the approach, even though that's the single most common reason strangers approach folks like this. He really thought that these strangers might want to have sex though? Ok.
The whole piece has a really naive tone to it, trying to intellectualize people that were most likely just trying to bilk the author out of money, which the author isn't even convinced of at the end.
> So why did they do it? Maybe they were totally cynical, and just thought I looked like a gullible fish they could exploit for money. But I doubt it.
> Most likely, they thought they were doing something good. (For me? For their organization? For the world?) How is it possible to convince yourself that being this manipulative and this misleading is a good thing? It makes me re-evaluate what people are capable of.
It took one set of interactions with cult/scam/whatever kind of recruiters these were to make the author re-evaluate what people are capable of? Really? We've lived through decades of senseless war, a declining standard of living and a future that feels less and less certain by the day, but this is what wakes the author up? That sounds like a pretty sheltered life to me.
Indeed. People pleasers and "nice" people are prime targets because of insecurities and the lack of courage to be honest. "Oh, I can't refuse to meet later even if I don't want to because I might offend them." That kind of thinking. So they live out the charade and allow boundaries to be trampled just to avoid disapproval because they fear it that much.
It doesn't take much to notice this vice in a person who has it. Most people pick up on it rather quickly, even if subconsciously.
> Still, what I really wanted was to get back to work. It felt rude to say that outright, and they didn’t seem to notice how my eyes kept drifting back to my notebook.
This is very hard for some people (I am not being facetious here), but cult weirdos or not, it’s really important to be able to say something like “Thanks for chatting but I’m going to work now.“ No apology is necessary. Nothing equivocal in the words they can grab onto and argue with. No lying, polite or or otherwise.
You may need to practice this in the shower or the car. You may need to practice it on people even when you don’t necessarily need to go. But you need to practice it if you are a born and trained people pleaser like me.
I regard not being able to do so as something close to life-threatening, because when you are raised to put other people’s interests before your own, you can spiral into incredible depression and self abuse.
Yes, being able to politely but clearly say "no" when people ask you to do something is an important skill. I struggle with it myself.
People who are experts at imposing on other people's time will latch on to any crack you leave open. Don't give reasons. You might think "I'm sorry, but I don't have time to get involved in that" is clear, but they will counter with "it won't take much time at all." Just say "no, thank you, but I must decline" or something that doesn't leave any room for further discussion.
>People who are experts at imposing on other people's time will latch on to any crack you leave open. Don't give reasons. You might think "I'm sorry, but I don't have time to get involved in that" is clear, but they will counter with "it won't take much time at all." Just say "no, thank you, but I must decline" or something that doesn't leave any room for further discussion.
It's not an expert thing at all. It's a standard sales technique.
1. Make your pitch;
2. Go for the close;
3. Deal with any concerns/objections;
4. Go back to step 2.
When I was still just a kid (~18), I took a B2B sales job and that was one of the primary strategies they pushed for closing deals.
They might reply with some form of "But why?" in which case the best answer is
- "this is none of your business" or
- "because I want to".
If they're extremely manipulative, they'll follow up with more "why?"s but you just keep repeating these two until their why's are exhausted or you leave with a "So... bye"
This technique is called the broken record in the book "When I say no I feel guilty" which talks basically only about these types of interactions.
> A week later, they suggested we go to lunch again. Again, I was tempted to cut off contact, but I asked some friends and again they all said I was insane and imagining things. Determined to prove that I was capable of normal human interaction, I carried on.
Your friends may mean well, but they may also be a bit dumb. You really don't have to interact with people that you don't want to if it's entirely voluntary to begin with, especially if things feel "off".
It's easy to claim so in a hypothetical, but I still like to believe that had you asked me, I would have said something like "if it feels so off, don't do it".
This is different from being anxious over, say, ordering a pizza over the phone (that I've seen in a few friends), where I would recommend pushing over your anxiety, because that is almost certainly guaranteed to be a short, professional, and, most importantly, absolutely un-intimate conversation.
> Determined to prove that I was capable of normal human interaction
I'm a bit confused. Isn't it possible that they actually were lonely/bored weirdos who are bad at social boundaries and host a (probably mind-numbingly uninteresting) discussion group?
Don't get me wrong, I shut these sorts of people down at the first conversation because I hate dilettante philosophy with a passion and have a strong distaste for any hint of spiritualism. But there are underemployed folks at all my regular coffee haunts who are always chatting up willing patrons and will ask to exchange numbers if someone is patient enough to engage. But AFAICT they aren't nefarious, just bored and weird. One hocks CDs of his bad garageband compositions, but again, he's harmless.
Yeah, this was my read too. There are plenty of bored and lonely people who also fancy themselves armchair intellectuals, who'd love to talk to you for hours. It may make them annoying and irritating, but it doesn't make them a cult. I don't see anything in the article that this was "attempted cult recruitment", more just "lonely people discussion group".
The author implies that those strangers set off alarm bells at several times, and that is what is important. Giving those strangers the benefit of the doubt would never have made that doubt go away, from what I could tell. If they actually were just ''lonely/bored weirdos'' the writer would still be ahead by trusting the doubts and behaving circumspectly based on them.
Given the title, I expected the story to end with positive confirmation that the two people were in a cult. Not "and then they invited me to join a private discussion group, I ghosted them, the end".
Again, I'm in material agreement that talking with weirdos is generally a losing proposition for any number of reasons. But I don't understand why he's so certain these people were in a cult. They could've been in an MLM. They could've also just been weirdos with a private discussion group. Heck, the "sex" possibility listed at the beginning isn't even proven false. We don't know. The story has an inconclusive ending, which is odd given the title of the piece.
The bait-and-switch of the title gives me the same bad vibes that the author got from the people in the story. And the end of the post feels... forced and perhaps even dissonant. I dig deeper and the guy has a formula for the good life. A personal subreddit (?!) and a substack that all appear to be about nothing in particular?
Does this guy want something from me or is he just a harmless oddball who likes talking into the void / to his small audience? Probably the latter. Most weirdos are harmless and I'm glad they exist even if I don't want to engage with most of them. In fact, maybe he's aware that he sometimes comes across like this and that's why he wrote the post? And the title is, I guess, pretty mild as far as clickbait goes. No harm, no foul.
It's kind of funny that I get the same vibe from him as he got from these people. And even funnier that I'm commenting on a post that gives me odd vibes claiming I never engage with people who give me odd vibes :)
In any case, I remain unconvinced that these people were definitely recruiting for a cult. But maybe that's not even the point of the post.
There is a vague conversational sense that something is off. For me, this has occurred several times just prior to receiving masonic handshakes. It's happened enough that I take notes quickly afterword in order to compile a list of keywords/phrases in order to help identify what's going on. jc, this sounds absolutely unhinged after typing it out.
Yeah I’ve gotten this wired vibe from religious leaders. Just a little too friendly and steering conversations into odd areas. I try to refocus the conversation back on them as the interesting subject and that breaks the pattern but with 2 it’s difficult.
Even if that was the case they were still being manipulative. The whole "you can't talk about this stuff with other people" shtick is pretty transparent. I don't think you can say they're /just/ socially inept.
The one thing that makes me think "possibly not a cult?" is that they met up 4 times before the "private meeting" idea was introduced. I feel like cults usually try to start getting you integrated into the larger group earlier than that, especially if you're just some rando they met at a cafe.
Some of the other points in their interaction do heavily hint at cult, though. Could just be a group that does recruitment differently than I'm used to. I did missionary work in a cult once (not going to name which group, because I don't want to derail this thread arguing over whether this particular group is a cult or not), and the described behaviors and conversation topics certainly ring a bell.
>I feel like cults usually try to start getting you integrated into the larger group earlier than that
Maybe they've been taking lessons from online marketers and have found out that striking early gets them in the first meeting, but the churn is too high and they started a drip campaign instead ;)
I would say the most likely scenario is the one where they were attempting to get something from them. Based on the authors account, they weren't meeting for the purpose of talking to each other, they were using social engineering to strong-arm the author into their group.
It's kind of interesting knowing that if you can get a few people to do a thing that other people will go along with it because that seems to be the thing to do. For instance, if you and a few other people start regularly working out in a park there's a good chance regular passers by may ask to join in at some point.
"I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members." --- or something similar, Groucho Marx, maybe.
I'm not so obviously desirable to be in a group that someone with no social connections to me should be inviting me in. It'd be different if the invite comes with context, but a cafe has little context; most people eat, and a lot of people drink coffee.
Anyway, on the subject of cults, if you want to join a quality death cult, that's stress free, with no social obligations, might I suggest the Internet Death Cult of Fun, https://deathcult.fun/
I spent a good five years of my career working (software consulting) at the Starbucks near my old house. As it turns out, the place was a hotspot for MLM pitches (not generally directed at me, but it wasn’t hard to notice). Once or twice, I actually saddled up next to them after their original mark had left and got the pitch, although the conversation generally didn’t last too long when I started to ask for more details.
One of the funnier ones ended something like:
Me: So what exactly would I be selling? Or doing? That part isn’t clear yet.
Him: Ok, let me ask you something. If I told you that you had to shovel cow manure for two years and then you got to retire with a good steady income for the rest of your life, would you do that?
Me: does the job involve shoveling manure?
Him: No. That’s an analogy.
Me: Oh, so it’s not shoveling manure, but it’s like shoveling manure?
Him: No no no it’s nothing like that.
Me: Oh ok, so what would I be doing then…?
And on and on…
But, over time, you start to notice subtle tells, and can even see it as they’re walking across the parking lot. “Those folks are going to try to recruit someone into their MLM today!” I really wish I could nail down what exactly those tells are… but even years later, I was sitting having a coffee and my scammer alert went off at a couple walking across the parking lot and sure as shit they spent the following hour trying to recruit some kid.
Edit: actually, to your point, is that little things are off. When they do actually talk about business, they use business words but they don’t mean quite the same thing they normally do. Or in the couple from this weekend, they were dressed up like… a stereotype of a “business couple”. Like if you learned how business people dress by watching TV. Just the details were off. He was wearing an expensive looking shirt with a decent tie, but with a spring (not suit) jacket that didn’t match the look, and dress shoes that were simultaneously too fancy to be comfortable on a Sunday afternoon and also too cheap looking to be something you’d wear to the office every day.
She had the same kind of thing going on. Fancy frilly black dress with her hair done up (not something you’d normally just wear to Starbucks on a Sunday), but wearing very plain black flats that just didn’t match the fanciness of the dress. And something about her gait… like walking like someone who was trying to look confident?
I know other people like you: extremely attuned to subtle signals and they turn out to be bang-on correct. It is a real sign of deep subconscious intelligence that your brain integrates the cues and surfaces the answer. Plenty of people think they are “intuitive” and can “read people”, but actually I think there are few people that are really genius at it. A genius will say it is obvious, because it is to them, and they might even latch onto some rationalisation about how they know. The rationalisations are sometimes not correct, but I suspect the extremely talented can even correctly explain the pattern they have identified.
They make me feel like I have an IQ of about 60 . . . although I also believe you need to have some ability to even be aware of the truly skilled, so maybe I have some latent talent!
Hey, not to get too dark about this, but I'm going to offer an alternative hypothesis that isn't quite as rosy as your flattering interpretation:
I grew up in an abusive alcoholic household. I had 18 years to really refine my "subtle cue" radar to try to guess whether or not it was going to be a calm night or a wild night of yelling and screaming.
It's often not as conscious of a process as the situation this past weekend was. As a brutal example, I had a partner a long time ago who, as it turned out, was having an affair. I started having anxiety attacks but couldn't explain what they were about. In an attempt to try to figure it out, I kept a journal of my thoughts every time it happened, but I couldn't find any kind of correlation. At some point the attacks just stopped and I was happy...
When the affair was finally revealed and after the dust had settled a bit, I pulled out my journal and we sat down together and put together a timeline. Every single anxiety attack lined up with one of the times she was out with the other guy, and I think we worked out that there was only one time they had been together where I didn't have an anxiety attack. Pretty much perfect correlation, but I had no clue _why_ it was happening until ~6 months after they had stopped the affair.
At any rate, yeah, you're spot on about the tuning. It's definitely tough to rationalize what's going on sometimes, and it does definitely come from deep inside the subconscious. I'm just torn on whether I like it being characterized as a "deep subconscious intelligence" or whether it might be better called "a powerful survival mechanism refined by two decades of (mostly) verbal and (occasional) physical abuse"
Thank you for your story - it is an exact example of the talent and you don’t seem to know what the cues were. I guess the question is: do most people with abusive childhoods learn better spidy-senses?
Perhaps you are exceptionally talented (smart) in that area. Is there a standardised test? How can you judge yourself against others? How do you go to a course to improve?
I think of intelligence as the ability to integrate subtle information and come up with a correct answer. Intelligence is usually seen as something rational, but I certainly see it as mostly subconscious. I try to be broad minded when looking for smart people as some of the smartest don’t appear to be on the surface (hidden/crypto smarts): the skill to recognise subtle fashions, the skill to correctly read complex human situations, the skill of pruning, etcetera. Usually the skills are not taught, instead a brain just picks it up.
If I wanted to get better at reading people, what do I need to do to get my brain tuned in? I know that the usual routes we are taught are poor: e.g. reading a book about how to ski.
I love the questions and wish I had answers! I honestly have the same problem with my software career too… from around 8 years old, programming was kind of my escape from the world. I self-taught a ton from library books, and then the Internet when we finally got dialup at home in ‘97. First installed Linux in ‘98. There was no learning plan, I just picked it all up along the way until ‘02 when I started undergrad.
Just like your questions about learning how to be better at reading people, I have absolutely no idea how to teach someone to think about software the way I do; I’ve been asked many times!
To further complicate things with learning or teaching any of these, I also was diagnosed with ADHD last year at age 37. Retrospectively, that makes perfect sense based on teacher feedback, report cards, getting 50s and 95s in the same semester… I’m sure that that also contributed to how this weird brain all got assembled, but damned if I can explain it.
Edit: thank you for this! I don’t think I’ve ever really made some of these connections before!
Take it as a signal of something, but certainly don't take it at face value. Apply your intellectual abilities to identifying the origin of that signal. Maybe they just remind you of someone or something; maybe they unwittingly struck a nerve; etc.
Your gut can be wrong especially if you are a low trust person. I’ve had a lot of times where people did something nice or did something I would never do and I was suspicious but ultimately it turned out good for me. Unexpected human kindness sets off my alarm bells every time, but it’s still a good thing
This was an annoyingly skillfully written piece. At numerous points I felt I knew better than the author, only to confront my own foolishness a few sentences later. This kept me reading while my mind drafted the HN comment about how the author is too naive and can’t say no. But true to form, the last paragraph had me questioning everything – was it I who was duped?
That said, this definitely wouldn’t have happened to me, given how cold and unapproachable I am. This is great for avoiding scams and people who want to take advantage of me. However, I suspect such standoffishness has denied me many opportunities for social connection. Someone like the author is more likely to stumble into a cult, but also more likely to meet new people. So I guess you take the good with the bad.
The author's perspective is one that I find very relatable. I am often able to see when people are trying to take advantage of me from a distance, but I choose to "give them the benefit of the doubt", even though I may know that there is a very slim chance that they actually deserve it. I do this because I am curious. When your experience suggests that you can accurately read people's intentions and motivations, talking to bad faith actors becomes a fun game of figuring out what they're up to and learning about their world. A risky one, certainly, but I like playing.
While I don't know you, you underestimate "social geniuses" and con men.
Regardless of what you think of Trump politically, his is an example of the unrelenting assault of certain personality types, likely of the hypomania category.
I have known possibly two or three hypomaniacs in my life, thankfully lacking sinister ulterior motives, but nonetheless the experience can be overwhelming.
As a man, if any female stranger ever initiates a conversation in a cafe, I can safely assume that she has some kind of ulterior motive. That may sound cynical or sad, but that's life.
Thus I can shut down this kind of interaction long before I feel obligated to meet people for brunch even though it feels awkward.
Really depends on the individual and the circumstances.
I'm defective as a person. Because of that most people are able to pick up that there's something wrong with me on some level in short order. So for me, anyone approaching me unsolicited without a clear objective is already a warning sign. Not necessarily of ill intent, just something unseen and unknown to me.
Someone like you I'd assume as some sense of normalcy of being a functional human being. And I'd guess that's probably why some people would find you approachable and why someone would strike a conversation with you randomly.
> Someone like you I'd assume as some sense of normalcy of being a functional human being.
Nobody who knows me in real-life has ever accused me of being "normal." That being said, there certainly are different levels of "weird vibe" that one can give off so I won't say that your weirdness doesn't trump mine.
Also for interests of full disclosure, I'm above average height (182cm) and blonde haired, both of which probably help to tilt things in my favor for a first impression.
My theory is that attractiveness is a big factor. As a below average male I have similar suspicions of more attractive women striking up conversation. Yet I had a very attractive male friend who said he quite often was approached with genuine romantic interest.
It really depends on the context and situation. One example off the top of my mind - I was working from some coffee shop, at the table next to me another geek was also coding. He seemed to be working on something interesting. After a couple of hours I just struck a conversation. We had lots in common in terms of coding areas of interest, shared some fun battle stories, etc. Eventually went back to coding and then went our separate ways. But it was a fun little interaction that I still remember, while for the life of me I can't remember what I was working on.
I (female) met my husband by striking up a conversation with him at a bar. I didn't (and don't) have any ulterior motive for starting that conversation. I didn't even want to date/fuck him when I started talking to him, just was being friendly.
Sure, stay very vigilant about scams, cons, non-genuine people, manipulators, and attempts at recruitment, but it's simply not true that every single female stranger has ulterior motives.
Practice enforcing boundaries: If what you really want is to get to work, then there's nothing rude in signalling likewise (e.g. by turning back to your laptop) or saying so directly. What is rude is people who ignore such cues and continue to try talking to you.
Listen to intuition: If something/someone feels slightly off (even if you can't articulate precisely what/how), then feel free to distance yourself immediately. You can later ruminate on why at your own convenience.
Recognize you don't need to justify feeling disinterest in or even active dislike of someone on sight. They might even be perfectly good people but if you're not drawn to engage, then that's your prerogative. You certainly don't need to prove or disprove their decency/motives by continuing to engage.
> Isn’t that… pretty much exactly what my friends from the cafe did? How do you draw the line between “sensibly taking into account how real people react” and “manipulative dark patterns to literally get people to join your cult”? Perhaps there is no clear boundary.
I find the final questions interesting... bc for me, it is obvious that there is no clear-cut line, just degrees on a continuum which is healthy on one side and toxic at the other extreme.
Human attention is the ultimate currency - we literally spend all of our conscious time allocating it to different uses at a constant rate, and anything that we do to catch the attention of others is asking them to divert part of that use towards ourselves for a benefit.
For me, it is a moral duty to make sure that any such interaction is geared towards producing a win-win situation. This is why I consider intrusive advertising to be morally abhorrent - not just for being annoying, but because it is taking away our most valuable resource from us, without even asking for permission. Advertising should be confined to appear on limited, pre-agreed channels where you don't mind finding the occasional relevant ad.
In the near future I expect that personal attention managers will supplant the dreadful Skinner boxes that social networks have been built on, and instead provide applications that serve our interests - not those from an outsider.
Now I have this little private group to discuss this kind of things, wouldn't you be interested in joining? ;-)
We could always establish the Attention Seekers Club. :-P
My ultimate goal is founding a religion that transforms the way of thinking of mankind, making the differences between points of view sacred (ha ha only serious) - which would imply building rituals (and code!) to find common ground, and agree to disagree in a civilized manner when that's impossible.
We have a cult in my town. They brand themselves a flavor of sufi. They have a few businesses. A couple seats on the city council.
Imagine talking to a guy who's trying hard to sell you a used car. It's like that. Really pushy and manipulative.
They focus their recruiting efforts on teens, children, college students. They have a private kindergarten/gradeschool.
Years ago I read an FBI list of standard psychological manipulation techniques used by cults. Then I saw them in action at their local coffee shop. Hey, they're "Love Bombing" that person!
I was talking to one of their members. Sure we're a "cult". Sure we practice "mind control". Then he proceeds to tell me their special definitions for cult and mind control. That's called "taking control of the language".
They use their members as cheap labor at their businesses. And send the profits to their headquarters in Bangladesh where they have some schools, businesses and an orphanage.
The leadership has very nice cars.
My friend was in it for a few years. Then the "Murshid" (top guy) ordered my friend to send his daughter to their special school in Bangladesh. He noped out at that point.
> How do you draw the line between “sensibly taking into account how real people react” and “manipulative dark patterns to literally get people to join your cult”? Perhaps there is no clear boundary.
Are you kidding?
The difference was glaring when (and why) they asked you to go private.
You want to teach people facts about humidifiers and then (hopefully) see if it stand up to independent inquiry. You changed your approach so that others wouldn't simply dismiss your evidence out of hand.
These two would have eventually removed your ability to independently inquire.
If you went to a private place with them, there would be a guru whose entire goal would be to use your insecurities and skepticism against you in order to disorient you to such a degree that you become highly suggestible. Could be with lighting, trance music, scented candles, $foo, chants, group games, or anything that pushes your physical and emotional boundaries past what you'd normally be comfortable with, etc. You get a warm feeling, then-- bam-- the guru attributes it all to $foo. Now all your reasoning abilities are fighting against the possibility that there might really be something to this $foo thing.
Probably anyone whose been involved rescuing cult members will confirm how dangerous they are. But also consider your own evidence-- how many times did you profess even the mild kind of skepticism that litters HN threads here? From what I read, it seems like you didn't even explicitly mention your intimacy schedule or other red flags as you experienced them. In fact, your only pointed question seemed to come at the very moment they tried to rope you in by asking to go private. In other words-- you gave them time to make their entire cult pitch to you, and only really put up any noticeable friction at the last moment.
The lesson is decidedly not how we're all a little bit like cult recruiters. It's that you were close to becoming indoctrinated in a cult. Remember the shot of adrenaline when the sirens started shrieking for you? Now imagine that happening while being surrounded by a room full of those people, with a guru looking directly at you waiting for you to explain the feeling of receiving $foo. And all it would have taken was one more innocent thought about wanting to meet a few more friends.
I just realized how alarmist that last line is! I mean, do go and meet more friends. Just not ones in cults. Since you avoided this cult, just remember the feeling of them slowly pushing your boundaries, and use that as a filter in the future.
But TFA never confirmed that it was a cult. Suspicious circumstances, yes, but people who meet to discuss things privately doesn't mean cult. It could just mean they get very deep into certain topics and want to pre-screen people.
OTOH: TFA was clearly uncomfortable with this couple. He was perfectly within his free will as an adult to discontinue the relationship.
based on what I know of "new age" cults these two things are not always mutually exclusive
ask anyone from an older generation who lived through the late 1960s/early 1970s as a young adult...
in the modern era I'd wager there's some degree of venn diagram overlap between MLM recruitment and "open relationship" people too
actually as I recall an example of this was shown in entertainment media in the 1999 movie "Go" where a cop and his wife are also running a MLM thing and try to recruit/sleep with one of their targets
Agreed. I had a friend who got into Landmark, and they're not subtle. She eventually recovered, but it took years. Religious groups and Scientology don't start out that slow. Chabad does, but their target group is limited.
Some kind of scam, I expect. It seems so retro for a scam. You can scam so many people online for so little investment that a labor-intensive scam like this seems obsolete.
> You can scam so many people online for so little investment
Honestly curious, how does one do this? I hear this a lot, but when I have tried to actually advertise legitimate services online, the ROI is insanely bad. I can't imagine a cult leader would get better results, so why do people claim this is easy online?
Honestly, this looks like a shitload of work. The art is beyond me completely, I'd need capital to get that made by competent artists. They have articles from Rolling Stone, so I'm guessing I would need a LOT of capital to line that up. They have half a million followers on Twitter and Instagram, etc. This looks very much like a high investment scam needing a medium company worth of talent and capital to pull off. In short, this looks like the work of a funded startup. How do you actually do this with very few resources?
I hiked the Long Trail in Vermont some years ago, and there’s a cafe/hostel in Rutland called the Yellow Deli run by 12 Tribes. The joke amongst hikers was that if you stayed there for more than 2 nights, you’d never leave.
They left “trail magic” food advertising their establishment, which was pretty tasty, especially to someone with a strong case of hiker hunger. And they’d be very friendly with you while you are at the cafe.
Their flyers were completely over the top. Made for some entertaining reading for a day.
> But here’s an uncomfortable analogy: I’ve talked before about how when I first wrote about ultrasonic humidifiers, everyone dismissed the argument for “nonsense” reasons, like not having any citations. Eventually, I realized I could change my argument to avoid that reaction: I was “calmer” and put the citations earlier. Most importantly, I knew that if I clearly stated my thesis early on, would dismiss my article without reading it. So instead I let my claims appear gradually. (I’m not stating that thesis here, either, for the same reason.) Isn’t that… pretty much exactly what my friends from the cafe did? How do you draw the line between “sensibly taking into account how real people react” and “manipulative dark patterns to literally get people to join your cult”? Perhaps there is no clear boundary.
The ethical thing to do is whatever you think helps other people. If you think people reading your article are trying to learn true, useful things about humidifiers, it's good to write the article in whatever way is conducive to that. If instead you wrote it in a way designed to make you look the best, or to sell humidifiers, that would be a problem.
The title is inaccurate. There is nothing in here about "cult recruitment", more just the author not being comfortable with the vibe someone was giving off. Which is fine, but it's a far cry from "cult".
What a fun article. It's not about cults at all, it's about "In what order should I communicate my points to best get the point across, and are some orders unethical?"
I think about this a lot in terms of argument graphs. Imagine a DAG where premises are on the bottom and the conclusion (or conclusions) are on top. And, like most compelling arguments, the premises are unsurprising and widely held, while the conclusion is wildly counterintuitive. Finally, pretend that the argument is actually valid and true - it's legitimately something new.
In what order should you communicate the argument? Do you start top-down? The author tried that with humidifiers and it didn't work at all. Do you start at the very bottom, with the uncontroversial friendly stuff? Well, that's pretty much what the cult did.
I prefer a blend of sorts, but it's difficult to systematize. Basically, you're kind of starting at the bottom, but with little spoilers and hints of where you're trying to lead the presentation.
"After 30 minutes or so, I realized I was never getting back to work so I made an excuse to leave." That's an extraordinary amount of time to put up with being interrupted.
I lived in Berkeley, where there are still loads of little cults popping up, so this sort of thing happens fairly often.
I knew somebody who was a pretty seasoned cult member and she explained to me that apparently there is a lot of competition between cults to recruit and poach high performing zealots, just like headhunters in tech.
This story is a really great argument for "trust your gut." You don't always need an eloquent articulation of why something is off for it to be real. Also, no experience gets better than the initial meet. If something feels off initially, that feeling will never go away.
This was ALMOST a story worth sharing. The author made a big leap in their conclusion without enough evidence to be compelling, and basically just confirmed their friends' judgements that they were being paranoid. I feel a little sad for the author and hope they break out of their box and live a little. Talk to more strangers. If it seems shady, definitely get out of the situation, but unless something ACTUALLY happens, why waste someone else's time with a story that doesn't have a compelling conclusion?
You seem to be missing the point. Cults thrive on manipulating social interactions and slowly chipping away at others' boundaries. No cult pitches the shadiness up-front for the incredibly obvious reason that it scares away targets; instead they slowly coax people into taking one "reasonable" step after another until they can't recognize the shadiness for what it is in the moment. The compelling conclusion is that people who think they can easily spot cult recruitment tactics are in fact perfect targets for cults.
No, i got all that, although i don't know that i agree with that conclusion (but i also don't care to argue for or against it). My point is that there are actual stories about people getting recruited into cults that are worth reading (or even ACTUALLY almost getting recruited, rather than someone that jumped to a conclusion before actually investigating to see for themselves). A story about a guy who THINKS he MAY have been courted by cult recruiters is just... dull. If you found that story interesting, i have a ton a stories i've never shared about things that almost might have happened.
Ever since I started working in 2015, I often encounter a salesperson from a company that engaged in lead conversion for its customers. They are almost everywhere I've been in my city. What they do is to sell stuffs and donate proceeds/profits from sale to the charity they are working with at that point. While this may not look out of place, the fact that they approach people with a slight lead of "helping charity" only to sell its products make me wary and try to avoid them.
What they do is that they will have a short activity to get people to sympathize with their cause (asking to write made-up pet's name to vote on what necessities is important to it), then they will describe that they are doing CSR work for its company in association with the charitable organization. They will conclude the conversation by asking us to purchase products, and some salesperson outright saying that it's a donation (when in fact it isn't). They fix a minimum price of their stuff at $15, but they will try to get a bundle of $60, and when I say I don't have that much, they will keep dropping the price, as low as $3 (no stuff). With the minimum wage here is $10 a day, whatever they're trying to sell is just too expensive.
I had a bunch of similar interactions like these were I grew up and about 6 with different missionaries across Latin America. Starting out with innocent seeming conversations slowly going towards selling their value prop. For me the most repugnant in most of these interactions was, how intentionally they were fishing for very personal things that I'm worried, sad or insecure about just so that they can then present their magical solution for it.
Yeah that’s usually the tell they are fishing too hard for insecurity or major life problem that needs a solution. It’s not a problem 1 on 1 but you don’t want to get stuck sparring against multiple opponents
By the way, it's quite fun to join a cult intentionally. I did that a number of times in my early 20ies. It means such an unusual situation to create: you sort of take them seriously and not at the same time. You listen to them with reasonable openness and attention (often extracting some useful thoughts from their philosophies) and even with fair amount of basic human sympathy but without falling into blind faith like ordinary victims or even allowing a slight amount of unnoticed effect on your reason. This is an exercise which can benefit both you and the people from the cult (who often are ordinary members there and are going to get disillusioned with it soon - and an experience of meeting a person who didn't get charmed yet agreed to be open to them is going to help them). It usually ends by both parties losing interest in each other gradually: you stop hearing anything new from them, get bored and give up attending their meetings, they give up inviting actively because they understand they can't really have you anyway.
This type of thing happened to me all the time back in college, except the "cult" was Christianity. It was sorta common on campus, though. But I think I got it a little more because I was a bit of a loner. So many over-friendly dudes wanted to save my soul.
Youngs, is this still a thing on college campuses?
I got "recruited" into a Christian church just a few years ago when I was in college. I was doing an internship over the summer so most of my friends were out of state and I was a bit lonely. I met a group of friendly people on campus, and we had a conversation similar to those described in the article, a lot of deep and personal topics.
I ended up going to their church a few times, but I felt weird about it considering I'm an athiest
It does come off weird if you inquire as to people's blood type and opinion of accidental cremation straight out before you invite them over for a party... but it's best to be open and honest about these things. After all, otherwise they wouldn't know to bring a sacrifice.
About 15 years ago, I was listening to a podcast that was largely about economic philosophy and personal freedoms. High on the libertarian views and it appealed to me at the time. I heard about a meeting organized by the people who made that podcast and decided to check it out. The podcast and related organization were connected to a property investment system at the height of the housing bubble. My wife decided to go with me.
We met in the basement of an unfurnished house. There was an American Flag on a free-standing pole. We said the pledge of allegiance and I think there might have been an ambiguous prayer. Then we watched a video of some sort by the founder of the podcast.
The experience was very weird. It set off my “this is weird” alarms which made me step away from it.
The founder eventually went to prison for running a Ponzi scheme.
I think people very much want to belong to a group, and be told that the way they view the world is right. And there are plenty of people who are happy to tell you you’re right and you belong if you’ll just offer yourself up to them.
1. People can singularly hold views that seem radically different to the average person. Label them skeptics, crackpots, etc.
2. People can collectively hold views that seem radically different to the average person. Things like common religions, major political parties, etc don't fit in here: people may disagree with ideas in religions or politics, but the ideas themselves aren't radically different
Individuals of #1s and #2s cling to their beliefs and sometimes define themselves by those beliefs.
I'm assuming cults fit in #2, but are there #2s that aren't cults?
I’ve been with a couple of companies where the “corporate culture” thing was heavily preached by HR. You could call it cultish because of the endless training and mantra about mission and passion and competition and a whole slew of other words ending in -ion. It was only when I met others who had also left where we finally spoke easy and realized we had the same sentiments.
I’d say the author took a very large risk and gamble by engaging with these types of people. Many criminals and intelligence agencies employ the same tactic, one of them will be a very attractive woman, and while you’re distracted the male will rob you or follow you in your car to your house.
> A week later, they suggested we go to lunch again. Again, I was tempted to cut off contact, but I asked some friends and again they all said I was insane and imagining things.
Anon should first cutoff contact with those creeps then he should cut off contact with his friends.
Pretty common tactics.
When I was young I spent couple of months in UK. I was looking for a job and a girl come close to me, asking if I were Italian (she can recognize me by the accent and by the clothes) and suggesting me to bring my CV to local Staples that was looking for staff. She asked me where I live and we exchanged phone numbers (I thought this was interested on me).
We start messaging and after few messages, she told me that she was married and she had two kids, so I slowly stop the chat.
After 10 days, I was at home and she rang at my door with his husband a friend. They would like to invite me to a meeting in London, without providing much details. My family was part of a semi cult movement, so I am able to recognize to recognize those threats and the cult recruitment tactics.
Then I asked more details and after lot of debate they reveleade to be part of Jehova witness.
I told them that I was not interested and to don't try to recruit me again and I slam the door.
They come back other times, but I did not open the door, then I found some Jehova witness flairs on my postbox.
After I left and come back, my flatmate told me that they come several times looking for me and inviting him as well to the meetings.
> How do you draw the line between “sensibly taking into account how real people react” and “manipulative dark patterns to literally get people to join your cult”? Perhaps there is no clear boundary.
Hmmm, reminds me of the spectrum of the "Pickup Artist" tricks...
It's all the same stuff. Worth learning about to immunize yourself from these things. The very first 10 mins of the Apple+ show We Crashed is a master class of some of the techniques.
My point was that some of the "techniques" are just things that humans do naturally - noticing that gives you quite a lot of power (but also responsibility).
The person writing this seems really overly-agreeable. It's interesting to see that such people exist, and that the couple could pick him or her out from a crows like that. I guess cults really do have some practice and skill in that regard.
Many horrors of the world emerge directly from the belief that one owns the one true secret to happiness. The more banal reality that there are many enjoyable ways to live, doesn't attract followers.
I may know someone who writes like this. Very interested in how someone converts online comments into having sex with readers or getting them to join a religion, presumably one in which they also have sex with readers. They need to know how not to do that so they know what to avoid.
How did you discover that they were part of a cult? They just invited you to a group discussion and you didn't go to know if it's a really cult or just a bunch of people meeting and making new friends.
Reminds me of the time that I made the mistake of talking to some Midwest Worker's Association folks. Never, ever give a Communist your phone number unless they tell you what org they're recruiting for first. Those people are _persistent_.
It seems like the author was broadcasting a lack of boundaries / submissiveness. Ignoring all your intuitive warning bells and letting them continue to completely dictate the reality-framing let’s them slowly build illegitimate trust. They apparently didn’t quite get the pacing right and failed, but seems like they were well on the path.
They're so personable that you're thinking oh nice, I have a new friend and agree to have coffee. Then the second steps and on as the author mentions happens where they start to ask personal questions like if you're happy in life, what would it be like to not have any debt, retire early, etc.
This all happens over two-three meetings where they then start to talk about they have a group or mentor they work with that can get you going with your life goals.
We never made it into the actual meet the group / mentor part as we knew at this point something felt scammy about it and broke off contact after that.