Dunning Kruger

  • 0 Posts
  • 2 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 16th, 2023
  • Dunning Kruger@lemmy.worldtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Woman loses thousands of dollars to romance scammer posing as astronaut in distressEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    There’s a lot of information that we don’t know about this, but I bet that there are a couple of pieces of information that you are overlooking here.

    My guess is that someone who believes that another person is a trapped astronaut is probably not just “stupid,” as in it’s not just that they didn’t go to enough schooling or they weren’t paying attention to their surroundings, but they are more likely to be someone with an intellectual or cognitive impairment.

    Cognitive decline and dementia are common parts of aging, and frequently affect people in their 80’s, as this woman is reported to be.

    Scams also frequently target people who are vulnerable, with one theory being that misspellings and grammar mistakes in written correspondence may be deliberate ways of screening out more savvy individuals.

    Vulnerable people are often targeted, not just through romance scams which prey on our desires for connection and understanding, but also towards people with intellectual disabilities and impairments, or more pronounced mental health conditions.

    Adding to this, many of these vulnerable people also have extremely limited financial resources; as individuals with cognitive decline, intellectual disabilities, and mental health conditions often live in poverty or are reliant on meager social service programs.

    I can only imagine what portion of this woman’s savings $6700 was, and what she may have been sacrificing to try to help someone who she believed was in danger.

    As magnetosphere mentions above, it is possible to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, while still holding empathy and compassion for the real person who was hurt here.

  • Dunning Kruger@lemmy.worldtoYou Should Know@lemmy.world•YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.
    3·
    11 months ago

    Sure, it can seem on the surface like wanting to support people of a particular race is in itself a kind of racism, or at least a situation that emphasizes unfair distinctions.

    Unfortunately, race does still matter in America, even if we personally disagree with it or want to ignore it. The health and economic research data make it very clear that people of color in America, especially black people, experience harder lives in almost every category. This is due to both recurring experiences of present-day prejudice and discrimination, as well the inter-generational impacts of wealth inequality and psychological trauma.

    You might already know about this, but redlining is one example of the way that patterns of discrimination can creates a systemic effect, which, in turn, can impact the physical and financial effects on a family across time. These kinds of systemic effects can then make it harder for current generations of these families to recover and live safe lives today though, we personally might celebrate that the policy doesn’t exist anymore, and even though we personally might say that we don’t support people acting like that anymore.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

    No one really has to do anything, but some people might choose to support groups of people or organizations who they think might have experienced similar kinds of hardships in their families, and might be glad to have a way to try to do something different with their money than give it to another multinational corporation every time.