Interesting Fact : Some People Are Full Of Crap

This is all the protection one really needs.

Rooze: Like it or not, we do judge people as being credible or without credibility.

It is just human nature, and it is something we must do, so that we can make good decisions about with whom we work with and buy from.

This really wasn't an "us versus them" post. But I was poking at an idea someone posted on the forum in the last week.

We can only judge people according to what we know of them.

If the information is available, we should use the information available to us to make a decision about someone.

0 posts is never a reason to judge someone as lacking credibility.

Some of the sharpest people on the planet have never heard of the Warrior Forum, and therefore have 0 posts in the forum.

We should never judge people harshly, just because they have no body of evidence beyond a single post on the forum. We should judge them based on what they give us to work with.

Some people just ooze brilliance every time they hit a key on their keyboards. And you can often sense that in a single post.

Other people trigger the BS sensor every time they hit a key on their keyboards. LOL

As consumers of information and products, we should all do our due diligence to make sure -- to the best of our abilities -- that we are not being fooled.

Yet, I am certain that if you asked everyone on this thread whether they have been duped before, we would all have horror stories about how we were once fooled by someone with a very practiced spiel designed to separate us permanently from our time and/or hard-earned money.

Yep, I am not perfect either. I have been duped by many folks in my life, and the experience has taught me to pay closer attention to those red flags when they rear their ugly heads.

Human beings naturally respond to "us and them." It is the foundation of all racism, bigotry, prejudice, and injustice: the idea that I am good because I am me, and we are good because we are like me, and they are bad because they are not like us.

It's worth examining that about yourself. Americans will give other Americans shocking amounts of credit for living or being born in the same state. This is particularly true of Ohio, Texas, and New York.

But you could say you were born anywhere. It isn't rocket surgery to say "Texas has a lot of IMers, so it is to my advantage as an IMer to say I was born in Texas." And even if you are an honest person, all you have to do is move to Texas. You can even leave after a while; you'll get credit just for having lived there before.

So it's also not rocket surgery to say "I shouldn't give anyone appreciable credit for being born in any particular state, or for having lived there, because that does not really tell me anything about who this person is."

Which is really what you're looking for in someone's body of work: a pattern of behaviour which they are not actively promoting. There's a gentleman here who rants incessantly about the overwhelming quantity of hype on the WSO forum... but writes hideously hype-infested sales letters in the test forum. He closes his WSOs quickly, and doesn't post much on the forum while they're running, which means you're unlikely to connect the dots - but some of his posts in the test forum are still there years later.

So if he happened to raise your flags, and you did a little research, you'd find him doing exactly what he complains that other people are doing. So when he says they do it because they think this thing, or are trying to do that thing, he's probably talking about himself.

That's the problem with "us and them." You probably don't really understand "them" in the first place, and your idea that you understand "us" is almost certainly inaccurate - all you really understand is you.

Everything else is hearsay and perception. You don't really know why other people do what they do; you only know what they did, and why they say they did it. And in a lot of cases, you don't even know what they did - only what they say they did.

When I say I mailed my list and this happened, you don't even know whether I mailed my list unless you're on that list and saw me mail. Even then, you don't know whether I got the results I claim.

Which is precisely where you should fire up the BS detectors. Or, if you want to be really clinical about it, just ignore the whole thing. Consider this sales pitch:

"I have the greatest method of getting mind-blowing CTR. I mailed my list with this simple trick, and got over 80% CTR. And I'll teach you this incredible method for only $50."

Everything in italics is hype. You can ignore it. The sentence in bold is something you can't effectively verify. You should ignore that, too. So this sales pitch factors down to:

"I have a method of getting CTR. I'll teach you this method for $50."

Now that you aren't going "greatest mind-blowing 80% CTR only $50!" you can probably make a smarter purchase decision on this: namely, that there is no substance to the offer.

It doesn't matter whose offer it is, or what state he's from, or whether you both rooted for the Patriots in the Super Bowl. Do you want to spend $50 for a mystery CTR trick?

There are threads every week from people complaining about the crap in the WSO forum, and threads every week from people talking about how to cut through the crap in the WSO forum. And the same people post in both threads: the first one, to say they buy a lot of crap and the WSO forum sucks... and the second one, to say they decide whether to buy primarily based on who is running the WSO.

In other words, is it one of "us" or one of "them" running this WSO?

Somehow, nobody ever seems to connect the dots of "I buy based on who is running the WSO, and I end up buying a lot of crap I can't use."

This behaviour is natural. Your brain is wired to think this way. But you are a human being, and able to improve yourself. The "us and them" mentality is counterproductive and often exploited. Transcend it.

Bill is a huge proponent of this idea himself. Just because someone is new to the Warrior Forum does not mean he has just fallen off the turnip truck, and just because someone has several thousand posts does not mean he knows what he is talking about.

I'm with Bill on this one, and I like to point out that through all my thousands of posts and hundreds of thanks, most of them are dirty jokes and insults and "that's what she said." If you really dug through all my posts and pulled out the ones with real value, it's less than 10% of them.

Which means a sober and serious person could be every bit as valuable to the forum as I am with less than a thousand posts. A lot less. In fact, I know some people I consider far more valuable to the forum than myself... who are walking around with less than 150 posts.

Meanwhile, there are more than a few complete and utter morons on this forum who have just about as many posts as I do. Sometimes more. Because all your post count really means is that you talk a lot, and all your thanks count means is that people like you.

Remember when you were in school, and there were popular kids who talked a lot?

How were their grades?

However, the overwhelming majority of people are completely incapable of this. Most of the "fake it till you make it" crowd come in here asking "how do I get targeted traffic?" with a link in their signature that says "click here to get massive buttloads of targeted traffic."

Most of the rest will come in here and parrot some worthless crap they read in a PLR book, which alerts those who take the "YOU are a moderator" policy seriously, and some of us will stalk into that thread like Antonio Banderas and his brothers in Desperado and open fire.

Which leads to another observation: there are people who have been in business (maybe not the IM business, but business is business) for many years and seen BS of all sizes, shapes, and varieties. They're often pretty good at spotting BS that other people can't spot.

So while it might look like someone is being unfair and just attacking the newbie, it's frequently the case that the newbie isn't new at all... but is pretending to be, so you'll drop your guards and turn off the filters.

It's just like when you're walking through Queens, and the pretty young girl in the alley says "please, could you help me?" as you walk by - maybe the girl really needs help. Maybe something really is wrong. But it's more likely that her friends are waiting in that alley to beat the crap out of you and take your wallet. Which is why the savvy New Yorker stays right where he is, takes out his phone, and calls 911.

Voice of experience.