Hacking

Halfway through Mr Robot (just season 1) right now. The show is addicting to me, and in a fairly unhealthy way. The main character, Elliot, plays a lot of mental tricks. I can't tell if he enjoys it or if it's just his only way of communicating.

His best trick is to play stupid - that's one of my favorites too. I don't want to brag, but by some accounts I am smart. Rami/writers/directors do an excellent job pointing out the best way to get someone to trust you is to make them feel like they're above you. My [liberal] belief is that people are generally good, they just disagree on what good means. This often translates into people wanting to share their idea of good - a form of teaching.

There's that classic saying “the best way to understand something is to teach it to someone else”, but I feel like there's another side to it. The best way to learn about someone is to be taught by them. I try to use this technique pretty often, where I will definitely know the answer or solution in some scenario but falsify anyways. I'm in STEM, more often than not there is a singular right answer, but seeing how other people treat a problem is significantly more interesting. I don't mean treat a problem as in “how do I solve the question” so much as “how do I transfer the solution from me to you”.

You learn a lot this way, but it comes out at the cost of lying. Sooner or later, you can't lie about everything anymore. I'm curious to see how this will end for Rami. I just saw the prison episode (trying to keep it spoiler-free), and it's one of the best social engineering failures. They deliberate set up several episodes of the gang getting by on their quick wits and taking advantage of those slower than them. What happens when you hit someone that doesn't work logically? Garbage in -> Garbage out

I'll update this when I finish the available episodes.

Heh, called the first twist, not the second one. Great show.