If You'll ... Then I'll ...
If You'll ... Then I'll ...
If you are willing to do the following, then I will provide the benefit of all my knowledge here for your (hopefully, eventually) personal gain. There is no other way that this skill acquisition would be made so easy and work-free.
I will teach you how to play poker without even betting a single cent.
I will teach you how to make home made BBQ sauce from scratch in less than 10 minutes.
I will teach you how to read emotions in others and be able to interpret them accurately.
I will teach you how to increase your life's income by three times.
I will teach you how to master any skill that you have ever set your mind to and become proficient in it.
I will teach you how to attract a woman with ease, so that she feels desired and attractive around you.
I will teach you how to plan the perfect day off for yourself, involving no work and minimum distractions.
For all these benefits I require the following:
You must be willing to commit ONE HOUR of your time per week for six months (no money is exchanged).
If you are willing to commit to the above, then I will provide all of the following benefits.
In this article, the author goes on to describe how he's been able to successfully convince over a thousand people that he can teach them how to play poker without even betting, offering a free eBook which describes the process.
This is one example of how people who read this and don't understand it might think it is not credible. To a critical reader, it might appear that if you can say any outrageous thing and get away with it in cyberspace then what you say is not credible. However there could be some truth in this and so from a logical point of view we have an anomaly. What we have to do is try and find out what is the nature of this anomaly so that we can investigate it further. The anomaly could be that there are people who are not as gullible as others, but with language such as this, they might be able to appear to be gullible. In any case it is quite obvious that this article was written in such a way that if you don't understand the first part of it, then you won't understand anything at all. It is a kind of pay-per-click advertising for the online poker site just like many other Internet marketing articles. Many articles are chock-full of words and sentences that don't mean anything when taken to their logical conclusion. It is not very hard to conclude that the author is trying to sell something and unlike many other Internet marketing articles, this one appears legitimate.
See also other examples of Internet marketing articles such as:
It is clear from this article that the author was able to persuade people he didn't even know that he can help them without having even met them. There is no logical reason why we should accept it, but instead have an epistemological investigation into the idea. The idea that he is going to teach you how to play poker without betting seems unbelievable, so before we do any research into it we need to see how credible he appears to be. It seems very unlikely that someone would make up something like this in order to sell something, and of course if anyone makes up a story about doing this, then people would never believe it. If a person tells you they can walk on water, then by logical deduction instead of believing them, you should expect them to fail and fall in the end. We need to first look at his credibility and performance before we have any concern about what he says.
So we need to look at how people who have used this eBook have found it. We investigate this by looking at other books written by the same author and see what their reviews are like. We also do a search of Amazon for any other books he has written to see how they are regarded. After reading all of the reviews, we might find that the book is more credible than it appears at first glance and a logical investigation into the credibility of any statement or action would be justified. In one short book review we read:
If you could give zero stars, I would...this is a scam!! The author claims he can teach anyone with no previous experience how to play poker for free. Sounds way too good to be true, plays like a hard core sales pitch. This book was given to me as a gift and I wish I would have received one of these instead: http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Richer-Thenmighty/dp/1581801251
If we Google the author's name and look through his other books, then we can see this is not an isolated case:
But now that i'm reading more books by the same author (Nick Grudin), I think this is more related to his style ... I really like this book. It is not a hard sales pitch! It's actually a very touching story about how he got through something that devastated him... Its not like this is some sort of "join the club" kind of book or anything, its just an honest, reflective and inspiring story...I wouldn't say it was my favorite out of all his books, but I do think it was a must-read for any aspiring entrepreneur
The pictures used in the photos on the back cover appear to be from other places. We can't find any other evidence that he has been successful with this method at all.
In the end, by logical investigation we can conclude that the author appears to be a con artist and that with language so contrived to persuade readers that he has taught thousands how to play poker without betting and even if he does offer some useful advice, it's unlikely that anyone will be able to take advantage of it for any length of time.
We could go on exploring other dubious content on the Internet, along with its plausible explanation or we could just accept it as an anomaly and try an alternative approach. No matter what we do, after having investigated many dubious Internet marketing articles we have learned not to believe anything without first investigating the author's credibility and performance. We can't ignore the obvious, but we need to understand it first. The proof is in the pudding.
Milton Freidman who is also known as "The Wizard of Oz" was a famous con artist of the 1930s, and many now think he was a fraudster despite his extraordinary success in convincing people that he was genuine. Hollywood believes in the legend that he was indeed a con man. He has become this because so many people were convinced by what he said and did not doubt him at all. In fact they thought they had been his apprentices, so when they later found out that wasn't true, they were deeply disappointed and disillusioned with him and his methods.
Conclusion
The Internet is a vast array of information, and every day new things are appearing on the Internet that could be considered dubious. Most people will just accept it in the same way they accept everything else, which is to say they see through it. We need to have the courage to investigate anyone's credibility. Maybe we need to do a lot more of this but we must leave this kind of investigation to those better qualified than ourselves for their task, for in the end only people who really understand things can evaluate them properly and make decisions about them effectively. Those who don't understand should not form opinions about them.