3 ms·
Indeed. If you start a religion, and get a single person to join it, you can (truthfully!) claim you've doubled the size of your congregation! The reason this
by javajosh 6y ago
Indeed. If you start a religion, and get a single person to join it, you can (truthfully!) claim you've doubled the size of your congregation!
The reason this scammy verbiage works is because it violates "linguistic norms". Congregations are "large" things in peoples minds, so when you claim to double it, the image that comes to mind is adding a substantial number. By violating these norms, you can lie without lying. It's a neat trick, the use of which has been mastered by the legal profession. But the technique clearly has wider applications, sadly.
- dfilppi 6y agoThis technique is the basis for politics
- javajosh 6y agoThere is a reason why virtually 100% of Congress are lawyers. (Not sure where to look up the stats on that, though.) Edit: I was wrong. It's "only" ~50% of Congress, assuming the numbers are roughly the same since 2016. source: https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/6/30/12068490/too-many-lawyers-politics https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2016/6/30/12068490/too-many-la... That's still a huge number, compared to the % of general population who are lawyers. In the US there are 1.4M lawyers; if the pop is 350M then they are 0.4% of the population - and a much smaller fraction of the adult working population (roughly .02%).
- zuminator 6y agoI was with you til the last sentence. The adult working population is about half of the total population, so approx 0.8% are lawyers, not 0.2%, and certainly not 0.02%.
- ameister14 6y ago>There is a reason why virtually 100% of Congress are lawyers. Yeah, I mean - there's a reason people that write software are mostly engineers.
- rozab 6y agoThis seems to be about supply and demand, not linguistics.