Tyler Cowen with some propositions about the economics of advice and how advice relates to understanding fellow humans a bit better:

1. You don’t know what a person really thinks until you hear his or her advice. Along these lines, if you really want to know what a person thinks, ask for advice and he or she will open up.

2. In philanthropy there is a saying: “Ask for money and you will get advice. Ask for advice and you will get money.”

3. There are many exacting scholars who should be locked in a room, asked for advice of various kinds, and forced to speak into a tape recorder with no edits allowed. The advice-giving mode mobilizes insights which otherwise remain dormant, perhaps for fear of falsification or ridicule or of actually influencing people. All of the transcripts should be put on The Advice Website, with an open comments section, to limit the actual influence of the advice. Some famous people would be revealed as foolish in critical regards. The contents would be most interesting as non-advice and the site would carry a government warning that the advice is not to be taken seriously.

4. Often we do not trust people until we hear their advice. We suspect in any case that they wish to control us, and until we know what they have in mind, we remain wary. Sometimes it is necessary to give advice — even pointless advice — to establish trust.

Naturally, these guidelines don’t apply to medical advice, and it’s probably a good idea to invest a bit more due diligence in someone who writes for a living.

Nonetheless, as business communications get more human every day, perhaps the astute entrepreneur, executive or salesperson might consider engaging colleagues at this entirely different level to open some new conversational and relationship doors.

Absolutely fascinating:

Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a "change blindness" experiment. 75% of the participants didn’t notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: "Here’s proof that most of the time we look but don’t see." I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn’t really see things unless he was painting them.

Must be the season for social-engineering spam, because if you thought this was bad, get a load of what just showed up in my inbox:

This is a well-done ploy on many counts: it appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, looks official, and logically follows tax season. The attachment, a Word DOC, was opened without incident on my Mac, but the document showed an embedded object foreign to my operating system (OSX Leopard), so there was no issue.

Deeper research shows that it quite possibly might be a trojan horse that installs a virus; if you read the comments in the previous link, you’ll see different delivery mechanisms. Some are PDFs, some ZIP files, some DOCs. Regardless, it seems as if the object, regardless of its wrapper, installs some sort of malicious payload.

Be careful. This ploy was clever enough to get past SpamAssassin, so I’d guess most antispam definitions don’t have this one in their tables yet.

If you’ve received anything like this, post it below so others can understand what’s floating around out there.

I found this waiting for me in my inbox this morning.  Fun!

Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong.and in charge of the registeration in Asia.We have something important need to confirm with your company.

We received a formal application from a company called “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” applying to register

Internet  trademark:

Miproconsulting

Domain names:
miproconsulting.asia
miproconsulting.biz
miproconsulting.cc
miproconsulting.cn
miproconsulting.com.cn
miproconsulting.com.tw
miproconsulting.hk
miproconsulting.net.cn
miproconsulting.org.cn
miproconsulting.tw

in China and also in Asia on Jun. 23. 2008.

During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” has no trade mark, Intellectual property, nor patent even similar to that word. as an authoritative registration organization, we have the duty to inform you this matter. If you do not know this company,  we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of  sa-lar yun Investment Corp yet, in order to deal with this issue better, please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Hayee
Auditing Department
SK Holdings, Ltd.

This is clever and it took a bit of time to figure out the pathology.  But there is one, and it’s interesting.

This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.).  Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.

Isn’t it nice that someone halfway across the globe is looking out for our best interests?  Makes me want to do business with them right away.

There are many versions of this floating around the web, most of which have Chinese senders.  Seems they’re really advancing their pretexting game.  Hooray.

If you’ve stumbled across this yourself, paste a copy of the email you received in the comments.  Like other spam of this ilk, there are likely countless variants out there.