Thread by @AlexandraErin

One of the least comfortable thing I find in my ongoing informal study of con artistry is... the weird dividing line between people who overestimate, overpromise, and overextend, and people who are out to scam people.

One of the things I think my favorite Discworld book Going Postal handles really well iis juxtaposing a con artist, Moist von Lipwig, with the well-meaning Post Office of old, whose last guardians "just got a little behind."

At a certain point in the book's history, the mail stopped moving because the Post Office stopped delivering it. Not on purpose! One of the last employees standing explains it: you know how it is, you fall a little behind so you kind of put some mail aside, you MEAN to catch up.

And the thing is, every few years somewhere in the Anglosphere (and probably beyond, but my experience is news in English), there's a mail carrier somewhere who gets arrested for theft or interference with mail or similar, for exactly this reason.

None of them *mean* to steal mail, or delay it, or cause any harm. It's people who fall behind and can't catch up... often hand in hand with merciless metrics for motion and time use, austere budget cuts, staffing cuts, hour cuts...

These cases break my heart, but that's a different thread. They exist on a continuum with the embezzler who just... borrows a little to make ends meet, but then they're in a hole and they can't make it right without digging more holes...

So imagine someone with a grand vision for a company, or a convention, or a big nonprofit org, or whatever.

And they aren't clear on the details or where the money is going to come from, but they believe in themselves and the idea.

And they assume if they can get the ball rolling, there will be time to work out all those pesky details.

So they get the ball rolling... and it keeps rolling. And just as doubt creeps in, other people start to believe in them and their idea.

And all along there is the siren song of sunk costs.... sure, success seems less and less likely, but if they CAN pull it off, then no harm is done.

There's a tipping point past which you are DEFINITELY lying to everyone else way more than you're lying to yourself, but it's hard to pinpoint where it is.