"Bin tax" plan likely to fail, say MPs

A newly discovered rule of Gullibility says ;Don't Blog when you're half asleep!; I was checking my Yahoo e-mail this morning when this headline Bin Tax plan likely to failcaught my eye.


Not another bloody tax I thought! Isn't the defence budget big enough? Then rubbing the sleep from my eyes I quickly realised that I'd made completely the wrong assumption.

Now this is interesting from a 'gullibility' perspective, and just goes to show how prior assumptions can cause you to interpret new information in a 'skewed' or biased way. I had clearly distorted and deleted relevant bits of information. It also suggests that you need to be 'awake' when receiveing and interpreting information too. Now isn't this what any influencer and persuader that lacks integrity attempts to do to us? Their aim is to put our critcial thinking capacity to sleep. So, for example, the unscrupulous sales person seeks to establish instant rapport in order for us feel awkard asking 'to the point' questions, the politcial despot (your favourite here) claims to have all the answers to present and even future problems we haven't the inisght to have thought of so we abdicate all of our sense-making and decision making faculties to them, and the errant partner sings us an 'excuse lullaby' full of plausible (and unproven) explanations of 'that phone call', 'that late night at the office', and that 'out of town conference'

(Mini Gullibility Flashback) The classic in my case of the latter was being sent away for the week-end on a 'learn how to paint in watercolours' week -end at no less a place than Flatford Mill in Suffolk (John Constable territory and the subject of theThe Haywain - how brill' was that I thought - only to learn a few months later that it was a 'cover' for my ex-missus getting together with a guy I had recently took on for a software project. Happy Birthday RR!

If you want to avoid friends taking advantage of you then a couple of suggestions would be 'stay awake' and regularly empty your 'mental bin' of its assumptions!