I’m sure it’s harder when you’re older but it’s nothing like learning a foreign language unrelated to your mother tongue.
And my point is that they don’t have to learn anything new to avoid getting scammed. Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake” and “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice. Unless, of course, they never developed those skills and have been getting taken their whole lives, which seems to be pretty common.
My point is that you are being naive, which is ironic given that you claim they are dumb :-).
> Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake”
This is not an existing skill. The existing skill is a life of learning how other people may try to deceive them. But then the baseline shifts faster than they can imagine, and suddenly their skill is useless.
For instance, humans tend to put more trust into eloquent people, because it usually is synonymous with education. Not that it is a perfect rule, but it is a useful one. Or it was, before LLMs. Now suddenly anyone can sound eloquent. It's not just older people: VCs suffer from the exact same problem. CEOs pay way too much to get bullshitted by McKinsey and the others.
> “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice
Don't you give your money to your bank? How do you know they won't leave with your money or that they won't bankrupt next week? Should I call you dumb if you have been unlucky enough to be in one of those banks?
My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless. If you can understand that the spaceships you saw whizzing around in Star Wars on a theater screen weren't real, you can understand that a dancing cat on a phone screen might not be real. Plenty of old people do understand this, so it's not some impossible task, or even one as difficult as learning an extremely difficult foreign language.
Trusting eloquent people just because of how they sound has always been a way to get scammed. Exposure might be higher now, but people who are getting scammed by eloquent SMSes today were probably getting scammed by friendly, educated-sounding people offering "an incredible investment opportunity" or to "help with the ATM" decades ago, or Amway, or chain letters.
My bank doesn't qualify as "strangers." I have an existing business relationship with them. That relationship started when I reached out to them, not vice versa.
> My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless.
But it's not your choice to make.
And really, how many people don't understand why they should use a password manager? Or can't be arsed to learn how to use one? Or don't understand how to parse a link like https://microsoft.updateeleven.com?
Are they dumb or do they lack practice? I bet they lack practice because they don't really give a shit about that. My grandmother is 100, she doesn't spend 6h a day swiping TikTok, and she doesn't grasp the concept of AI-generated videos. But she can knit infinitely better than me. Should she call me dumb because I can't knit?
Because people don't give a shit about stuff you care about doesn't make them dumb. Maybe you don't know much about music, or painting, or dinosaurs, and that does not make you dumb.
And my point is that they don’t have to learn anything new to avoid getting scammed. Their existing skills of “understanding that moving pictures might be fake” and “don’t give your money or private info to strangers who write to you” will suffice. Unless, of course, they never developed those skills and have been getting taken their whole lives, which seems to be pretty common.