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.
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.