{"id":68697,"date":"2025-02-07T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T06:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=68697"},"modified":"2025-02-06T09:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T14:55:08","slug":"qotd-the-chump-ratio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/02\/07\/qotd-the-chump-ratio\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Chump Ratio"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>P.T. Barnum gets a lot of quotes about gullibility attributed to him, because, well, he’d know, wouldn’t he? There’s a sucker born every minute, you’ll never go broke overestimating the public’s stupidity, and so on. One I particularly like is: One in Five.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what you might call the Chump Ratio. In any given crowd, Barnum (or whomever) said, one person in five is a born chump. He’s ready, willing, and able to believe anything you put in front of him, and so long as it’s not skull-fornicatingly obvious fakery \u2014 an extremely<\/em> low bar, as you might imagine \u2014 he’s all in. The best part is, chumps don’t know they’re chumps, and they never, ever wise up (poker players have a similar adage: “After a half hour at the table, if you can’t spot the sucker, then you’re<\/em> the sucker”; it has the same impact on behavior, namely: none whatsoever). You don’t have to do anything to sell the chumps; they’re practically begging you to take their money.<\/p>\n

Barnum didn’t say much about these guys, but there’s another ratio that applies to a given crowd, also about one in five: The born skeptic, the killjoy, call them what you will. This is the guy completely unaffected by the lights, the music, the smells of popcorn and cotton candy, the children’s laughter … all he can see at the carny is the tattooed meth head who put everything together overnight with an Allen wrench. He might well show up at your carny \u2014 the wife and kids wanted to go \u2014 but you’ll never make a dime off him. No show in the world is ever going to sell him, so you don’t need to worry about him.<\/p>\n

It’s those other three guys in any given crowd that make you some serious money … or bring the whole thing crashing down on your head. They’re who the show is really<\/em> for.<\/p>\n

It’s pretty easy to sell these folks. After all, they want<\/em> to be sold. They’re at the carnival, aren’t they? And yet, it’s also pretty easy to screw it up. They’re willing to suspend disbelief \u2014 they want<\/em> to \u2014 but the line between “necessary suspension of disbelief” and “an insult to one’s intelligence” is thinner than you think, and lethally easy to cross.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Carny World”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-09-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P.T. Barnum gets a lot of quotes about gullibility attributed to him, because, well, he’d know, wouldn’t he? There’s a sucker born every minute, you’ll never go broke overestimating the public’s stupidity, and so on. One I particularly like is: One in Five. That\u2019s what you might call the Chump Ratio. In any given crowd, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,28,41,13],"tags":[746,139,1462,810],"class_list":["post-68697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-gambling","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-skepticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-hS1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68697"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94021,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68697\/revisions\/94021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}