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Notes -
I think this absolutely ceased to be true (if it ever was) in the current era where the average person is exposed to dozens of possible scams every day, many of which were devised by extremely sophisticated actors and have been refined over years or decades to be almost imperceptible from honest business opportunities.
Maybe if you still live in a small town where you know your neighbors (i.e. you're unlikely to exceed Dunbar's number) and you've got friends and family nearby looking out for you your intuitions will still suffice to navigate life without too many pitfalls.
But even merely browsing the internet can have you stumbling into places that are designed to suck you in and extract resources or spur you to action or instill some false but alluring belief which will in turn be exploited by other malicious actors.
Most of Crypto-space, for example. Blows my mind how billions of dollars have been thrown at rugpull scams and pyramid schemes just by making people believe it was possible to 10x their money for zero actual effort. Get-rich-quick schemes have existed forever, but the sheer ubiquity of them is what makes it more risky for the average person these days.
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