Conversation

Grifts are undertheorized, and too often conflated with long cons, scams, frauds and other more blatant soft crimes. Lemme offer a definition. A grift is a scheme that profits from the existence of a real problem without actually addressing it.
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Small grifts merely exploit the problem. Big grifts perpetuate it. A grift is particularly stable because unlike a true scam it doesn’t offer decisive solutions that claim to fully solve it and can therefore proved to not work. Theranos was a scam, not a grift.
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Replying to
But isn't it true that startups are often somewhere on a continuum from Legit >> Scam, insofar as they always start as hypotheses and some degree of Con is required to get the resources which will sort the wheat from chaff? I saw Theranos as merely very far to the Scam side...
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