Integrity Is So 20th Century

One of the new activities I took up after retirement was playing bridge. A good friend offered to teach me, and I said sure, fairly bursting with my usual over-confidence about my likely skill at this game.

Ha. Bridge is hard, and I really sucked at it for quite some time, but my very patient friend stuck with me, and now I think I am a not-annoying partner for her. I play a fair bit now, and it’s fun as well as challenging.

In for a penny, as they say, so I joined the ACBL at the start of my bridge journey. That is the American Contract Bridge League, and by joining I got access to useful things on their website, as well as being mailed a glossy periodical full of stories and tips about playing, as well as ads for bridge cruises and the like. All good.

Last week, I got the following email on my old UWO email account. (Professors Emeriti keep their work email accounts at UWO until death do us part.)

The email came from one Shirley Su, email address shirleysu2364@gmail.com, which looks pretty legit, and the subject line was:

‘Seeking your bridge perspective on non, full information scenarios’

The body of the email was as follows. I have not edited it at all:

Hi Andrew, I’m Shirley, a TPM from Desert IT in LV, NV.

Sorry to bother you. I noticed your commitment to bridge at ACBL and greatly admired your ability to develop rigorous strategies.

Our team is currently building an AI decision-making model. During the research, we found that the risk assessment logic of the model  is highly similar to the “offensive and defensive game under perfect information” in bridge. Therefore, we very much hope to ask for some intuitive judgements from experts with rigorous logical thinking like you.

We are currently evaluation a specific scenario. If it’s convenient for you, could I ask you a few quick questions?

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Best wishes,

Shirley

Alert readers might realize that my name is not Andrew. Readers might also wonder, as I did, whatthehell is a TPM?

At first glance, there might seem to be some logic here. I used game theory in my teaching and research back in my working days at UWO, and it would be easy to find that stuff once you have the UWO email address. Further, in the language of game theory, bridge is certainly a game of imperfect information.

But then the flattery about my ‘rigorous thinking’ kind of gives the real point away, as does the utter inanity of this sentence:

During the research, we found that the risk assessment logic of the model is highly similar to the “offensive and defensive game under imperfect information” in bridge.

Neither a game theorist nor a bridge player would ever write that sentence. An LLM chatbot might.

The idea here is clearly to flatter me into thinking some high-level ‘TPM’ wants my brilliant advice, which will induce me to respond to this email. What would happen after I did I can only guess, as I did not respond, and got two more emails over the next two days saying they haven’t yet gotten my reply, and they hope they didn’t bother me.

Right. So stop bothering me, assholes.

This would all be some mix of funny and stupid except for one thing: These turkeys clearly got my email address from ACBL. I signed up to join that org, and I always use my work email for such things, precisely to keep the email client I use to communicate with people I know and like free of such shit. I no doubt clicked some box that said ACBL could do whatever they liked with my info, cuz we have no choice. So what did ACBL do? They gave (sold, more likely) my email address to some assholes who run email scams, who then gathered up info from the web about my working days and then sent that email to the address they had purchased from ACBL.

Well, thank you, ACBL.

The enshittification of the world continues apace.