Signaling games of spying

I’m trying to fool you. You realize that I’m trying to fool you, and I—realizing that—try to fool you into thinking that I don’t realize that you have realized that I am trying to fool you.

It is I who have fooled you into fooling you that you have fooled me!

There are many reasons I like these mind games. One of which being the anonymity and interaction of the internets. Where someone is on this chain of knowing who is being fooled, pretending to be fooled, and so on. It reminds me that intelligence work, or even sometimes straight police work, is bound to be less a matter of gathering evidence and more a matter of interpreting it. Which then reminds me that there are lots of things that this could apply to and all you end up with is the level of convincing you have undergone to accept certain things as true in order to act on them. Or not act on them and play dumb.