Patrick Winston, professor and former director of MIT CSAIL, told a brief story in class back in 2008 or so. He said it was sort of a running joke in the gradua

Patrick Winston, professor and former director of MIT CSAIL, told a brief story in class back in 2008 or so. He said it was sort of a running joke in the graduate admissions committee that people were drawn to study and research the areas of AI that corresponded to weaknesses of their own. I.e., people with poor hearing study speech recognition. People with face blindness study computer vision. People with poor writing skills study natural language processing. And so forth. "And every so often", he said, turning to face the class with a small grin on his face, "we get a grad student who comes before the committee and says he's interested in all aspects of artificial intelligence." It was amusing at the time, but had an element of truth to it as well. It's not surprising to me that dishonest people would be drawn to a career studying honesty.