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> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest su
by FFP999 3y ago
> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did.
The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street.
Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot of book-learning but less common sense than a sea slug. I think we saw one such get convicted today.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 3y agoThere's also a fact of human nature that smart people often don't understand: you can be the smartest person in the world and still be stupid under the right circumstances.
- FFP999 3y agoQuite right. One more related fact: competence in area X does not necessarily translate into competence in area Y, even if X seems to be a much more difficult thing than Y.
- StressedDev 3y agoHis problem was not a lack of common sense. His problem was he was dishonest, a conman, and a thief.
- FFP999 3y agoTrue--but nobody made him talk to the media in the time before the trial, and nobody made him take the stand and thereby make himself vulnerable to cross examination. So in addition to "dishonest," "conman," "thief," and "convicted felon likely to die in federal prison," we can also reasonably call him "dumbass".
- StressedDev 3y agoGood point - I think you are right about this.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoHe can (and does) have multiple problems. It's not like because he made one really bad decision, none of this other bad decisions exist anymore.
- Finnucane 3y agoTo be fair, those students are contending with people driving in and out of Boston. The odds are not in their favor.
- FFP999 3y agoYou're not wrong--but all the more reason to be on your guard, and maybe wear running shoes.
- manonthewall 3y agoI've lived in 6 different cities in my lifetime, in every one they claimed they had the worst drivers in the USA. Edit: well color me an idiot, I just checked and a 2019 usnews report had boston as ranked 3rd on worst drivers, based on whatever set of variable they came up with, so touche.
- FFP999 3y agoI found what I think is probably the same report. This one anyway had DC and Baltimore, two cities where I've personally driven a good deal, as the worst, and I would believe that. One other thing to note is that two of the _other_ top 10 are also in Mass, Worcester and Springfield. That's the only triplet on the list in the same metro area. Though I guess, for the point I was making, it doesn't matter if Boston driving is the actual worst in the country or not, as long as it's very bad, which I promise you it is.
- insanitybit 3y agoInsane that Miami wouldn't be on there, makes me question the whole thing.
- FFP999 3y agoImagine Miami only with ice storms, and you've got Boston.
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- crtified 3y agoPerhaps so, but I also think this situation is less of an indictment upon academia than it is upon, say, bankers - which is basically what his career was, both before his crypto work, and during it. After all, it's not difficult to find an effective book teaching one to safely cross a road.
- rendaw 3y agoI saw this when visiting Washington University in St. Louis too! Street, plenty of cars, light turns red, students continue to walk into the crossing directly in front of an oncoming car which brakes and honks.
- fsckboy 3y agothat "almost hit by car" anecdote is complete nonsense. There is plentiful jay-walking in Boston/Cambridge (just as there is in New York City, and has been recently legalized in California). To an outsider, perhaps it looks like people are dangerously walking into traffic? But how many MIT students actually get hit by cars? the number would be unusually high if the number of close calls were unusually high, but without looking up any statistics I can assure you it's something nobody ever thinks twice about. Also Mass Ave which tons of people cross is not the most highly trafficked street by MIT, that would be Memorial Drive, but hardly anybody even has a need to cross Memorial Drive so that part is also hinky.
- FFP999 3y agoDamn, you found me out. smoke bomb
- plorkyeran 3y agoThe thing I learned very quickly while living in Boston is that no one will ever stop for you if you let them think they can keep going without running you over, but drivers do expect pedestrians to just walk into the street and are prepared for it. If you want to cross at a spot without a signal or stop sign, you have to act like you have no idea that there's any cars coming while still keeping an eye on them in case they genuinely didn't see you. The end result looks like a lot of people have death wishes, but the pedestrian injury rate isn't actually unusually high.
- insanitybit 3y agoBoston or Cambridge? Coming from NYC I was shocked at the fact that cars in Cambridge would constantly yield to me, even in situations where I really didn't expect it. Contrast to NYC where I do follow that exact process you're describing - act oblivious, make yourself look like you really will let them hit you, that way they won't. Although in NYC you gotta be real careful about that strategy...
- FFP999 3y ago
- manonthewall 3y agothe whole "book learning nerd not living in the real world" is quite cliche these days, there are much better descriptors such as emotional, literary, mathematical, etc intelligences. Someone may be high in all of them or in just one or none.
- FFP999 3y agoI mean, I explicitly _said_ it was a cliche. But I'd argue that it's not wrong. I guess if I had to describe the kind of person I'm thinking of in a more nuanced way, I'd say they're educated and very good, often brilliant, in their chosen work, but both have low emotional intelligence and are lacking a sort of...I don't know how to put it exactly...basic ability to take care of themselves. There are also plenty of booksmart nerds with high emotional and practical intelligence. (I like to think I'm one, sure didn't used to be.) On the whole they are fun people to be around.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoThat's been my impression of SBF since FTX collapsed. Quite book smart, but zero experience in building a major service that custodies billions in other peoples' money. Raw intelligence is not enough in that context. Ideally you want to have apprenticed for at least a few years at a real exchange or custodial service. Somewhere you learn all the engineering details about how to architect it with proper financial controls, safeguards, and correctness guarantees so that this kind of failure cannot happen, either via human skullduggery, mistakes, or system bugs or security vulnerabilities. Sam never had any of that. He probably got caught up in the moment, implicitly assumed he was smart enough to compensate and not need it, that money is fungible and free-flowing and he can move it around and always make more, etc. And his investors were all finance guys overly impressed with his trading ability and ignorant of the above. This is the unfortunate but unsurprising result.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ants_everywhere 3y ago> He probably got caught up in the moment, implicitly assumed he was smart enough to compensate and not need it The pop psychology term for this is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- kuhewa 3y agoNot really. The Dunning Kruger effect was that those in the bottom quartile of competency greatly overestimated their own competency. He wasn't incompetent. Just had good old fashion hubris.
- ants_everywhere 3y agoThe person I'm responding to was making the case that he was incompetent at his job: > zero experience in building a major service that custodies billions in other peoples' money. This is exactly what the Dunning-Kruger effect describes. He was incompetent at the task he was doing and didn't know enough to be aware of his incompetence.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoOh come on, you’re just using a stereotype here and hurling it at MIT students as a whole it’s almost as if the remark is just supposed to make you feel better about yourself. What you said isn’t even relevant to the FTX case and it’s highly unlikely that someone who’s “just book-smart” will have SBF’s connections to commit a crime of this scale.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FFP999 3y agoI stand by what I said.
- sharts 3y agoPerhaps the fact that his wealthy Stanford lawyer parents have always provided ample bubble wrap around him his whole life that has internalized making excuses for things and being used to getting wrapped in more bubble wrap rather than face negative consequence.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoAffluenza?
- kuhewa 3y agoThis is what comes to mind imo. Michael Lewis describes his ability to dance around questions as dazzling, but I have to wonder if his parents would have just called him out on his bullshit a little more often if he might not have gotten himself in as much trouble later.
- nytesky 3y agoWhy didn’t we see any of that question dance dazzle on the stand? I can’t believe he was “I don’t remembering” in the instances Lewis was referring.
- SilasX 3y agoWe did! He was doing exactly what he did to everyone else whose questions he tried to evade, it's just that this time people called him on it (and had legal power to compel non-evasive answers).
- jat850 3y agoAudience. What may come across as question dance dazzle might suffice to impress or allay concerns of certain people (employees, investors, etc), but it's not probable to work the same under oath and the techniques of prosecution. It's hard to dance around evidence with what you say, no matter how its said, with evidence to the contradictory put right in front of the court.
- pkulak 3y agoWhat a bunch of Jays.
- shever73 3y ago> there really is such a thing as a person with a lot of book-learning but less common sense than a sea slug I don't even think SBF had the book-learning, just intellectual arrogance. "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
- salty_biscuits 3y agoI had to search to check that the quote was real, that is some spectacular hubris!
- Zanni 3y agoIf you like that, you should hear what he had to say about Shakespeare: "I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but I really shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable." [Going Infinite, p29] Now I get that Shakespeare doesn't appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste, but to judge his work on probability when the work itself is right there to judge on its own merits is like the joke about an economist who sees a hundred dollar bill on the street and says, "If that were a real bill, someone would already have picked it up." He also dismisses the "plot twist" in Much Ado About Nothing (when Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio) as "illogical" and the province of characters who are "one-dimensional and unrealistic" because "I mean, come on—kill someone because ... his fiancée is cheating on him?" As if no actual human being had ever killed out of jealousy, when it's usually one of the main motives for murder. It's like he's visiting from another planet or something.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
- mejutoco 3y agoOccam‘s razor suggests simpler explanations than book smart, stupid at common sense. For a person openly opposed to reading books, and proud of it.
- FFP999 3y ago"Book smart" is an idiom. Doesn't mean they're necessarily a big reader.
- mejutoco 3y agoWhen confronted with his actions 2 simpler explanations than "booksmart, but not real life smart" are: - A scammer (unethical, independent of intelligence) - Not smart at all I do not understand how someone see his actions and concludes: he is book smart only. Especially since he has expressed anti-intellectual views. EDIT: expanded, removed non-charitable
- matsemann 3y agoIt's quite insane that your society puts the onus on the pedestrians not to get hit, and even makes it illegal to cross the road. It should be the licensed drivers' responsibility to not hit someone. And in the middle of a campus cars should of course yield to pedestrians. Such a car-centric world.
- sebstefan 3y agoIn the same vein, you could find through experimentation that the speed at which you can finally get hit by a car without someone claiming it's your fault for being too quick on your bicycle is to be approximately stationary But not so stationary, because then you were not visible enough
- matsemann 3y agoSchrödinger's cyclist, both too slow and too fast at the same time. When behind on a road: "you're holding up traffic with your slow cycling!". When later causing an accident for not yielding to a cyclist "he came out of nowhere in a reckless speed!".
- FFP999 3y agoWell obviously then you should have been wearing a high-viz vest and a full Christmas tree's worth of blinking lights. Then when a driver hits you they can say they were distracted by all the visual effects.
- Nemrod67 3y agowould you say the same for trains? and if not why?
- thecopy 3y ago* Train tracks does not take up 70% of cities. * Trains are not constant, they come more seldom * Trains are _extremely_ predicable. Cars are the opposite. This is why trams in i busy inner city are more safe than cars. You know exactly where that tram is going and at what speed.
- mnky9800n 3y agoI typically think that what makes MIT the greatest is their marketing department. They do a lot of great things, but what they do best is telling everyone that they are the best.
- eloisant 3y agoThey still manage to recruit some of the best students, so their graduates are smart simply by the fact that they got accepted at MIT.
- fragmede 3y agoThat assumes the fourish years of being surrounded by other students and professors who are smarter than you, and work harden than you, along with making friends with them does nothing for the students after their time there. Students entering MIT are used to being the smartest at their highschool and coasting through it. So it's a shock when those things are no longer true. (tbc, the same thing happens at other schools to a lesser degree.
- mnky9800n 3y agoYes but there's plenty of institutions that all do what MIT does and field dependent probably better. It's simply not the case that MIT always represents the best all the time. It doesn't even make sense that that could be true. And why would you want it to be unless you were the MIT marketing department?
- hef19898 3y agoFirst, a university is great by doing great stuff and producing great graduates. Then those great graduates confirm the greatness of the university. And then, ultimately, graduates are great simply by coming from an university that once did great things.
- FFP999 3y agoI'll give them this: they throw a great puzzle hunt.
- gosub100 3y ago
- jwmoz 3y agoI think a lot of the time he couldn't control his autism.
- FFP999 3y agoIs he, in fact, autistic? Has he been diagnosed by an actual doctor as opposed to, say, Reddit? If so Wikipedia is silent on the subject.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoShould probably close that street then. Killing college kids isn't worth saving 14 seconds to get to your house in the suburbs.
- FFP999 3y agoAs much as this appeals to me, it doesn't seem feasible: the problem is that this road ends at the Harvard Bridge (so called because it isn't near Harvard, because Boston), which crosses the river into Boston. Close this off, and traffic on the two adjacent river crossings, the Longfellow and BU Bridges, goes from "terrible" to "you should have walked". Aha! you say, there is a perfectly good subway right there! Why don't people take that? Because the MBTA, our transit agency, is a notorious disaster. I won't load you down with examples here, but you can google e.g. "MBTA dumpster fire" or "what is wrong with the MBTA" and soon you'll know all you need to know. I am a little bit hopeful that Philip Eng, the former head of LIRR and new GM of the MBTA, will be able to turn it around. He really seems to mean business, and he's an actual engineer with experience running a railroad. The old GM, Steve Poftak, was mainly qualified by having an MBA, having the right ideological positions, and knowing the old governor. I don't think anyone is going to miss him.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrepd 3y ago>The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street. Getting offtopic, but isn't this more an indictment of America's insane car-centric culture? It's ridiculous that you see a major thoroughfare going through a heavily populated zone which is extremely unsafe to cross yet still laugh at students which "almost get hit by cars".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]