I found it incredible that such brilliant and attractive people would be dumb enough to risk it all for the relatively paltry gains that embezzlement can earn.

I found it incredible that such brilliant and attractive people would be dumb enough to risk it all for the relatively paltry gains that embezzlement can earn. I kept looking to see the underlying motivations... In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke takes a starfighter and flies to another planet, pursues training with Yoda etc. I'm pretty sure the other timelines in the movie don't reasonably match up and I don't recall this causing a big hullabaloo. What people will blithely accept in a popular movie tells you something about their mental processes. It tells you something about how tolerant they will be of half-truths and stories not quite adding up IRL. And some people like exploiting that fact for some reason. They usually have an excuse -- "I'm some minority group or other and we never get a fair shake." But the reality is, as the author says, they just like it for some reason. Most people have partial info and make decisions based on simple rubrics, not comprehensive overviews of some unknown future. People routinely see what they want to see -- "Look! Free money -- again!" -- and blithely ignore inconvenient truths -- "Oops! Arrested again." Comments suggesting "right to be forgotten" is problematic are correct. It typically just teaches people they can get away with it.