When faced correcting a false reality you have created, it can be quite hard to decide to phase change into telling the truth. The lies that come out come from not being prepared and not being a very good liar. For people who lie like this, a good way to think about it is as though it were a disease.
Actually intelligent people just don't do things like this, even if they have nefarious intent. There are quite smarter ways to accomplish substantially the same thing that this crime does not reflect.
I'm not convinced that this person was particularly intelligent in the first place.
Or just don’t talk to the police and lawyer up. I agree the best thing is to not do the crime, but if you are a criminal then the intelligent and simple thing is to use a lawyer.
The full phrase - "don't talk to cops except upon the advice of your lawyer" - isn't complicated either.
Are you really claiming that intelligent people don’t commit crime or don’t lie? That seems incredibly naive.
Intelligent criminals and liars are better at it, better at obfuscating, better at making it unclear whether or not a crime was actually committed, better at never having their crime discovered and not getting caught if it is.
I've been seriously bitten by this, and find it more scary than fascinating. Growing up, I thought people who followed cult leaders and charismatic narcissists were so stupid (still do), it appeared so transparent to me. Later, in my professional and adult life I found myself to be equally gullible when intelligent people were abusive or outright dumb in other areas. This has been a challenge to unlearn, like learning an old dog to sit. Basically, our proxies for predicting people's character range from bad to terrible.
Hell I grew up in Normandy and was 16 when some Americans became so mad we refused to follow their war in Iraq they called us ungrateful. Talk about the fall of an idol :D So all that freedom we were supposed to be grateful for was only ever supposed to be used when deciding between buying a coca cola or a pepsi cola, but never for real big boy decision ? Thanks I guess ?
Rules have no intrinsic meaning, authorities are there by luck and circumstances and not their mystical ability to always lead towards the right direction, people try their best and often fail and nobody truly is intelligent in all circumstances.
oh I am 100% with you on this. I tried to elaborate but I just sound bitter and twisted, and that's probably true. But I've spent the last few years unlearning things I thought I knew. It has been a painful and expensive set of lessons.
long story short: I think we judge people's reaction to a situation by projecting how we would act... but that's not how people actually act.
The people who do this are smart, confident and charismatic. It is clearly a negotiating strategy. But in reality, the only thing that matters is who controls the flow of money. If they control the money then it doesn’t matter what they said, they can do what they damn well please. They know this up front, and they count on it.
Despite these setbacks I’ve done alright for myself, but honestly, I’m really bummed out about how useless I am when it comes to judging people and creating businesses where I’m free to actually do my best work.
Anyway, I don’t know if that helps you, but you asked and honestly it has helped me a bit to vent even if it’s all in the abstract.
Even before Omidyar stepped down from Craigslist’s board, his appointed agent, Garrett Price, started bullying Craigslist’s owners. In an email to Buckmaster, Price wrote that Craiglist was “driving [eBay’s] execs (especially Meg) to distraction.” He told Buckmaster that eBay’s takeover was “inevitable” and that Craigslist needed to accept their fate, telling “Buckmaster that he and Newmark were mortal, but eBay was not, and eBay would acquire 100 percent of craigslist whether it took decades and, if necessary, over Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s dead bodies.”
Buckmaster replied by reminding Price that when they negotiated the sale of their stake, eBay had agreed to abide by a three-year “courtship period” during which time, if Craigslist felt their two cultures were incompatible, eBay had agreed it would sell back its shares.
Price’s response to Buckmaster:
“that was then, this is now.”
It's been one thing for me to be on the receiving end of bad behaviour and to form an opinion and suspicions about what happened.
But it's quite another to see it played out deliberately, in the large, using trust and friendship as a weapon to defeat a group of people who aren't even playing the same game.
The remarkable thing for me is that people really are capable of this kind of shitty behaviour; that it can be entirely intentional, and planned well ahead of time. And that it doesn't matter how rich some people are, they are happy to cheat and steal just to get a little bit more. It's disgusting.
Thanks again for linking to it.
From what I’ve seen, openness and honesty are highly regarded in technical work but these traits are considered disadvantages in business.
Tech has a contempt culture problem, and this can be one manifestation of it: feeling that being moderately bright about getting computers to do things makes you a tremendous intellect, and everyone else around you an easily hoodwinked moron.
Perhaps the most extreme example was Hans Reiser. Anyone who followed the twists and turns of the case against him for murdering his wife will remember how many trivially disproved lies he told, apparently under the illusion that he was a mastermind who could put one over on the courts based on his faulty understanding of ideas like reasonable doubt.
https://www.theregister.com/2008/07/10/reiser_rejected_volun...
It actually takes explicit training and practice, as it goes against every social habit and "instinct" we have developed throughout our entire adult lives.
A big part of the lawyers job is to question people. Their stories fell apart pretty quickly.
Once I got quizzed when boarding ElAl flights. They have well trained interrogators. It turns out a complicated life story and ADHD method of story telling doesn’t make them happy. A lot of “I said X because the full story is way too complicated, so here’s the full version” ;)
People think they can stand up to it but it’s hard when it’s someone whose full time job is exposing fake stories.
I actually rehearse now, because police in the USA are so corrupt and unreliable.
Something along the lines of "I know you are just doing your job, but, respectfully, I must consult with my attorney before answering any questions."
Then (to their dismay and annoyance) I repeat the exact same thing over and over again when they inevitably ask me other, follow up questions, trying to work around my initial refusal. (It's so disrespectful, as well as illegal, for them to keep going at that point.)
I have also semi-successfully appealed their FOIA denials covering the incident.
It has resulted in the sexual assault of some of my traveling companions by US CBP (full and thorough body search, simply as punishment for remaining silent). CBP is lousy with criminal pigs.
You can't refuse to answer questions when entering most countries you aren't a citizen of, if you wish to be permitted entry.
I knew a senior developer doing advanced R&D at a big tech company, who also kept getting suckered into MLM scams.
Dude, let's not be generous. Could he write code? Yes. But this is a guy who wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them.
He wasn't even hired on as a dev, he was hired to be the "Cloud guy", essentially a sysadmin for AWS, and basically spooked the CEO into giving him the keys to the castle.
Sounds like the single sensible thing he did. Have you seen the npm ecosystem?
Of the top 10 posts on HN about NPM in the past 30 days[1], 9 are about security problems, and last 1 is about package spam.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
To illustrate: A new Ruby on Rails app has 1/10th the number of maintainers in its dependency list than a new create-react-app codebase.
Picking a language (and possibly runtime) is a pretty huge investment if you intend to become proficient. A lot of people like to think that they are polyglot programmers and that language doesn't really matter. But it does. It takes a few years to become a decent programmer in a given language. And if people claim it takes just weeks or a couple of months, it really only tells you that they have very low standards.
If you are familiar with a given language, ecosystem and runtime, and you care about productivity and quality, the path of least resistance is to stick to what you know. Taking on a major project in a language you don't know is a risky proposition. In terms of quality, time, and even in terms of being able to deliver something acceptable.
I tend to have a main workhorse language. It typically takes 2-3 years to reach an acceptable level of comfortable familiarity with a new language. If history is any guide I tend to stick to the same language for 5-10 years. 5 years ago I switched from Java to Go. I mostly worked mostly as a manager at the time, which is why it took longer to reach what I think is an acceptable level. I'd say it is only in the last 18 months or so I've started feeling sufficiently competent in Go to call myself a Go programmer.
That being said: I think the JS space is both a poor technical choice and a poor career choice. The whole ecosystem is janky as fuck, you have to spend a lot of time dealing with silly complexity that tries to fix the jankiness, and the type of work you get isn't very attractive.
To me, this seems like a classic example. To quote the press release: "During the execution of that search, SHARP made numerous false statements to FBI agents, including, among other things, in substance, that he was not the perpetrator of the Incident and that he had not used Surfshark VPN prior to the discovery of the Incident. When confronted with records demonstrating that SHARP purchased the Surfshark VPN service in July 2020, approximately six months prior to the Incident, SHARP falsely stated, in part and substance, that someone else must have used his PayPal account to make the purchase."
This man was a senior developer yet this quote sounds like it comes from a nine year-old. Not to mention "hire a lawyer, don't talk to the police" has always been pretty solid advice.
He now faces significant prison time, and the strong potential for a dismal life.