- blocks anybody who looks into his past
- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
The latter two are opinion. The first two are factual but hard for anyone else to validate.
I tried looking into "misrepresents his affiliation with MIT" and I couldn't figure out what he's misrepresenting. He claims to be a researcher at MIT. The MIT Deep Learning page[0] is all videos from his YouTube channel, including Fridman lecturing at MIT.[1]
What's the misrepresentation?
Just listen to his podcasts. I was podcast hunting the last couple months and came across a recommendation to his podcast. I have no idea about him as a person, his background or his critics; so I was in an unbiased state.
I listened to a few podcasts to realize the dude is toast. He does mumble a lot of "sophisticated" words to sound smart but after 4 or 5 episodes there is nothing of substance that you get from him or his guests. I wondered why he was recommended in the first place but then remember lots of the podcasts in America are JRE style.
The thing I dislike about Lex is that he doesn't really critically interview. If you interview someone, you put your credentials at stake to interview them, and it must be critical IMO. Instead, Lex is more of a marketeer, giving the interviewee room to spout their message via his platform.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/zaeztd/_/...
If you see his Youtube profile picture it’s pretty obvious he wants to present himself as a lecturer or professor staff, which he is not.
For the latter 2 I’m sure the other comments on this thread are helpful.
I personally didn't find the claims in that reddit thread persuasive, but I understand how others might interpret them differently.
Aside from Taleb, I don't recognize any of the people who claim Fridman blocked them, so for all I know, they tweeted obnoxious stuff at him and then complained about being blocked. Taleb is extremely abrasive, so I can't fault anyone for blocking him.
If it was like Yann LeCun and Andrej Karpathy complaining that Lex blocked them, then I'd question how aggressively Fridman blocks people, but if it's random Twitter accounts that seem to just shitpost all day, why do they have a right to communicate with Fridman?
I'll also direct you to the moderator list of the /r/lexfridman sub. No real people, none of them ever comment, and his subreddit is one of the most [deleted] I have ever experienced. If you look at reveddit, also check the comments. Quite telling. https://www.reveddit.com/v/lexfridman/?localSort=num_comment...
If your response is "maybe he just likes a heavily curated subreddit" then all I can say is keep coming back.
For being so open minded, he sure does have an incredibly tight grip on information control. This is coming from someone that used to think Lex was the cream of the crop.
I've listened to a lot of his podcasts, I do not recall him mentioning MIT once.
>- blocks anybody who looks into his past
What? You mean in youtube comments? Aren't they supposed to be talking about the video not about whatever his past is? (I have no idea about his past, I just know he did something related to self driving cars at some point)
>- styles himself as an expert version of jre while being a terrible interviewer
He often describes himself as a terrible interviewer (which I disagree with), so I'm not sure how he's "styling himself" as anything
>- is often misinformed about the subjects of his podcasts.
He's an audience stand in who asks questions to the subject matter expert that he has on his podcast. If he already knew everything it would break the format.
He actually used to host his pod at MIT before he moved to Texas to be closer to his true loves, Joe and Elon. Haven't watched him in years since he moved away from tech and more into (mostly right wing) political guests but even then you could count on one hand the interviews he didn't mention Rogan or Musk.
I feel like there must be some other reason you don't like him, because none of your reasons are consistent with reality.
What do you mean? I'm out of the loop, not arguing with you.