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Notes -
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no
(Non pay wall link)
Tragic end.
I feel bad for the dude - honestly a hearty laugh is all I want when people violate social norms like this and show us how frankly evil our institutions can be.
Sure I can blame the dude for every lie told but it only permeates my life several levels deep … the association of someone like Arday and my life only really touches when the walks start crumbling down.
What gets me mad is the institutions.
It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.
But things snowball and here we are.
I don’t even know what I’m supposed to learn from this, and I don’t know how I can help make the world a better place than I left it. People used to change the world I feel like, and I’m only changing the people around me … which is something!
I’m 100% reading the biography about this.
This was always going to happen with DEI implementations.
We need to have an honest conversation about IQ and IQ subtypes and figure out a way to make it palatable to the masses.
Maybe different nomenclature maybe not so numerical (at least to the public).
People who are word/verbally tilted (I think the term wordcel is a degrading) don't really understand the world like shape rotators (also hate using that word) but we still have an obligation to help them as our fellow man.
It's hard to know how smart Arday was, because he obfuscated so much: claims of autism and developmental delay, claims of non-verbal, claims of illiteracy, claims of epilepsy after an assault, testicular cancer in his proposal for the memoir peddled to Simon and Schuster which then morphed into brain tumour(s), etc.
I think he was clever, but not outstanding, and lazy/dishonest enough that he saw how society was holding out claims of disability and racism to him as a shortcut to getting where he wanted to be, rather than relying on native intelligence and hard work, so he took the easy path. And this worked for him, so he kept looking for short cuts even when that involved increasingly baroque levels of confabulation. Eventually he would have been found out, and he was, and this is the end result.
Arday's lying was pathological, in the sense that he told far more lies than was professionally optimal. I suspect the same underlying mental illness/neurodivergence (if this is a meaningful distinction at all) caused both the pathological lying and the suicidality - particularly given Simon Baron Cohen's comments. (Baron Cohen knew Arday well enough to predict this, and was doing the groundwork to place blame long before Arday resigned his position). Given what we know now, it wasn't classic autism, and Simon Baron Cohen has blown up his own credibility far more effectively than his brother Sacha could have done with a Borat interview.
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