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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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I don't know if he's a sociopath; I think he's that particular kind of smart idiot who was very mathy and his indulgent parents and all around him told him he was a genius and he believed it. Given that his parents are both law profs, how the hell he ended up in jail can't be explained by anything other than that they indulged and enabled him to try and get around the restrictions on the phone and online time, etc.

Except then that having the freakin' NYT publish a story you gave them, involving private documents of a third party, is not keeping your head down and at least pretending to be compliant. Actions have consequences, and this is them.

I don’t know about sociopath. I feel like behaviors become beliefs. He may have crossed a few smaller lines and gotten away with it. Then bigger lines. Then all of a sudden he’s running a full fledged Ponzi scheme and has lost any about to see where the line of societal rules exists. Alcoholics don’t drink a bottle of vodka a night on their first sip.

Not to kick EA movement when it's down because hoo boy did SBF give them a black eye, but it's that general attitude: "we are so so Smart and we are working hard to make things go better with our Smart and we have all these lovely theories that the normies, bless their little Not Smart hearts, could never understand" at work, combined with "everyone I know has been on legal speed since they were in primary school, plus we are So Smart we call our drug taking 'nootropics' and 'hacking our brains to be more efficient'" and thus you end up with the guy taking so many pills he rattles when he walks and he's so wired to the moon he can't sleep above four hours a night, as per coffee_enjoyer below.

That gushing, fawning interview/article about how he was going to be the saviour of the world via crypto and EA probably didn't help, when you've got people propping up your view of yourself with "Sam, some say you are the most wonderful person in the history of humanity ever. I'm not one of them. I think you are merely superhuman and the greatest living genius right now".

how the hell he ended up in jail can't be explained by anything other than that they indulged

He was abusing dopaminergic drugs typically prescribed to Parkinson’s patients and went years with only four hours of sleep per night. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that he was abusing a lot of nootropics in addition to selegiline

I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn that he was abusing a lot of nootropics

Now I'm imagining a next-generation HHS targeted-ad campaign, "Modafinil destroys."

You think I'm joking. I'm not.

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