[mtlynch]

Can you substantiate any of these claims?

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?

[0] https://deeplearning.mit.edu/

[1] https://youtu.be/O5xeyoRL95U

[thorncorona]

I’m not going to rehash countless internet arguments but you may take this Reddit thread and look into it yourself for the first two:

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.

[mtlynch]

Thanks for sharing the link!

I personally didn't find the claims in that reddit thread persuasive, but I understand how others might interpret them differently.

[CommitSyn]

There are countless examples of people being blocked by Lex for harmless tweets and extremely minor criticism. I only skimmed it but here's the Twitter search for 'lex Fridman blocked' https://twitter.com/search?q=lex%20Fridman%20blocked&src=typ...

[mtlynch]

I can believe that, but I also have to take those claims with a grain of salt.

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?

[CommitSyn]

Sure, without making an entire Medium article for you, which I don't have the time to do, I can't prove they weren't all shitposters, although there are some notable names, but that would be a lot of them.

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.

[csomar]

> Can you substantiate any of these claims?

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.

[Fnoord]

I kept thinking what Java had to do with all this, but thanks to this comment it finally connected that it refers to Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm not very familiar with his podcast but there was some American podcaster who ended up being a covid denial fanatic. Might've been him.

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.