[glofish]

It is because the person is evidently a con-man.

So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.

[Accujack]

I'd say being a confidence man is secondary. Primarily, he seems to have some sort of mental illness. He's paranoid, and seems quite unstable. It's likely he has delusions of grandeur and considers himself a major force behind saving millions or billions from COVID.

I suspect if pushed to replace himself as governance for GISAID (which I suspect he controls alone... I doubt the mentioned technical or governance boards exist) he may well lock off all access to the data that's accumulated or even delete it to prevent someone from taking it from him.

[JohnFen]

Everybody, without exception, can be conned. Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else.

[SapporoChris]

"Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else" Absolute statements are very rarely correct.

[JohnFen]

There is a huge amount of data, going back at least a hundred years, that backs my statement up. But just to be very clear, I'm speaking statistically. You might be the exception to this (but I wouldn't bet on it).

The reason smart people are no more resistant to being conned than anybody else is because conning people is an emotional approach, not an intellectual one.

Any given specific con may not be one that will sucker everybody (in fact, it certainly won't), but con artists tailor their cons to their target. The one a smart person will fall for is different than the one a dumb person will fall for.

As Brian Brushwood says in his excellent podcast "The World's Greatest Con"... "We don't get conned because we're stupid. We get conned because we're human."

[Dylan16807]

It's a statistical statement, so it's very easy for it to be correct.

A subgroup is either more X, less X, the same X to the limits of testing, or has too complicated a relation with X to fit into the above.

The only "absolute" aspects are things like the median and deviation. No positions are being pushed to the extreme.

Even better, "no more" covers both "less" and "same", so it's even easier for a statement like that to be correct.

[SapporoChris]

This is how I interpret the statement: "Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else". 'it' = being conned. 'anyone' does include the dumbest people in the world, so, "Smart people are no more resistant to being conned than the dumbest people in the world" which is enough in my opinion to falsify the absolute statement.

[Dylan16807]

I understand that interpretation but I think "anyone else" is supposed to stand in for an everyman, not the most connable person you can find.

[SapporoChris]

Thank you for your explanation.

[CoastalCoder]

I agree with your main point.

Is the term "smart people" sufficiently vague that it would need refinement for the level of certainty you're describing?

[Dylan16807]

I don't feel like it does. The more vague you make a category, the easier it is to say it's the same as the general population.

[glofish]

Of course that everyone can be conned,

but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -

I am surprised that anyone would think otherwise.

[majormajor]

> but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -

Nah, you just run a different playbook. You gotta leverage that arrogance. Like Bankman-Fried.

[JohnFen]

I think otherwise simply because that's what the data says.

I was talking to a con artist once who took the point even further. He said smart people are actually easier to con for a few reasons.

The smarter a person is, the better they are at working out a chain of reasoning that can "prove" the con isn't a con. Since a con is appealing to human emotion, not logic, you can make a smart person want to believe the con so much that they'll work out the "proof" that it's legit all by themselves.

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