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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

How can someone be smart enough to earn that kind of money, but stupid enough to fall for this hilariously obvious scam?

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That is all I could think when reading the article yesterday.

I can understand some people such as older and less tech savvy people getting caught up in scams but an otherwise intelligent early 40s person working in the IT industry?! I just don't understand how he fell for it. I guess the only answer is greed overrode his better judgement.

His original investment was only 40k in 2017.

Admittedly still a chunk of change to have invested in a risky asset like bitcoin but it's not like he earned 400k by being "smart enough" and then emptied it into bitcoin.

OK sure, but one would think that anyone smart enough to even figure out how to buy bitcoin, let alone interested enough to spend that much, would not be a complete internet fool.

The first part of this assumes having money is some sort of proxy measure for intelligence.

It is not.

There is also an assumption that if you are "intelligent" then you are intelligent at everything - this has not being my experience of knowing some really smart people. In fact, I actually that to do something really stupid requires a high degree of intelligence - largely down to sheer hubris.

It definitely is. The correlation between money and intelligence is very high.

Yeah, it is super clever to inherit money, or be born in the right place at the right time, or not being abused by alcoholic parents turning you chronically depressed, etc, etc. Please..

Just because the correlation isn't 100% doesn't mean it's 0.

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