Could someone with a background in trial law explain why she would do this? Is the entire family just bad at emotional regulation? If so, is this common among professors at a top-3 law school?
Honestly, if you want to distinguish "human" from "lizard in a human skin suit", "animal" (a la Gom Jabbar), or "machine"*, the "Rubber Chicken Bearing Test" (https://youtu.be/9AqqmjGzeTQ) is your aqua regia**!
* Forget the "Turing test" ... ***
** Or, aqua humanus ... or aqua homo ... to put it in words the channers undoubtedly lurking here might understand :)
*** More seriously, probably forget any "test" ... aside from "probing all the way through" https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... ... though, even that seems likely to be inaccurate ... https://youtu.be/Umc9ezAyJv0 ...
All that to say, there reactions are more likely to be those of elite academics and parents, definitely not those of litigation attorneys. Also, both professors are widely thought to be rather free-spirited and gregarious. Additionally, Bankman is a psychologist and seems to really get into the whole California ‘wellness’ and freedom vibe.
People react how they react, but these two are ultra elite academics who dabble in political circles and consultancy, so their world view is going to be different than the family of an average defendant being denied bail in a court.
Here's the original CoinDesk report that the meme spun off from. It's pretty obvious these people were stressed out of their minds, and understandably so:
> They appeared to oscillate between dejection and defiance, at times holding their heads in their hands and clasping their hands. Bankman-Fried’s mother audibly laughed several times when her son was referred to as a “fugitive” and his father occasionally put his fingers in his ears as if to drown out the sound of the proceedings.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/12/13/inside-sam-bank...