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Comment by taco_emoji | Hacker News Reader

SBF doesn't strike me as "highly intelligent" in the least.

You may not like it but you need to be pretty smart to pull off what he did. I don't think too many people could do what he did even if they wanted to.

I think the same counts for a certain presidential candidate. A lot of people say he is just dumb but personally I think he has to be pretty intelligent to get to where he is.

I think it's a mistake to believe that it requires more than average intelligence to con a great number of people.

The reason the world mostly works is because we all mostly trust each other. A relative handful of assholes and bullies will easily find ways to take advantage of that trust, but that doesn't make them intelligent.

Conning people, being loud, bullshitting 100% of the time, taking massive risks to the point of getting locked up are not signs of intelligence. They just mean you have no clue about the consequences of your actions and you might get lucky to get away with it.

I am not the parent, but agree with them that SBF seems high-intelligence, low-wisdom (, and low street-smarts). Why do you think him unintelligent?

I don’t think there’s any friendly way to say this, but that might have more to do with you.

He got hired by Jane Street, that's a very high bar.

This will probably sound ridiculous, but I can't get over the fact that he was playing Dota 2 for years, thousands of games played and was still in bronze league. I consider RTS games like this a proxy for intelligence, and while it isn't a perfect proxy due to it also requiring hand dexterity / mechanical skill / some arbitrary memorization, I do still think it's a good indicator that there was something off with him mentally.

You should passively improve with the amount of games he had under his belt, even if you put no conscious thought into why it is that you're losing or what you could be doing better. He performed at a level which is what, the lowest 10% or 20% of players? Many of whom were probably new to the game because most people will climb in rank over time.

Nope. Some folks start bad at, say, chess and stay bad, or will regress back down to 800 ELO. Perhaps they do not care, or their bad moves have become habitual, they are just playing to fill the time. Or maybe injury, pain, or mental health problems mean stagnation or decline. Maybe they are busy thinking about other things instead? That being said, the narrative of "up and to the right" for progress is a common mythology these days. Maybe that mythology needs questioning when something does not behave the way it "should".

It was League, not DOTA. It's a MOBA, not an RTS. IIRC he was in the bottom 15% or so.

That said, it's totally fine to play a videogame without any desire to be good at it.

More importantly studies on chess show that a tiny amount of skill (<10%) is explained by intelligence. I see no reason that MOBAs would be much higher, as in chess they are likely mostly memorization and practice.

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