Aleksey Vayner Has Died at 29
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The communities and networks we have built online have proven to be fantastically capable to creating and organising for good, whether it be raising funds for disaster relief or catapulting some deserving person to stardom, but we've all too often decided to ignore our power to tear down and destroy with frightening speed. Aleksey Vayner's video may have been silly and weird but it did not merit the public humiliation he received.
It would be too much to expect that large scale ridicule of an individual like this will never happen again, human nature is what it is and cruelty and anonymity go hand in hand. But as individuals we can at least prevent ourselves from being a part of it by pausing before we forward, retweet or share the next picture, video or meme and considering whether the person being laughed at deserves to be destroyed for our amusement.
It's hard to predict the path a particular meme will take once it has gone viral. Compare say "creepy girlfriend" to "scumbag Steve".
If you can predict with good to absolute confidence where a particular meme would go, then you have something extremely valuable that any marketing dept would go for.
Remember, most of these things happened unexpectedly to the people involved. I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that a) knew in advance what would happen and b) wanted it to do so deliberately.
Making the best of a bad situation is not understanding this sociological phenomenon.
Contrast this with memes where a picture caught the eye of a photoshopper who then decided what joke to write on top.
It was her own sense of humor from the start. Good on her :)
[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend
I just looked it up.
It's not bad at all. It's entirely pedestrian. I don't see any difference between this and, say, a Bieber track, except production values.
> cruelty and anonymity go hand in hand
Anonymity and cruelty are orthogonal concepts - there is nothing about anonymity that implies or requires cruelty, and the connection runs the other way just as often, but as human beings, we find it easier to focus on and remember the negative more so than the positive.
People are much less likely to be cruel when people they appreciate could be made aware of it.
This has actually been studied academically (the "online disinhibition effect"). Anonymity definitely seems to correlate with poor behavior, even if it's not a causal relationship.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...
I could know someone is named John Smith for example, and that still wouldn't help me pierce his anonymity unless there were other distinguishing features (picture, phone number, etc.).
So majority people are actually nice even when anonymous. And penny arcade is a comic site, not a dispenser of truth.
Although your anecdote is just as anecdoty as the comic author's anecdote...
I expect it was about Paul Feldman -- it was a very interesting story -- the guy was an MIT-trained economist who, in frustration at getting nowhere at a certain point in his career, gave it up to deliver bagels, etc. to companies every day and he collected data on people's behavior when it came to leaving payments.
The following NY Times Magazine article is by the Freakonomics duo about him (the story made it into the Freakonomics book):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-ma...
PDF of the same article from one of the authors (i.e. a non-nytimes.com link):
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/WhatTheBagelMa...
You'd be surprised. Do you have anything to validate that statement?
Because the empirical observations of anybody on this internet thing (forums, comment threads, etc) suggest otherwise.
Perhaps you start from a logical premise ("I don't see any connection between cruelty and anonymity") but forgot to take into account human psychology factors (e.g "Hmm, I can harass that guy a little harder, it's not as if he knows who I am and can get back at me").
Yeah, there's only scads of research that shows that anonymity leads to bad behavior and that being reminded of yourself (mirror) and other people (photographs) watching you -- even non-human robot faces watching you! --causes people to improve for the better.
Mirrors and pictures of faces cause people to behave better -- to steal fewer "honor system" vegetables, bagels, flowers, to donate more to charity jars, to stick more closely to their diet plans, etc.
In the 60s, an anonymous student wore a black bag to class at Oregon State for a long time… the essay reporting on its effects that I read that 'The Black Bag' suffered a lot of bizarre and anti-social behavior from fellow students, so bad behavior related to anonymity cuts both ways.
You may think that the "concepts" are orthagonal, but let's be honest, aren't you just working a priori here without any evidence?
You damn egoist, pick up the phone. Who will take care of [your?] mother?! At least sell your source code and fuck off to Costa Rica. The very same paypal will give you 200-300 pieces [I think these might be pills rather than dollars]. Pick up the phone bitch!
Edit: thanks for the corrections, indeed, that would most likely be $200,000-$300,000. Although I'm a native speaker I didn't grow up in Russia so my slang and colloquial language is pretty weak :>
OP mistranslates the comment horribly.
"Nobody sell this guy any pills" (so he does not kill himself) "You selfish bastard, who's going to take care of mom?" (if you kill yourself) "You could always sell the source code and fuck off to costa rica" (an alternative to killing yourself) "Paypal would pay you couple of hundred thousand for it" (saying that the above-mentioned source code is very valuable) "Pick up the phone bitch" (apparently he is ignoring the phone calls from his worried friends, and they wish him to stop doing so).
Does that help?
As far as I understand (I'm a native Russian speaker) in English, selfishness refers more to self-gratification while egoism refers more to acting in rational self-interest.
- somebody who has proofs of great achievements he did
- a backstory showing how these achievements are compatible, possible and repeatable for this young immigrant who is decided to succeess
- during the vice.com video, apparently a self-reflective decent dude, whose only mistake may have been to send a self promotion video to get the job he really really wanted.
He didn't hate. He worked on himself and was pushed my a great internal drive. He was trying to get the right to pursuit happiness applied to his situation.
I call that a success.
Then the haters showed up and hated him, for daring to pursuit dreams, his dreams, thinks that they would certainly never get to do themselves, even in their wildest dreams
These haters may have seen him as a show-off - and that's sad.
I call someone like this a beacon of hope on what we humans can achieve if we really put ourselves to work.
Pay attention - these persons are quite infrequent, sometimes fragile (Aaron). Help them if you can. But they're here on a mission to change the world.
If you are one, I advise you to HIDE the good things you do.
Poeple are jealous. Any good dead you do, any investment on yourself you make, any skill you have (breaking bricks for ex) - whatever. Consider that a dark secret of yours and wait for the day when usual humans will no longer hate, but welcome instead, humans with 'better' capacities.
RIP Aleksey, you seemed like a great man. The word unfortunately was not ready to allow access to people like you... yet.
- Video of him skiing in the video is stock footage he bought on craigslist.
- Video of tennis serve at 140 mph.
- Plagiarized an economics paper in his resume
- Claimed to be one of a limited number of people in Connecticut certified for nuclear waste disposal
ivygateblog.com seemed to be the biggest follower of his and may still have a lot of the articles and the paper resume.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/23/061023ta_talk_mc...
* taught tennis to Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford
* a specialist in Chinese orthopedic massage
* the Dalai Lama wrote his college recommendation
* he is an action star
* he is an espionage expert
* he is a professional athlete
* he practices on the C.I.A. firing range
* he participates in martial-arts competitions in a secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York
* he competes at skiing competitions in Switzerland
* he worked for the Russian Mafia forging passports
* won two games in a tennis match against Pete Sampras
* founded a charity for troubled kids
* wrote a book called "Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust"
* is a professional male model
* must register his hands as lethal weapons at airports
* is one of four people licensed to handle nuclear waste in the state of Connecticut
* has killed two dozen men in Tibetan gladiatorial contests
My take? He was an awesome guy.
In the context of a huge elaborate joke about himself, this guy is easily someone I would have liked to hang out with, purely for the entertainment factor.
I'm liable to believe it was a little bit of both.
In the video, I see him breaking bricks and lifting weights, armwrestling etc.
All this is quite possible for me, and no reason to be ridiculed against. Physical prowess is a good thing!
The rest I don't know, and considering the "media fame" and joking aspects you mention, unless the claims are directly attributed to him by verifiable sources, I would call them hearsay.
The ridicule against Vayner wasn't because he played tennis, lifted weights, practiced karate, or ballroom danced. The ridicule existed because he compiled these accomplishments into a video resume which he sent to UBS. He was ridiculed because he thought this was the best way to present himself to a potential employer and to many, came across as egotistical and pretentious.
This video alone was enough to go viral, but add to it the fact that there was evidence that a lot of the claims in his video and resume were falsified makes the story even more outrageous.
I went straight to Wikipedia, which at least tends to have decent citations to follow. While it doesn't seem like anyone has a copy of his resume, the at-the-time President of Charity Navigator [1] says he literally lied on it [2]. I don't really see why Stamp would weigh in unless such a claim had actually been made, and Stamp's call for expulsion doesn't appear to have been rescinded.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20071012124658/http://charitynavi...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20070929071909/http://www.trentst...
http://web.archive.org/web/20070222123930/http://www.ivygate...
Here's an article about his sister, who has been successful since age 22 investing in real estate:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/04/real_estate/investment_prop/...
She's relevant because an address she owns was used as the address of the charity. There's no evidence she knew what he was up to.
Students who know him considered it all to be a joke or at least not malicious:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080422030103/http://www.yaledai...
> But Won Chai ’07 said that while Charity Navigator has a right to be upset with Vayner, he thinks the humor of Vayner’s resume should be appreciated.
> “I think clearly he was trying to play a practical joke or just trying to draw attention to himself,” he said. “Whether or not it was a good thing or not, I couldn’t say. People seemed to be enjoying it. I-bankers are forwarding this stuff to each other. Maybe it’s good for a laugh now and again.”
> Pieter Morgan ’09, who has lifted weights with Vayner, said he thinks Vayner often makes seemingly unbelievable claims because he genuinely believes them to be true. Morgan said he thinks Vayner is a genuine person, despite his penchant for seemingly implausible stories.
> “I think it’s like in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ with Russell Crowe,” Morgan said. “When he tells you these stories, it’s completely genuine, which is what is completely amazing. He’ll tell you with a completely straight face that he knows the Dalai Lama, and he is completely serious. I think he is fundamentally a nice guy.”
Here's his charity site which seems to only have been active in November 2006. There was a web comment that mentioned that he used these sites to get girls and was apparently quite a player.
http://web.archive.org/web/20061129145614/http://www.empower...
Today, aside from the sheer chance of being in an industry with more talent demand than supply, I can point to code that I've written and my raw merit as a developer can almost instantly be understood and I can easily find a job. Github is a resume and all that.
But I often forget that it's not always so easy for people outside my discipline and it's everything a person can do to differentiate themselves and show determination and a sense of personal development. That is the tragedy of his video resume, because there is certainly a talented and proud and sincere person underneath that production and all that so many people could do was find a way to tear it down.
Swartz was in effect martyred by the US Government over an "information wants to be free" matter of idealism.
Vayner became a laughing stock because some asshat in UBS leaked Vayner's awful, awful, AWFUL video resume. And all Vayner had going for him was some athletics.
It's "The people deserve access!" versus "I can karate chop 7 bricks, hire me UBS!"
If you think people laughed at Vayner out of jealousy, you haven't seen the video resume.
Swartz was a great man? OK
Vayner? Not so much. More like an above-average guy, unfairly hounded.
ADDENDUM: There's a lesson here, you should be very careful about what info you give to an organization, even a 'respectable' one like UBS, even in a job application, so that you don't give some bastard the chance to ruin your life... I doubt the person who did this to Vayner even loses sleep over it.
When I was 14 years old, my mom took my iPod to a repair shop because it refused to turn on. In a week, when they said they fixed it, I went to this shop with my friend. Although I had the address, I couldn't locate the building, and we spent an hour searching for it in the cold. We passed an internet café and a wonderful idea popped into my head. I sent them this email:
My fingers are freezing.
Been looking for your motherfucking shop for an hour.
Barely writing. Wait for me, assholes.
What came as a surprise to me is that the same minute I walked into the store I realized that sending this email—heck, even stopping to write it—was a grand silly idea. Self-WTF. I couldn't remember just why I did this. It was like I had this silly little brother who did it, but it was me who had to face the consequences. But then, just five minutes ago this seemed like a really clever and fun thing to do!
In such moments I did not just embarrass myself (and my mom) in front of people I don't know, but I also made my family extremely puzzled because I was the “smart” kid who has been learning programming by books since twelve, knew OOP and stuff, moderated a large internet forum dedicated to programming, and this kind of behavior just didn't fit together with what they knew about me.
Sometimes people do very silly things they later regret. And usually they do them because they try their best at a given moment, with all the knowledge and context they are given, and make a wrong decision. Such decisions I never regret.
But sometimes people do their worst for no apparent reason, and then they WTF at themselves. Their judgement fails them, something blinds them and they do unimaginably stupid stuff, and later they feel even more embarrassed because they don't just see how misguided they were—but that it was so painfully obvious from the start.
I think it's important to understand this distinction this before judging people in any way.
This is in the general case, of course. It doesn't cover how the internet sometimes makes a big deal about fairly silly things.
I once worked with someone in his 50's who was undoubtedly a highly intelligent with an intense attention to detail -- super productive. However, he was known for claiming, among other outrageous things, that he was (1) a former Army Ranger, (2) a former Navy Seal, (3) a former Marine, (4) former Secret Service tasked with protecting Ronald Reagan, (5) Grandson of a 4 star general, (6) Leg press 800 lbs, (7) broken 3 aluminum "forks" on bikes (the part connecting your front wheel to the frame). This really is only a tip of the iceberg of the things he claimed. After several months, I found out that "pathological lying" is an actual psychological condition. The moment I found out, I was convinced that this coworker suffered from this condition.
I wonder if Aleksey was the same. My coworker was unusually bright, physically strong, and was good soul. I couldn't understand why he would need to inflate himself through lies, given such obvious strengths of his -- until I found out about this psychological condition. Aleksey seems to have been the same way.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Is_Nothing_%28video_...
That's actually pretty trivial for anybody who lifts weights even semi-seriously. I could leg press 600lbs as as skinny 160lb high-school senior. Now if somebody claimed to be able to squat that much, they'd be making quite a claim, as that's possibly near world-class range depending on their weight. (At one time the world record back-squat was right around 1000lbs, but I'm pretty sure that's been broken)
(7) broken 3 aluminum "forks" on bikes (the part connecting your front wheel to the frame).
That gets another meh from me. Breaking frames and forks isn't that uncommon, at least in the mountain biking world. An XC bike that isn't designed for handling big drops might break if you ride off a 3ft drop, for example (bodyweight would also be a significant factor in this).
The other stuff though, especially taken all together, is, yeah, fairly incredible.
(I myself could back squat 350lbs at my peak so I understand that leg pressing 800 lbs on a machine isn't particularly unfathomable. However, usually you don't find power lifting and road cycling -- which was the subject of the conversation at that time -- in the same person, especially riding enough miles to stress fracture three different aluminum forks [1]. I'd certainly consider switching to steel at that point.)
[1] Although I myself am a powerlifting cyclist :P
45 degree inclined leg sled: 1010# for 10 reps, when my squat was ~250#.
The press gives you a lot of mechanical advantage (1.7x), removes stabilization requirements, and subtracts out bodyweight (part of your total squat lift).
Power lifting and road cycling is actually a very good training complement: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/16/health/he-cycling16
I think I can chime in on this one. While I've never faced the likes of Pete Sampras, I'd say it's not too far-fetched for an advanced amateur player to take a game from a world-class player.
After all, it takes just a few mishits to lose a game (four, to be exact) - and they can have a bad day, a momentary lapse of attention; and, just like that, the game's gone. Especially if the amateur has a decent serve.
Now, to win a match (or even a set) against Pete - that would be a life-time achievement worthy of putting on the resume :)
Interesting.
The type of tales told by a prior coworker of mine line up neatly with the ones you heard.
My guy claimed to be a former officer at Department of Homeland Security, former CIA agent, adopted son of a Japanese swordsmith, able to bench press 450lbs, previously owned 14 cars including all manner of exotics, killed a man for sleeping with his ex-wife, killed a man while "on-assignment" in Mexico and earned a double MS at Berkley.
Again, this was just the tip of the iceberg and when he wasn't telling stories he was affable and generally competent at his job.
I wonder if/why folks with these conditions gravitate towards a certain brand of stories?
Edit: looks like the title has been updated
It makes me wonder if there are counselors specializing in this domain and sociological research into how this kind of stuff happens and how it affects all people involved. These events are quite sad but also a bit fascinating and novel.
Before the spike in notoriety from the video resume, there was a much smaller burst of unflattering notoriety for Aleksey in the May 2002 edition of Yale's Rumpus magazine [1] by one Jordan Bass titled “Craaazy Prefrosh Lies, Is Just Weird”.
It starts out like this:
“Maybe, once, you lied about your age, or your weight, or your location the night your unfaithful boyfriend was stabbed to death. Maybe you lied about your criminal record when applying for a job, or your sexual history when donating blood. Little things. Everybody does it, right? What's the harm? Maybe your slight deviations from the truth even give you a little thrill, a mild buzz gained from subverting the truth and risking discovery. You're a badass, right?
Aleksey Garber, who has been accepted to the Yale class of '06, is not impressed. When you're a guy who tells the truth about as often, and with the same reluctance, as the average person goes to the dentist, you've got no regard for those who dabble in tall tales.”
It ends like this:
“What can you say to that, really? This is the man’s life, as he tells it. Is any of it true? Well, what is truth? [...] In the end, all we can really say is that “Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements, and if you look at it that way, then it’s all true. We who have encountered him should feel privileged that Aleksey Garber has deigned to include us in the epic adventure that is his life. I know I certainly do.”
[1] http://www.yale.edu/rumpus/archives/pdf/rumpus_02may.pdf
My current guess is that Vayner killed himself but not in a Swartz-like way: he simply OD'd on recreational drugs (something a lot of egoists, including Hubbard to say nothing of HN's friend John McAfee, make a hobby of).
A friend who spoke to Gawker implied that it was a drug overdose, though it's not said if it was intentional: http://gawker.com/5978638/aleksey-vayner-the-yale-grad-with-...
Also, the cryptic comment is clearly in Russian. That, or some unlikely intersection of Russian and Ukrainian. More likely, they figured the guy was Ukrainian, so the comment must also be in Ukrainian.
It really doesn't paint him in that bad of light. (I know nothing of the rest of his history, but I find the video pretty motivating)
It's sad because he clearly had a psychiatric issue and only if people were more educated on this matter, they could've reached out to him and offered him help to get his problem under control, instead of just laughing at him.
To an uninformed, uneducated person, it's likely that this is all he was: a pathetic, over the top compulsive liar.
I presume he died because he killed himself, which is something someone would do after at least temporarily snapping out of the psychosis that made them do all of those things and realizing it wasn't something they would ever be able to take back or sweep under the rug, thanks to the 'wonders' of the internet.
Most of us do stupid things in our early 20s to establish ourselves. The problem for him is that he applied to jobs in investment banking. In 2006, IBD analyst programs were the destination career for 25th-percentile graduates of elite colleges. So there was this huge crowd of douchebags that wanted to be bankers and were falling over themselves to get in the door.
So when Aleksey Vayner's video resume was leaked, he was immediately typecast as a douchebag and ridiculed. People no longer saw him as a person, but just as some pathetic, arrogant pre-banker. In retrospect, it's evident that he didn't deserve that.
I have the sense that being ridiculed on the Internet is becoming "just a thing" that almost everyone goes through on the way to accomplishment. It's like being heckled for stand-up comedians. The first time it happens, it's extremely unsettling. Then you figure out a way to deal with it-- there are the Jimmy Carr, George Carlin, Louis CK, and Steve Hofstetter approaches-- but it takes some time to get good at that.