alt Hacker NewsIt's fascinating to me that the upper classes find Holmes interesting. In the working class world I grew up in, chicks like her are a dime a dozen and can usually be found at Grateful Dead tribute concerts espousing the benefits of crystals and channeling her alien guide who she discovered while chanting an invented baby talk language high on molly and nitrous oxide.
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They were taken with her blue-blood "high WASP" background. Elites put a premium on pedigree (because they benefit from theirs!) and so they just loved the fact that her ancestors started Fleischmann Yeast even though her fam squandered their inheritance within 2 generations. Part of the reason her parents put so much pressure on her to become wealthy was to try and claw back that generational wealth they felt they were owed. Her dad in particular was very bitter over how dad had lost a load of money on bad investments in Hawaii. He then flopped at his oil career (Enron) and never got over his family's loss of wealth and status.
If you read Bad Blood there are quotes from her wealthy investors saying things like "well, her great-grandfather was a famous surgeon so medicine runs in her family!" as part of their decision to invest in her.
Many rich people are really gullible to direct bold face lies because they are used to things working out for them and so are often less skeptical / guarded(generally speaking) if the lie sounds good.
I grew up with the mindset being told if things were too good to be true they probably were and to expect failure and be pleasantly surprised if things worked out. This is practical advice for many lower to middle class individuals, but it can also hold you back because you stop looking for genuine opportunities. Better advice would be to do your due diligence.
With Holmes, and hindsight is always 20/20, it should have been obvious that she was full of shit. As you say, I have met dozens of people, men and women, like her, that just lie reflexively and I have learned to spot them from a mile away and avoid them at all costs. If you catch someone lying or exaggerating something inconsequential, and by that, I mean it really does not in any way help them or get them out of trouble, it is easy to brush it off as a white lie, but it is the people who will lie for no reason at all who are the most dangerous because you can be assured that they will lie when they do have a reason.
Those don't seem like particularly lower class attributes, I know many trust fund babies that are jam band wooks/roadies that could be described this way.
Well, in the upper class, they aren't dime a dozen.
(Btw, your comment filled me with warmth, thanks. I also recommend Scott Aaronson's "On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality" [1].)
[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html
Woah woah woah, lets not bring molly into this. The greatest drug on the planet has nothing to do with new-age nonsense. Nitrous on the other hand...
Those who make fun of crystals fail to realize that technology is literally a race to who can etch the finest/smallest inscriptions into the most perfect crystals. Followed by who can best feed the knowledge of the world into those very crystals via optimal mechanations such that those crystals produce intelligence.
Your comparison missed the actual interesting part about the billion dollar fraud.
People who commit fraud at that scale are not a dime a dozen.