| ▲ | Teever 8 hours ago |
| There's an interesting list of criticisms about Larry Summers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15320922 Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart? It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder? |
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| ▲ | protocolture 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| >It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder? From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are. |
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| ▲ | m463 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > how do people like him climb so high up the ladder? I think about things like this... Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't. And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess. In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered). I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit. so... this might be the pattern. |
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| ▲ | GolfPopper 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Telling people in power what they want to hear. I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure. |
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| ▲ | AlexandrB 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder? I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence. |
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| ▲ | Finnucane 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard. |
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| ▲ | profsummergig 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points. Seems anecdotally true. |
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| ▲ | bamboozled 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them. |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart? "Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe. |
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| ▲ | JKCalhoun 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder. I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things. |
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| ▲ | Teever 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | According to wikipedia: > Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president. And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife: > In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21]. I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it. It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls. Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful. But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb. As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals? [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel... | | |
| ▲ | edbaskerville 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals? The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance. (Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.) | | |
| ▲ | fakedang an hour ago | parent [-] | | On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns. The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now). | | |
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| ▲ | lapcat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder? The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets. |
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| ▲ | octoberfranklin 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I know we're never going to fix this problem, but it's depressing how we seem to have made zero or negative progress on it. | |
| ▲ | bamboozled 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass. It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites. | | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case. "Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case. It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into. |
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| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated. |
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| ▲ | benhill70 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | He just supported the status quo. Look how much money he lost during the 2008 crisis. Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything. | |
| ▲ | Finnucane 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When has he been right about economics? |
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