The day the "too dumb" defense works is the day we can open all the cell doors and close down the prisons, because that's everyone's defense.

There's more to it being a defense:

> Delinquents and criminals average IQ scores 8 to 10 points lower than noncriminals, which is about one-half a standard deviation. IQ and criminal behavior are negatively correlated at about r = -. 20 (Hirschi and Hindelang; Wilson and Herrnstein).

Did they adjust for dumber criminals being more likely to be caught?

How does one adjust for uncaught criminals?

Get a control group of smart people and have them start doing crimes and see if they get caught.

We call this “financialization”.

Chronic unsolved crimes gets some of it at least. If say, thirty percent of murders are cold cases then you know they aren't all getting caught. Other constraints would hint at the possible count potential murderers. If two people are killed on the same day two days of travel apart then you have at least two murderers.

That doesn't help with estimating levels of non-detected crimes of course.

Elapsed time between crime and capture might be a good regressor.

> Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students. He attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California. From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. In 2014, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.

There's no way he can plead stupidity.

Being dumb never got anyone off of a crime. I'm pretty sure he will face serious consequences regardless. The "bumbling kid" narrative won't help him there.

But it's relevant in discussions when I've seen him called worse than Madoff who engaged in a very overt crime. Again we don't know exactly how much SBF tried to directly profit off the business yet and how much it was a concerted plot to scam people. ...And since the internet requires you to be extremely obvious, that is not saying he's not a bad guy or absolved of responsibility or whatever.

> Again we don't know exactly how much SBF tried to directly profit off the business

The article has some large numbers. "Bankman-Fried received an incredible $1 billion in personal loans, as well as a $2.3 billion loan to an entity called Paper Bird in which he had 75% control."

That’s not a given. The #1 criteria of fraud is intent. If you can’t prove intent, there was no fraud.

We may not like it, but that’s how the system is set up.

The gov't says 'reckless indifference to the truth' qualifies as intent.

Reckless indifference to the truth, then, should condemn both SBF and his aggrieved.

All involved knew what they were doing, or took extraordinary measures to blind themselves to knowing.

Yes, it's intentionally set up like that to facilitate crime.

The “intentional” part of your claim is extremely dubious, even if I agree with it if you omit that word.

I don’t think there’s an unintentional relationships which facilitates and under-punishes fraud, but I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot.

>He needs to face the same charges regardless of whether he was malicious or stupid.

We're not gonna invalidate a huge amount of legal precedent spanning centuries for one dude. Intent matters.

(That said I think he's lying and knew what was going on the whole time)

And he absolutely will... People are ridiculously acting like he got away with something because he's not in Federal prison yet. It hasn't even been a month since it all blew up.

Even if true, wouldn't that mean he was defrauding the VCs by representing that he could run a pseudo-bank correctly? Out of the frying pan...

Fraud requires intent.