One thing that is I think a real impediment to understanding in...

One thing that is I think a real impediment to understanding in cases like this is that very smart people often lack an accurate theory of mind for very stupid people. They simply cannot imagine that somebody like Arday, who found a button he could push to get attention, would continue pushing that button without any awareness of what the inevitable consequences would be, because he apparently lacked the intellectual capacity to entertain the hypothetical of "what's going to happen when somebody starts to question this?" You saw that in the interviews he did: he was genuinely surprised that someone would check if his story was true, because no one ever had. I also found it noticeable in his lectures, which were full of weird malapropisms: he literally had no idea what the words he was using meant. That audiences sat through those alarming word salads and continued to reward him for it is pathological, and a testament to how powerful social manias can be among educated people eager to prove their innate goodness.

This blindness among the very smart to the minds of the extremely stupid, especially among sociologists, finds its way into all kinds of bad policy making. You won't set good policy for policing if you don't understand how somebody with really low IQ and poor impulse control is going to think and behave. You won't get why winning the lottery ruins people's lives, because you don't understand that giving a really stupid person a huge amount of money in a lump sum is like giving a child a loaded handgun. (Apply this to universal basic income and see what you come up with.) You don't get why a homeless guy, given a nice apartment for free, would immediately trash it or burn it down. You don't get why admitting people to college who don't have the innate intellectual capacity for college work is going to cause them serious harm. Some people just have very low intellectual capacity, and you can't fix it.

Anyway, I'm done posting about this completely avoidable tragedy. The poor guy got used by a whole bunch of really terrible people, who will never accept even the slightest responsibility for what they did, or learn any lesson whatsoever.

And here the algorithm serves me up a fine example of exactly what I'm talking about.