Every place full of ambitious people is full of liars, but I've lived in several such places and overall the ratio of lying to ambition here is lower than anywhere else I've found. There are a lot more posers in New York and LA and Cambridge than there are in SV.
Posers in Cambridge? I assume you mean in the Boston finance/brahmin/etc. world, or maybe in "academia", not in engineering programs or the tech world.
MIT grad students seem pretty transparent about what they're doing, what impact it could have, etc.
