> In the course of 2-3 days last week, SBF’s estimated net worth went from ~$15 billion to a negative number, possibly the fastest evaporation of such a vast personal fortune in all human history.
No.
His net worth was never $15B. His net worth might have been negative - less than that homeless living in a tent under the bridge.
He was a fraud, a con man.
There's no reason to assume his entire Effective Altruism interest was authentic. It could easily been a way of connecting to important people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
Effective altruism seems to be a sort of cult that’s way for elites (that is, the upper class) to both make themselves feel better and to give them yet another vector of superiority over people.
In Sam Bankman-Fried’s case, he seems to have let it be a justification for the huge risks and likely criminal actions he took.
SBF literally said he would wager the world for another world with 51% odds.
There's no amount of money that will satisfy someone like that, even if his EA statements were heartfelt. Why would he give a billion dollars to charities, when he could risk it, flip it into $20B, and give it to charity? Why would he give $20B to charity when he could risk it, and flip it into $150B? etc...
That, I think, is the basis of the advice from Aaronson. There should be some natural rational limit to the tendency because of exactly the types of events that just happened.
Good luck finding that limit though, especially when the market seems undefeatable.
important point. best predictor for future behaviour is past behaviour. also the reason why somebody gets euch never suddenly becomes genuinely altruistic.
> Why would he give a billion dollars to charities, when he could risk it, flip it into $20B, and give it to charity? Why would he give $20B to charity when he could risk it, and flip it into $150B? etc...
But that would be the rational thing to do...
$1B less donated to charity is only roughly 1/20 as bad as $20B donated to charity is good, because there are also other people donating large amounts. In other words it's not at all like betting everything and ending up homeless if you lose the bet. At $20B vs $150B the catastrophe of losing $20B starts to become more significant, but I would absolutely still take that bet.
It's easy to see that this logic leads to a Zeno's paradox where you can never donate anything because it would cut into potential future profits that you could donate in the future. Since it leads to contradiction, it is obviously wrong in some of its assumptions.
No, because you are talking about compounding returns (which I was not), but improving people's lives today gives far greater long-term benefits than investing the money at reasonable return and donating more in the future, for well-known reasons.
In your post above, you justified not giving 1B to charity because it could be bet until it raised to 150B. But there is no reason why, by the same logic, you couldn't justify playing that 150B to raise it to any number rather than giving it away to charity today.
The point I was trying to make in my post* was that at some point you should stop gambling, because losing the bet would be catastrophic to humanity, but that point is maybe around $10-100B. (Depending on odds, obviously). It's because you pick the low hanging fruit of good causes, so every doubling of the amount gives marginally fewer gains. Eg. just look at how Bill & Melinda Gates have complained about how hard it is to give away billions per year.
*Aside: obviously it was tone-deaf for me to reply to that quoted sentence out of the context in this case of the money being stolen
> Effective altruism seems to be a sort of cult that’s way for elites (that is, the upper class) to both make themselves feel better and to give them yet another vector of superiority over people.
Setting aside the case of this crypto conman, is being holier-than-though the valid criticism it feels like - or is that just my instinct to protect my ego, when the guy sitting next to me and earning the same salary donates 100x more much to charity than I do?
most of the good done in the world thee days is paradoxically perhaps achieved through commerce, not charity per se. and even charities are mostly effective in the sense that they get money flowing into the economy, where people can trade value for value and attend to their material needs, etc etc. most charity is not as effective as simply achieving some equity in income distribution, or barring that just overall higher levels of income and lower costs for the inputs that go into the economy.
dont get fooled by people who think they can put good-ness into a box labelled "giving", I dont believe its that simple.
Doesn't that imply an EA enthusiast earning to give at a wall street hedge fund is doubly good, because they're charitably giving mosquito nets to developing nations while engaging in commerce and making money flow around the economy?
I think charitable giving has mostly secondary or tertiary benefits and those are mostly "trickle down" or just velocity of money effects. it gets some hoarded wealth into circulation which was a big issue the last 20 years with lower rates and quantitative easing etc, creating so much hoarded cash (look at corporate cash balances and hedge fund / VC / PE assets the last 10 years as a clue)
like the covid vaccines weren't possible because charity, but because science, the two are in no way equivalent. and there is evidence (not proof) from the last 150 years that capitalism enables science at a much higher multiple than charitable giving.
There's another crypto figurehead who is prominently in the EA tribe: Vitalik Buterin.
I would characterise both as elite but not upper class (as in, regularly going to old money dinner/rave parties).
I don't know which of the two is more "Effectively Altruistic".. lol.
Nevertheless, I find the anti-parallels with Buterin .. charming. Vitalik is clearly less anti-intellectual, less ambitious (more Ravenclaw than Slytherin), and thus less offensive to the gods.
I'm not sure if it's that far to be a cult because I was never in it, and the will to share is commendable.
To me it sounds like a way to justify making more money at all costs under the guise of a moral high ground. It'd feel more honest to do it without the cosplay around it and the "I donate better than you" holier than thou-ness.
I think it's more of a reactionary outburst from people who became wealthy enough to wonder about the purpose of their life and want to detach themselves from the late stage capitalist brand they get as cushy first world living while still reaping all the benefits.
I'm afraid if there were many good hearted people in that movement this single event will also discredit the rest. But maybe it was all a cult, who knows.
In this guy's case it sounds like a handy way to minimize whatever sentence he gets over this because he can argue "he did it out of pure intentions to help the world", which basically counts as insurance / marketing expenses for the scam.
Similarly, I don't think it's correct to characterize SBF's background as 'middle class'. Apparently, both of his parents are Profs at Stanford Law School. Most likely, they are wealthy or even rich and SBF could benefit from their network, gaining access to the American elites without too many questions asked.
By common sense: most of academia is monetarily less attractive than Stanford Law School. The salaries of two full professors there make the family at least wealthy, i.e., able to maintain an upper class life.
And the perks of being a full professor at Stanford Law School presumably include very attractive opportunities that can make one rich (able to amass wealth), e.g., well-paid consulting gigs and advisory roles.
But I agree, my distinction between wealthy and rich is pretty sloppy.
From what it seems, SBF is a pathological liar. He tried to lie at the last minute, assuring everything was fine and that others were to blame. After the last minute, he kept saying that if you filter out the mandatory "sorry" messages. It's not just Apollo 11 gone wrong, it was NOT Apollo from the start.
Maybe EA is a bit too far stretched, maybe it just attracts the wrong kind of individuals.
> ... possibly the fastest evaporation of such a vast personal fortune in all human history.
That title would probably go to Zucc after the most recent set of earnings. But the previous title holder was none other than Mr. Cyber Hornets himself, the man who just about popped the Dot Com bubble - Michael Saylor.
Saylor lost $6B in a single day (and $10B in 2 weeks) after reporting that his firm had cooked the books in 2000 and his 1999 profit was actually a loss. This was the largest single-day decline in history at the time. [1]
He was fined $8.2M banned from running a public company (just kidding, of course). [2] You'll never imagine what line of work he got into next.
[edit] $6B in 2000 dollars is ~$10.38B in 2022 dollars, and similarly the $10B over 2 weeks would be ~17.31B adjusting for inflation. So it looks like Mr Cyber Hornets still gets to slide in at number two.
Well he was into EA when he was a nobody at University… I doubt that it was all for show.
Generally, in public downfalls like this, people over ascribe the causes to moral turpitude. There aren’t enough details here to say either way yet. There is a good book about this sort of thing Mistakes were made (but not by me). [1]
I think the blog post is very good, providing a unique perspective, and wonderfully written.
No, EA's cultish aspects played a huge role in this.
SBF got his start in crypto doing arbitrage with Japan, because setting up a trading account in Japan was hard. He got someone to do it through the EA community.
Most of the people who are in positions of power in his companies came from the EA community. And no joke a bunch of them are all in romantic relationships with each other too. You've got the CEO of his trading firm, who SBF dated, posting on tumblr about how poly relationships should be a vicious power struggle to get to the top.
I think you're way underestimating just how weird and cultish this whole clique is, and how moral criticism is actually valid here as the ideology is in a central role. These people cast themselves as noble heros making the world better in the net, when in reality they're total nepotistic weirdos.
My comment was about how there is often more to the story than a simple bad guy narrative when someone acts in reprehensible ways. You seem to be saying the same thing, so I agree with the sentiment. As to the role that EA played in it, I don’t know enough to say, and you don’t provide any sources. My point was that I don’t think he was pretending to be an EAist.
You don't go to prison when you are the 2nd biggest donor to the current president's campaign.
Mark Karpales didn't go to prison for Mt Gox, he spent some months in jail because they were afraid he might leave Japan + Japan isn't like the west he prpbably doesn't have connections there, then left and worked for different financial companies and then started another company assessing risk or something.
Alex Mashinsky (founder of Celcius) didn't go to prison either.
On the other hand, Do Kwon (Terra) is a fugitive and interpol is looking for him, and Satish Kumbhani (Bitconnect) got indicted but disappeared so the cops are looking for him.
So yeah you have to turn off your pattern recognition or else be called a bad name.
"Clinton's critics alleged that Rich's pardon had been bought, as Denise Rich had given more than $1 million[36] to Clinton's political party (the Democratic Party), including more than $100,000 to the Senate campaign of the president's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and $450,000 to the Clinton Library foundation during Clinton's time in office.[31]"
Lots. The abusive ones get the press but there's a lot more than just never get attention. Obama issued a ton of clemency and pardons, a large portion of which were non violent drug sentences.
Theranos was exposed as a fraud in 2015. but only now, in 2012, Elizabeth Holmes' trial has reached sentencing with the prosecution asking for 15 years.
It's an unbelievable amount of for persecutors to untangle the web of transactions to be able to prove to a jury the existence and scale of fraud.
I would bet that both Mashinsky and SBF will spend a lot of quality time in a federal prison.
>I would bet that both Mashinsky and SBF will spend a lot of quality time in a federal prison.
They won't, Mashinsky will NEVER go to prison for Celsius, and SBF, if somehow was to go to prison, will commit suicide on his first day there (suicide will be commited upon him but potato potato).
Why would anyone help him out when he won’t be able to donate in the next election cycle? I’m just speculating since I’m not a billionaire lobbying congress, but I’d imagine there’s little reason to help someone who cannot donate in the future.
Well you didn't understand what I was implying: Enron's Skilling is in prison, Theranos' Holmes is being sentenced to prison, Do Kwon of Terra is a fugitive, the Bitconnect guy is a fugitive. The only guy from 2008 to go to prison was Kareem Serageldin, an Egyptian.
Celsius' Mashinsky, MtGox's Karpales didn't go to prison, and I bet Bankman-Fried won't either. Epstein has been investigated by the FBI for 20 years before going to prison and during the Deutsche Bank - Epstein trial a pizza delivery guy rang the door of the son of the judge overseeing the trial, and shot him dead after he opened the door.
Is you don't see a pattern between the two paragraphs then what do you want me to tell you, just stick to the news.
If the allegations of criminal activity are true, he will very likely end up in prison.
Obviously it will take time for investigations to gather evidence, prosecutors to file charges, etc. These are still very recent events. Just be patient!
I'm so lost. I'd never heard of this guy or FTX until a couple of days ago. Can someone give me a link to the best and (this is important) most succinct summary of what the hell happened here? Why did all this money vanish, and what crimes did SBF commit?
1) FTX had a token they issued, but were booking this as an "asset". This is like issuing yourself an "IOU 1 billion" note and claiming you're a billionaire.
2) To obfuscate this slightly, they lent "$10bn" of tokens to Alameda Research, which was a "hedge fund" run by his girlfriend on the exchange
3) Alameda made huge trading losses, as often happens to novice traders. A Nick Leeson event.
7) That was the last we heard from SBF. There are now reports that the exchange has been "hacked" and coins stolen. It is not yet clear by whom, or where SBF is.
One of the worst posts I've ever read from Scott, this reads as shockingly tone-deaf and blithely optimistic. He totally ignores the actual events that transpired and instead focuses on Sam's purported ideals, probably because Scott Aaronson feels a lot of kinship with him as a fellow nerd and therefore can't seem to believe anything other than "he just made a mistake somewhere". I don't want to pass judgment on Sam, as we don't fully know what happened yet, but Aaronson seems to be taking an extremely strong stance in support of Sam by saying "the worst thing he did is he incorrectly weighted money", which seems undue.
IMO, it seems like Sam had an astonishing amount of pride in himself -- purportedly installing backdoors, playing LoL while on calls with investors, antagonizing competitors, installing nobody with any experience -- and it was all accepted, even rewarded. I can't help but think that if he had trusted others a little bit more, he might have been able to make better decisions for the sake of his company and the world. If I could give him advice, something like that would be it.
You mean he has the gall not to jump on the “let’s drag the billionaire on Twitter” bandwagon?
The way I am gauging the situation is that even if you tap your breaks on the “this guy is total scum and is trying to make a break for Argentina/Dubai” narrative that you’re complicit in his evil doings.
Why do I make that bold claim? Your very interpretation of Scott’s plea to wait on passing judgment.
You prompted me to do some reading. I suggest not doing the same. It's a story of people who generalize their personal experiences into the state of the world berating other people for generalizing their personal experiences into the state of the world. It's a great lesson on why communicating your feelings as a man is still liable to subject you to scorn.
> He totally ignores the actual events that transpired and instead focuses on Sam's purported ideals,
This argument about tone-deafness is kind of collectivist rally against individual conversation. There is no need for everyone to focus on the same thing. One could even argue that overly focusing on the actual events is less productive (as for actual events there will be official investigation that should lead to more solid results).
> but Aaronson seems to be taking an extremely strong stance in support of Sam by saying "the worst thing he did is he incorrectly weighted money"
That just seems like misreading of the post, Scott explicitly wrote: "If SBF indeed gambled away his customers’ deposits and lied about it, then I condemn for it utterly".
You see, one of the most important "rules" of good content marketing is being controversial. No-one like to talk about stuff that is average. Average is boring.
Same here on HN btw. Who cares about another take how evil Sam is.
It obviously pays off for Steve, at least in the short run. He is on the front-page of HN and has gained a couple of subscribers.
I don’t know if hubris is a sufficient explanation here.
Bankman is a bit hard to pigeonhole. He isn’t a textbook narcissist like Adam Neumann. He doesn’t appear to be a psycho/sociopath a la Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein. He also doesn’t have the moral elasticity of someone like Madoff. If I had to guess, I think the relationship (which may or may not be platonic) between him and the people at Alameda is what sunk him. He got into some kind of situation there which he couldn’t deal with effectively. He has various neurodiverse traits IMHO, that make this more likely.
But who knows, he could also just be a crook who is good at maths, or the high priest of a cryptosex cult.
> To my mind, though, it’s important not to minimize the gravity of the fateful decision by conflating it with everything that preceded it. I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers.
This seems like such an oddly prickly and defensive bit to throw into the middle of the essay? I have no idea why Aaronson is nervous about being associated with SBF ("both were affiliated with the same large research university at some point in time" hardly seems damning), nor what on earth these charges about disrespect to women are about. Am I missing something?
I really enjoyed his book and have learned an enormous amount from his blog on QM, QC, etc.
However, it's clear he has some very neurotic attitudes surrounding sexuality. I don't say this lightly and without empathy. I was raised by evangelical extremists. I'm talking the kind of people where the school I went to debated whether it was sinful to allow the girls to wear pants instead of dresses during a blizzard. I never received any form of sex education or guidance on the topic. You get the basic picture. I get where he's coming from.
But he's just wrong to be so overly concerned about being seen as a sexual predator. I don't know what the solution for him his other that introspection and perhaps therapy, but I do wish he'd have enough self awareness to realize that perhaps, this is not the topic he should be offering sage like advice blogs about.
The whole piece, "the geometry of conscience" is about guilt-by-association.
Rather than use the phrase, he takes "association" to be a distance metric, and guilt to be a measure of conscience.
I'd suppose quite a lot of people have, of late, felt the "guilt by association" culture inimical to a lot of social media. This is just his way of illustrating its impact on him.
A woman in a leadership position might likewise have said, "and I'm supposed to be JK Rowling, ..."
> traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
This seems a bit of a leap to me.
It's a bit like saying a King or Queen is morally ahead of you. You're taking a point of concentrated wealth in a system designed to create that concentration and comparing it to 1 individual and using that to support the system.
I can see why that works if you think you are likely part of the concentrated wealth, but it seems like it would fall apart under the level of scrutiny that effective altruists alledgedly put in.
>>You're taking a point of concentrated wealth in a system designed to create that concentration and comparing it to 1 individual and using that to support the system.
I wasn't able to follow. Could you rephrase or elaborate on the last part?
Effective Altruism asks "what's the most I can do?" and come up with the answer, "become a king and give my(!) money I earn(!) to effective charities".
That only makes sense if your starting place in the system makes becoming a king possible.
Meanwhile, if they asked "what's the most we can do?" then the answer is unlikely to involve kings and more likely involves changing the system that gives them the opportunity to be kings.
Okay, thank you for the explanation. But is "becoming a king" the means that Effective Altruism advocates, or just the means that this individual decided upon to meet EA's larger goal?
EA may leave it to each individual to decide the best route to do good for the world.
I do agree that changing the system to make becoming a king impossible is the best route possible. But for people in some circumstances, even this goal may best be achieved by first becoming a king.
> the answer is unlikely to involve kings and more likely involves changing the system that gives them the opportunity to be kings.
Certainly true. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be able to reach the consensus needed to make such changes to the system. Hence we have to ask instead "What can I do?"
The author effectively covers this rebuttal with a catch-all early on, but this still reads a bit like a defense of "fake it until you make it". The implication being that SBF (or e.g. Elizabeth Holmse) were only _somewhat_ responsible for their fraudulent activities - and that any "normal" person would have trouble discerning whether or not their actions are fraudulent or merely "overly optimistic leadership".
I wish I could say the era of "move fast, break things" is over, but I have lost all faith. Can we please just stop all this craziness now? Good leadership should be about having good intuition, good instincts and planning for _long_ time horizons.
Instead the valley's "idols" are Zuckerberg and Elon and a bunch of quants obsessed with financial engineering.
>From everything I’ve read, SBF’s mission to earn billions, then spend it saving the world, seems something like this imagined Apollo mission
How can the author pretend SBF his actions are comparable to a "tiny crack in an oxygen tank"? He willingly and knowingly defrauded customers and investors. Arguably as early as years ago and already provably months ago when he started bailing out crypto companies with funds defrauded from customers and funding his (failing) trading firm with customer funds.
Personally with all the lies and deception I'm starting to believe his entry and reign in crypto is one big fraud. There's no record of his geographical Bitcoin arbitrage whatsoever except hearsay. His exposure to tradfi (jane street) is limited and he didn't do anything impactful there. His "baby" Solana is a glorified Excel sheet working on a few centralized nodes. Most of his networth has always been in illiquid coins he created himself. And to see how this drama has unfolded, I find it hard to believe how he is into EA and not just obsessed with having influence and driving up his money-highscore as if it's a game.
Comparing what happened to FTX to a tiny leak in a gas tank due to a money saving measure by von Braun to balance the budget of the Apollo 11 mission, which results in a catastrophic failure and erroneously puts in question the ambition and mission to visit the moon and quantitative methods employed, is completely asinine.
This underplays what happened. FTX implosion appears to be due to fraud, lack of controls within the organisation and puts in question the judgement of the EA community, VCs, auditors, media.
The lessons to draw are not technical in nature. To continue the author's analogy: Wehrner von Brau as an individuap, construction and inspection procedures, or security culture at Nasa. They are instead fundamental. And would put in question all of NASA, the ecosystem (universities, suppliers), funders like the Congress and the president , and any oversight agencies.
If the what we've learnt so far is confirmed, then a Sequoia investment and its due diligence failed, trust in the EA community is undermined as it is not particularly ethical or rational.
I cannot imagine writing something this embarrassing and deeming it worthy of public consumption.
There is a very, very weird phenomenon of people that consider themselves to be very clever inexplicably carrying water for others that also consider themselves to be very clever, regardless of the material conditions or facts at hand. It’s like Scott Aaronson is applying to be in a club that Mr Fried is the bouncer for.
I know that it garners fewer clicks, but wouldn’t it be more honest to just say “Damn. I wish I had been rewarded with billions of dollars for my shitty behavior, and further (since I’m imagining myself in this scenario) it all worked out in such a way that I was deified for this grift.”
The best way to drive social media engagement as a “thought leader” is pick a slightly contrarian viewpoint and then just keep doubling down forever, no matter what. People will flock to you who want external validation of whatever they wish was true, and you can build a quite successful brand.
The mental image of Scott Aaronson furrowing his brow and tracing a flow chart with his finger, eventually arriving at “Free thinking thought leader” is hilarious to me
He's misdirecting. He will be not be "held accountable", he may be asked difficult but fair questions about his close association to organizations also associated with SBF, via money and ideology, not via ethnicity or (traditional) religious creed. But it's more sympathetic to people only half paying attention when framed his way.
As someone with negative self-esteem and a whole list of psychological issues, I don't understand how people can have so much little self-respect to the point of ~simping~ for those "generous billionaires" and actually believing their good intentions even after they've stolen billions of dollars.
Cynicism is not that common sense, it seems.
Anyway, what a weird, weird post. (and what's with the random insertion about harassment?)
It is increasingly clear that SBF was an important piece of a complex network of conspirators to increase the price of the speculative asset class know as crypto. It is also evident that he could have not achieved such a relevance without the institutional support he cemented as the second larges donor to the current administration. The evidence seems to confirm the role played by FTX in defrauding the retail investors to siphon the funds into Ukraine and laundering money for questionable parties across 130 global entities. Anyway you watch this it becomes evident that SBF was playing a central role within a complex and elaborate global network attempting to bring and end to democracy as we know it today in America. Let us remember the only reason we have achieved the greatest advancements in science and technology is because of democracy and free markets enshrined by the US Constitution. Once those principles are gone we can only move backwards into the dark ages where the church and state ruled with an iron fist, the sun circled around us and the inquisition attacked everyone dissenting. Beware of what you ask for technology needs to retain a human aspect algorithms can only capture a fraction of what the real world means...human rights and freedoms must prevail...are god given...humans need to stop playing gods...remember Icarus.
Effective altruism weights large amount of utility that are distant from the user higher than non-utilitarian moralities such as familial obligations, purity, or fairness. From an EA perspective, SBF made a morally correct gamble since his intent was to donate all the winnings. The discounted utility of donating the potential winnings of shitcoins outweighed the utility of not doing so. Perhaps it would be wise to reconsider the premises of EA rather than run to its defense as the author has done here.
> From an EA perspective, SBF made a morally correct gamble since his intent was to donate all the winnings.
No, that's a caricature of EA (edit: AFAICT EA seems to be about working within the system). There are perfectly rational reasons not to break moral standards (such as not gambling with other people's money or lying about safekeeping it): the world becomes a worse and unstable place and becomes far harder to improve when everyone acts like that, when you can't trust other actors; and people will keep score of how you behave.
(In another comment I wrote what may seem to be a contradictory view, but I was considering a completely abstract gamble there, not what SBF actually did.)
> From an EA perspective, SBF made a morally correct gamble since his intent was to donate all the winnings.
EA perspective is not limited to one specific moral foundation (in this case act utilitarianism), it is a general idea that if you are going to be altruistic (for whatever reason), you should rationally focus on how to get best 'benefit to others' for your money. EA is not moral philosophy, it is altruistic strategy. For some, altruism is not even connected to morality.
So the gamble you describe is more argument against act utilitarianism than against EA.
Exactly this. All the debates about whether SBF's EA ties were "authentic" or he strayed over time or whatever are missing the point.
EA is a morally bankrupt, barely coherent, stupid ideology designed to justify pre-hoc teenage technocratic fantasies. In that sense, no matter what SBF believed in his heart of hearts he's a poster child for EA all the way.
I'm seeing so many of these posts and I just don't understand how this perception of EA has formed. What charities are you giving to? EA would say you should give to fight global poverty and improve global health as fighting malaria is more effective than say, giving to a local arts community. What's bankrupt, barely coherent, stupid, and technocratic about that?
> EA would say you should give to fight global poverty and improve global health as fighting malaria is more effective than say, giving to a local arts community
Dozens of ideologies say that. EA doesn't say only that.
A common theme in Charles dickens books is a character that cares so much about people in faraway lands that they completely neglect their family. Today with our understanding of mission colonialism these behaviors appear even worse.
On a personal level, my familial obligations supersede even local art charities and much less distant global health issues. Most EA people have enough instinctive moral behavior to avoid falling into a trap like SBF, but EA taken to its extreme clearly states that distance is not morally relevant.
Yikes. After railing against hypotheticals, he says:
it seems morally hard to distinguish a
cryptocurrency trader from the millions who
deal in options, bonds, and all manner of
other speculative assets. And a traditional
investor who made billions on successful
gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity,
then gave virtually all of it away to
effective charities, would seem, on net, way
ahead of most of us morally.
Okay, ignoring the fact that you can’t make billions off of trading derivatives without significant side effects— who has ever done this?
Warren Buffett maybe is the closest. He has promised to give away his fortune but he didn’t earn it in option trading. And whether his money will be used “effectively” is still an open question.
I’m sure lots of people have a fantasy of making billions and then helping the world with it. But more often the people who get there start believing that helping the world is best done by continuing to grow their own business interests. Couple that with the toxic ideas of EA and you start believing that any abuse you place on people today is fine because it’s in service of Long Term Propserity. That you never have to define what that is or exactly how your actions contribute is a feature.
> traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
May I just mention the "philantropist" Bernie Madoff here?
> And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
This is madness. Morality is not a game with points.
Of course it's not strictly points, but capturing a large chunk of profits that would inevitably be earned by someone in the zero-sum trade that occurs in financial markets (though traditional finance, despite the trope, is not zero sum), and donating it, means having a greater positive effect on society than most.
prime example of someone paying dues to his extended network by nudging the narrative of a fellow networker/his parents to a somewhat less damaging vector. next: alan dershowitz. disgusting
What a fascinating highbrow example of how demagogy fuels fanaticism. The author is so enamored with the Effective Altruism discourse that he goes to great lengths to justify the current scenario SBF is in.
And ironically he mentions interest in "saving the world from fascism", but can't notice himself being manipulated in the same manner employed by fascist leaders.
> I’ve never met SBF, although he was a physics undergraduate at MIT while I taught CS there.
> And a traditional investor who made billions on successful gambles, or arbitrage, or creating liquidity, then gave virtually all of it away to effective charities, would seem, on net, way ahead of most of us morally.
> On reflection, maybe I’d just try to convince SBF to weight money logarithmically when calculating expected utility (as in the Kelly criterion), to forsake the linear weighting that SBF explicitly advocated and that he seems to have put into practice in his crypto ventures
No.
His net worth was never $15B. His net worth might have been negative - less than that homeless living in a tent under the bridge.
He was a fraud, a con man.
There's no reason to assume his entire Effective Altruism interest was authentic. It could easily been a way of connecting to important people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.