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Quantumfreakonomics  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5509 thread views

FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl

You may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's idea that Covid is science's Chernobyl. Just as Chernobyl was Communism's Chernobyl, and Covid was science's Chernobyl, the FTX disaster is rationalism's Chernobyl.

The people at FTX were the best of the best, Ivy League graduates from academic families, yet free-thinking enough to see through the most egregious of the Cathedral's lies. Market natives, most of them met on Wall Street. Much has been made of the SBF-Effective Altruism connection, but these people have no doubt read the sequences too. FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world, a place where the nerds were in charge and had the funding to do what had to be done, social desirability bias be damned.

They blew everything.

It will be said that "they weren't really EA," and you can point to precepts of effective altruism they violated, but by that standard no one is really EA. Everyone violates some of the precepts some of the time. These people were EA/rationalist to the core. They might not have been part of the Berkley polycules, but they sure tried to recreate them in Nassau. Here's CEO of Alameda Capital Caroline Ellison's Tumblr page, filled with rationalist shibboleths. She would have fit right in on The Motte.

That leaves the $10 billion dollar question: How did this happen? Perhaps they were intellectual frauds just as they were financial frauds, adopting the language and opinions of those who are truly intelligent. That would be the personally flattering option. It leaves open the possibility that if only someone actually smart were involved the whole catastrophe would have been avoided. But what if they really were smart? What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act? If humanity's chances of survival really are best measured in log odds, maybe the FTX team are the only ones with their eyes on the prize?

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I have spent a lot of my time in neckbeard libertarian circles, so I have heard a lot about cryptocurrencies in the past 10 years.

I made an early decision that I would not touch them with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.

I like my investments like my taste in paintings: safe, traditional, and matched to my low time preference.

I'm in the same boat as you. A friend explained bitcoin to me in 2012. How it works makes sense but I kept circling around to "But what is this for?". The basic arguments:

  1. No government control of money

  2. Making transactions easier.

  3. It's scarce

(1) is a pipe dream and just makes it a big flashing neon target for government capture or destruction.

(2) is just false. Crypto is an immense PITA to actually transact with and debit/credit cards are almost too easy to use. Add in scams, complicated passwords/keys that can be easily stolen/lost, and widespread usage seems like a joke.

(3) is meaningless without some underlying value. Lots of things are scarce that nobody wants.

Everything about it screams "speculative asset"/"baseball cards". I guess I would be much better off today had I not been skeptical and set up a miner or ten.

No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.

If you had bought bitcoin or ethereum in 2012 you would likely have much greater wealth now. So this seems a very odd statement, unless you don't care at all about money

if you had bought bitcoin or etherium in 2012 you would likely have much greater wealth now

You can say this about virtually any security you think of, but a few landmines would have taken you to zero. It does not a compelling argument make. If im going to gamble money for 10:1, 100:1, 1000:1 returns i can already do that with conventional regulated securities, and not be at risk of getting hacked and losing everything.

If you had bought $100 dollars worth of bitcoin you could have been a millionaire. No other investments have been quite so explosive.

I care about money, but I also care about risks.

Think of it with ex post/ex ante. I don't regret my ex ante decisions in 2012, because I couldn't have rationally anticipated that (thus far) I would be making money buying bitcoin.

Similarly, if I'd put the right numbers into a lottery ticket, I could have won all sorts of lotteries, but I don't regret not doing that.

Same here, and I DID put money into Crypto back then, and it DID pay off in numerous ways, but my risk tolerance was low so I never made any bets I wouldn't have been willing to make at, say, a poker table at a casino.

People don't realize how many crises early crypto endured, and how many points it hit where any normal person would have pulled out their money either because they wanted to take profit on their absurd gains or they lost too much to stomach.

I don't know how many people got wiped out by losing private keys or from sketchy exchanges collapsing or bad altcoin bets in the last 6 years. The deeper you got into the space (beyond just BTC and ETH) the higher chance you'd get burned HARD.

So ex post it is entirely possible to have zero regrets about not jumping on the train. Ex post I am happy with how well my Crypto career paid off (legitimately the main reason I could buy my house when I did) but also well aware it could have gone differently had I decided to put in more money on riskier bets.

I have almost entirely released all my Crypto holdings and put more money into tangible things where the risks are much more straightforward.

Good points. And to make it clear, I was joking when I said above that I felt "superior" to anybody. My aversion to crypto, like my aversion to gambling, is a subjective preference. It is as subjective as my taste in art, which is why I mentioned that in my first post.

As it happens, I am very sympathetic towards crypto as a political mission (non-gov cash is cool and anonymous non-gov cash would be very cool) but that's different from my investment choices.

I was joking when I said above that I felt "superior" to anybody. My aversion to crypto, like my aversion to gambling, is a subjective preference. It is as subjective as my taste in art, which is why I mentioned that in my first post.

I mean, when I've been perusing the Crypto subreddits the past few years, a sense of superiority is hard to avoid when you see newbies making the same mistakes over and over again, whilst you've learned your lesson (hopefully by observation and not experience) in the early days. And I'll speak up and be like "Guys I've seen this exact scenario develop before and here's what you should watch out for" only to be drowned out by "FUD, WHEN MOON? NGMI, HODL HODL HODL!"

As it happens, I am very sympathetic towards crypto as a political mission (non-gov cash is cool and anonymous non-gov cash would be very cool) but that's different from my investment choices.

Bingo. I'm crypt-optimist but at some point during the NFT craze I realized how hard 'we' had lost the plot.

I have spent a lot of my time in neckbeard libertarian circles

huh? What does this have to do with the topic?

I made an early decision that I would not touch them with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.

I like my investments like my taste in paintings: safe, traditional, and matched to my low time preference.

I guess the important part is that you feel superior :marseyeyeroll:

I guess the important part is that you feel superior :marseyeyeroll:

This was unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this.

huh? What does this have to do with the topic?

Neckbeard libertarian circles have a lot of crypto talk. I was hearing about crypto in such circles more than 3 years before anywhere else.

I guess the important part is that you feel superior :marseyeyeroll:

Exactly, that was precisely the point I was making. I also feel superior for taking my waterproof jacket on a day when it might rain and consider all people who get wet as inferior human beings.

I also feel superior...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hubristic

I just want to see one that develops a real transaction ecosystem, where the use case is millions of transactions processed.

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