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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Interesting post, much of this mirrors my thinking in the last few days. The members of this grim little cabal are rationalists in the first degree, each one of them a type specimen. And though they claimed to be effective altruists - and would have been proudly lauded as such up until two weeks ago - it turns out they're degenerate gamblers and crooks whose amoral recklessness has hurt millions of people. It is statistically nearly certain that some victims of FTX will kill themselves, if they haven't done so already.
You can't delegate morality to mathematics. All it leads to is arrogance, and the 'freedom' to always be able to justify your own behaviour to yourself, even when your actions are those of a base criminal. Rationalism is not a wholly failed project; effective altruism is an important and useful dogma - but these ideas must be alloyed with traditional morality to be effective at inducing virtue.
You can't delegate morality to non mathematics either for the same reasons, whether it's telling an axe murderer where your friend is, the numerous contradictory things Christians are taught, or reporting your own family to Mao to preserve Communism.
Proponents of every moral system can justify plenty of terrible things. This has nothing to do with mathematics which constrains the types of arguments you can make. That's not to say mathematics solves the problem, but it's really hard to believe it exacerbates. Jesus literally says things like
And virtually every Christian finds it easy to ignore Him (He's not really being ambiguous here...).
People justifying whatever is convenient isn't a problem with a particular moral system, it's a problem with people.
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