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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So this "Effective Altruist" was funneling money to the Democratic Party and has a multi-million dollar bet against Trump 2024.
His promo video talks about "climate change" and "pandemic preparedness", literally the two most over-promoted fashionable causes where almost all funding has been a waste or worse exacerbated problems for people who need the most help around the world.
Sorry, SBF is a joke using the EA label as a shield from scrutiny and to bolster his brand.
But we have to admit SBF and Caroline seem to fit the rationlist communities stereotypes. Honestly I see a bit of myself in them: eschewing materialism and living an apparently humble lifestyle, the chill math-nerd vibes, passion for technology and making the world better, the girl looking ten years younger than she is - she could be getting fisetin from the source as me for all I know.
To me this is one of the best things about this little ideological pocket of the internet. We can approach the world with the same sort of curiosity and skepticism, read a lot of the same material from SSC and elsewhere, and yet end up in wildly different places in terms of our beliefs and values. And then come together to try to understand each other.
That's one of the key things that made the motte (and other rat-adjacent communities) valuable and interesting. We are not all the same. Although the motte participants seem to be more right-skewed, there are lot of obedient conformist woke types that follow a lot of the same content.
So now we have a situation where one of the most successful people to be associated with this sphere turns out to have ruined a bunch of people's lives and defrauded major investors of billions. If Rationalism was some kind of united community, this would be a chernobyl. But we're not. Some of us believe that the elements of rationalism that think "we know so much better than everyone else" needed to be taken down a notch and this event only helps.
It's high time we moved to post-rat anyways. The idea of rationalizing your way through the worlds most complex problems was a dead end. EA might have made sense in a stable world with clear optimization pathways. What we are confronting now is a profound social and cultural shift where anything with positive connotations seems to get usurped for evil purposes under the guise of doing good. The collective actions of the world's elite are displaying an almost schizophrenic form of control: e.g. malaria nets to save lives while warning about overpopulation.
I could care less about how this affects the rationalist community. What we're really trying to do here is avoid the bullshit on the rest of the internet where you submit a post with relevant information trying to add nuance to a debate and it turns into just trying to figure out which "side" you're supporting. We can continue that regardless of what happens, and perhaps over time more people will see value in it.
Literally no one is working on pandemic preparedness seriously. None of his funding was for COVID, it was for biosecurity work which could stop the next pandemic. We haven't even gotten gain of function research to stop receiving federal funding; this was and is desperately needed.
While lots of people talk a
goodkinda-mediocre game about climate change, almost none of them are working on actual fixes. Money going toward carbon capture would be fantastic. (And TBH I think if this hadn't flamed out, some of FTX or Alameda's people would have eventually taken the money and eaten the bullet of dumping iron filings in international waters, previously the highest-profile potential EA Crime.)Observe the actual post-rats. They're just non-rationalists with a couple cultural signifiers; no more effective, and in general much less, than anyone else in the community or the adjacency. They have absolutely reverted to the condemnable behavior you're mentioning. Post-rationalism is a crock of shit and has been since the minute it started.
Okay, I'm curious, what's this supposed to do? Stimulate algae growth?
Yeah, basically. Dust erosion from continents feeds the ocean ecosystem, and there's certain bottleneck elements the same way there usually are with gardening, where a little more of one thing boosts growth tremendously. Iron is a big one. You can get a whole bunch more calcium carbonate dropping to the bottom of the ocean that way.
Back when I was in school there was a lot going on with studying continental formation/drift and global wind patterns having feedback loops for temperature on multi-million year timescales, but I don't know what came of it.
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It's more of a hit to EA than to rationalism but it's still a hit to rationalism because a fair number of rats glommed themselves onto EA's glow up and it's a somewhat reciprocal relationship (the EAs are fine with rats lending their hand as long as they don't provide bad press, in which case disavow - that's the +EV move after all)
I can only offer advice as I will not profess to be a devoted adherent to rationalism. I enjoy the commitment to spirited debate their communities foster and Scott in particular is (was?) a good welcome mat for the community.
Bankman-Fried and the EA crew are the reverse. This is preaching to the choir here but the Carrick Flynn fundraising campaign exposed the movement as a pretty naked political project of more or less basic Democrats with a slightly refocused issue set. The engorgement of donations, including those late enough in the campaign they likely had minimal impact, to a low importance primary demonstrated none of their professed values and was instead a rather desperate grasp for power.
Bankman-Fried embodied this more explicitly, as an institutional insider following the steps of "EA" outsiders trying to ledge their foot in the door. He leveraged his connections to create this fraud, and would have continued to get away with it as long as his laundered reputation of EA work kept him Cathedral-approved to the institutional actors he partnered with.
Apply your normal caveats to anecdata here, but as a once decently involved crypto user/trader precisely zero people I am in touch with kept money on FTX. Why? To people in the space, myself included, the guy radiated inauthentic. This is a world full of scammers, hackers and overall shady individuals. Anyone selling you that they're anything but nakedly self-interested in making a buck is probably lying to you and untrustworthy. That's where mantras like "the code is the law" come in. This is poison to retail investors but the idea is that you're buying exactly what you can see whether it's a smart contract, an app or a wallet. The libertarians in this space are not Scott's "grays" who we now know were just a shallower shade of blue that wish the rest would slow down the swimming leftward into the deep blue of the Pacific (note those guys were all from California) - they're hardline libertarian econ types with a side of some gun nuttery and no snake stepping
Bankman-Fried's ultimate goal was to buy enough government and institutional power to legislate a favorable environment for himself and a poor one for his main competition, an exchange run by a Chinese-Canadian that's had to dodge his own government a couple times that the hardline libertarians will still tell you not to trust (their hardline is Bitcoin-only with your own keys) but one where I actually know people with money on it because their motives are less vague.
Now, you're going to ask me who actually lost the $10 billion here if I'm Pauline Kael-ing away all these people and the Bitcoin libertarians were never on board to begin with? Well, some long-time crypto whales did trust them as did a lot of those institutional investors (VC types, or as a short-hand basically anyone who owned Solana) and celebrities they got in bed with it seems, and probably a wave of retail that came after me. All of them are fucked, which means they're gone from the space for quite some time if not permanently. Does Sam care? Nah, you can read his takes on betting it all for a bigger win down the thread. And he could have gotten away with it too if his grift kept going just long enough to legislate away his meddling competition before they could catch him with his pants down!
Is this an Effective Altruism or rationalist mindset? No, it's just what every other corporate oligopoly/monopoly in the United States tries to do. Maybe he could justify it with some ends justify the means consequentialism that once he dominated the industry he could gather all these resources and better utilize them but that just lays bare my issue with EA in general. If all you want is power to effect political action to reshape the world to best fit your interest, you don't have a new or unique movement. Lots of people now and throughout history have wanted that!
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