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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Notes -
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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