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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Oh man, that Sequoia piece is pure gold, gold, I'm telling you!

Ellison is a freckle-faced redhead with a personality that splits the difference between bubbly and nerd-ball. She’s partial to a pair of designer frames that make her look a bit like Edna Mode, the superhero stylist in The Incredibles.

About six months after SBF dropped out, Jane Street sent Ellison on a recruiting trip to California, so she decided to call on her old friend. They’d been office buddies at Jane, but they’d also occasionally socialized outside of work, too, being fellow EA acolytes. Ellison wanted to catch up, but from the get-go, SBF was acting uncharacteristically shifty. There were several canceled coffee dates, and when the two finally did get together—at Jumpin’ Java, an old-school Berkeley coffeehouse with hand-painted murals on the wall and whimsical art in the windows—SBF evaded even the most innocuous of questions.

“So,” Ellison asked after joining SBF at a table, “what have you been up to in the last few months?” Ellison, it should be noted, was dressed as a sultry wood nymph—she was on her way to a LARP (Live Action Role Play) party.

Photo here of her in that costume, which if this is your notion of "sultry" then good God you are even more vanilla than I am, and I live under a rock

BorfRebus, plainly you are not the only one whose monkey hindbrain went "yes".

Curious, SBF had started looking into crypto—and almost immediately noticed something strange. Bitcoin was trading at a higher price in Japan and Korea than it was in the U.S. …SBF was incredulous at the numbers he was seeing on his screen. This is probably not real. But then came the second thought: If it is real, then there’s $5,000 just lying on the ground. Instead of wasting time on internal debate, SBF decided to create some accounts on different exchanges and see if he could execute the trade. He couldn’t. But, interestingly, it wasn’t because the arbitrage opportunity wasn’t there—it was. But there was so much red tape with the banking system and currency controls that it was a difficult trade to execute.

…The first job was just getting the money into the system. The operational challenges were huge. Not just anyone can walk into a foreign bank and start wiring money out of the country every day. …Fortunately, SBF had a secret weapon: the EA community. There’s a loose worldwide network of like-minded people who do each other favors and sleep on each other’s couches simply because they all belong to the same tribe. …Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.

…There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. …After just one conversation with SBF, Singh decided to leave Facebook to take on the more meaningful work of building FTX. Caroline Ellison came, too, quitting Jane Street and moving to California only weeks after SBF described the operation to her over tea. The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. …But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

“This thing couldn’t have taken off without EA,” reminisces Singh, running his hand through a shock of thick black hair. He removes his glasses to think. They’re broken: A chopstick has been Scotch taped to one of the frame’s sides, serving as a makeshift temple. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”

Wow, those stodgy old banks with their red tape and distrust of crypto, putting the brakes on the good FTX could do! Lucky the EA community was there to be behind Sam all the way and get around them, huh?

If I was anyone named in this piece, or anything to do with EA, I'd be fleeing to Bolivia right now, because this does tie Bankman-Fried in tight with the EA community despite all the distancing they've been trying to do, and it makes the movement sound like the most cultish, dodgy set you could hope to meet.

“Everything was rickety—there was no avoiding the ricketiness. Obviously, the line between rickety and shady is a little unclear at times, but the places that seemed like they were going to steal customer funds outright, we didn’t touch,” Singh says. “Even the best players in the space were having big problems.”

Should have been looking in the mirror when it came to shady outfits, Nishad!

He wanted FTX to be known as the respectable face of crypto. This required ad campaigns, sponsorship deals, a charitable wing—and a war chest to pay for it all.

FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers.

Oh, gosh. Oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh.

Can Sun, FTX’s in-house legal counsel, tells me that his main job is to cement the many deals SBF makes on a handshake. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Sun says, the terms favor the other side. It’s another corporate policy derived from a rigorous logical argument: In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the best first move is always to cooperate. And, if the counterparty defects, “it’s better that I know this guy will screw me over now,” Sun says, “rather than later.”

As they say, comment would be superfluous.

The main point here, to be serious for a moment, is how the jargon is the same rationalist/rationalist-adjacent sort of talk I've seen discussed on here and the other SSC-sites. Bankman-Fried at least absorbed enough to be able to sling it, and it's hard to say how much he meant or believed it. "Not at all" seems to be the current take by people who, naturally, desperately want to disassociate themselves and their movements from anything to do with him.

But it's a failure mode that needs to be addressed. This guy talked all the talk, then turned out to be dodgy as hell. And he seems to truly have believed and operated on all the risk calculation, utility calculation, game theory, prisoner's dilemma scenarios everyone else is talking about and recommending as guides.

It's easy to No True Scotsman Bankman-Fried. But what if he was a Scotsman? And what if it turns out all the fancy jargon about seizing risk is not, in fact, the winning way to operate? What if we stodgy types with our rules and regulations and red tape are, in fact, correct?

EDIT: Okay, returning to "just how far up Bankman-Fried's backside can this reporter fit his head?" times, the excited admiration of what is (at best) extremely rude behaviour from Bankman-Fried does a Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff:

The next day, I finally get a chance to interview Sam Bankman-Fried. We meet in a tiny conference room. I’m prepared with a mic and an MP3 recorder at the ready. SBF comes in with his laptop and opens it to start playing his new favorite computer game, Storybook Brawl, before he even sits down. It’s an obscure title, an “auto-battler”: an emerging genre that combines elements of trading card games (like Magic: The Gathering) with chesslike moves and strategy. The game was released only a few years ago by an equally obscure low-budget “indie” game company, Good Luck Games.

Though we’re face-to-face, SBF makes no eye contact at all—zero, not even a glance. His eyes are glued to his screen. His fingers are tapping on the keys, sometimes furiously, sometimes hardly at all. His right knee is bouncing at 100 bpm: a nervous tic, the result of a forgotten fidget spinner. The interview starts.

I open with a doozy: “Am I,” I ask, “talking to the world’s first trillionaire?”

…This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.

Wait for it....

…SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank!

Are you impressed? Wow, so impressive!

All this is still with not even a glance at me—his true focus is on the screen. He’s playing the video game. But, to be fair, perhaps “playing” is the wrong word here. Perhaps he was play-testing: looking for ways to incorporate crypto into his favorite game because, unbeknownst to me at the time, as we were talking, Good Luck, the indie game company behind Storybook Brawl, was being absorbed into the FTX empire—the latest in a string of FTX acquisitions.

Does this behaviour convince our Star Reporter, one Adam Fisher, that Bankman-Fried is, in fact, talking out of his ass? You be the judge!

…After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

…The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

Let's hope for his sake that Mr. Fisher did not sink every cent he possessed into FTX trades, else he'll be working till he's eighty to clear off his debts 🤣

Yeah the article is pretty bad. Good thing it was memoryholed so few people will find it heh...

On the other hand SBF must have some insane charisma to be able to get all these people in line. I mean lord, I know some people that are charismatic but it sounds like he is next level. Despite being kinda ugly.

Yeah, I can't figure it out simply by how he looks in photos, but he must be something special in real life so that even when he is being rude (or autistic, take your pick) about avoiding eye contact and playing games while supposedly talking to you, people who should know better because they're dealing with guys who are trying to sell them on get-rich-quick-schemes for years just fall down at his feet in adoration.

On "The Top Ten List Of Things I Regret Writing" in the future for Adam Fisher, this Sequoia article is going to take the Numbers 1-5 slots.

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