astralcodexten.substack.com
I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.
Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body
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Notes -
A little bit of everything. They're smart kids, from well-connected families, who went into finance because that's where their families had connections and where you could earn a lot of money for "earn to give" and make yourself rich at the same time.
Had they been less well-connected, they'd probably have ended up staying at Jane Street and doing the 80,000 Hours thing. But because they had well-connected families backing them with networking and money, and were in the circles in the whole Silicon Valley/Bay Area/Rationalist/EA overlap where they could find VCs willing to throw money at them, and they had a Great Idea where Bankman-Fried noticed "hey, I can make money by setting up a crypto exchange to take advantage of the difference in rates!" - well, then Sam hired on his work pals, college pals, his and their current and ex-romantic partners, got set up, and took full advantage of the family connections.
And for a few years it went great, he was making money hand over fist, everyone was falling over themselves to laud how great he was, and he got ambitious. And the problems started when he couldn't keep all the plates spinning in the air, and where ordinary people would be cautious (one would hope) that pernicious Rationalist trait showed up about "the winning answer is the counter-intuitive one; the one that ordinary people would pick, the conservative, cautious one, is the loser. If it's a 49%/51% chance, go for the 51%!"
So he did think that he could fix it all by taking money out of accounts and moving it about and that would let them get over the immediate difficulty, then it would all go back to pure profit and he could put the money back and gain at the same time. No problem. High risk, sure, but he's not a normie, he's a smart guy who knows the art of winning.
Bullshitting about the trolley problem and similar thought experiments is harmless when it's just a bunch of people online like us. It becomes a problem when you are a trolley operator. And Bankman-Fried was a trolley operator. And instead of doing the normie thing, swallowing his pride, and admit he wasn't a genius at winning, he took the risks because that's what the decision theory outcomes say is the best strategy, and it all came down around him.
It might have been going to all come down around him anyway, but at least it would have been with his honesty intact.
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