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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Insane to me that SBF is speaking as publicly as he has been. I get criminal law is different if you are rich (formally), but I thought rule #1 was don’t talk to anyone.

There's a picture of his desk with a bottle of modafinil next to a MAOI label, so even if people smarter and much better informed than me "don’t really want to have an opinion on this", I think the list of hypotheses should at least include "he's impaired his decision making" somewhere near the top.

Could be selection effects too, though. If the path to becoming ridiculously rich these days relies on having all of talent and connections and hard-work and luck and risk-seeking behavior (because if you only have four out of five then you only get 80% of the log(success), and that's not enough to get you on magazine covers), then predicting that ridiculously (if only briefly...) rich people will continue to exhibit risk-seeking behavior afterward would just be the null hypothesis, whether that behavior came from drugs or just from their personality.

I think he figures he is either screwed or he thinks can somehow talk his way out of this by making his case to the public. THe only opinion that matter is the prosecutor not the public . The public opinion is irreverent here.

Seemingly he doesn't listen to his own lawyers, so there's no shutting him up and stopping him from digging the hole deeper. He also seems to be trying to rescue his reputation, so he's still maintaining he could have sorted it all out, except... people jumped ship, persuaded him to apply for bankruptcy, didn't keep him informed, pulled the rug out from under FTX, etc. etc. etc.

He never did anything wrong, except maybe be a bit careless with paperwork, and he could have made it all work because there were billions in investment due to come in and if only that pesky run hadn't started, so on and so forth.

I do think he's at least half a fraudster and swindler, but he also seems to be half delusional; believing so firmly in his own genius and talent, and good intentions, that while he may say "I fucked up", deep down he doesn't believe it.

He got too many arse-licking interviews and articles, like that Sequoia one, praising how he was this philanthropic genius who was going to make crypto the currency everyone used, and infinite profits forever and ever amen, that he can't face reality: he wasn't that smart, some of it was down to pure luck, and he is a swindler.

The guy was used to lapping up crap like this as his due, of course he can't accept that it's all nonsense:

In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages.

SBF learned to trade at Jane Street, an under-the-radar high-frequency trading shop in New York’s financial district. The firm recruits from the smartest students in math and physics at MIT. SBF, a physics major at MIT, had interned at Jane Street in the summer of 2013 and was one of the few such recruits invited back for a full-time job. He was put to work as a market maker trading global ETFs—more difficult than simply making a market for a single stock, in the same way Tri-Dimensional Chess is more difficult than the bog-standard variety.

Dear God in Heaven, no wonder the guy thought he was the Messiah, given a steady diet of this sort of flattery.

I have two theories on his motivation:

  1. Force of habit: SBF has marketed himself pretty intensively and owes a lot to his image. By his own account he thought that was necessary for his business. He may just be incapable of not trying to talk his way into more money.

  2. SBF has donated to many news outlets, including Vox and the Intercept. One suggested motivation for his disastrous Vox interview was that he thought he was be dealing with a friendly.

Note the "Vox interview" was published by Kelsey Piper, who is another figure in the EA community. It's possible he thought he was confiding in a friend, whereas she thought the public's right to know what he said was more important than his friendship.

What a ridiculous bit of delusion, though, to think even that your written correspondence with a friend would be beyond the reach of a prosecutor.

Is it delusion, or just naivete?

When that friend is a Vox journalist, you haven't even asked for it to be off the record, and you're communicating over an unencrypted medium the feds can just subpoena? Stupid either way. His lawyers had to have told him all the relevant information by then, he just told them to go fuck themselves.

It is. But clients are often idiots.

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