This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud
So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.
In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.
Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.
So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.
The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.
But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)
FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried tweets that he's willing to testify before lawmakers
Yes, this is after he made Coffeezilla -some random Youtuber- look like Saul Goodman. I checked the date and still can't believe it.
It's happening again: I'm getting back into the spiral of "oh, he's just a moron" to "he can't be as dumb as he looks - what on Earth could be his plan here?".
Taking a guess: he really doesn't think he did anything wrong, he really does think that if only he had been given a little more time, he would have made all the money back and no problems. He wants to push the angle that he was tricked/bullied into signing the bankruptcy agreement which was a bad decision, so all the lost money is Not His Fault and he was so high on the constant praise and adulation he got for being some kind of financial genius who was making ethical billions and changing the world via philanthropy, that he can't parse how everyone has now turned against him. After all, when they were all kissing his boots, he was doing exactly what they are condemning him for now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Stefanopoulos interview (~8 minutes long) was so bad. I have my biases as a lawyer but a good interview should absolutely feel like a cross-examination, and Stefanopoulos did a great job at repeatedly hammering the same questions SBF kept evading. You can see the dude's gears working in the video as he keeps stumbling into pincer attacks.
The thing that gets me about the whole situation is how boring and predictable the whole thing is. It's a pretty straightforward situation that's done in many an attorney or financial advisor or any other position that involves having custody of other people's money—taking loans you shouldn't be taking. So FTX or one of its associated companies had a lot of its own funds invested in crypto and when crypto tanked they didn't have enough cash to meet their debt obligations so they "borrowed" money from people who invested with them and when that wasn't enough, and they didn't have enough new money coming in, they still couldn't meet their obligations and the chickens came home to roost and now a ton of people are out a lot of money.
And in a company as large as FTX there's simply no excuse. No, he wasn't a Bernie Madoff intentionally running a pyramid scheme, but that would have at least made more sense. Instead he decided to loan customer funds to Alameda Research, which is bad even if the money is paid back with interest, but is catastrophic if the whole company goes under in the meantime. Had he not done that Alameda probably would have gone bankrupt, and that probably would have accelerated FTX's bankruptcy, but companies go bankrupt all the time. Now he's looking at prison time, and doesn't seem to be doing himself any favors with respect to avoiding it.
yes, he could have just stopped 2 years ago and still made a lot of money. exchanges are very profitable business due to fees.
Except he couldn't, because that wouldn't have fit the narrative he constructed. I do think, and this is just personal opinion, that he very badly wants validation from Mommy and Daddy. So having to quit the big huge money-printing operation he put together because it was unsustainable would be admitting failure, he wouldn't get the same praise that he was getting from everyone about being a genius whiz-kid and world saviour, and Mommy and Daddy would have been so disappointed (once again?).
I do think there is a ton of ego involved; he seems to have been the stereotypical Smart Kid who was expected to go on to bigger and better things, but ended up with a finance job like just another schlub with an MBA and not all those Big Brain MIT graduates:
I do wonder about his brother Gabe, was he the Favourite Child and Sam was always trying to out-do his younger brother? But that is wandering into the territory of armchair psychology, and I don't even have a first aid certificate 😀
If you want a look at where the FTX money was going (including all that Guarding Against Pandemics charity work), take a gander at this. Oh yeah: hosting cocktail parties for both political parties, which Carrick Flynn would probably have attended had he been voted in, that's really effective charity in action right there and not just one more lobbying outfit as I prognosticated EA efforts would become if they shifted to political meddling!
EDIT: If that last reads as unkind, well EA has come a long way from its Drowning Child guilt-tripping days; now you don't worry about replacing your expensive suit, you buy a $3 million dollar DC townhouse to host cocktail parties instead of frittering donations away on malaria nets.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, yeah. But the important thing to remember is that he's a smart moron. The embarrassing Sequoia fanboy squee article hit that point, too:
As an aside, anyone who coins a cutesy neologism like "mathletic" should be rolling around on the floor, clutching their ears, in agony. But what is my point here?
Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.
Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".
I agree that he doesn't have some grand legal plan, but I do think he is relying on "negligence or ignorance". The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties". Everyone seems to have had an instinctive mindset that the conventional way of doing things - even business - was somehow icky, somehow.... normie. And they weren't normies! They were supersmart EA types who were going to save the world by making tons of money and having fun doing it!
So whether or not Bankman-Fried set out from the outset with fraud in mind, the setup was so chaotic, it was conducive to it. I think there is something suspicious there, because Bankman-Fried had so much ownership and control behind the scenes, but he may genuinely have thought he was a supersmart cookie who could find a new way to make zillions after his One Weird Trick dried up.
His parents are lawyers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he imbibed some half-baked notion that "if I say X was separate from Y, and it was Y did all the fiddling around with funds, then I'm in the clear" when it comes to his technicality about "it wasn't FTX that did it, it was Alameda". I do think he's relying on technicalities to save his skin, which just shows once again that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
I really hope one of the lessons people in the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent sphere, including on here, take away from this is to lose the ugly attitude around the idolisation of 'intelligence' and the corresponding denigration of 'normies' (this constant assumption, as I've said, that ordinary people are all 90-95 IQ and not the average of 100 IQ or even up to 105!).
I think that this is an affliction that affects all intelligent people, but the concentration of people who think of themselves as "underappreciated geniuses" is probably higher in EA and other nerdy spaces, fortifying the walls of the echo chamber to the point where reality can rarely penetrate to bring people back down to earth, and so you end up with midwits who think they're geniuses getting mugged by reality. It's good to have some friends who aren't college educated, don't work in tech, etc. if only to ensure that you're not completely trapped in such a bubble.
I acknowledge that there genuinely are a lot of Really Smart People in these spaces. And it's not everyone who does it, but the automatic correlation some make between "ordinary person" and "95 IQ" really annoys me (as someone who hits 105 IQ only on their best days, if I believe that Ravens Matrices test I took online). Yeah yeah yeah, "Most people (about 68 percent) have an IQ between 85 and 115. Only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ (below 70) or a very high IQ (above 130). The average IQ in the United States is 98" so really X is not being dismissive when they reach for "95 IQ" in their imaginary ordinary person.
But when we're talking about ordinary people, we are talking about "the average" which is set at 100 IQ. So a glib "95 IQ normie" is being dismissive, is saying "those dumb people are really dumb, so much dumber than me" and that's no way to think about or talk about your fellow citizens. You can disagree with the presumed opinion of the man in the street, but there is no cause to presume he's stupider than the average.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From personal experience posting/discussing about IQ here, this is hardly true at all. Maybe it was more true pre-2018 but not anymore. Many on the right are as equally skeptical as those on the left about the worship of IQ.
I dunno how indictive this is of genius IQ, probably not much. It's not that hard to do well in high school. MTG would not be so popular if it was only geniuses playing it. He got into Jane Street, which is pretty damn selective, so probably an IQ of at least 140 if I had to guess.
More options
Context Copy link
No he's not; the "ordinary people" are the ones getting rooked into buying at the top of the crypto bubble, or latching onto one of the innumerable scams out there. Running one of those scams, especially one as big as FTX, is harder. Plus, SBF did legitimately stumble into profitable bitcoin arbitrage opportunities; if he had just stopped there, and not gotten out over his skis, he would have still made a lot of money - completely legitimately! - on those "magic beans".
He did make legit fast bucks on the arbitrage, but that was something that was not sustainable and he should have known it. He took advantage of a loophole, and that loophole got stopped up. He probably did realise it, couldn't or wouldn't give up the lure of fast easy millions, and decided to go into exchange business instead.
And the ordinary people weren't the ones who gave him $1 billion in funding, it was the (presumably) smart investors at Sequoia Capital and elsewhere:
$420 million divided by 69 comes to around $6 million each, so do you count someone who can drop $6 million into an investment as "ordinary people" and if you do, then you and I have very different definitions of "ordinary people".
My understanding was that the reason the FTX scandal went from "niche finance scandal" to "world-shaking cataclysm" was that SBF wasn't just losing institutional/high net worth individual money, but instead was raiding ordinary joe-schmo funds nominally being used to buy and sell coins on FTX to transfer to Alameda. Is that incorrect?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I made the point below, but how do we even know this is true? Given what we know about SBF, isn't it more likely that he was simply stealing user funds from the start?
Think about it logically. Which makes more sense?
Obvious billion dollar arbitrage opportunity is discovered by SBF and no one else OR
Known fraudster steals user deposits for his own purposes
He very probably did make legitimate profit off the "kimchi premium", and while it wasn't his own money and he did need to hit up investors for it, he wasn't stealing their dough, at least not at the start, because they lucked into making money faster than they could lose it. Interesting and indicative parts bolded by me in the below:
So Alameda starting running into the problem of no more easy money and worse, losing money. Bankman-Fried decided that setting up his own exchange would be the new easy money, and getting more funding from investors was the solution to Alameda's losses. That seems to have worked for a while, too, but the losses continued and so he started dipping into the funds FTX was supposedly holding separate from Alameda.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it seems pretty easy to check. Go back and look at the buy/sell records for Korea and Japan at various points during which the "kimchi premium" was allegedly there for the taking.
More options
Context Copy link
The Japan-US arbitrage was known in early 2018. Even now there are still ways to make $ trading crypto. I imagine someone with enough data analytics and his intelligence could find patterns.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The discussion of IQ below lacks the proper conceptual grounding in theory of intelligence.
It is simple - four quadrants.
Einstein is a Smart Smart Guy. High IQ, very nerdy.
Jack McMoron who you've never heard of, never graduated high school and drives drunk to his McJob. He is a Dumb Dumb Guy.
Joe Rogan is a Smart Dumb Guy. Deep but often strange analysis, but internally consistent, applied to everything from politics & history, to guys beating the piss out of each other. Interests are pedestrian. Smart Dumb Guys make good friends.
Sam Bankman Fried is a Dumb Smart Guy. He's very mathematically strong, speaks eloquently, built multiple massive businesses. He also taunts the people with the power to destroy his ponzi scheme on Twitter.com, and then when it is obvious he is a criminal, decides to speak. A LOT. Against legal advice. In embarassing ways.
So where does IQ fit into this? Is IQ only for the first "smart" in the descriptor, or does high IQ mean someone is good at both?
Maybe both smarts are correlated with IQ, but the second one probably more so than the first, at least for raw IQ?
I don’t really have any stake in or have a deep understanding of this, but that’s my impression.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Joe Rogan -smart average guy
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.
Ordinary people buy scratchcards. And honestly, who's to say that SBF even messed up as far as his own benefit is concerned. He got to spend several years as a rich and influential power broker, and may still evade severe punishment. The actual dumb people are the 110 IQ cryptophiles that got ripped off again.
This describes a lot of people in their late twenties nowadays. It's not abnormal.
I'm pretty sure when both Bankman-Fried and Ellison were working at Jane Street, that operation was not run out of the CEO's beanbag office with no accountancy or audit services.
This was not a bunch of kids working on their zany start-up about crocheting motor bike helmets for chihuahuas. This was a large business dealing with huge sums of money.
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like I need more context on the purported relation between IQ and ability to understand hypotheticals. I'm confident a statement like "For some IQ X all people above IQ X can understand hypotheticals and no people below IQ X can understand hypotheticals" is false for any X. Like, why would it be true? Just based on the way we measure IQ what's the relationship between being able to do reverse digit span and understanding hypotheticals?
I'm happy to believe there's some IQ threshold X below which no people can understand hypotheticals, but I suspect there would also be a substantial population of people with an IQ above X that also cannot understand hypotheticals. Similarly there's probably some IQ threshold Y above which everyone can understand hypotheticals, but also a substantial population of people with IQ below Y that can understand hypotheticals.
Just based on the way we measure IQ the claim that there exists some IQ level that perfectly partitions individuals into can/not understand hypotheticals seems pretty implausible.
This is a greentext from 4chan but it's pretty funny and demonstrates the point if true - it's more about conditional hypotheticals than any hypotheticals: https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png
That "We did research on convicts in San Quentin. They're absolute fucking retards" - well yeah, they ended up in San Quentin. They are also fucking with you because why would a bunch of convicts go out of their way to help some nerdy white middle-class motherfucker with his science project who all too plainly is treating them like lab rats?
The part about empathy may or may not be true, but it's also "You never admit anything, you say you don't know, when the cops are questioning you". If they said "I imagine that guy I beat up felt awful, he was in pain, he was humiliated" then bozo, you have just admitted you beat the guy up, that is another X days on your sentence.
Whatever about the convicts being unable to model theory of mind, our grad student researcher also can't model why convicts in jail are not going to cop to anything an authority figure asks questions about.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The idea seems to be that «a hypothetical», as a form of syllogism, has some minimum complexity/minimum description length that cannot be represented in a mind that has e.g. working memory corresponding to a given IQ – the minimally sufficient thought, even optimally chunked thanks to experience, just breaks down from noise and signal decay, in the same way complex mathematical expressions or rich verbal statements or puzzles break down for people of somewhat higher level.
That model strikes me as implausible because a basic hypothetical is very simple and people who struggle with understanding that ought to struggle even with speech.
On the other hand, using a hypothetical in practice usually involves thinking through some scenario diverging from known reality, which recruits imagination and a mental scratchpad with some non-negligible context length. So there are at least two levels of understanding – a hypothetical is an asymmetric function of sorts; you can check if it makes sense, but you're not necessarily able to use it as the first step in a reasoning chain that the other party's trying to prompt you into. In that case, it's prudent to concede your failure, drop the entire line of argument and just output the «okay smart guy, not listening» before you're tricked.
Of course intelligence is heterogenous (modestly so, given that g accounts for most variation, but still), and hypotheticals of different nature ought to be unequal in MDL. Additionally, Wason selection task shows that some ecologically valid concepts allow for efficient application of what seems to be the same basic algorithm – we don't have general-purpose theorem provers in our heads, more like a population of heuristics and cached partial solutions for specific cases. So people can be «good» at some hypotheticals but flounder when provided a novel one. Weeding out those specific cases is what good test design is about.
I wouldn’t be so surprised, at least with speech; they‘re different areas of the brain (and cognition, probably), and the way Broca‘s and Wernicke’s areas correspond to speech production seem much more fundamental and binary than whatever thing is to intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A few months ago I met a guy who bought me a scratchcard and insisted I complete it for 'fun'. It was not fun. The scratching is tedious and messy and the anticipation is unpleasant because I anticipate losing.
More options
Context Copy link
Every time I've run into this, it has not been presented as a fact, and the number was far lower than 100 - I think 85 or 80 maybe? Where here have you seen someone claim that it's a known fact that people of 49th percentile intelligence or lower can't understand hypotheticals?
It is likely wrong
More options
Context Copy link
I've never seen it here but I've seen something similar claimed on Twitter. I don't remember the exact IQ number so it could have been 90.
More options
Context Copy link
I saw someone on the SSC subreddit who had supposedly done IQ studies claim this. It was a very lengthy post with a lot of upvotes.
I saw a guy on 4chan claim this for under 90 IQ.
More options
Context Copy link
I remember that too, but thought it was <85 IQ. Camas search hasn’t found anything, though.
There was some discussion by ZorbaTHut and Naraburns here that I found interesting.
I remain confused, at best, on this topic. I've brought up the sort of incapability revealed by Gwern's review of McNamara's Folly (including with Gwern), and if you work with seriously developmentally disabled adults at all it comes across as, if anything, an understatement. But there are alternate explanations (eg, people don't take tests seriously, the lizardman's constant being high, etc), and some of the conclusions regarding how wide-spread these problems are don't seem present in the real world, even ones with far less political relevance (IQ is supposed to strongly correlate with reflexes). There are more complex explanations that might make it all work out, but I don't know how many of them are serious rather than best-fit.
Shameless link to the blog, but the Project 100,000 recruits likely had IQs between 80-90, which is average-to-below average, not developmentally disabled at all. https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/07/30/project-100000-an-analysis/
What happened was due to troop shortages, a greater quantity of low-quality soldiers was recruited than typical, but this was not unprecedented at the time. It was practiced during WW2.
Looks like the US is poised to repeat the experiment. US Navy now enlisting recruits with ASVAB score of 10. ASVAB scores are set with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, so people scoring 3-4 standard deviations below the mean test taker.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You are most likely right about this being a myth about low-IQ people, but I have personally verified, on more than one occasion, that people who don't understand hypotheticals exist.
I'll buy that people below a certain IQ threshold can't understand hypotheticals, but this IQ threshold is obviously to me far below 90. I think I have a pretty good understanding of what 85 IQ people are like and they can grasp that they would be hungry if they didn't eat breakfast. They are not very good at following logic, learning foreign languages, planning ahead, or doing math, but they can understand hypotheticals at a basic level.
More options
Context Copy link
To add onto this, while I don’t actually know much about the research in the area, I don’t find it actually that difficult to believe (that some very select, very stupid people can’t understand hypotheticals). All children at some point of growth don’t, just as all children at some point don’t have anything resembling a theory of mind. You just need some people who never quite get beyond that as they age (or spend way too much time getting there).
To be fair, I don't think it's stupidity, if anything it might indicate intelligence. My guess at the mechanism is people intuitively recognizing where the argument leads, and throwing a wrench into the conversation so you don't get to make it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, even though I've been as critical of him as anyone I have to ask myself if that's at play in my frustration here. Like...I have an intellectual theory for why Bankman-Fried is acting this way, but it just seems to not be able to intuitively connect. So I keep instinctually looking for more and then get annoyed when I don't find it.
But, if this was some random SovCiv
representingfucking himself in court, I don't know that I'd be having this same reaction at the inability to just shut the fuck up. I'd laugh at the video of the moron on /r/PublicFreakout and move on.But SBF was supposed to be smart, even if just in an Elizabeth Holmes way.
It would be ironic if his original PR blitz is still subtly shaping my reaction despite its original purpose having fallen apart.
I was literally thinking to myself, upon hearing of them in the mansion, that "this sounds like kids playing start-up in the Bahamas with Daddy's money". Unfortunately for them, they didn't use Daddy's money.
That part is debatable, because a lot of the "non-normie" stuff they did was directly in service of fraud: e.g. sending sensitive messages in a format that deleted them after some time. Now SBF is trying to cover up some of that shit (most importantly the comingling of funds) by acting like they were basically just college kids doing bullshit without following the rules cause they were innovators maaaan. But that "we moved fast and broke things" seems like a convenient cover.
But, then again, there was some shit that I can't see being beneficial to fraud and really does look like stupid/lazy people simply not bothering with rules: e.g. the revelation that they apparently paid expenses via chat emojis.
I think it became fraud, more than it started as fraud (otherwise why lose all that money trying to do legitimate trades in Alameda? Caroline Ellison allegedly lost $1 billion....). But the whole thing had such a basic lack of any controls and regulation that it was a hop skip. If you're smart but also dumb, desperate, likely hopped off on stimulants and working/living in some weird nerd-frat house instead of a real company then maybe this seems like a good idea. And then there's no one to stop you.
It's true. Your average idiot knows enough to "shut the fuck up and lawyer up". I do think part of Bankman-Fried's problem is that he is smart but up to now hasn't really faced any (obvious) consequences of failure. He seems to have been conventionally bright, done conventionally well at school, went into a conventionally good job, then decided (and maybe this is on MacAskill and maybe not) that philanthropy was the way to get fame and good repute, and to do that he needed a lot of money, and hey he was already working in a trading firm, crypto was the new big thing all his nerdy friends were geeking out about, how about he picked up some of that easy money?
And now he really doesn't seem to realise that he did anything wrong. Everyone in crypto does sketchy stuff! If only they had given him a bit more time, he could have made all the money back! Why doesn't anyone realise he isn't the bad guy here? So he keeps giving interviews and shooting his mouth off to show how he's just misunderstood and sure he fucked up but that wasn't malicious, and he keeps digging the hole for himself deeper and deeper.
More options
Context Copy link
I do not understand why handling expense claims via Discord or Slack bot is somehow problematic. This emoji thing gets repeated together with other clearly problematic ones and I do not understand it.
Because you're supposed to have a system to deal with petty cash disbursements, with expenses, with "okay hey boss I need fifty mil, fine?" "yeah sure fine".
Boring, conventional, stuffy old-fashioned business routine stuff. The problem with Discord, Slack and emojis is now all this money has gone "poof!" and nobody can say who spent what or where it went, and when they need to account for this in order to pay the creditors, that's important.
More options
Context Copy link
Because Discord and Slack messages are mutable after the fact, they do not create an auditable trail (depending on implementation).
Imagine an implementation that runs like this. When an expense is submitted a bot posts a summary of that expense in a Discord channel. The expense is authorized by some kind of emoji reply or react to the bots message. It would be trivial for anyone with administrator privileges on this discord (or even mere expense approver privileges) to commit fraud in this system, in a way that would be difficult to detect.
At some time t_0 our insider submits an expense they know is fraudulent. The bot posts the expense summary and the insider approves the expense. At some later time t_1 the actual disbursement of funds for the fraudulent expense occurs. Then at some later time t_2 the insider goes back and undoes their approval of the expense (they remove their react or delete their message or whatever). If the insider has admin permissions on the discord they could even delete the bots message perhaps wiping away any trace the expense existed. At some time t_3 the apparently unapproved disbursement is discovered. How do you reconstruct who approved the fraudulent disbursement?
There's a reason that software specifically for managing expenses exists. There's a reason that software records information like who submitted the expense, what the expense was for (often by line-item), and who approved. Crucially there's a reason why these expense records are immutable after they are approved and the funds disbursed.
I assumed that Slack/Discord would be used as interface, with bot archiving it to some persistent less mutable database.
Or channel being configured in way blocking editing - for example with bot reposting message.
Given that it was crypto and specifically FTX I assume that expense claim process was filled with fraud with bad implementation serving as smoke screen (deliberately or accidentally).
But I still do not see problem with emoji specifically
That is possible also with software specifically for managing expenses, there someone with admin permissions also can tamper with database. It is also possible with paper.
Which is why you have two people who keep track of where the money are goin'. One of the joys (🙁) of my admin work is getting the year-end reconciliation of the petty cash dumped on me before we send the accounts off to the auditors. You have to match up receipts with expenses claimed, money out, money remaining, money drawn on to replenish imprest, etc.
I couldn't just print out a list of emojis and say "there you go, boss" as to who purchased what, where, when and for how much.
When I was keeping track of expenditure on a multi-million punt project back in the day, I certainly couldn't have got away with "here's the list of emojis by which we approved that £100,000 for buying equipment that time, dunno when exactly".
According to the Sequoia article, where the reporter was in the Bahamas sitting in on meetings and ordinary operations, this is the kind of money they were shifiting:
You really do want to be keeping a record of where even your sub-$100 million purchases are going and who approved it and who asked for it.
that part is DEFINITELY insane
that is also insane - but not emoji part part - the "lol, we have not recorded what was actually approved by whom"
The bankruptcy filing is great reading because John Ray is very not happy one bit with the way things were done.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, I didn't want to mention names so as not to be pointing fingers at specific people. Your 95 IQ rednecks comment was made in the context of that guy is not thinking about sending his son to Harvard.
No, he's not. And he's probably not thinking about sending his son to the local state college, either. Maybe he's thinking about the kid doing an apprenticeship with Uncle Carl the mechanic or Cousin Bill the electrician.
So if you're talking about "ordinary people whose kids will never get the chance to go to Harvard", why use "95 IQ redneck" as your exemplar? Maybe our redneck is 105 IQ! Maybe he's not a redneck! Maybe he's just a hard-working blue collar guy who would love it if his kids could go to college (any college) and get an education and get a nice white collar job where they don't have to bust their humps like he does! (My father was that guy).
Do you see why it comes across as dismissive and condescending?
More options
Context Copy link
MIT + Jane Street . if this is not high IQ, i dunno what is
More options
Context Copy link
It's also possible that his extensive drug use caused functional brain damage.
Or the dude is just frickin' weird and doesn't understand social cues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Would SBF be teaching law at Stanford in your world?...I suppose that could reduce the damage, but the idea is funny.
Oh gosh, imagine if he had followed his parents! Yeah, that would be something else. But I sort of get the impression that he wasn't bright enough, or bright in the way of law? He went to MIT for the physics degree, so not the humanities type.
EDIT: I got distracted going down a rabbit-hole by looking up the school Bankman-Fried attended, and lemme tell you, meth-fuelled polycules in the Bahamas are nothing compared to what our grandparents' generation got up to! 😁
So Bankman-Fried went to Crystal Springs Uplands School, a prep school established in what was the mansion of one Charles Templeton Crocker. But the real wild child was his sister, Aimée - five marriages, a host of lovers, (alleged) conversion to Buddhism and a complicated family life:
Interesting, that could have been one more spur for Sam to decide "I'm going to be so rich, no-one can ever bully me again!"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Only if they don't teach people who go on to work in crypto brokerages.
In slightly more general terms, this indicates that philosophers don't fully appreciate the "nothing" side of the thought experiment. Perhaps having to make a public speech. Just something to drive home the emotional element of the "nothing", along the lines of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_Kzf21cFoQ
Will MacAskill must be ruing the day he ever met this smart young guy, right now:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can we see the math and logic he's said to have done?
I ask because I remember there being something of a dive into his League of Legends ranking based on the infamous investor call, and apparently he was not at all ranked the way a genius mathlete willing to put in the hours would be at all, and also because I myself have seen a lot of people who associate with smart, nerdy things entirely for smart, nerdy cred, and whose actual ability to engage with the crunchy, mathy, requires-focus-and-practice bits of them is completely nonexistent.
I'd absolutely believe that Sam got top marks entirely based on his family and social connections and the fact that a prep school is about making him look good for a college environment that has completely desisted from actual educational discernment. It's absolutely the case that smart people can believe very dumb things, especially when those dumb beliefs are serving as vital shields for their self-image, and that high-IQ memorize-loads-of-facts-and-do-novel-work-with-them types can end up carefully compartmentalizing against the heresies of their day and circle, and get badly bitten when their failure to think in that one context happens to arise.
But until I see Sam's math SAT scores or evaluate some complex code he's written, I'm personally going to hold off on claiming that he's smart.
He got into Jane Street. It's worth reminding that even people who have credentials suggesting very high IQ often do not get in. So, family and connections would not have worked in regard to that. I don't see what is wrong with saying he is a legit very smart dude who fucked up badly.
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't be shocked if he aced his SAT math, given MIT Physics major/Math minor, but neither would I be impressed.
Assuming that he was a decent student, but not outstanding in context, and that he organized his classes with at least a half-assed gesture towards efficiency, something like the following describes his math education:
5 on the AP Calc AB exam to test out of single variable Calculus general requirement (18.01).
Multivariable Calculus (18.02, general req) and maybe Differential Equations (18.03, Physics major req) his freshman year.
Physics Flexible track with Math as his focus area--three more math classes after DiffEqs. Let's say Linear Algebra (18.06), Combinatorial Analysis (18.211), and Introduction to Numerical Analysis (18.330).
Two more math classes to finish off his math minor. Possibly Probability and Statistics (18.05) and Principles of Discrete Applied Mathematics (18.200).
(Also, the rest of his Physics major.)
130 IQ isn't unreasonable. Very smart; not exceptional. The above courses are roughly the minimum you'd need for his major/minor combo, and nothing I've seen indicates a student that was punching above his weight through grit, determination, and excellent organizational skills.
He attended something called Mathcamp, I don't know if this really is for mathematically-gifted students and can't be finessed, anyone who does know if this depends on pure brainpower please comment.
That his parents are lawyers but he went the STEM route would seem to indicate genuine ability there.
More options
Context Copy link
How much IQ would you need to cheat your way through your entire MIT education, I wonder?
My own knowledge of MIT is rudimentary, but I remember it having a strong focus on student trust and honor from looking into the Aaron Swartz fiasco. And it appears that the story of Sam was finding and exploiting high-trust environments where not even bare due-diligence against adversarial actors was being done.
Am I wrong about this? Does MIT gleefully count coup against attempted cheaters? Is there a high-publicity case of a student turning in their roommate for cheating, or a professor being recognized for diligence in uncovering a novel cheating method and bringing it to the attention of all and sundry?
Again, I assume that he needs to have reached a basic minimum to cheat competently; I'll qualify him with "probably smart, with no verys". But nothing I've seen qualifies him as one of the STEM cognitive elite other than some certifications, and in current year, I do not trust any certifiers.
The "Sam is one of the cognitive elite" narrative appears to rest on three pillars; FTX itself (now distinctly counterevidence), his job and educational history (which I don't trust at all without a deeper dive), his accidents of dress and hobby (taking interest in math, logic, debate, and LoL). For myself, I find a missing pillar; I would expect a STEMLord to need to sharpen themselves against the unyielding whetstone of reality to achieve mastery. It certainly could be that Sam was a technical genius who focused all of his productive energies on his set-up for FTX (and then growing FTX), and that he judged a better expected return from laser-like focus on that than a model rocket hobby or a few hundred Project Euler solutions. But absent any hard evidence of such, I consider that Sam could be either a cheat, a liar, and a fraud who is also a brilliant technical mind, or simply a cheat, a liar, and a fraud, and as such do not multiple entities (or properties, I guess).
And, again, if you have evidence that it would be wildly unlikely for MIT to let a cheat, a fraud, and a liar through its programs, I'd love to hear it.
MIT's selection processes is hard enough that someone who would be inclined to cheat would not get in. Given that SBF got into Jane Street, likely he was smart enough to graduate without needing to cheat.
Can you demonstrate this? I admit, I'm not seeing how making selection criteria harder would decrease the likelihood of cheating. I mean, in the extreme case, if you make a test that only one billionth of humanity could pass fairly, then the odds that any given person passed the test fairly (when there are great reputational and financial rewards for passing the test, no deep culture of investigating and calling out cheaters, and strong incentives to have everyone passively trust the process and not assume cheating as a default possibility) are fairly low.
Again, I'm not an expert on MIT's admission methods, but if, e.g., they hold their own proctored and blind-graded exam for all students they are considering admitting, I'd definitely update in the direction of considering MIT more reliable. But given that my default assumption about colleges (which is that they will cheerfully drop admissions standards into the ground to accept those of their favored demographics, and raise the standards on the unfavored demographics to compensate), I simply do not believe that MIT is honestly selecting students according to fair criteria.
Demonstrate how? It's well known that MIT is both hard to get accepted ,as is the coursework
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jane Street does not hire traders or interns who cannot pass notoriously tricky technical interviews with math problems and brainteasers. Period. This is well known in the industry.
this guy gets it
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.
But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.
Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.
The crypto trades came much later, in 2018, and with his own money. Jane Street was 2014.
Fair; I am operating entirely off of a few article summaries which specifically mentioned that he traded crypto at Jane Street, and if there is evidence that Jane Street wasn't trading crypto at the time, I certainly don't have either any specialist knowledge of Jane Street or notable faith in the article summaries.
The point remains, however; if my (hypothetical) investment manager was bragging to me about how much money he made with Bernie Madoff, I would seek another investment manager, even if said investment manager decried buying into the Ponzi scheme specifically and even if Bernie had other legitimate investments. It doesn't matter if they came out ahead (plus, I, being a suspicious bastard, would figure that a smart investment manager would make damn sure to conceal the fact that they lost money by not doing basic due diligence on Bernie's fund if they did lose money in it); no matter the outcome, my own trust in someone who put money down on Bernie would go inexorably down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But he didn't steal from them, did he? They were smart enough to know how much leash they could give a man like that to safely make use of his talents without him getting ideas. Which is probably the most important part of managing finance guys.
Did he? I honestly don't know. Has anyone done a post-fall post-mortem deep dive on SBF's time in Jane Street?
If I go by the Sequoia article, the timeline goes something like this:
(1) Bankman-Fried is doing his physics/maths degree at MIT
(2) Meets Will MacAskill, who was recruiting for earn-to-give, via people in his fraternity
(3) MacAskill steers him towards an internship in Jane Street
(4) He seems to have done okay there (but as you say, we have no idea what really went on). Meets Ellison there. Article fanboys hard over him, so take the following with a grain of salt:
(5) Quits, for whatever reason (article says it's all in the service of his devotion to utilitarianism yadda yadda but again, we don't know if he was asked to leave/let go/decided to quit for unknown reasons)
(6) Goes back home to the Bay Area, gets a job - courtesy of MacAskill - as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism
(7) Ellison is sent on a recruiting trip to California by Jane Street, decides to look up Bankman-Fried
(8) Turns out he set up this thing called Alameda Research with a grubstake of $50,000 (could be his own money, his parents' money, who knows) to exploit the 'kimchi premium' and is coining it
(9) But he could be making much, much more! So he goes looking for $50 million loan and gets a good chunk of that via EA contacts
(10) He puts together an admittedly ramshackle operation to exploit this hard
(11) Ellison quits Jane Street and signs up
(12) MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!
(13) But of course, all good things come to an end, and so the next step is "Hmmm, maybe I should open a crypto trading exchange, there is probably easy money to be made there, too"
(14) Founds FTX and the rest we all know
More options
Context Copy link
That would interesting, but JS is very secretive too. Employees are incentivized to stay quiet .
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He's dumb – for what he got into.
I say often that merely-smart guys like Sam have a tendency of pegging themselves, like, 20 points higher than they deserve, fancying themselves premier league players; and that can have catastrophic consequences for their circle and many others. Bill Gates is, by all accounts, a genius; he was appropriately arrogant for his level when young, and now he has matured into a superficially humble guy with wide latitude of expertise who can afford pretty large-scale shit.
Top-tier colleges are supposed to help with that by exposing a smart guy to actual geniuses and forcing to recalibrate. Certainly helped Bezos..
Early success or praise (which may have more to do with access to material or conscientious/education-focused parents) probably doesn't help
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it helps, a bit of information about MIT's Science Core, which is one of the graduation requirements for every undergraduate, regardless of major--two semesters of Calculus (single and multivariable), two semesters of Physics (mechanics and electricity/magnetism), one semester of Chemistry, and one semester of Biology. Also, if you have not completed every class on that list by the end of your freshman year, something has gone wrong.
As one example from the list, the course summary for 18.02 (Multivariable Calculus) is as follows, from MIT's Course Catalog:
"Calculus of several variables. Vector algebra in 3-space, determinants, matrices. Vector-valued functions of one variable, space motion. Scalar functions of several variables: partial differentiation, gradient, optimization techniques. Double integrals and line integrals in the plane; exact differentials and conservative fields; Green's theorem and applications, triple integrals, line and surface integrals in space, Divergence theorem, Stokes' theorem; applications."
I assume that you and a number of people on this board would have no trouble passing these classes, particularly when you were college-age, but the Admissions Office shouldn't be in the business of approving candidates that can't pass hard graduation requirements, and you need a bit of a pushed IQ to get through that material.
None of that material is remotely difficult to learn and get throught for the first time, if you are a student with no day job or child caring responsibilities that is.
Not that I went to MIT, but the material remains the same even if you study it somewhere else ;-)
I admit trying to learn it between say 2330 and 0000 after being busy all day and having to get up at 6am might be difficult.
Anyone about 100- 115 IQ wise really shouldn't struggle with it if they actually try imho.
Putting SBFs intelligence lower bound as...median..
You severely underestimate how stupid I am 🤣
More options
Context Copy link
MIT is not a plug and chug school. Their goal is to create engineers and scientists who understand the technology they use/manage on a deep level.
Deep understanding of first year undergraduate material?
Deep understanding, as relevant for scientists or engineers, of the stuff previously listed is still quite superficial.
Edit: For clarity, superficial as in a first year undergraduate course as part of training for scientists or engineers.
More options
Context Copy link
I do agree - comparing the deep knowledge in computer science between MIT/CMU/etc grads and even just the next tier of CS universities is night and day - but I was under the impression that much of that happens after freshman year. In which case this…
…makes a bit more sense, even if I think @Azth rather underestimates how much difficulty the average 100-IQ person would have with something like calculus or physics. Like, for someone smart, even something like 15-213 in CMU is possibly doable solo, let alone freshman calculus (not even analysis!), physics, chemistry, and biology.
I guess what I mean is that both of you are kind of right but some statements are kind of wrong? @Azth underestimates the intelligence needed to take those classes without trouble, and you overestimate the deep learning required in such entry level courses, but would nevertheless be on point about the degree generally.
Yes, I can accept that.
Maybe I underestimate the intelligence reuqired - like stokes theorem is brought up by another poster and that is, at a deep level, implcitly obvious and formalising it is straightforward, dare I say trivial so perhaps I fell into the typical mind fallacy trap (although I am retarded).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you really think if you asked a sample of 100 IQ people to learn Stokes' theorem (perhaps with some monetary incentive) to the extent they could describe it and use it in applications that most would be able to?
Yes, once you filter for those who don't know calculus, other prerequisites, have sufficient time, etc. Pay them to learn the prequesites then stokes theorem. I think the main barrier would not be that people can't understand it but that they simply do not care.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I think most of us can agree Bankman-Fried is smart. Not as smart as made out when everyone was polishing his shoes with their tongues because he was worth (notional) billions, but not an ordinary dumb criminal either.
Smart in one particular way, but not street-smart enough to know to keep his damn mouth shut. Caroline Ellison seems to be smarter than that, I think she did one NYT interview (but I might be wrong about that) but otherwise has said nothing. Singh and Wang, his co-founders, seem to have dropped off the radar altogether (although the authorities might be on their track). It's Bankman-Fried who keeps stoking the fires with interviews and appearances and what-not.
What are the odds he's making a noble sacrifice play to draw all the heat away from his partners?
I don't think so, he seems to be throwing blame around on everyone he can think of but he was only careless, not intentionally fraudulent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More like 99%. Even legit smart guys do not get into jane street. You need another tier of intelligence above that.
That’s still just 135. 90-95% would be just 125-130. The 1% aren’t all actual geniuses.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's conservative. Jane Street doesn't hire 90th percentile interns. They work pretty hard to ensure all their interns are 99+ in quantitative skills
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For me, it's just parsimony. I have no faith in colleges in general any more, and Sam has demonstrated his ability to manipulate elite institutions, and is also a goober. It could be that he is high-IQ and a goober, or that he's a goober all around and simply bamboozled MIT the same way he did a bunch of others - or it might be that he simply had a lucky interpersonal-connection 'in' to MIT that would have worked whether his boiling-hot IQ was measured in C or F.
I also think it's probably fairly unlikely that we'll get hard data either way, especially now, given the extended time that's passed from any potential objective-ish evaluations like AP exams or SATs. Also, nowadays, it would be trivial for someone of his resources to game a few slightly-harder-to-fake signals, like a ghostwritten StackOverflow profile and some boilerplate personal projects on a GitHub account.
But given the sheer stupidity and utter agnosticism towards the very idea of personal consequences he has displayed so far, I feel like I can safely say he's probably real dumb, in the classic sense, excepting for his ability to lie and manipulate people (which, in fairness, is a non-trivial skill, but also one not necessarily interacting with deep math, science, and programming geekery). I predict that no actual evidence of Sam doing anything difficult and valuable with anything not vulnerable to social pressure, where the results can be verified (meaning mostly math or programming, since those are things I feel I could verify myself) will be found. I am not super-invested in this theory, and I happily admit this is purely a balance-of-probabilities as I see it; I'd be delighted for someone to turn up, e.g., a deeper dive into Sam's LoL rankings, if nothing more objective can be found.
He does seem to have some sort of charisma which, frankly, I wouldn't expect from his appearance. That Sequoia article is embarrassing in how hard the writer is squeeing over him, and it's really hard to know why, unless Bankman-Fried has some in-person ability to baffle you with his bullshit. I cannot get over the account of the Zoom call where Bankman-Fried is looking for funding and he gives some waffle in response to "so what can you do with your crypto exchange?" and they all fall over themselves to throw money at him:
More options
Context Copy link
If you were familiar with the interview process at Jane Street you would know that you were wrong.
Would you care to elaborate?
I know nothing about Jane St. other than they're a finance shop that is known for brain-teasers in their interviews. If they have in-depth procedures for, e.g., double-blinding the results of applicants' written responses to their math and statistics questions, so that the person deciding "Yes, this answer shows sufficient mastery of the topic and reasoning skills." has no cues from college or name, then that's a significant data point in favor of me being wrong, and I'd welcome it being pointed out.
But I've been in IT for a while and I know exactly how much brain-teaser questions (or, for that matter, basic tests like FizzBuzz) are actually treated as hard checks when either upper management or even just the interviewer in question really wants the interviewee to pass, and it is not much at all. And I absolutely do not consider Jane Street a quasi-priesthood of intellectual integrity, and that every employee working for them cares utterly about the incorruptible truth, because (again), they hired SBF to trade crypto for them.
But again, I know no specifics, and if Jane Street has specific procedures and checks in place to stop a charismatic fraud from joining their august ranks, I'd love to hear about them in more detail.
He worked at JS in 2014-2017. The crypto trading was in 2018 with his own money or other money, unrelated to JS.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who's gone through the Jane Street interview loop (no offer), I never was asked brain teasers; its questions are harder and more rigorously evaluated than any I've gotten at FAANG companies (many offers). As much as I'd like to write it off as their bias for privileged scion, there's no real reason to think that. Take that anecdote for what it's worth.
I'd be terrified of getting fizzbuzz at Jane Street; they'd be expecting something like this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He said multiple times he played LoL to distract his brain while doing other things, and that he never cared about rank. The fact that people think his League of Legends ranking could actually correlate to his IQ in this thread is surprisingly high.
What the heck does the fact that SBF said something (in this case, something nakedly self-serving) have to do with reality, reason, or any truth about the world?
It could be that this is the case, that SBF chooses to play a competitive ranked multiplayer game and generally bring his random teammates down, and deal with a notoriously stressful and distracting environment that (to my knowledge) no one else says is a good flow-supporting distraction like music or walking, and that he puts in zero effort because he doesn't care.
Or, alternatively, he could play the game because LoL is the kind of thing that smart, nerdy, driven people play (because it's so miserable for the casual player), wholly as part of a brand-building activity, and that he not only has no real interest in the game beyond the bare superficial needed to use it as a prop, and the reason he has not gitten gud in his hundreds of hours of play is because either he is profoundly uninterested in learning, improving, and gaining skills, or because he can't, and bronze league is his natural skill ceiling. (Also, as a note: this is entirely from second-hand absorption from one of my friends who plays MOBAs and extremely cursory research. I could be absolutely wrong about the rank of his accounts, the hours he's spent playing, and what both signify. I eagerly await any LoL-players present to chime in with first-hand information.)
My current position is that everything SBF says or has said, and that everything everyone around him who would plausibly benefit from him looking good or be punished for blowing the whistle on him, is suspect. He's a super-affirmative-action-hire, basically; he could be as competent and smart as his rep and just happened to fail horribly in these few cases (or, possibly, used to have been extremely smart and competent and then fried his brain on nootropics), just as an affirmative action hire maybe possibly good have gotten their job even if they'd been evaluated fairly, but there's no real way to know.
Or, the null set is that SBF is incredibly fucked-up to the point that he somehow enjoys what would be an otherwise painful and salt-inducing experience. There are people in the world who can eat durians or jellied scorpions or whatever and actually like it, maybe mining the League of Legends angle isn't very productive and has little implications for the things we know he did.
Yeah, again from that article and things his 'psychiatrist' (the guy whose job apparently was to write prescriptions for the Adderall etc. type drugs the FTX/Alameda people were on) said, Bankman-Fried has few interests. Doesn't read books, doesn't watch movies, is a vegan, isn't interested in fine food, etc. So playing vidya games is one of the, or maybe only, hobby he has.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a great point, if he truly had a crafted/scripted persona to sell to VCs and finance folks, as well as crypto maxis and regulators. I still haven't bought the whole 'he's really a genius mastermind' narrative, I think it's likely he truly was nerdy and raised in an extremely weird way, but got nerd sniped by naive utilitarianism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IQ supremacists online seem weirdly attached to proxies for IQ tests, so that they can then turn that proxy produced IQ to an indication of ability at {x}. I've noted before the difficulties with layering multiple potential correlation margins-of-error on top of each other.
I've noticed this as well - Chess was the game of choice for a long until time it was conclusively proven that there isn't a real link between IQ and chess. Helps that Magnus Carlson, the world champion of the past few years, refuses to get his IQ tested and specifically argues chess masters can't be too intelligent.
I hope there are studies being done on the link between League of Legends (or MOBAs in general) and IQ. Unfortunately studying IQ becomes less and less fashionable every year, unfortunately.
How would one equalize for effort? It seems like prep, especially in terms of research, is going to mean too much to any game outcomes for it to be a useful IQ proxy. That seems an insuperable barrier to using any casual hobby. Only things in which we can presume an average effort of "full" work as proxies for ability, things like competitive levels of sport, schools, and professions. Otherwise we're rating effort not ability.
More options
Context Copy link
It's worth nothing that correlations are likely to increase with ability. That is, being good at chess is not that highly correlated with IQ, but being among the best in the world is highly predictive of having a high IQ, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Still, there's something pretty funny about the suggestion that a guy's ranking in a video game is an indicator of intelligence. It's like suggesting that a guy who wins his fantasy league every year would be a good NFL GM.
Paul DePodesta seems to be doing pretty well career wise even if he mostly gets hired by loser teams, they tend to improve after bringing him on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have you ever met a < 100 - 1sd IQ person trying to bamboozle you? They are not very good at it.
I am quite sure SBF must be > 100 on the basis that he managed to run FTX and related organizations for several years. Maybe he scores better on verbal than math, but I think there are all indications he is above average, because your average manager and quant certainly are. Difficult to say if it was "boiling hot", but where did that claim from anyway? You don't need boiling hot for score > 105 or even >115, and I'd guess >50% chances he is above that cutoff.
I feel like there's a point around good toupees here; it could be that I've been bamboozled by dozens of low-IQ people and just never though to check.
As for my boiling comment, I was making a joke along the lines of room-temperature IQ, in that 212 (F) and 100 (C) are both boiling depending on your measure. And, to be clear, I don't think that SBF is significantly below average, and assume he's between 107 - 115 IQ generally just based on his heritage.
But I put no faith in his words, his presentation of himself, and any evaluation by someone who would either gain by reporting him smarter or be put at risk of retaliation by reporting him dumber as indicators of his smartness. I think that his first talent is shamelessness, and his second is creativity in exploiting trust, and his third is in presentation to limit the number of people who think to check on his first two strengths, and while he could also be quite smart at the shape-rotate-y stuff (and is probably not blisteringly incompetent at it), I see at present absolutely no reason to assume that SBF is "really really good at STEM/maths".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
SBF and his friends stole billions of dollars. Either they go to jail at some point, or they manage to sneak away like most crypto fraudsters. Neither outcome would be remarkable.
This kind of gotcha journalism is lame. SBF gives the same so slow stupid answers to every question and never really says anything concrete. Hopefully his new lawyer can convince him to stop embarrassing himself.
The interesting part is the people who jumped ship back before any of this came out, when Bankman-Fried was still being lionised as a genius and philanthropist. Some of them make vague allusions to being scared to say anything because Bankman-Fried was vindictive, and that's probably true: at the time, he had enough clout and good reputation that he could have make things uncomfortable for people who spoke out against him.
But that's a deficit of the EA crowd that I've noted (reading back the reports around sex pests and worse in the community, it struck me very much): nobody wants to be a nark. There's a real reluctance and indeed abhorrence of "going to the cops". Reading the various accounts of, and reactions to, that case about a harasser and abuser had me yelling all through it "For fuck's sake, he did that, why didn't you go to the cops???"
But, no. There's so much nuance, you see, and context, and grey areas, and that might be victim blaming, and this is not the community norm to be vindictive and punitive, and and and... so in several cases there were formal committees which set up and investigated and issued a report and said, in effect, 'we can't do anything about anything'.
Bankman-Fried got away with all this for so long because EA/Rationalist values are to be nice people and value community and not to engage with the state because of their non-traditional values and attitudes (I mean, cops are all part of the carceral state which has a monopoly on violence and and and).
So there were people who, back at the start, had an idea shady shit was going on but they didn't want to rock the boat especially not drag the other people still there into trouble, so they just left. It would be very, very interesting to track them down and find out what they knew; why did you resign as co-CEO of Alameda, for instance? Why did this set of people leave? What was going on, that they didn't like and didn't think was what they signed up to?
But we probably won't ever get that, because Bay Area Omertà.
Yeah I've heard some awful shit (like death threats to AI researchers from AI safety folks) but can never actually accuse anyone because the code of silence among that group is surprisingly strong.
There are some public accusations - such as stuff against leverage research here, here, drama in comments, commentary, potentially wrong initation of curzi post. Even there there's a sense it should've been public earlier. There's also the ziz stuff.
There are also periodic struggle sessions about being safe for women - in the comments specific people are called out for misconduct.
Any of these would make for great effortposts on the marsey site!
Yeah, but it's all within the group. Whisper campaigns. Nods and winks about "we can't invite so-and-so because, well, you know what he's like". But never going outside, never any suggestion that maybe if so-and-so is such a pest, it's not safe to be around him if you're a woman or trans or whatever, that this behaviour is at the level of "get the authorities involved". Lots of internal drama and struggle sessions, but dead silence around outsiders.
That "safe for women" link - and what did this delicate blossom do, apart from clenching fists and tears streaming down her face? Write a long blog post that will only be read by insiders, instead of (if there really is a genuine problem, instead of simply "you are not validating my lived experience and so I must stamp my foot!") doing anything concrete - even just going "hump this for a game of soldiers" and walking away.
More options
Context Copy link
Agreed! Those posts, including Ziz's blog and general craziness, are what I was thinking of. I've also heard some recent stuff said in confidence from a couple of friends in the space. At one AI Safety workshop apparently there was an older gentleman who owned an AI research company. In the anonymous 'ideas to save the world' spreadsheet, apparently someone wrote "kill X person (owner of the AI company, in that same workshop)."
My friend reported that the young event organizers just kind of nervously laughed and said don't do it again, without really addressing it or trying to find out who was responsible. That kind of behavior with kids in/just out of college who legitimately think the world will end soon is deeply troubling to me.
Trying to find out who was responsible for a specific post on a designed-to-be-anonymous spreadsheet would have been a massive breech of trust.
True... but that sort of death threat, even joking, should warrant immediately shutting down the workshop and severely scolding everyone in any remotely healthy group setting. Again, especially when dealing with impressionable and radicalized young folks. I see it as only a matter of time before AI safety terrorists start doing incredibly dumb things, shooting the movement in the foot.
More options
Context Copy link
Zounds am I sick of "Death Threats" discourse. What named person has ever actually been killed following an anonymous death threat from some extremely online dork? If you'd looked around the AI conference and seen the scrawny pale guys there, you wouldn't have worried about the death threat either. Death threats can't be used as some trump card of oppression, they're too easy to fake and too hard to verify.
It's also actually a good conversation starter. If X's work is going to destroy the world, don't we have a responsibility to restrain him if he won't restrain himself? There's a lot of good philosophical debate to be had there, it wouldn't surprise me if X threw it in the hat himself to start discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Boy oh boy. It's sad to see how much effort Scott et al. need to expend on defense in the comments for every post like this, and they can just post the same one each week until people are ground down and give in. The last one was demanding Title IX inquisitions for EA, right?
More options
Context Copy link
Struggle sessions about being safe for women, in particular, seem more like a null hypothesis than indication of anything actually wrong. If anything, I would expect it to be counter-associated with actually being an unsafe place for women.
Oh, agree - the above is evidence of EA publicly discussing 'awful shit', as opposed to evidence that EA is bad - as the comments go into, EA puts a lot of effort into 'safe place for women'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IMO the crypto people are much more likely to be in the boat of "I know this is a scam but I won't say" than EA people SBF knew (besides people directly in FTX) since they're deeper on the process side of making that money.
But the crypto people know that imo because they themselves are running the same scam. Binance's CZ (who basically helped take down SBF) for example looks very shady. Ever since this FTX thing he's continually been saying they have no problems (like SBF did) while steadfastly refusing to do an audit.
Not only do they not want to out themselves, not only do they hold each other's funny money as (worthless) collateral, everyone has to worry about what happens to the entire space when large exchanges go down. (This is why SBF was cultivating the image of savior for failing exchanges)
Combine their shared complicity and interests with SBF being a booster for crypto and courting regulators and politicians I'm not surprised that the people most knowledgeable shut up.
All the crypto people I know weren't touching FTX with a 50 foot pole. Crypto people tend to mess around with decentralized exchanges.
Crypto people would also know that margin trading is bullshit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If there is a warrant for his arrest, which I am sure will eventually happen, the odds are not good (except this guy [1] and a few others, so we're talking a tiny possibility, but this was in 1998; feds have way better tech and will not make those mistakes again).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruffo [1]
I have followed this for awhile. The level of incompetence in that case is astounding, if not willful. They basically let him walk away ..a guy who had millions presumably overseas an a 15+ year sentence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Enough people buy into his game. Maxine Waters. Even Bill Ackman has talked about him being honest. On a jury of 12 I wouldn’t be surprised if he could convince 1 or 2 every joes who know nothing about the evidence issues to vote with him.
I highly doubt he will submit to a jury trial. It would take years and the odds would be greatly against him prevailing.
He might have no choice. I think the facts in the case would rationalize a Madoff level punishment. He might be better off hoping his snake oil salesman routine fools a couple jurors.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
unlikely. this is why the feds wait so long to arrest , to gather enough evidence to make sure this cannot happen ever.
Why do you think evidence would matter? We are talking about a good salesman versus boring accounting and custodial rules. The entire argument I’m making is he could just get a few jurors to like him versus some UC Chicago professor brought in as an expert witness that what he did was outright theft.
the feds have something like a 99% conviction rate. The odds he will be among those lucky 1%? not too good, imho
Why is that relevant when I’m citing a specific reason for why that would not be relevant.
I do agree he gets convicted more likely than not but I would buy that 99-1 odds all day long. It’s a completely obvious Ponzi scheme and he’s got high ranking congresswomen praising him who had to get scolded by higher ups.
because it would not work..jury nullification is rare, usually motivated by political reasons, not fraud
I’m not calling it nullification. They would just believe he’s innocent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Its hard to find someone more annoying than SBF, but this guy fits the bill. The guy who reports on scams after the damage is done, or scams no one actually falls for but total idiots or obvious inside jobs. Where was this guy a month ago. Just more annoying clickbait from this guy.
Well, you have a point about all the people who come out of the woodwork after something happens and go "I knew it all along", but on the other hand if you don't have solid enough evidence that somebody is scamming, just strong suspicions or indications that something is not right, then posting anything online or in the media about "Well-respected Joe Jones is a big fat fraud" is going to get you into legal trouble.
For example, right now I'm seeing stuff online that indicates maybe something hooky is going on with Binance. But it's also likely that maybe the guy claiming this is lying or crazy. My own personal opinion is that crypto is a scam (right now, at least) and I don't have enough information to point at Binance above any of the rest of them as "Yep, for sure, this is a scam and a fraud".
If six or more months down the line it comes out that yes, Binance is a scam like FTX, then I'll be one of the "where were you a month ago?" people saying "I knew it". I don't know it, I may suspect it or have feelings that it could be, but without evidence one way or the other, I can't and won't go on the record about "This is a fraud".
Yeah, some people suspected FTX was fishy well before its implosion, but no one made any link between Alameda, binance and FTT, etc.
I believe this is protected by the 1st Amd. This is what Bill Ackman did with Herbalife, and what professional short-sellers do. They get evidence of fraud and make their case. They can be wrong, but it's hard to win damages against short sellers if taken to civil court.
More options
Context Copy link
Related case: by all info known to me Tether is a scam. But my reaction is to "lets not invest anything into it or anything related" not "spend effort on making people aware what is going on".
The same goes for FTX - if someone believed lies of 15% risk free returns and is not my family member/friends then I am not going to bother with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Uhhh, he literally did.
I mean, okay, he didn’t come out and say “FTX is a fraud, your money is getting stolen as we speak.” But he did strongly imply it.
More options
Context Copy link
I think he actually did call some crypto scams ahead of time...
More options
Context Copy link
Speaking of which, where was this guy? He seems to have opinions on crypto and it's his schtick to uncover overpriced frauds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link