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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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.

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

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.

The fact that people think his League of Legends ranking could actually correlate to his IQ in this thread is surprisingly high.

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.

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.

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.

Paul DePodesta has also been working in Major League front offices since he got out of college. It's not like he got hired off the street after someone saw how he dominated his roto league.

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