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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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There is one question I still need answered: It’s pretty clear at this point that SBF does not care about other people in the sense of having normal “empathy”. He lies, cheats, and screws people over all the time. And yet, he doesn’t seem particularly selfish? The guy was working 18 hours a day, ate vegan food, and had an ugly girlfriend (okay, he was def banging hot chicks on the side, but still). What was the money for? His actions don’t make sense if he was trying to maximize his own wellbeing. Why would he go on Twitter spaces and admit to fraud while under house arrest? Why take the stand at trial and almost certainly get years added to his sentence? He wasn’t trying to get out of jail. He was trying to restart the grift. If he got the chance to do it all over again, the only thing he’d change would be not paying CZ in FTT tokens.

So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part. Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy? I can understand being an uncaring sociopath. I can understand being driven by empathetic reason. I cannot understand what base human impulses drive SBF. He is an enigma, the Joker, a man I don’t fully understand.

So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part.

Absolutely that, the maximising utility bit. He found a theory that meshed with his quirks around maths and probability games, and he fastened onto it like a limpet. And I am beginning to think that it filled, for him, the space that ordinary people have around rituals like Christmas and birthdays. Again, this is me taking my own impression from what is only short mentions in the book, but it struck me that the parents didn't celebrate his birthday, for example, because there was a good chance they simply forgot it.

If you're possibly developmentally disordered and you're growing up the weird, oddball kid the elder of two kids where your younger brother is more 'normal' and more popular, even with your own parents, in the kind of household where the parents go "Oh, it's your birthday? Huh, who knew?" and the model of interpersonal interactions you are getting is "give them money to shut them up/make them go away so we can get on with the important stuff" (like fancy dinner parties) - then yeah, I can see the attraction in a shiny theory where you can do good and get all the validation and praise by "give them money to make them go away".

There's a sort of fox-and-sour-grapes comment about physical attractiveness which made me smile, because it is very much a teenager's view of dealing with rejection (but then again, Bankman-Fried was in his late twenties when Lewis was writing the book, and I do think it's telling that he's still stuck at this middle-school level):

His whole life, as far back as he could remember, he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives. “You start by making decisions on who you are going to be with based on how they look,” he said. “Then, because of that, you make bad choices about religion and food and everything else. Then you are just rolling the dice on who you are going to be.” Anna Wintour, now that he thought of it, represented much of what he disliked about human beings. “There are very few businesses that I have strong moral objections to, and hers is one of them,” he said. “I actually have disdain for fashion. I have general disdain for the importance that physical attractiveness has, and this is one thing emanating out of that.”

I mean, you're this rather scruffy, not the most handsome, slightly chubby and unfit kid in high school, you're already something of a weirdo or not fitting in, of course you're going to downplay the importance of looks: "I don't care if the pretty girls aren't interested in me, I'm not interested in them first, so hah!" But there's a deeper problem there; he's not interested in much of anything except the few things that seem to hit the dopamine receptors for him:

[Anna Wintour] looked like a million bucks, but her art, like all art, was wasted on Sam. When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance — even a person he’d slept with — he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

...He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people’s existence. He didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the Bankman-Frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. “We did a few trips,” he said. “I basically hated it.” To his unrelenting alienation there was one exception: games. In sixth grade Sam heard about a game called Magic: The Gathering. For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it.

[Early FTX employees] And they pretty much all shared, or said they shared, their boss’s utter indifference to grace or beauty.

So yeah, I'm leaning more and more towards the view that while he certainly is a crook, it wasn't avarice driving him, or not as ordinary people would define it; he wanted the money because it was a symbol of success, and to him, success means "Mom and Dad approve of what I'm doing, plus I get to live how I like and people have to do what I want" as well as the ego-boost of "See, I am the Only Guy Who's Always Right" from the approval of the EA crowd. And I think he picked EA as his philosophy because his younger brother (the popular, normal one, remember!) was already involved in that, it was the kind of nice liberal 'right side of history' values his mother would approve of (again, I'm feeling like Herr Doktor Freud with the mommy issues but uh, yeah, I think some definitely there) and the theory behind it all, which revolved around Bayes Theorem etc., fitted into the slots in his brain that he reserved for "worth paying attention to".

Also, yes I'm blaming the parents because he should have been brought to child psychologists and so forth from an early age since I do think that there's autism spectrum/ADHD/worrying lack of empathy going on there, not treated as Mommy's Little Echo:

By the time Sam was eight she had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s. She remembered the instant that happened. She had been at Stanford for over a decade, a frequent contributor of difficult papers to academic journals. “I was walking him to school, and he asked me what I was doing,” recalled Barbara. “I told him I was giving some paper, and he asked, ‘What’s it on?’” I gave him a bullshit answer, and he pressed me on it, and by the end of the walk we were in the middle of a deep conversation about the argument. The points he was making were better than any of the reviewers’. At that moment my parenting style changed.”

Yeah, no. I don't care how bright your eight year old is (and Bankman-Fried is smart but not genius-level smart), he's not going to be doing a law paper critique better than adult reviewers. What he is doing parroting back to you the things he's learned, from listening to you talking at those adult dinner parties, that you think and like and defend.

Caveat: I may be being massively unfair to the parents as I haven't read the entire book yet. They may indeed have been sending him to therapists and what-not. But so far, I get the impression that Barbara was the main parent, and both parents just accepted that little Sammy was weird and not like other kids, but he was doing okay in school and not in trouble, so whatever. Let him stay in his bedroom, we've got Pointless Virtue Signalling to get on with:

None of what the Bankman-Frieds did was for show; they weren’t that kind of people. They just really thought about what they did before they did it. In his twenties Sam would learn that his parents had never married. In silent protest of the fact that their gay friends could not legally marry, they’d joined in a civil union. And they never said a word about it to their children, or to anyone else, as far as Sam could tell.

Never told anyone, huh? If I believe that (which I don't), then it's not really an effective protest about unfair and unequal treatment, now is it? Imagine in the Civil Rights Era a white proponent of equal rights going "Well, I'm not going to drink out of public water fountains if black people can't use them too, but I'm not going to say a word to anyone about it so no-one will ever know that's what I'm protesting. That will certainly show the government what's what!" Pointless. Virtue. Signalling.

EDIT: Honestly, Babs, you should have thrown your kid a few birthday parties. Make him feel special. That you, as his goddamn family, cared enough about him to give a damn in taking time and trouble to consider what he liked and then prepared it for him, instead of "yeah, if you want something, tell me and I'll buy it" (and that will get you out of my hair when I can't even be bothered to remember your birthday). Then he wouldn't have grown up with such a desperate need for approval that he did what he did with FTX/Alameda Research.

EDIT EDIT: I'm not saying I'm getting Mrs Jellyby vibes here but I'm not saying I'm not, either.

The guy was working 18 hours a day

...constantly playing video games at an unusually poor level of ability.

Who was he banging on the side? I haven’t heard anything.

Not too much detail in the book as far as I've got, but he has unnamed girlfriends at some time, plus romantic interest in Tara MacAulay, one of the co-founders of Alameda Research, and then Caroline Ellison.

So even if he wasn't a Chadly stud, he wasn't having trouble finding girlfriends, either.

Not 100% confirmed, but I think the COO Constance Wang plus some other Asian crypto hedge fund lady. Plus you know, we men, we can assume.

/r/nbacircirclejerk is apparently everywhere

SBF also (commit to) spend a hundred million dollars on a sportsball stadium endorsement deal for a game he didn't care about. It's like the hours spent being awful at League of Legends that probably pad that workweek, or being vegan except for a shrimp accident, or not caring how hotel rooms or schedules worked. He banged a bunch of not-supermodel-tier women because he didn't need (and probably wouldn't have benefited from) a supermodel to get what he needed.

I'd like to think it was the same problem as Ayn Rand going from long speeches about honesty and fidelity through relationship to having an abusive affair: both were simply corked out of their gourd on the finest medicinal accellerants available, with corresponding monofocus on whatever was in front of them, augmented by the feeling and demand that this task was the right one.

But most people on these drugs don't do that, and there's no small number of teetotalers who do. It could well just be an addictive personality to a particularly boring sort of addiction, and I'll admit it's something I've seen as a temptation myself. It's the sort of thing that makes Expert Roulette in FFXIV not-boring, or arguing on the internet irresistible, and it's not always bad on the margins. Emphasis on that last bit.

Now you've got me wondering about the vegan bit 😁

How much was genuine conviction, and how much was copying others/agreeing with what they said but not meaning it (which he's been doing a lot of up to as far as I've read)?

Days after his arrival at MIT, for example, he’d met another freshman, Adam Yedidia — the friend whom Jane Street eventually hired. They’d fallen into a conversation about utilitarianism. Sam argued that it was life’s only sensible philosophy, and that the main reason people didn’t see this was a fear of where it would lead them. (“What scares people most about utilitarianism is that it encourages selflessness.”) Adam had listened to Sam go on about his beliefs until he finally said, If you really believed all that, you wouldn’t eat meat. At little cost to yourself you reduce a lot of suffering. Sam was serious about minimizing suffering. Sam also liked his fried chicken — but that wasn’t really an argument. “Whatever he said had been rattling around in my head, but I had been avoiding it because of a thought I did not want to have,” said Sam. “The thought was: I spend thirty minutes enjoying chicken and the chicken endures five weeks of torture.” There was nothing to do but overhaul his diet, and he did. “There are easy vegetarians and there are hard ones, and he was a hard one,” said Adam. “It’s unusual to change something like that when it’s difficult.”

...As classmates at Crystal Springs Uplands, Gabe [Sam's younger brother] and Nishad had gone vegan together

...Sam didn’t care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.

So he started off vegetarian, but that might have been more 'easy' vegetarian than his friend assumed (e.g. would eat eggs/shrimp). The vegan part may simply have been that he was around a lot of vegans and it was just easier for him to do the "Yup, vegan too!" bit (then go out and eat whatever the hell he liked) than have discussions about it every time anyone ordered a meal.

I'd believe he was vegetarian, or semi-vegetarian, but as for the veganism - I think possibly just copying others/letting them assume, by his favourite trick of agreeing while interiorly not intending to keep his word, that he was all the way vegan.

except for a shrimp accident,

Wasn't there also a video where he was being interviewed about his vegan lifestyle, in front of his open fridge, that had eggs in it?

Yeah. Could have been for other people using the fridge, but hard to tell.

Where's Thomas Jane when you need him?

Scott Pilgrim was a chillingly accurate documentary.

One of the most memorable and surreal moviegoing experience of my life was going into Scott Pilgrim vs The World completely cold and then this scene happening.

No trailers, and no prior knowledge of the property beyond that it was directed by the guy who did Hot Fuzz, and that my date wanted to see it. I thought I'd been talked into a quirky hipster rom-com a la Garden State, and rarely have I been so pleased to be wrong.

"Sam, isn't it "shrimp want me, AIs fear me"?

Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy?

That seems the easiest to answer: because maximizing multiversal expected utility means making a number go up, and a particularly hard number to make go up at that. If empathy isn’t necessary to drive a Tetris world champion devote his life to getting the highest possible score, then it isn’t necessary to motivate SBF’s actions either.

Obviously, the correct way to maximize multiversal expected utility is to make as many paperclips as possible. Make number go up!

/s

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