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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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A friend of mine argued that Michael Lewis' strange sympathy for his man-child subject, and for the parents poised to lose their child, might have more than a little to do with Lewis' own grief at recently losing his daughter. Relevant? I have no idea.

Possibly, it's difficult to know. What puzzles me enormously is that people who met Bankman-Fried in real life seem to have been charmed by him, and I cannot for the life of me imagine how he did that. Lewis seems to have fallen for it in the same way: once you let him lecture you, he seems to have this amazing ability to convince normal people that up was down. Even people looking to invest funds, who surely were dealing with plausible rogues every day in their business, seem to have put down all their guards and just thrown money at Bankman-Fried once they'd talked to him.

I first heard about Sam Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021 from a friend who, oddly enough, wanted me to help him figure out who he was. My friend was about to close a deal with Sam that would bind their fates, through an exchange of shares in each other’s companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ...My friend asked me if I could meet with Sam and report back whatever I made of him.

A few weeks later, Sam was on my front porch in Berkeley, California. ...We went for a walk — the only time in the next two years I would ever see this person who was always dressed for a hike actually go for one. During our walk I prodded him with questions, but after a while I was mostly just listening.

...By the end of this walk I was totally sold. I called my friend and said something like: Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong? It was only later that I realized I hadn’t even begun to answer his original question: Who was this guy?

I imagine that is why he testified on his own behalf in the trial, because he was so accustomed to letting the stream of bullshit wash over people and get them nodding along with him, but being questioned by a prosecutor in a criminal trial is not at all the same thing as being allowed to talk people into agreement with you, and the magic failed him there.

This is going to sound like a very weird and overwrought comparison to make, but I imagine Hitler must have had the same kind of uncanny ability to charm people face-to-face, because you look at this guy from Austria who wasn't much of anything and how the hell did he get to where he ended up as? How did he talk people into taking him seriously? How could enough people go along with what, when looked at in isolation and written down, are plainly preposterous actions?

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