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There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-frie

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” So there you have it: Books are for losers. I guess that explains a lot.

Emma_Goldman 4y ago
Wow... that is a shocking level of philistinism given his parentage. His own mum wrote a seemingly well-received book, and Will MacAskill, who he claims is his moral hero, has written three books.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Hardcore gamers don’t have the time to read books. Besides, books have no points, no special effects, other players and so on. There you have it, the philistines time has come. Let’s hope it won’t last too long
lordnacho 4y ago
Wow, I'm really surprised. Of all the people who could make anti-intellectual statements, I really thought SBF was one of the last. I get that many books these days are long winded (looking at you Nassim Taleb) ways to make a point, but someone absolutely needs to document all the thinking somewhere. Whether you read the whole book in detail is also optional. But to generalize this much about all books is astonishing. Plus he's a math/physics grad, aren't those books super dense with new lemmas on every page?
- ahelwer 4y ago
  Being an effective altruist doesn't make someone an intellectual. They teach the boy-in-pond thought experiment the first week of any college elective ethics class. They hand out The Life You Could Save to all harvard undergrads in the first week. Locking yourself into a myopic utilitarianism that avoids all structural critiques seems roughly the opposite of an open intellectual perspective.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I wasn't really thinking about EA, more that the type of person who is brought up by college professors and gets through some quite tight eye-of-the-needle admissions processes tends to be the kind of person who venerates knowledge in its most venerable form.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I think that the very very base level of EA (consider the relative good/efficiency of various charitable giving options; per-dollar things like mosquito nets save lots of lives) is not unreasonable, but the steps beyond are outrageous. You've got people saying that the only ethical giving is to AI organizations so that we either don't create the AI apocalypse or somehow convert all of our minds to digital form and this future benefit will outweigh every possible thing you could achieve today. When people say "what use is the humanities" I just gawk at this new generation of tech billionaires who seemingly have developed very strongly held opinions about the social organization of people without looking at all at the prior work in this area.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Most EA’s are just donating to givewell(global health and poverty). The long termists are a small portion of the movement and ai safety even smaller.
      - Emma_Goldman 4y ago
        I have followed EA for ten years and there is absolutely no doubt that its most prominent voices - Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, Rob Wiblin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, not to mention Sam Bankman-Fried - ascribe enormous significance to AI. I myself have yet to see a compelling argument as to how AGI is possible, let alone dangerous. If you look at 80,000 hours' list of 'most pressing problems', AI safety is first: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ Open Phil has donated $250m to AI safety according to its website: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advanced-ai/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advan...
300bps 4y ago
I guess that explains a lot No explanation necessary. Anyone paying attention knew this was a scam. SBF used his well connected parents to start a scam company. He created back doors in his accounting software to hide money flows. He hired his girlfriend (Harry Potter fan in her 20s) to be CEO of Alameda trading and transferred $10 billion in client funds for her to trade like it was their own money. Declared bankruptcy and resigned as CEO yesterday. Late last night someone pushed out new versions of the FTX website and apps with malware in them and stole $600 million worth of cryptocurrency which may be all that’s left of assets. Tom Brady was a big investor. Sequoia. Ontario Teacher’s Pension. So many more. https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1-billion-client-funds-missing-failed-crypto-firm-ftx-sources-2022-11-12/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1... https://www.reuters.com/technology/ftx-says-it-is-investigating-unauthorized-transactions-2022-11-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/ftx-says-it-is-investigat... https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/11/caroline-ellison-alameda-research-ftx-sam-bankman-fried https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/11/caroline-elli...
- enkid 4y ago
  Why is being a Harry Potter fan a pertinent detail? Plenty of people still like things they picked up when they were kids.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - 300bps 4y ago
      If saying she’s a Harry Potter fan is a “micro-aggresssion” what do you call her stealing $95 million from public school teachers in Ontario? What a ridiculous thing to be offended by.
      - 4y ago
Hamuko 4y ago
>I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. Either his three books are really short, or they're one of his several fuck ups.
- erk__ 4y ago
  I think that is a inline response in the article to SBF's statement
astoor 4y ago
There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality from the rest of us where everything is reversed (incompetence is competence, war is peace, ignorance is strength, etc.), or is there something else I'm missing?
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  They likely thought they'd be able to front run any issues. VCs don't invest to build viable businesses, they invest to make money. You can make a lot of money as an insider to a Ponzi scheme.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    I was kinda thinking the sell to investors was that only the depositors were going to lose all their money and that suited the equity investors just fine. But seems like even that wasn’t the case.
  - astoor 4y ago
    If you're planning on front-running any issues, I doubt you'd put articles like that (which publicly exhibit an almost pathological lack of self-awareness) on your website.
- ahMath8 4y ago
- vinyl7 4y ago
  A decade of money printing left investors with more money than they knew what to do with, so they threw it at anything related to current thing chasing the next FANG (which by the way, hasn't really happened since the last crash...probably because the startup market is saturated). It was a good thing after the 2008 crash and we needed to revive the economy, but it went on for far far too long and now we have a bunch of overvalued/unprofitable/scam companies.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
skriptonit - polozhenie (slowed + reverb)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Emma_Goldman 4y ago

Wow... that is a shocking level of philistinism given his parentage. His own mum wrote a seemingly well-received book, and Will MacAskill, who he claims is his moral hero, has written three books.

tartoran 4y ago
Hardcore gamers don’t have the time to read books. Besides, books have no points, no special effects, other players and so on. There you have it, the philistines time has come. Let’s hope it won’t last too long

lordnacho 4y ago

Wow, I'm really surprised. Of all the people who could make anti-intellectual statements, I really thought SBF was one of the last. I get that many books these days are long winded (looking at you Nassim Taleb) ways to make a point, but someone absolutely needs to document all the thinking somewhere. Whether you read the whole book in detail is also optional. But to generalize this much about all books is astonishing. Plus he's a math/physics grad, aren't those books super dense with new lemmas on every page?

ahelwer 4y ago
Being an effective altruist doesn't make someone an intellectual. They teach the boy-in-pond thought experiment the first week of any college elective ethics class. They hand out The Life You Could Save to all harvard undergrads in the first week. Locking yourself into a myopic utilitarianism that avoids all structural critiques seems roughly the opposite of an open intellectual perspective.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I wasn't really thinking about EA, more that the type of person who is brought up by college professors and gets through some quite tight eye-of-the-needle admissions processes tends to be the kind of person who venerates knowledge in its most venerable form.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I think that the very very base level of EA (consider the relative good/efficiency of various charitable giving options; per-dollar things like mosquito nets save lots of lives) is not unreasonable, but the steps beyond are outrageous. You've got people saying that the only ethical giving is to AI organizations so that we either don't create the AI apocalypse or somehow convert all of our minds to digital form and this future benefit will outweigh every possible thing you could achieve today. When people say "what use is the humanities" I just gawk at this new generation of tech billionaires who seemingly have developed very strongly held opinions about the social organization of people without looking at all at the prior work in this area.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Most EA’s are just donating to givewell(global health and poverty). The long termists are a small portion of the movement and ai safety even smaller.
    - Emma_Goldman 4y ago
      I have followed EA for ten years and there is absolutely no doubt that its most prominent voices - Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, Rob Wiblin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, not to mention Sam Bankman-Fried - ascribe enormous significance to AI. I myself have yet to see a compelling argument as to how AGI is possible, let alone dangerous. If you look at 80,000 hours' list of 'most pressing problems', AI safety is first: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ Open Phil has donated $250m to AI safety according to its website: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advanced-ai/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advan...

300bps 4y ago

I guess that explains a lot No explanation necessary. Anyone paying attention knew this was a scam. SBF used his well connected parents to start a scam company. He created back doors in his accounting software to hide money flows. He hired his girlfriend (Harry Potter fan in her 20s) to be CEO of Alameda trading and transferred $10 billion in client funds for her to trade like it was their own money. Declared bankruptcy and resigned as CEO yesterday. Late last night someone pushed out new versions of the FTX website and apps with malware in them and stole $600 million worth of cryptocurrency which may be all that’s left of assets. Tom Brady was a big investor. Sequoia. Ontario Teacher’s Pension. So many more. https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1-billion-client-funds-missing-failed-crypto-firm-ftx-sources-2022-11-12/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1... https://www.reuters.com/technology/ftx-says-it-is-investigating-unauthorized-transactions-2022-11-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/ftx-says-it-is-investigat... https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/11/caroline-ellison-alameda-research-ftx-sam-bankman-fried https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/11/caroline-elli...

enkid 4y ago
Why is being a Harry Potter fan a pertinent detail? Plenty of people still like things they picked up when they were kids.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 300bps 4y ago
    If saying she’s a Harry Potter fan is a “micro-aggresssion” what do you call her stealing $95 million from public school teachers in Ontario? What a ridiculous thing to be offended by.
    - 4y ago

Hamuko 4y ago

>I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. Either his three books are really short, or they're one of his several fuck ups.

erk__ 4y ago
I think that is a inline response in the article to SBF's statement

astoor 4y ago

There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality from the rest of us where everything is reversed (incompetence is competence, war is peace, ignorance is strength, etc.), or is there something else I'm missing?

BobbyJo 4y ago
They likely thought they'd be able to front run any issues. VCs don't invest to build viable businesses, they invest to make money. You can make a lot of money as an insider to a Ponzi scheme.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I was kinda thinking the sell to investors was that only the depositors were going to lose all their money and that suited the equity investors just fine. But seems like even that wasn’t the case.
- astoor 4y ago
  If you're planning on front-running any issues, I doubt you'd put articles like that (which publicly exhibit an almost pathological lack of self-awareness) on your website.
ahMath8 4y ago
vinyl7 4y ago
A decade of money printing left investors with more money than they knew what to do with, so they threw it at anything related to current thing chasing the next FANG (which by the way, hasn't really happened since the last crash...probably because the startup market is saturated). It was a good thing after the 2008 crash and we needed to revive the economy, but it went on for far far too long and now we have a bunch of overvalued/unprofitable/scam companies.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

skriptonit - polozhenie (slowed + reverb)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]