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Jesus Christ…does this guy not know that you should keep quiet when you’re the subject of a criminal investigation from multiple government agencies?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
curiousgal 4y ago
I am 30 years old and I am laughing at anyone who has trusted these kids with anything. His balance sheet shows just how childish and out of depth he and his possie of "execs" are.
- nabogh 4y ago
  Just looked it up. SBF is 30?
  - twicetwice 4y ago
    Yup, he founded Alameda Research in 2017 at age 25 and FTX in 2019 at 27.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    And I believe for the CFO it was her first job after college. And for another linked CEO they'd been a trader for three years, and then were made CEO at Alameda?
chrchang523 4y ago
This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing? BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually. COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing. BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical. COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie... (See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-criterion?commentId=3JEaWCYG2B5ocBJg7 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.) Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  SBF talks about money like a prop trader who thinks that blowing your account is just a thing that happens to everyone in their lifetime, crossed with an extreme Rationalist (of the self-described "Rationalist" community) who thinks everything can be reduced to choosing between Column A and Column B based on which column has more utils.
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    Is he wrong? I suspect that even if he does jail time for fraud etc. then he will come out of it famous, and with plenty of deep-pocketed investors lined up to ride another wave. What are the actual consequences to the big guys?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Quite a lot of Rationalists aren't Utilitarians, for various reasons. Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently: """I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives. Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""
- alexb_ 4y ago
  >COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? >BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option. This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"
jaywalk 4y ago
But stealing and then losing customer deposits "was never the intention" You know, "Sometimes life creeps up on you" and then the customer deposits you stole are gone! He's clearly innocent, so he has nothing to worry about.
- pram 4y ago
  We've all been there!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

curiousgal 4y ago

I am 30 years old and I am laughing at anyone who has trusted these kids with anything. His balance sheet shows just how childish and out of depth he and his possie of "execs" are.

nabogh 4y ago
Just looked it up. SBF is 30?
- twicetwice 4y ago
  Yup, he founded Alameda Research in 2017 at age 25 and FTX in 2019 at 27.
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  And I believe for the CFO it was her first job after college. And for another linked CEO they'd been a trader for three years, and then were made CEO at Alameda?

chrchang523 4y ago

This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing? BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually. COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing. BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical. COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie... (See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-criterion?commentId=3JEaWCYG2B5ocBJg7 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.) Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
SBF talks about money like a prop trader who thinks that blowing your account is just a thing that happens to everyone in their lifetime, crossed with an extreme Rationalist (of the self-described "Rationalist" community) who thinks everything can be reduced to choosing between Column A and Column B based on which column has more utils.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  Is he wrong? I suspect that even if he does jail time for fraud etc. then he will come out of it famous, and with plenty of deep-pocketed investors lined up to ride another wave. What are the actual consequences to the big guys?
- ben_w 4y ago
  Quite a lot of Rationalists aren't Utilitarians, for various reasons. Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently: """I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives. Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""
alexb_ 4y ago
>COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? >BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option. This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"

jaywalk 4y ago

But stealing and then losing customer deposits "was never the intention" You know, "Sometimes life creeps up on you" and then the customer deposits you stole are gone! He's clearly innocent, so he has nothing to worry about.

pram 4y ago
We've all been there!