6 ms·

What happened to the theory that he'd never be jailed? The expert analysts were so confident.

yieldcrv 3y ago
if he wasn’t an idiot he wouldn’t have been, cant control stupid unless the theory was about collusion in the executive branch and white house, then you still have an independent judiciary
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Same thing that happened with the expert analysis of LK99. It turns out that the real experts tend to be quieter.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages. Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.
- Eji1700 3y ago
  I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out. There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is. I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much. Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >even people in fields associated with better logic This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system. Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript. The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you
    - Eji1700 3y ago
      I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.
- swores 3y ago
  I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true. So... what's the point of your snide comment?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely. As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.
stefan_ 3y ago
To be fair, prosecutors were trying hard to keep him out of it.
- elicash 3y ago
  It's certainly true that prosecutors love when defendants keep talking publicly about the case. It makes their job much easier.
asu_thomas 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  I am sorry, but you're saying investment institutions routinely commit wire fraud? Um, is this true or one of those my-fave-youtube-debate-bro-said-its-true? Where are the whistleblowers? The SEC has a handsome program for such reporting. Or I guess I am naive.
swores 3y ago
The people saying that were presumably making predictions about whether or not he'd be found guilty with a jail sentence (which hasn't yet happened), not that if he does something as stupid as witness tampering he wouldn't have his bail revoked (which is what has happened). Personally I always thought it extremely likely he would get a prison sentence, but I think you're being premature to act like people who didn't think that have already been proven wrong.
- wmf 3y ago
  If he really owned the entire judiciary of the US and Bahamas his bail wouldn't have been revoked.
  - parl_match 3y ago
    Honestly, it sounds like his influence absolutely helped him get cushy terms of release. It was just after _repeated_ and _willful_ violations of the conditions of bail, that it was revoked. This was not his first run-in with the judge over his bail conditions, it's wild that he was allowed more.
    - adrr 3y ago
      What are you comparing it to? There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. I am curious what are the normal thresholds before you get bail revoked.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. The Other Guy has the sense to do vague and diffuse public messaging that (so far, without more of a pattern or additional acts) that has still gotten him warned about continuing it.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I think you missed the threads they're referencing. I see from your other comments you think there's a lot of hot takes in this thread. The threads around the time he was charged were full of nuclear takes about how the justice system was broken, how every minor development in the case meant he would get off scott free, etc. It also brought the antisemites of HN out of the woodwork to share conspiracy theories (given that SBF is a Jewish person who committed a financial crime). They were the roughest threads on HN I had seen at the time. (There were still good, insightful comments, but they were diamonds in the rough.) This is more or less an injoke. I completely see where they're coming from.
Alupis 3y ago
Quit frankly, if SBF would keep his darn mouth shut and stop doing completely irrational stupid things - he probably would remain out on bail at least until his trial. He's become his own worst enemy it seems.
- twelve40 3y ago
  if he thought the leak will help his defense then it's not irrational at all, even if he has to pay for it now
  - Alupis 3y ago
    It's irrational in that his defense was mostly he was in easy over his head and had no intention of defrauding anyone. His actions are making that angle impossible.
    - twelve40 3y ago
      being in over his head while being "manipulated by an evil ex" still sound pretty rational. pretty desperate, but not too inconsistent at least.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        The problem is the Court of Public Opinion matters not one bit. His attorney's could have spun that defense in court. What was there to be gained by his actions? Nothing... in fact, it appears it only served to make his situation worse.
  - BoxFour 3y ago
    It appears to be an exceedingly myopic decision: Preparing for trial at home instead of in confinement would be far more beneficial to his defense groundwork.
    - twelve40 3y ago
      well if they bet the farm on "blaming the ex"... who knows?
matthewdgreen 3y ago
By “expert analysts” did you perhaps mean “random Internet conspiracy theorists”?
JeremyNT 3y ago
This is entirely a self-own, because he was trying to intimidate a witness. If SBF had done the "normal" white collar criminal move of hiring a really expensive team of lawyers and doing what they told him, he'd be free as a bird. But I guess SBF isn't your "normal" white collar criminal - he's a special kind of stupid.
- b112 3y ago
  Your honour, only a truly innocent man, panicking, afraid, would act so absurdly!
- sharts 3y ago
  He’s Stanford special
  - shuckles 3y ago
    He attended MIT.
WeylandYutani 3y ago
SBF is just the fall guy. They always catch the one who took it just a little too far in order to placate the masses and pretend that someone is policing the stock markets. For the record the guy is guilty as sin but so is everyone in crypto.
- simple-thoughts 3y ago
  Do you seriously believe everyone who use’s cryptocurrency is a fraudster? Your claim is ridiculous, in the USA alone over 34 million people own cryptocurrency and approximately zero of them have stolen billion of dollars of assets.
jasonhansel 3y ago
Some people conflate cynicism with wisdom.
sharts 3y ago
Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial. I think a lot of people still predict that he will be set free from any wrongdoing after the trial because of his massive donations and money laundering for the political class.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial. SBF is going to prison. What does he have left to exchange? He has no friends but his parents (who will most likely end up indicted as well from the looks of it). The feds will hang him up high as an example of doing something, while Goldman and BofA get rich on the exact same market.
simple-thoughts 3y ago
His level of stupidity has been shocking even to people who has a low opinion of his competence. Contrast his case with Do Kwon, and you can see why people thought he would escape imprisonment.

if he wasn’t an idiot he wouldn’t have been, cant control stupid unless the theory was about collusion in the executive branch and white house, then you still have an independent judiciary

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Same thing that happened with the expert analysis of LK99. It turns out that the real experts tend to be quieter.

refulgentis 3y ago
In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages. Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.
Eji1700 3y ago
I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out. There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is. I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much. Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >even people in fields associated with better logic This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system. Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript. The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you
  - Eji1700 3y ago
    I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.
swores 3y ago
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true. So... what's the point of your snide comment?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely. As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.

stefan_ 3y ago

To be fair, prosecutors were trying hard to keep him out of it.

elicash 3y ago
It's certainly true that prosecutors love when defendants keep talking publicly about the case. It makes their job much easier.

asu_thomas 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lusus_naturae 3y ago
I am sorry, but you're saying investment institutions routinely commit wire fraud? Um, is this true or one of those my-fave-youtube-debate-bro-said-its-true? Where are the whistleblowers? The SEC has a handsome program for such reporting. Or I guess I am naive.

swores 3y ago

The people saying that were presumably making predictions about whether or not he'd be found guilty with a jail sentence (which hasn't yet happened), not that if he does something as stupid as witness tampering he wouldn't have his bail revoked (which is what has happened). Personally I always thought it extremely likely he would get a prison sentence, but I think you're being premature to act like people who didn't think that have already been proven wrong.

wmf 3y ago
If he really owned the entire judiciary of the US and Bahamas his bail wouldn't have been revoked.
- parl_match 3y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like his influence absolutely helped him get cushy terms of release. It was just after _repeated_ and _willful_ violations of the conditions of bail, that it was revoked. This was not his first run-in with the judge over his bail conditions, it's wild that he was allowed more.
  - adrr 3y ago
    What are you comparing it to? There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. I am curious what are the normal thresholds before you get bail revoked.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. The Other Guy has the sense to do vague and diffuse public messaging that (so far, without more of a pattern or additional acts) that has still gotten him warned about continuing it.
maxbond 3y ago
I think you missed the threads they're referencing. I see from your other comments you think there's a lot of hot takes in this thread. The threads around the time he was charged were full of nuclear takes about how the justice system was broken, how every minor development in the case meant he would get off scott free, etc. It also brought the antisemites of HN out of the woodwork to share conspiracy theories (given that SBF is a Jewish person who committed a financial crime). They were the roughest threads on HN I had seen at the time. (There were still good, insightful comments, but they were diamonds in the rough.) This is more or less an injoke. I completely see where they're coming from.

Alupis 3y ago

Quit frankly, if SBF would keep his darn mouth shut and stop doing completely irrational stupid things - he probably would remain out on bail at least until his trial. He's become his own worst enemy it seems.

twelve40 3y ago
if he thought the leak will help his defense then it's not irrational at all, even if he has to pay for it now
- Alupis 3y ago
  It's irrational in that his defense was mostly he was in easy over his head and had no intention of defrauding anyone. His actions are making that angle impossible.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    being in over his head while being "manipulated by an evil ex" still sound pretty rational. pretty desperate, but not too inconsistent at least.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      The problem is the Court of Public Opinion matters not one bit. His attorney's could have spun that defense in court. What was there to be gained by his actions? Nothing... in fact, it appears it only served to make his situation worse.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  It appears to be an exceedingly myopic decision: Preparing for trial at home instead of in confinement would be far more beneficial to his defense groundwork.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    well if they bet the farm on "blaming the ex"... who knows?

matthewdgreen 3y ago

By “expert analysts” did you perhaps mean “random Internet conspiracy theorists”?

JeremyNT 3y ago

This is entirely a self-own, because he was trying to intimidate a witness. If SBF had done the "normal" white collar criminal move of hiring a really expensive team of lawyers and doing what they told him, he'd be free as a bird. But I guess SBF isn't your "normal" white collar criminal - he's a special kind of stupid.

b112 3y ago
Your honour, only a truly innocent man, panicking, afraid, would act so absurdly!
sharts 3y ago
He’s Stanford special
- shuckles 3y ago
  He attended MIT.

WeylandYutani 3y ago

SBF is just the fall guy. They always catch the one who took it just a little too far in order to placate the masses and pretend that someone is policing the stock markets. For the record the guy is guilty as sin but so is everyone in crypto.

simple-thoughts 3y ago
Do you seriously believe everyone who use’s cryptocurrency is a fraudster? Your claim is ridiculous, in the USA alone over 34 million people own cryptocurrency and approximately zero of them have stolen billion of dollars of assets.

jasonhansel 3y ago

Some people conflate cynicism with wisdom.

sharts 3y ago

Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial. I think a lot of people still predict that he will be set free from any wrongdoing after the trial because of his massive donations and money laundering for the political class.

ramesh31 3y ago
>Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial. SBF is going to prison. What does he have left to exchange? He has no friends but his parents (who will most likely end up indicted as well from the looks of it). The feds will hang him up high as an example of doing something, while Goldman and BofA get rich on the exact same market.

simple-thoughts 3y ago

His level of stupidity has been shocking even to people who has a low opinion of his competence. Contrast his case with Do Kwon, and you can see why people thought he would escape imprisonment.