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Perhaps I shouldn't expect rational behavior from someone who ran a cryptocurrency exchange, but this decision is utterly bewildering: judges tends to take even

Perhaps I shouldn't expect rational behavior from someone who ran a cryptocurrency exchange, but this decision is utterly bewildering: judges tends to take even the perception of witness intimidation seriously, and there's no light in which releasing someone's diary (versus than attempting to have it admitted as ordinary evidence) isn't meant to be intimidation.

gitfan86 3y ago
But that was the whole logic of crypto. "The USD is going to go to zero someday so I might as well steal everyone's USD today"
- arcticbull 3y ago
  For real though. Give me all your soon-to-be-worthless real dollars in exchange for magic beans. But uh, if the beans are so good, why do you want my dollars?
themodelplumber 3y ago
He is an interesting person in that way. I've been casually analyzing the situation and his actions from a personality theory point of view. It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend") But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style. That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way? Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices. He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out. Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc. His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck." In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction. (This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)
- zaphar 3y ago
  Alternatively, his ego is too big for his own good. Intelligence without experience combined with a large ego can present as stupidity to onlookers. A little bit of wisdom would have done him a lot of good.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  > It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere. He sees it more as a unique series of situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. This is a remarkably generous framing. Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?
  - deciplex 3y ago
    > Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals? There were about 26 billion reasons for that, at one point. e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it
    - CPLX 3y ago
      Latin American cartel leaders have notched similar amounts of wealth, how do we evaluate them?
      - deciplex 3y ago
        Well, we evaluate them rather differently than the Sackler family, that's for certain.
        CPLX 3y ago
        Ironic as they’re in the same line of work.
      - 3y ago
tiahura 3y ago
rational behavior He's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Rational for him may be much different than you or I can comprehend?
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  He just borrowed from depositors until he was sufficiently leveraged for his personal risk tolerance.
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    This is the man who said he was willing to bet the destruction of the world against a 51% chance of the world being duplicated, leading to a (under certain questionable population ethics calculations) doubling of total utility. His risk tolerance is either infinite or, more likely, he doesn't have a clue what it is so he treats it as infinite.
    - jjoonathan 3y ago
      It's a meme. On WallStreetBets, /u/ControlTheNarrative found a "trick" to borrow $50k from Robinhood and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational ("I repeat this until I am sufficiently leveraged for my Personal Risk Tolerance.") I am making a comparison to SBF, who found a "trick" to borrow almost a million times as much from investors and depositors and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    He has publicly stated that his philosophy was ignoring risk completely in pursuit of the best expected value. (Whether becauae its true, or because it was a forn of attention-seeking edgy rationalism, or what...)
loeg 3y ago
This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded. He's the classic irrational actor.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded. And one of whose first acts as things broke was to publicly fire his lawyers for telling him to shut up about it instead of digging his own grave with social media posts.
jackmott42 3y ago
No judge is or has taken Trump's witness tampering seriously.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Chutkan seems to be taking his potential witness tampering within the scope of the case assigned to her seriously.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    checks he is still not in jail after that "IF YOU COME AFTER ME I COME AFTER YOU" tweet.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Because it's vague and no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed. It could be interpreted to mean anything about anyone anytime. I agree that it was a veiled threat, but consider the court's prompt and decisive response to the protective order request before going into snark mode. To be sure, Trump's own counsel adheres to an entirely different standard than that which they seek for their client, arguing in one brief that a meme tweet of a smug Joe Biden sipping coffee and saying he likes his dark was evidence that the current administration is out to get the defendant.
      - ncallaway 3y ago
        > no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed This is mixing up different things. The protective order is about disclosing information obtained from discovery provided by the prosecution. No one is arguing that the tweet above was contempt of court for violating the protective order. As you note, it was written before the protective order was in place, but also obviously before they obtained discovery from the prosecution. So he was incapable of leaking anything from the discovery at that point in time. The complaint about witness tampering or intimidation doesn’t stem from the protective order. Rather, it was a condition of his release after the arraignment, which did happen before that tweet. Witness intimidation is actually a violation of federal statute (18 USC S 1512), so is _always_ not allowed, regardless of the timing of any instructions or orders from the judge.

gitfan86 3y ago

But that was the whole logic of crypto. "The USD is going to go to zero someday so I might as well steal everyone's USD today"

arcticbull 3y ago
For real though. Give me all your soon-to-be-worthless real dollars in exchange for magic beans. But uh, if the beans are so good, why do you want my dollars?

themodelplumber 3y ago

He is an interesting person in that way. I've been casually analyzing the situation and his actions from a personality theory point of view. It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend") But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style. That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way? Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices. He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out. Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc. His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck." In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction. (This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)

zaphar 3y ago
Alternatively, his ego is too big for his own good. Intelligence without experience combined with a large ego can present as stupidity to onlookers. A little bit of wisdom would have done him a lot of good.
woodruffw 3y ago
> It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere. He sees it more as a unique series of situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. This is a remarkably generous framing. Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?
- deciplex 3y ago
  > Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals? There were about 26 billion reasons for that, at one point. e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Latin American cartel leaders have notched similar amounts of wealth, how do we evaluate them?
    - deciplex 3y ago
      Well, we evaluate them rather differently than the Sackler family, that's for certain.
      - CPLX 3y ago
        Ironic as they’re in the same line of work.
    - 3y ago

tiahura 3y ago

rational behavior He's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Rational for him may be much different than you or I can comprehend?

jjoonathan 3y ago
He just borrowed from depositors until he was sufficiently leveraged for his personal risk tolerance.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  This is the man who said he was willing to bet the destruction of the world against a 51% chance of the world being duplicated, leading to a (under certain questionable population ethics calculations) doubling of total utility. His risk tolerance is either infinite or, more likely, he doesn't have a clue what it is so he treats it as infinite.
  - jjoonathan 3y ago
    It's a meme. On WallStreetBets, /u/ControlTheNarrative found a "trick" to borrow $50k from Robinhood and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational ("I repeat this until I am sufficiently leveraged for my Personal Risk Tolerance.") I am making a comparison to SBF, who found a "trick" to borrow almost a million times as much from investors and depositors and lost it all on a dumb bet while making a big display of being rational.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  He has publicly stated that his philosophy was ignoring risk completely in pursuit of the best expected value. (Whether becauae its true, or because it was a forn of attention-seeking edgy rationalism, or what...)

loeg 3y ago

This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded. He's the classic irrational actor.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> This is the guy who has been running his mouth to anyone who would listen ever since FTX imploded. And one of whose first acts as things broke was to publicly fire his lawyers for telling him to shut up about it instead of digging his own grave with social media posts.

jackmott42 3y ago

No judge is or has taken Trump's witness tampering seriously.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Chutkan seems to be taking his potential witness tampering within the scope of the case assigned to her seriously.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  checks he is still not in jail after that "IF YOU COME AFTER ME I COME AFTER YOU" tweet.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Because it's vague and no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed. It could be interpreted to mean anything about anyone anytime. I agree that it was a veiled threat, but consider the court's prompt and decisive response to the protective order request before going into snark mode. To be sure, Trump's own counsel adheres to an entirely different standard than that which they seek for their client, arguing in one brief that a meme tweet of a smug Joe Biden sipping coffee and saying he likes his dark was evidence that the current administration is out to get the defendant.
    - ncallaway 3y ago
      > no protective order had been entered at the time it was composed This is mixing up different things. The protective order is about disclosing information obtained from discovery provided by the prosecution. No one is arguing that the tweet above was contempt of court for violating the protective order. As you note, it was written before the protective order was in place, but also obviously before they obtained discovery from the prosecution. So he was incapable of leaking anything from the discovery at that point in time. The complaint about witness tampering or intimidation doesn’t stem from the protective order. Rather, it was a condition of his release after the arraignment, which did happen before that tweet. Witness intimidation is actually a violation of federal statute (18 USC S 1512), so is _always_ not allowed, regardless of the timing of any instructions or orders from the judge.