7 ms·

Michael Lewis's Blind Side

96 points by throwup238 3y ago

drcode 3y ago
Like the Lewis book, I feel this review doesn't grapple with the basic fact that SBF's quasi-success is just as easy to replicate if you just model him as "psychopath" instead of "psychopath AND genius" The first option doesn't make SBF interesting anymore
- refulgentis 3y ago
  I'm not sure optimizing for interesting would help - it's hard to find genius in a story about building a crypto exchange then lying about it's financials.
collinmcnulty 3y ago
In his podcast, Michael Lewis described his job as finding the expert in a topic and then making their understanding legible to the reader. Going Infinite demonstrates the weakness of this approach, which is that he is entirely too credulous and sympathetic once he has picked his “expert”. I have enjoyed a lot of his writing, so I hope in the future he makes more space for changing his initial impression and critique of his subject, perhaps he can start by reading The Undoing Project by noted author Michael Lewis.
- rjtavares 3y ago
  I like Matt Levine's take on Going Infinite: > Many of the reviews that I have read of the book complain that Lewis does not sufficiently explain that Bankman-Fried is Guilty and Bad, Actually, but that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read. He wanted to understand and explain Bankman-Fried’s psychology and tell a good story. If you want to read a moral condemnation of crypto theft, you can get that anywhere. You go to Michael Lewis for character and story. Michael Lewis does characters, not subjects.
  - cmcaleer 3y ago
    I have this problem with a lot of media in general these days, both fiction and non-fiction. Although it's enjoying a huge cultural resurgence today among young people, I feel like if American Psycho were to be made today, Bateman would have to be made comically evil with his faux liberal (to use the language of Bankman-Fried) 'woke shibboleths' left behind lest readers get mad that Bateman is being used as a tool to bash those beliefs -- ignoring the interesting commentary that Bateman actually uses it for status within his social circle and as a disguise for the person he really is. You see this a lot in coverage of very contentious issues too. I'm purposefully not naming any directly here (I'm thinking of at least 3 varied topics where this is particularly bad), but there are a lot of very complicated, hot-button issues where if you read any article that goes against the 'established' narrative in a nuanced way, there are usually several paragraphs of throat-clearing where the writer feels the need to go "We all know x is important, for reasons 1, 2, and 3".
  - barnabee 3y ago
    > that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read Exactly this.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Then perhaps his books belong in the fiction section?
  - truculent 3y ago
    Okay, sure. But TFA isn’t about Lewis not condemning the Guilty and Bad SBF, it’s about Lewis falling short on his own terms. > Lewis paints a portrait of Sam as singularly motivated by doing the EV-maximizing thing despite the social and emotional costs inflicted on others. But the real Sam in this story is not taking a hit to his reputation in order to maximize expectancy; he’s carelessly burning expectancy in the process of cultivating a reputation for punishing and humiliating his competition. The “blind side” is that we don’t get the full illustration of SBF’s character, because it’s filtered through Lewis’s credulous reporting, lack of access to certain key players, and limited attention to the financial details of what was going on. This is particularly disappointing because these are precisely the things that Lewis is known for doing so well.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> spends most of his time playing video games ... badly. This to me is one of the funniest parts of the story. He wasn't even good at it[1][2]. [1]: https://milkyeggs.com/crypto/what-happened-at-alameda-research/ https://milkyeggs.com/crypto/what-happened-at-alameda-resear... [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2258-ce03-4fbb-a9b2-7d9ec6e3d7f0 https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2258-ce03-4fbb-a9b2-7d9ec6e3d...
- gurchik 3y ago
  He is bad at League, but that article framing it as some kind of mental disorder is grasping at straws. 20% of all League players are in the Bronze tier. I've probably played more League than SBF has and I'm still Silver. Why? Because I'm just trying to have fun with my friends. Not everyone is trying to climb the ladder. A lot of guitarists have been playing for years and only know the basic chords because that's all they want to play. There's nothing wrong with that. The other examples the article points to that SBF has "fried his brain" are not compelling to me either. The author is attempting to explain how SBF could have lost all this money. I think the simplest explanation is that his "intellectual ability" has nothing to do with it, he's just a crook who thought he would get away with it.
vishnugupta 3y ago
I liked The Big Short, movie and the book, as a story and also because the author claims that it's based on true events. Now after seeing Michael Lewis fumble all over the place about SBF I'm not sure about the latter anymore. Maybe Michael Lewis got too attached to his subjects and was hoodwinked or maybe he knew it was not all true and went along with them because they made for a good story. All in all he lost his credibility big time, at least among lay (i.e., outsiders of Wall Street) readers. Later I read somewhere on Twitter that apparently WS folks knew his book to be a BS anyway.
- lordgrenville 3y ago
  In the same vein Flash Boys is mostly about Brad Katsuyama starting IEX, and the evils of HFT. I wondered while reading it if there was another side to the story.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    There absolutely is; in fact, most of the story is on the other side, and Katsuyama's premise doesn't even make much sense.
  - loeg 3y ago
    E.g., Flash Boys: Not So Fast is one example of another side. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23570025 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23570025
- nytesky 3y ago
  I wonder if Lewis is going through a rough patch professionally because of the recent tragedy he suffered — his daughter died in an automobile accident. I would not be surprised if it made him more sympathetic to a “young kid” at this point in his life. That sort of thing is soul crushing.
  - SkyMarshal 3y ago
    Didn't know that, but yeah I could totally see that making Lewis more sympathetic. I've never particularly liked SBF even before he imploded, but I don't want him spending the rest of his life in jail for a non-violent crime. I'd rather see him banned from finance and banking and sentenced to a million or so hours of teaching programming and computer science to underserved poor children, or something similarly constructive. He has these amazing skills that could be put work benefitting society, and instead we lock him away so the prison-industrial complex can profit. Such a waste, let's rethink that.
stevenwoo 3y ago
It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions, otherwise this could have been written by anyone months after the trial finished. Also I thought for sure the writer was going to mention the book, The Blind Side, where it appears possible that Lewis got the primary facts wrong because he trusted his source too much,but it’s only used for the title. For reference the NYTimes review of The Blind Side got it right 17 years ago where the primary sources for Lewis was his friend Tuohy and wife.
- gist 3y ago
  > It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions Well the OP counters his own speculation (but even if he didn't who knows what really happened): "(indeed, I was missing the domain knowledge and operations experience required for my role, as I had only ever been a trader)." What's interesting about this is the tendency for people to assume the reason 'asked questions' as completely true.
  - truculent 3y ago
    The subtext here is that OP may not have been qualifies on paper, but nobody else was either (indeed, in a world where “grown-ups” are unnecessary, it may have been looked at as a positive)
adamgordonbell 3y ago
I think many people will not read the book because of the reviews saying Lewis is compromised. But you should absolutely read the book. It's very good. As Matt Levin says: > You go to Michael Lewis for character and story. It does give you an inside look at being on the ground at FTX in the days before and after the collapse and also spends a big part of the book on time at Jane Street, which fascinated me. Before this, all I knew was OCAML, and not the craziness of modern trading. The big bet on Trump and the stock market election night 2016 is riveting. That insane idea SBF had, to pay Trump not to run again and talking to his people about it was also entertaining. It's just not really a book explaining the fraud. It's a number of wild scenes from a strange person's life as it collapses. And yeah, it is probably a bit too sympathetic, but it's not shy about him being a weirdo, and EA people being all a bit strange, and Lewis trying to understand what is going on in this guys head.
- blueboo 3y ago
  Maybe you’re implying this — it’s an obvious omission — but his credibility should encourage us to read “character” and “story” for their evocative imagination and not, say, for fact.
  - adamgordonbell 3y ago
    Nope, not saying that. but the other person in the comments has a point: > It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      So as a group I shouldn't take such authors as anything except entertainers?
      - adamgordonbell 3y ago
hosh 3y ago
I was looking forward to Michael Lewis’s book precisely because I wanted to see how these mistakes happened. Some of his other books were more like that.
steveBK123 3y ago
The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are. He has a way with storytelling and manages to get access to some serious players sometimes in fringes of the market that are not being written about elsewhere. He has a bias for scrappy little guys vs big guys across his books, but the little guy, on balance, is not always the "good guy". Often in the type of tales he writes, there is no good guy.. Sometimes it's just a bunch of guys at a poker table and one of them is going to go home with the money. I'd try not to derive any moral lessons from that. I also do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad now rather than deciding on their own. It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  The issue is Lewis going out of his way, in so many pubic forums, to present SBF as a good guy genius with only the best of intentions. At worst, as a good kid who made a couple of sad mistakes that you should forgive him for. Before and throughout SBF's trial, Lewis's biases were displayed more and more in his denials and ...fanciful interpretations and justifications of the things SBF did. It is not that his book should have painted a bad guy as an unequivocal bad guy. It is that you cannot trust Lewis' accounting of events and people because of his known extreme bias in the matter; his descriptions of events and emotions at play during them are filtered through a very biased lens. It can still be an entertaining read and story, it just can't be a trusted one.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yeah completely fair to point out that in this particular case, Lewis is completely over the top in his support of SBF, even well past the point that his crimes are clear.
    - OtherShrezzing 3y ago
      I really like his books, but Lewis also had this issue in Flash Boys. For half of the book, he writes about Aleynikov, someone accused by Goldman Sachs of stealing high-frequency trading code. Lewis writes a thorough and uncontested defense of Aleynikov. Around 3/4 of the way through the book, Lewis reveals that Aleynikov did actually transfer the computer code in question out of Goldman, but contests that this is immaterial because Aleynikov told Lewis that he'd taken it to contribute to open source efforts. The prosecution for Aleynikov's crimes was definitely heavy-handed (and that in itself would have made a good book), but there's really no doubt that he transferred the code out of Goldman, breaking the law while doing so.
billiam 3y ago
Go ahead and read this book if you are fascinated by the psychology and character and life of Sam Bankman-Fried. I can't imagine a more boring subject--the man-baby is one of the most depressing public figures I have come across in my time in tech. I've seen his selfishness, self-absorption, and privilege many many times among startup founders. What Lewis is actually selling here and what he is always peddling in his books is a breezy, readable way to understand complex subjects for a readership who can't be bothered to learn the details, and crypto is a perfect candidate. His act is wearing thin, and The Blind Side exposed just how lazy his approach appears to be. He can pretend this book isn't about how clueless people like him can be taken in by a recognizable conman and sociopath, but that is what this book is about.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  Agreed, that this book was written with a target audience in mind. (People who loved the blind side movie) But, I also wonder how much of this is Lewis trying to avoid legal culpability. If he knew that the whole thing was a total scam and he didn't warn anyone but is now making millions of dollars of the story, the people who lost money in FTX may want to sue?
aragonite 3y ago
> ... A sharper Lewis would have evaluated Sam on his own terms, tracking his probabilities and interrogating how closely they aligned with reality. At a minimum, he should have pressed Sam on how he reached his probabilistic claims. When Sam asserts that the $4 million worth of Ripple that went missing in the early days of Alameda had an “80 percent chance” of eventually turning up, Lewis asks no further questions. ... Lewis’ failure to examine that 80 [percent claim] is especially jarring. What sort of 'further questions' was Lewis supposed to ask sbf? Lewis began work on the book in Spring 2022. The missing Ripple/XRP tokens incident happened around April 2018 [1]. This is not even to mention the fact that the tokens did eventually turn up on their own, so Sam's "80 percent chance" hunch proved entirely correct in retrospect [2]. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_a_Ne/5rW-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22for%20Sam%20to%20leave%20he%20had%20to%20want%20to%20leave%2C%20and%20Sam%20did%20not%20really%22&pg=PT122&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise... [2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_a_Ne/5rW-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22million%20worth%20of%20missing%20Ripple%22&pg=PT123&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise...
jeffhwang 3y ago
I have read many Lewis' books and admired his skills as a storyteller and stylist for decades. I found Going Infinite fun to read but less satisfying than The Big Short, Liar's Poker, Moneybag, etc. As a good complement or even substitute, I highly recommend Zvi Mowshowitz's review[1] of Going Infinite. I have some familiarity with the trading world but virtually none in crypto. The book review is incredibly long but very rich in both micro details and macro perspective. Zvi seems to know what he's talking about as a former Jane Street employee who knew people in the book (including some acquaintance with SBF before he became SBF) and as a crypto trader. [1]:https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite
- dang 3y ago
  Discussed a bit at the time: Book Review: Going Infinite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38014638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38014638 - Oct 2023 (24 comments)
fredgrott 3y ago
Note read the CoffeeZilla YT podcast notes, a more interesting story and the facts are right all the time not just sometimes...better journalist on fin and fin crime than Lewis will ever be. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw
AlbertCory 3y ago
This is a great, great article. I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud." Well, not really. If you're one of those: tell us what opinions you have NOW that everyone else doesn't also have. That's the test: what do you see that isn't generally accepted? What I especially like about this article is, in the "How can we do better?" section he tells you how you can avoid falling in with the conventional wisdom.
- bambax 3y ago
  > I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud." Well, not really. Well, I don't know about that. On one side, there were people who were convinced it was a fraud, some of which were very vocal and public about it. On the other side there were people who didn't care, or wanted to believe. But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit. I think that's a tell.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    well, if you thought "fraud" but didn't say so: still, no credits for you.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    It’s so easy to say stuff like this in hindsight. > But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit. Sequoia invested in FTX. Are we going to no-true-Scotsman them out?
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman I had to look that up. I've heard the expression but didn't realize it was that much of a thing. Exactly. "No one but a chump believed in FTX." If you were a chump, you keep quiet and hope no one remembers and throws it back at you.
- 3y ago
Dowwie 3y ago
What makes the Lewis story worse is that he was asked to vet SBF as part of investor due diligence
tracer4201 3y ago
[dead]
Havoc 3y ago
His books have always been a bit more entertainment than accurate retelling of history. Don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with that
jessicatammie03 3y ago
[dead]
deborahroland 3y ago
[flagged]

96 points by throwup238 3y ago

Like the Lewis book, I feel this review doesn't grapple with the basic fact that SBF's quasi-success is just as easy to replicate if you just model him as "psychopath" instead of "psychopath AND genius" The first option doesn't make SBF interesting anymore

refulgentis 3y ago
I'm not sure optimizing for interesting would help - it's hard to find genius in a story about building a crypto exchange then lying about it's financials.

collinmcnulty 3y ago

In his podcast, Michael Lewis described his job as finding the expert in a topic and then making their understanding legible to the reader. Going Infinite demonstrates the weakness of this approach, which is that he is entirely too credulous and sympathetic once he has picked his “expert”. I have enjoyed a lot of his writing, so I hope in the future he makes more space for changing his initial impression and critique of his subject, perhaps he can start by reading The Undoing Project by noted author Michael Lewis.

rjtavares 3y ago
I like Matt Levine's take on Going Infinite: > Many of the reviews that I have read of the book complain that Lewis does not sufficiently explain that Bankman-Fried is Guilty and Bad, Actually, but that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read. He wanted to understand and explain Bankman-Fried’s psychology and tell a good story. If you want to read a moral condemnation of crypto theft, you can get that anywhere. You go to Michael Lewis for character and story. Michael Lewis does characters, not subjects.
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  I have this problem with a lot of media in general these days, both fiction and non-fiction. Although it's enjoying a huge cultural resurgence today among young people, I feel like if American Psycho were to be made today, Bateman would have to be made comically evil with his faux liberal (to use the language of Bankman-Fried) 'woke shibboleths' left behind lest readers get mad that Bateman is being used as a tool to bash those beliefs -- ignoring the interesting commentary that Bateman actually uses it for status within his social circle and as a disguise for the person he really is. You see this a lot in coverage of very contentious issues too. I'm purposefully not naming any directly here (I'm thinking of at least 3 varied topics where this is particularly bad), but there are a lot of very complicated, hot-button issues where if you read any article that goes against the 'established' narrative in a nuanced way, there are usually several paragraphs of throat-clearing where the writer feels the need to go "We all know x is important, for reasons 1, 2, and 3".
- barnabee 3y ago
  > that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read Exactly this.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Then perhaps his books belong in the fiction section?
- truculent 3y ago
  Okay, sure. But TFA isn’t about Lewis not condemning the Guilty and Bad SBF, it’s about Lewis falling short on his own terms. > Lewis paints a portrait of Sam as singularly motivated by doing the EV-maximizing thing despite the social and emotional costs inflicted on others. But the real Sam in this story is not taking a hit to his reputation in order to maximize expectancy; he’s carelessly burning expectancy in the process of cultivating a reputation for punishing and humiliating his competition. The “blind side” is that we don’t get the full illustration of SBF’s character, because it’s filtered through Lewis’s credulous reporting, lack of access to certain key players, and limited attention to the financial details of what was going on. This is particularly disappointing because these are precisely the things that Lewis is known for doing so well.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> spends most of his time playing video games ... badly. This to me is one of the funniest parts of the story. He wasn't even good at it[1][2]. [1]: https://milkyeggs.com/crypto/what-happened-at-alameda-research/ https://milkyeggs.com/crypto/what-happened-at-alameda-resear... [2]: https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2258-ce03-4fbb-a9b2-7d9ec6e3d7f0 https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2258-ce03-4fbb-a9b2-7d9ec6e3d...

gurchik 3y ago
He is bad at League, but that article framing it as some kind of mental disorder is grasping at straws. 20% of all League players are in the Bronze tier. I've probably played more League than SBF has and I'm still Silver. Why? Because I'm just trying to have fun with my friends. Not everyone is trying to climb the ladder. A lot of guitarists have been playing for years and only know the basic chords because that's all they want to play. There's nothing wrong with that. The other examples the article points to that SBF has "fried his brain" are not compelling to me either. The author is attempting to explain how SBF could have lost all this money. I think the simplest explanation is that his "intellectual ability" has nothing to do with it, he's just a crook who thought he would get away with it.

vishnugupta 3y ago

I liked The Big Short, movie and the book, as a story and also because the author claims that it's based on true events. Now after seeing Michael Lewis fumble all over the place about SBF I'm not sure about the latter anymore. Maybe Michael Lewis got too attached to his subjects and was hoodwinked or maybe he knew it was not all true and went along with them because they made for a good story. All in all he lost his credibility big time, at least among lay (i.e., outsiders of Wall Street) readers. Later I read somewhere on Twitter that apparently WS folks knew his book to be a BS anyway.

lordgrenville 3y ago
In the same vein Flash Boys is mostly about Brad Katsuyama starting IEX, and the evils of HFT. I wondered while reading it if there was another side to the story.
- tptacek 3y ago
  There absolutely is; in fact, most of the story is on the other side, and Katsuyama's premise doesn't even make much sense.
- loeg 3y ago
  E.g., Flash Boys: Not So Fast is one example of another side. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23570025 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23570025
nytesky 3y ago
I wonder if Lewis is going through a rough patch professionally because of the recent tragedy he suffered — his daughter died in an automobile accident. I would not be surprised if it made him more sympathetic to a “young kid” at this point in his life. That sort of thing is soul crushing.
- SkyMarshal 3y ago
  Didn't know that, but yeah I could totally see that making Lewis more sympathetic. I've never particularly liked SBF even before he imploded, but I don't want him spending the rest of his life in jail for a non-violent crime. I'd rather see him banned from finance and banking and sentenced to a million or so hours of teaching programming and computer science to underserved poor children, or something similarly constructive. He has these amazing skills that could be put work benefitting society, and instead we lock him away so the prison-industrial complex can profit. Such a waste, let's rethink that.

stevenwoo 3y ago

It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions, otherwise this could have been written by anyone months after the trial finished. Also I thought for sure the writer was going to mention the book, The Blind Side, where it appears possible that Lewis got the primary facts wrong because he trusted his source too much,but it’s only used for the title. For reference the NYTimes review of The Blind Side got it right 17 years ago where the primary sources for Lewis was his friend Tuohy and wife.

gist 3y ago
> It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions Well the OP counters his own speculation (but even if he didn't who knows what really happened): "(indeed, I was missing the domain knowledge and operations experience required for my role, as I had only ever been a trader)." What's interesting about this is the tendency for people to assume the reason 'asked questions' as completely true.
- truculent 3y ago
  The subtext here is that OP may not have been qualifies on paper, but nobody else was either (indeed, in a world where “grown-ups” are unnecessary, it may have been looked at as a positive)

adamgordonbell 3y ago

I think many people will not read the book because of the reviews saying Lewis is compromised. But you should absolutely read the book. It's very good. As Matt Levin says: > You go to Michael Lewis for character and story. It does give you an inside look at being on the ground at FTX in the days before and after the collapse and also spends a big part of the book on time at Jane Street, which fascinated me. Before this, all I knew was OCAML, and not the craziness of modern trading. The big bet on Trump and the stock market election night 2016 is riveting. That insane idea SBF had, to pay Trump not to run again and talking to his people about it was also entertaining. It's just not really a book explaining the fraud. It's a number of wild scenes from a strange person's life as it collapses. And yeah, it is probably a bit too sympathetic, but it's not shy about him being a weirdo, and EA people being all a bit strange, and Lewis trying to understand what is going on in this guys head.

blueboo 3y ago
Maybe you’re implying this — it’s an obvious omission — but his credibility should encourage us to read “character” and “story” for their evocative imagination and not, say, for fact.
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Nope, not saying that. but the other person in the comments has a point: > It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    So as a group I shouldn't take such authors as anything except entertainers?
    - adamgordonbell 3y ago

hosh 3y ago

I was looking forward to Michael Lewis’s book precisely because I wanted to see how these mistakes happened. Some of his other books were more like that.

steveBK123 3y ago

The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are. He has a way with storytelling and manages to get access to some serious players sometimes in fringes of the market that are not being written about elsewhere. He has a bias for scrappy little guys vs big guys across his books, but the little guy, on balance, is not always the "good guy". Often in the type of tales he writes, there is no good guy.. Sometimes it's just a bunch of guys at a poker table and one of them is going to go home with the money. I'd try not to derive any moral lessons from that. I also do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad now rather than deciding on their own. It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.

anonymousab 3y ago
The issue is Lewis going out of his way, in so many pubic forums, to present SBF as a good guy genius with only the best of intentions. At worst, as a good kid who made a couple of sad mistakes that you should forgive him for. Before and throughout SBF's trial, Lewis's biases were displayed more and more in his denials and ...fanciful interpretations and justifications of the things SBF did. It is not that his book should have painted a bad guy as an unequivocal bad guy. It is that you cannot trust Lewis' accounting of events and people because of his known extreme bias in the matter; his descriptions of events and emotions at play during them are filtered through a very biased lens. It can still be an entertaining read and story, it just can't be a trusted one.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yeah completely fair to point out that in this particular case, Lewis is completely over the top in his support of SBF, even well past the point that his crimes are clear.
  - OtherShrezzing 3y ago
    I really like his books, but Lewis also had this issue in Flash Boys. For half of the book, he writes about Aleynikov, someone accused by Goldman Sachs of stealing high-frequency trading code. Lewis writes a thorough and uncontested defense of Aleynikov. Around 3/4 of the way through the book, Lewis reveals that Aleynikov did actually transfer the computer code in question out of Goldman, but contests that this is immaterial because Aleynikov told Lewis that he'd taken it to contribute to open source efforts. The prosecution for Aleynikov's crimes was definitely heavy-handed (and that in itself would have made a good book), but there's really no doubt that he transferred the code out of Goldman, breaking the law while doing so.

billiam 3y ago

Go ahead and read this book if you are fascinated by the psychology and character and life of Sam Bankman-Fried. I can't imagine a more boring subject--the man-baby is one of the most depressing public figures I have come across in my time in tech. I've seen his selfishness, self-absorption, and privilege many many times among startup founders. What Lewis is actually selling here and what he is always peddling in his books is a breezy, readable way to understand complex subjects for a readership who can't be bothered to learn the details, and crypto is a perfect candidate. His act is wearing thin, and The Blind Side exposed just how lazy his approach appears to be. He can pretend this book isn't about how clueless people like him can be taken in by a recognizable conman and sociopath, but that is what this book is about.

gitfan86 3y ago
Agreed, that this book was written with a target audience in mind. (People who loved the blind side movie) But, I also wonder how much of this is Lewis trying to avoid legal culpability. If he knew that the whole thing was a total scam and he didn't warn anyone but is now making millions of dollars of the story, the people who lost money in FTX may want to sue?

aragonite 3y ago

> ... A sharper Lewis would have evaluated Sam on his own terms, tracking his probabilities and interrogating how closely they aligned with reality. At a minimum, he should have pressed Sam on how he reached his probabilistic claims. When Sam asserts that the $4 million worth of Ripple that went missing in the early days of Alameda had an “80 percent chance” of eventually turning up, Lewis asks no further questions. ... Lewis’ failure to examine that 80 [percent claim] is especially jarring. What sort of 'further questions' was Lewis supposed to ask sbf? Lewis began work on the book in Spring 2022. The missing Ripple/XRP tokens incident happened around April 2018 [1]. This is not even to mention the fact that the tokens did eventually turn up on their own, so Sam's "80 percent chance" hunch proved entirely correct in retrospect [2]. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_a_Ne/5rW-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22for%20Sam%20to%20leave%20he%20had%20to%20want%20to%20leave%2C%20and%20Sam%20did%20not%20really%22&pg=PT122&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise... [2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_a_Ne/5rW-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22million%20worth%20of%20missing%20Ripple%22&pg=PT123&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise...

jeffhwang 3y ago

I have read many Lewis' books and admired his skills as a storyteller and stylist for decades. I found Going Infinite fun to read but less satisfying than The Big Short, Liar's Poker, Moneybag, etc. As a good complement or even substitute, I highly recommend Zvi Mowshowitz's review[1] of Going Infinite. I have some familiarity with the trading world but virtually none in crypto. The book review is incredibly long but very rich in both micro details and macro perspective. Zvi seems to know what he's talking about as a former Jane Street employee who knew people in the book (including some acquaintance with SBF before he became SBF) and as a crypto trader. [1]:https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite

dang 3y ago
Discussed a bit at the time: Book Review: Going Infinite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38014638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38014638 - Oct 2023 (24 comments)

fredgrott 3y ago

Note read the CoffeeZilla YT podcast notes, a more interesting story and the facts are right all the time not just sometimes...better journalist on fin and fin crime than Lewis will ever be. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw

AlbertCory 3y ago

This is a great, great article. I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud." Well, not really. If you're one of those: tell us what opinions you have NOW that everyone else doesn't also have. That's the test: what do you see that isn't generally accepted? What I especially like about this article is, in the "How can we do better?" section he tells you how you can avoid falling in with the conventional wisdom.

bambax 3y ago
> I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud." Well, not really. Well, I don't know about that. On one side, there were people who were convinced it was a fraud, some of which were very vocal and public about it. On the other side there were people who didn't care, or wanted to believe. But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit. I think that's a tell.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  well, if you thought "fraud" but didn't say so: still, no credits for you.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  It’s so easy to say stuff like this in hindsight. > But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit. Sequoia invested in FTX. Are we going to no-true-Scotsman them out?
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman I had to look that up. I've heard the expression but didn't realize it was that much of a thing. Exactly. "No one but a chump believed in FTX." If you were a chump, you keep quiet and hope no one remembers and throws it back at you.
3y ago

Dowwie 3y ago

What makes the Lewis story worse is that he was asked to vet SBF as part of investor due diligence

tracer4201 3y ago

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Havoc 3y ago

His books have always been a bit more entertainment than accurate retelling of history. Don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with that

jessicatammie03 3y ago

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deborahroland 3y ago

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