You may be familiar with Curtis Yarvin's idea that Covid is science's Chernobyl. Just as Chernobyl was Communism's Chernobyl, and Covid was science's Chernobyl, the FTX disaster is rationalism's Chernobyl.
The people at FTX were the best of the best, Ivy League graduates from academic families, yet free-thinking enough to see through the most egregious of the Cathedral's lies. Market natives, most of them met on Wall Street. Much has been made of the SBF-Effective Altruism connection, but these people have no doubt read the sequences too. FTX was a glimmer of hope in a doomed world, a place where the nerds were in charge and had the funding to do what had to be done, social desirability bias be damned.
They blew everything.
It will be said that "they weren't really EA," and you can point to precepts of effective altruism they violated, but by that standard no one is really EA. Everyone violates some of the precepts some of the time. These people were EA/rationalist to the core. They might not have been part of the Berkley polycules, but they sure tried to recreate them in Nassau. Here's CEO of Alameda Capital Caroline Ellison's Tumblr page, filled with rationalist shibboleths. She would have fit right in on The Motte.
That leaves the $10 billion dollar question: How did this happen? Perhaps they were intellectual frauds just as they were financial frauds, adopting the language and opinions of those who are truly intelligent. That would be the personally flattering option. It leaves open the possibility that if only someone actually smart were involved the whole catastrophe would have been avoided. But what if they really were smart? What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act? If humanity's chances of survival really are best measured in log odds, maybe the FTX team are the only ones with their eyes on the prize?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you ignore the caveat he gave up-front which is that this reasoning only applies if the universes are non-interacting?
That caveat is only to establish that you actually double your utility by duplicating the earth -- and not just duplicating it onto a planet that we would have settled anyway. He is explicit about that. The point is that in raw utility calculations short of the infinite, he is willing to gamble with everyone's utility on any bet with positive expected value.
More options
Context Copy link
nah that was a trivial objection on his part, most of the value of the earth comes from the fact that we might colonize the universe, so he wanted to make sure that the "double" in "double or nothing" truly meant doubling the value of the earth, if the second earth appeared close-by to us, it wouldn't really be doubling the value since there's still only one universe to colonize. But if one is assured that the value can indeed double, then SBF was completely on-board with betting it all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link