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SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.
For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.
Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.
All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.
From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe, so we've been focusing on the Effective Altruism angle, but I don't think the mainstream knows of the grey tribe yet, and if the blue tribe has recognised him as one of their own (with him being a democratic donor and all), then it makes more sense that the media would be defending him.
I think he's blue. What has he done or said that makes him grey?
from wiki:
He's grey in the sense that he's a Silicon Valley rationalist utilitarian who ticks all the grey-tribe boxes. See the original definition in I can tolerate anything but the outgroup
This does not constitute a basis for a political tribe, especially because permissive attitudes on gay rights and drug use are being increasingly embraced by both the right and the left.
This might constitute a basis for a political tribe, depending on exactly how libertarian you are, and on what issues. But, the blue tribe has already defined libertarianism as a red tribe position, and the concept of the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is well established in highly online leftist circles, so as a libertarian you're basically red tribe, unless you're the sort of libertarian who can fit within blue tribe moral constraints, in which case you're basically blue tribe.
I'm skeptical of the utility of the concept of a "grey tribe" in the contemporary American culture war.
The purpose was not for it to be a political first tribe and Scott was intentionally using non-political examples. He even calls the gray tribe a subset of the blue tribe in the piece, it's worth reading to post if for no other reason than to get acquainted with the origin of some of the jargon here.
what is the utility of this distinction? just to identify the "Efective Altruists" from among the blues?
It was more to distinguish almost all non-Blue Tribe internet-users, and probably motivated in part by the (for Scott, formative) collapse of internet atheism into left- and not-left groups in the mid-Bush era.
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It's almost an Albion's Seed-type category. You're looking at a socio-cultural sub-group, like "Hot Topic goths," "preppy girls," or "theater kids" back in high-school. It's a personal tendency and personality type married to a particular set of tropes and cultural products.
The thing that sometimes confuses me is that they assign things like using Uber to this tribe (like in the Scott article), but that is almost a necessity in an urban context for all the people that don't earn enough for a car (a Tesla in case of the blues) but need to go somewhere in a timely maner.
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Ah, the previous poster didn't post the actual source Keep in mind they're categories drawn in 2014. Their purpose is to identify cultural bubbles more than political parties with the understanding that there can be blue tribe Republican voters. I do recommend reading the entire, long, article. It has a firm place in the canon of this community.
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