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Scott has a piece up on SBF's drug use. Unsurprisingly, the writing is clear and informative. It's Scott doing Scott things - go read it!
That said, I can barely get through it. This latest bout of examining SBF and his crew just fills me with a sense of absolute disgust and contempt. I rarely feel what people are talking about when they see some public figure do something they don't like and refer to it as "gross", but this has to be what that sensation is. We're talking about a guy that essentially committed fraud to collect billions of dollars, funneled tons of money to preferred political causes, played dress-up as being highly altruistic, and still might well get away with the whole thing. But none of that really triggered the disgust reaction, all of that just seems like the sort of thing that I predict the scions of Harvard finance law professors get up to - scamming money in maybe-legal fashion just seems incredibly on brand for such families, even if the specifics of effective altruism spice the story up.
Against the odds of anything that I would have thought years ago, the part I'm disgusted by is the drug use and treating it as just a bit of biochemical calculus to work out whether it's a good idea. I cannot even begin to relate to the idea of thinking about things like this:
...
Using things like this when you don't actually have anything wrong with you, when you just wish your mind worked differently viscerally disgusts me. I'm not exactly a Mormon over here - I start the day with coffee and often finish it with whiskey. I don't care if people smoke weed or even have the occasional bump of cocaine. Something about this though, medicalizing your very existence and taking psychoactive drugs all day, every day. Of course, Scott gets more into the pros and cons of the drug, whether it induces compulsive gambling, and so on, but I keep returning to the simple prescription to just not pump yourself full of psychoactive drugs in your quest to embezzle more money to send it to "good" causes.
I'd drifted away from rationalism, effective altruism, utilitarianism, and other ideas in the same constellation over the years, but nothing really quite put a bow on it like this SBF story in its full ridiculous caricature of how utterly bankrupt of basic morality and humanity the whole suite is. Scott closes with:
As someone that's not a credentialed psychiatrist, I have free advice that has served me and people close to me well - just don't do any of this. If you're ever having to consider whether you had a psychotic break because of meth or the lack of sleep caused by the meth, and the putative reason was so that you could work really long hours moving financial chips around while creating absolutely nothing of any value, you're doing everything wrong. These shouldn't be critiques on the margins, they should be wholesale repudiation of such a lifestyle. If I were part of the EA community, I'd be getting out in front of this and rejecting everything about how these people behaved, not saying that maybe they should have just used lower doses of their drugs.
So tired of seeing this guy's greasy hair and face everywhere. Not that it matters much, but I don't we can conclude this early that he enriched himself with billions of FTX customers proceeds. His wealth was entirely based hypothetical holdings that for reasons that have yet to be understood, evaporated. It says that $1 billion is missing but the presumption of innocence means a very high burden of proof must be cleared , even if to some of us it seems obvious he stole the money. It hasn't even led to an indictment yet, yet we're confident in casting aspersions.
But self-serving , pretend altruists are not unheard of. Megachurch pastor fraud is a dime a dozen. https://www.google.com/search?q=Megachurch+pastors+fraud
It’s even dumber than that. He didn’t use customer funds to enrich himself. He used customer funds to bail out his girlfriend’s hedge fund so she could keep trading shitcoins on margin.
his latest defence is FTX didn't have a bank account so customers were transferring money to Alemeda and then OOPSY DAISY the money was never transferred from Alemeda to FTX. (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy) I'm not sure how that covers all the deposits because presumably you could transfer crypto as well.
there is a bunch of interesting DMS between the reporter and SBF including this:
SBF--secretly based? Were people wrong about him being a Democratic operative hoping to advance globalist interests?
I think he is an operative of a single interest, himself.
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This is what’s so interesting about the whole thing. Sam and Caroline aren’t ordinary your everyday scammers. These are batman villains. It’s not enough simply to stop them, they must be refuted.
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I wonder how crypto prices going to zero would affect his his punishment. Would the damages be assessed at 2021 prices or hypnotical much lower prices?
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Wild article. I wonder if he is speaking freely because he is oblivious to his legal jeopardy, because he has already resigned himself to spending the rest of his life in prison, or because he is already living in a cave in some non-extradition jurisdiction.
He posted on Twitter that he didn't think the convo would be published.
Prosecutors aren't limited to reviewing what has been published...
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He seems to just be very chill. Maybe it was the drugs making him jittery, after all. https://twitter.com/psyopcop/status/1592977107281666049
Fair... but the interview seems pretty likely to be quoted back to him by prosecutors, and I don't understand how he couldn't foresee that, especially with two law professors as his parents.
No one can resist the siren call of #ThingsIWillRegretWriting, especially when it seems like their only chance to get their side of the story out there. And especially especially in a live interview where you don't have time to think.
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