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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.
– t. Galkovsky
Sick burns. We're all living in America, though.
I've heard it asserted that European boxers were disgusted upon learning that Anglos do weight training to prepare for competitions. Those are supposed to be games, vigorous festivals of bodily perfection, causes for joy – the opposite of dreary displays of a peasant's work ethic or a merchant's cold numerate chase after marginal returns. Or something. Well you know how it turned out, and the role performance enhancing drugs play in competitive sports now. Moloch whose dumbbells are (mumble mumble), I guess. But don't the stunts of modern champions look positively superhuman? Don't those playful Chads of the all-natural era seem scrawny next to the optimized contemporary giants?
This jealous amazement underlies general American obsession with finding some edge, and specifically Silicon Valley fads like mindfulness meditation, diets and training routines, ADHD medication, microdosing LSD and now weirder prescription stuff. (A guy called Sam doing EMSAM, seriously?) The most egregious case was probably Serge Faguet. Like Sam, only on a much smaller scale, he crashed and burned thanks to his miracle enhancements (he had the bright idea of visiting Russia with LSD and amphetamine in his luggage). The most incredible bit of his story wasn't drugs – it was using fancy hearing aids without indications. To hear more than others.
All that being ridiculous enough, what is your actual objection? I may be wrong, but it seems you'd take issue with PEDs whether they work or not, regardless of their safety profile and side effects; they disgust you viscerally due to their inherent effect.
My hypothesis is that this is your lack of chutzpah talking. Fair play, equivalent exchange, no weird tricks, not trying to get something for nothing, not getting carried away with hypothetical astronomic returns, not gambling, not doing crazy drugs – those are reasonable defaults to avoid failure modes like St. Petersburging oneself, setting the community on fire or summoning Cthulhu. But like I've argued recently, chutzpah, the brazen rejection of those defaults, and pursuit of narrow unorthodox openings, can be instrumental for actually transcending the status quo. Sometimes it works, and works so well we've come to depend on it with all of our engineering and science and finance; it is reasonable, then, to ask if practicing it in a certain manner is justified in a specific case. This is a question of specifics.
Unfortunately, the specifics with current psychoactive drugs are pretty dismal even if they don't make you outright crazy. The brain is… complex; effects of any molecule peppered onto its mechanism are crude and untargeted. Using drugs to improve one's already healthy cognition is equivalent to using Curves in a graphical editor to «enhance» a picture, or naive transformations of sound: good enough if you have shit taste or sensory deficits, but it only destroys available information; wipes out subtle differences of pixel values by banding them; clips audio tones; reduces precision of inference; discretizes and roughens your thoughts. Across the multidimensional space of mental contents it erases the lion's share of possibilities and, may Allah forgive me for such mawkishness, the depth of human soul. It may work well enough in a predictable environment like school or the workspace of a linear worker, where prioritizing the few legible, measurable features the Boss cares about is a sensible trade-off. If you make high-uncertainty decisions, you may find that «production velocity» isn't as valuable as seeing clearly the road your'e on.
Drug enhancement does not disgust me any more than the normal condition. It is more noble to struggle against the limitations of human condition than to accept it. «Baseline humans aren't that cool» is something any transhumanist feels viscerally and seeks to remedy.
It is, however, prudent to acknowledge when you're being greedy and petulant in denying that the tech isn't there yet.
Or, well, that your scam is going tits up and you'd do well to liquidate it before collapsing the entire market.
As I mention in another reply, I'm actually still trying to parse exactly why I'm disgusted, which means that any answer is likely to be more rationalization than reality. I suspect that if there was truly no side effect, I wouldn't much care. In the case of these psychoactive drugs though, there always seems to be a side effect - in this case, there's video of SBF jittering in his chair like a crackhead. Worse still, the use of PEDs in this case isn't to some noble end, it's to spend more time running a harebrained financial scheme. I'm not disgusted by a cyclist taking EPO (even though it's cheating, I don't feel disgust), but I am disgusted by the inhuman looking freaks in bodybuilding taking steroids to make themselves that much more inhuman. Likewise, a caffeinated scientist doesn't disgust me, but a finance scammer on designer drugs does.
IF you have a link handy, please give. I've got my treasured video of Hitler & George Floyd rhytmically jittering like crackheads, were I to add in Bankman the whole thing would be somewhat improved.
best I can do is a deepfake of Xi Jinping pulling his eyebrows out with tweezers, take it or leave it
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LOL, are you curating a Stereotype Paragon of the Race collection?
No, but well, now that you've suggested it..
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