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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Sounds like the policy is working exactly as designed. When woke priorities are enshrined as foundational legal principles , their directives become another lever for bureaucrats to pull in order to get a job done. The incentive to, say, eliminate all straight white able bodied men from a candidate pool now exists, and it will influence everyone under the sway of these legal principles -- regardless of the actual ideological bent of the person taking the action!

That is to say, I think it's quite possible that the person who made the decision you describe in your post might have been completely non-ideological. They may truly have just been trying to make their job easier by pulling a lever that had recently been made available to them without much caring whether it was fair. And that IMO is the effect these laws are meant to have.

The government instituted a 'volume management strategy' to comply with the government's policy on 'employment equity', and that strategy was to just ignore people with the wrong skin colour or genitals because the government says they (the government) can't do anything else and you see no mention of quotas or hiring equity?

They're not looking to increase "equity"

The people who decide to chop every white guy out of laziness are 100% looking to increase equity. That decision only makes sense through the lens of equity. Why would you cut your best pool of employees? Would you accept laziness as an excuse if I chopped out all the black people? They're less likely to be good hires anyway.

deleted

Wokes are more correct than the mainstream. They know that their favoured groups are of lower quality, otherwise IQ testing for jobs would not be illegal. You might also expect they would push for something like blind resumes. They don't do this because their desired effect (equity) only happens when you explicitly hire by race/gender and drop standards.

Alternatively, they found a loophole to cut applicants and if it increases equity they don’t give a shit.

Sure, but they would never use a loophole that decreased equity.

I don't know- upthread there's a poster who works for the Canadian civil service, and he says that citizenship and french proficiency requirements routinely get used even though they decrease equity.

French is an unusual edge case because French Canada was one of the original groups claiming... not exactly oppression but that their culture was being overwhelmed by Anglos. Quebec has strong French language laws and the Federal government appeases them in many cases with bilingual requirements. Our constitution has written in it that French and English have equal status and rights.

Because of that, it's more difficult for leftists to directly attack French culture. There's laws, and they also have their own claim to being a minority. That being said, Montreal has a ton of foreigners in there and I expect this to change eventually.

I think the contention was that they would be unable to, because every group except white men is protected by equalities laws.

I would make the claim that HR as an industry is captured enough (especially in government) that you could remove all affirmative action laws and not see much difference.

Except that strategy wouldn't even be a consideration if they weren't trying to increase equity in the first place. It is absolutely not "just a side effect of a tool that they're wielding to reduce the number of applicants they have to deal with", the tool you are seeing in use is the one that gives the government justification to do what they please by blaming the bureaucracy they fucking created. "Oh so sorry we had to throw out your resume, we didn't have a choice because policy! If we spent all that time going through resumes for the best possible candidates we wouldn't have time to make all these policies about employment equity (which is different to hiring equity)!"

Agree, it's a completely ridiculous justification and there are clearly ideological considerations at play here. As you already noted, if the government mandates ideological woke policies that uniquely protect certain groups and allow for their preferential treatment over others, it can't then utilise that self-created loophole and state that it has nothing to do with ideology.

You could make the argument that the specific people making the hiring decision might not be thinking about equity, but I'm inclined to doubt that, since employers aren't necessarily backed into a corner here either. You can whittle down your candidate list without randomly throwing applications out or excluding people from consideration based on arbitrary demographic criteria. Those applying to business and computer science roles often have to take psychometric and aptitude tests, and the government could do the same and exclude any candidates whose performance isn't up to scratch. As a bonus, if this is implemented properly the quality of their employees would be better. But that's not going to happen, because the demographic imbalance that's going to result in is probably anathema either to them or some higher-up they're accountable to.

EDIT: clarity

I work in the public service and agree that equity was probably not the (main) motivation for the strategy they picked. Most of what you hear about equity is signalling buzz. Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity. Seems like this team just found a hack (which I doubt is common) to shorten their screening process. Mostly likely they don't care who will be hired anyway. People here seem doubtful, but the public service and hiring processes are so heavily decentralized. It's totally plausible for a team to do this without being motivated by equity.

Of course, there is obvious bias because they could never get away doing the opposite strategy (e.g, filtering out equity groups). That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.

Most managers I've asked told me they face no pressure to hire for diversity.

There's enough examples now of a) hiring managers being explicitly told not to hire white men, and b) hiring managers' bonuses relying on meeting diversity hiring requirements that I have a very hard time believing this.

Is the pressure bimodal: extreme in some extremely converged companies and totally absent in others? Or are people just reluctant to admit they're under pressure?

I haven't spoken to many senior managers, mostly mid-level managers. My impression is that senior elites and execs in companies pay more attention to diversity so it would make sense for the public service to match that as well.

I'm very interested in cases where managers in the canadian public service had bonuses tied to diversity requirements. Do you have any examples you can link to?

Ahh yes, performance agreements. My experience with these is that people don't commit to targets they can't already meet. After all, these objectives are mostly self-imposed, and the exercise is more of a formality. That said, I'm sure it's sometimes the case some execs have to work hard to meet their diversity targets. Thanks for sharing.

In a world of 750 million people (Europe + US + Canada) that's supposedly dominated by wokeness, there are going to be enough businesses for the 'man bites dog' story of 'we're not hiring white dudes' story to pop up as much as people interested in that story wants, even if 95% of businesses are hiring relatively meritocratically, putting aside diversity initiatives that even the vast majority of right-leaning people would shrug at.

I also think, that most people at a high level in corporations legitimately believe they've missed out on talent due to structural issues, and since they're greedy capitalists, that's costing them money, which is why they're investing in diversity initiatives. Why not find the gay Latinx trans woman who will find a better way to increase production targets by 3% and earn me a bonus?

That said, there are policies which increase the proportion of white workers, like requiring citizenship and the ability to speak french.

Neither of these things are in any way comparable - the former seems like an obvious prerequisite for a public service job, and the latter actively impacts on the quality of your employee in a country where a significant proportion of the population speaks French as a first language (approx 20% in Canada). The fact that they happen to select for white workers because whites are more likely to possess these desired characteristics is just an unintended consequence of having these policies.

Just because a policy happens to result in an increase in the proportion of a certain demographic does not mean it is analogous to explicitly demographically based policies.

The point is, there are other policies which will impact demographics. I don't want to change the subject too much, but I actually think the french level requirements in the canadian public service lead to worse outcomes than white-male exclusion, even if it were scaled up 100x. It's currently impossible to manage employees or be in a sufficiently senior role unless you speak french, even when the vast majority of francophones opt to read,write and speak in english when working. When my team is hiring, I'd rather work with a "non white male" constraint than a "must speak french" constraint. The french requirements are often unnecessary and make it very difficult to hire talent. As a french speaker, I've leapfrogged colleagues of similar productivity because they were anglophones who couldn't even be considered for a number of promotions.

Still, though, I agree that on the surface one policy sounds a lot better than the other and that they're not analogous with respect to why they impact demographics.

I would say it’s more than just “on the surface”. One policy is based on immutable characteristics, the other is based on the possession of a skill which they would like employees to have. “Any policy that affects racial composition is tantamount to racism” is an extremely tenuous position at best.

You claim that a “non white male” constraint isn’t as bad to you as a “must speak French” constraint, but in spite of your explanation it’s hard to see why this is so. You can make the argument that the French requirement is extreme and should be relaxed since it isn’t integral to job performance, but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment. White men can’t simply assume a different demographic if they want to, and their exclusion isn’t for lacking a certain skill but instead for ideological/diversity reasons. It’s easy to see which condition is far more restrictive and far more difficult to justify.

I didn't say the french policy was racist, just that it led to worse outcomes. I probably won't convince you. You're not a canadian public servant and don't see what it's like. I'm not defending the no-white-male policy or anything. Apologies for the what-about-ism, I made an off-topic comment and now I'm just elaborating.

but employees can learn French if they want to get a promotion, and it actually represents a specific skill that can be of use in employment

Here's a situation I've seen a ton: An employee wants to become a manager, so they go on paid french training, putting their job on pause for weeks or months. When they come back, they inevitably don't use their french because francophones don't care and don't want to slow down important conversations by speaking to a french novice. Once their newly acquired french abilities atrophy, the training cycle repeats. I've seen this happen to a ton of really talented people with passion for their domain.

Also, learning french as an adult is pretty difficult, especially when the public service is not at all immersive. Even francophones usually prefer english because they'd prefer not to learn twice the terminology, check weird grammar rules or slow down communication.

This argument does not seem well considered at all

I see where you're coming from. However the outcomes I've experienced suggest the french-requirements are a worse policy.

Okay, I’m outside right now, so it’s hard for me to draft anything. A few things, though:

learning French as an adult is pretty difficult

Difficult =/= impossible. It might be hard, but this does not mean it’s equal to something you literally cannot change. You’ve made a case for why the French barrier is bad, but not for your comparison.

However the outcomes I’ve experienced suggest the French requirements are a worse policy.

Your comments seem to imply that you have no real experience with the “non white male” policies, so making a comparison between whether language barriers or diversity-based demographic barriers are worse based on your experience is premature at best. This could be taken as evidence of a lack of diversity initiatives in the Canadian public service, but I’m not too inclined to rely on anecdata as a source because of 1: potential issues with unrepresentativeness and 2: distortions relating to perception.

The studies I’ve seen relating to hiring biases in the Australian public service (the country where I live), while not exactly extrapolable to the Canadian situation, suggest that "diversity hiring" is de facto being practiced and that it is endorsed. These biases favouring women and minorities in the Australian public service were found in a study conducted by the behavioural economics team of the Australian government, and in light of this finding they discourage blind hiring because it might prevent public servants from discriminating in the Appropriate Direction.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170702213823/https://pmc.gov.au/resource-centre/domestic-policy/going-blind-see-more-clearly-unconscious-bias-australian-public-services-shortlisting-processes

That’s interesting. In Texas(which has a similar percentage of Spanish first language speakers to Canada’s French first language speakers), Spanish speakers are generally willing to put up with novices by slowing their conversations down.

It’s outrageous that this is allowed but random removal is not. I guess the Charter has a specific carveout for affirmative action (15.2)...to be French-inclusive, this is carte blanche.

I seriously applaud you for using ATIP in that manner. Bravo.

Their excuse seems a bit convenient. I'd think that a lot of government jobs get a ton of applicants, do they do this every time?

I am Canadian and I occasionally apply for commissar jobs for fun. The last one was like, native liason in a city with basically no natives. I did make sure to tell them I was a trans two spirit disabled Hispanic, so I am probably a shoe-in. Do they just look at your LinkedIn profile pic or how would they verify you actually are all that stuff?

I mean, to be clear, none of that is actually verifiable by appearance- Hispanics can be and routinely are very very white, and wild gender identities often seem to be little more than ‘cis but very blue tribe’.

I suppose if they really wanted to verify they could make you take an aptitude test in Spanish.

I think I could pass a gender ideology test better than most nonbinary people.

Same but something tells me they would know I was faking it

Come join themotte plays blood on the clock tower and get better at lying. Next async game starts tomorrow noon central.

Commissar, yeah. That is literally the role the Indigenous Liason gets paid $117k/year to do.

I've heard before that HR will at the very least use your LinkedIn picture to verify you sort of look like what you claim. In the event of no pictures easily available, my guess is they go by name. My name does not sound Hispanic or two-spirit. As nice as it sounds to get free jobs pretending to be black, HR would not let you get one over on them so easily. If you were not black in the interview, they would find an excuse to cut you loose.

A couple minor anecdotes about schooling, and some related thoughts.

Earlier this year I blew off Back to School Night, because it is just a litany of teachers slowly reading notes that really ought to be just a syllabus handout. One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent. My children are excelling (by the standards of high-tier blue state public schools), so the conferences were also a series of boring conversations in which I strove to appear Interested while teachers recited figures and handed me print-outs of details I already knew from the online system that tracks grades. No, there are no social or behavioral issues. Perhaps a lingering artefact of my own issues with diligence, the one thing I pointedly ask every teacher to confirm is the apparent total lack of homework.

When I attended this particular middle school in the 90s, the school day consisted of many 40 minute classes, with 3-5 minutes of shifting between them, and then an average of 2-4 homework assignments per night. These assignments weren't difficult but keeping track and on top of all of them was something I struggled with, especially bigger projects with distant due dates. There were token efforts to help with this, like every student being given a record-keeping journal, and teachers insisting that we make note of each assignment, but we were mostly left to our own devices as far as getting it all done and handed in. My parents made some effort to help, but they are blue collar types, and this sort of thing wasn't quite their wheelhouse either. I spent those years blowing out the competition on the standardized tests, and then getting Bs and Cs because I just couldn't manage to remember that tasks had been assigned, or worse, I'd do them and then forget to hand them in.

In retrospect, it seems probable that the only reason I got into college at all was because a certain PMC-princess developed a crush on me in high school, and drug me into social circles where people socially kept on top of assignments. This is a massive, often unnoticed privilege; if you had it, take a moment to appreciate it. This carried me though the first half of college, and there is a painfully obvious demarcation where my ability to wrangle the administrative parts of college vanished when that social circle did.

My kids, OTOH, in the new, post-pandemic set-up, have 75 minute periods for their main classes (math, science, English, history), and then repeat one of them at the end of the day in a mildly structured study hall, where they are encouraged to finish assignments. As a first note, longer classes and less time wasted swapping to different classrooms seem like obvious optimizations for the school day. But that extra period of guided study hall at the end of the day seems really useful for instilling the kind of mindset that recalls, organizes, and accomplishes tasks. Most days they don't have any actual homework, which is an improvement since it's mostly busywork. But even when they have an assignment that does spill over into homework, between those extra skillsets and the integrated technology for assignment tracking they are so much more on top of things than I ever was. As an HBD-disclaimer, maybe that's their mother's Jewishness shining through, but there seems to be a qualitative improvement compared to pre-pandemic.

I'd picked up a lot of scorn and skepticism for academic pedagogy over the last decade, to the point where I think the entire field is borderline hokum. It feels important to acknowledge sensible organizational changes that have yielded noticeable improvements, instead of just maximizing administrative cowardice. Maybe it shouldn't have taken decades and a pandemic to figure it out, but progress isn't obvious, and it's certainly an improvement.

And on the topic of administrative cowardice, the other anecdote. My son is one of a few dozen boys who stay after school most days to play pickup games of basketball and football using the schoolyard facilities and fields. There is a nearby playground that usually has small children with parents, but these boys (ages range from 9-13) are mostly unsupervised... until now.

There is a boy in that cohort who is diagnosed as autistic, the sort where he probably wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything 20 years ago. At one of those recent pickup games, he was beaten up to some unknown degree, and his mother happened to see the whole thing from her car while stuck in traffic. The mother approached the administration, and was essentially told "This is unsanctioned, after-hours play, we have nothing to do with it and will do nothing for you." So, she went and filed a police report. That kickstarted some action, specifically a ban on kids playing in the yard after school without parental supervision.

Now obviously, I feel for the boy. I wish he hadn't gotten assaulted; I am sure that was a horrible experience. But I also wish that a few dozen other boys hadn't gotten effectively banned from convenient exercise, independence, and peer socializing. And I can't even really fault the administration; they're probably justifiably worried about lawsuits. Or... at least that's how other parents are interpreting it. Reading the email that was sent out about it, all that's really said is a reminder that students are "expected" to leave the premises if they don't have a sanctioned activity or parental supervision. It's not phrased as a hard requirement. It actually seems like a fine needle-threading that absolves the school of responsibility, without actually accepting responsibility for enforcing the ban, the exact sort of "take responsibility for your own choices" that I would have insisted they should do instead of some cowardly, heavy-handed ban.

So, for a second time, I feel that this organization I have heavily criticized deserves some praise for responsible decision-making. Credit where it is due. I'd send the principal a congratulatory email... but that seems like the sort of autistic idiocy that might force his hand.

I'm a teacher in Canada. I'm not sure lack of homework is either a good thing or the result of advances in pedagogy.

I teach high school, and can say with full confidence that it has been decades since kids have been educated as poorly as they are now (and this in in Canada, where I say with much less confidence that average performance is better than the US). Less and less is expected of kids every year, everything operates in what Zvi Mowshowitz calls easy mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-easy-mode/), when most of it should happen in what he calls hard mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-hard-mode/) and grade inflation is rampant. All of this is caused by institutional cowardice, since angry parents call all the time to complain about their kids' grades. Because homework was often a mark-depressor (as you note in your own case, and as it was in mine), it has become unfashionable largely because, if people send their kids to school for any nobler reason than "day care" it's to have the kid's intelligence certified ("He's an A student"), rather than to have the kid actually learn things. So cutting homework raises grades and reduces teacher workload- it certainly isn't cut because people are reading well-designed studies and changing their practice based on the findings. But cutting homework also removes a ton of practice from the kid's life, which means the kid is absolutely worse at the subject than he would have been. Maybe it's a good trade-off, maybe it's not that important to be good at school when you're a kid, maybe school should be nothing more than day care, but the kids definitely know less and have weaker skills than they used to. And your taxes are increasing to pay for it.

Note also that places like Kumon exist to SELL homework to families. Since this homework is not connected to the school, they get all the benefits of the practice without any of the risk of mark depression.

Note also that places like Kumon exist to SELL homework to families. Since this homework is not connected to the school, they get all the benefits of the practice without any of the risk of mark depression.

It seems like you can square this circle with the assumption that school-homework is mostly designed based on ass-pulled postulates and hence doesn't work to do anything but take up time, while kumon homework actually teaches because it's designed better.

If you have a vision for building a better society, you would also be obsessed with improving competence.

This just begs the questions "better in what ways" and "more competent in what?" If the ideologues really do think that, e.g., racism, prejudice, and just plain old meanness are the cause of all society's ills, why wouldn't it make sense for them to honestly invest in educational systems that try to be more competent at not being mean to kids, and similarly try to be more competent in teaching kids to not be mean themselves?

I agree with you that technical skill and competence is quite important, and that modern education is not geared towards fostering it. In fact, I think that modern education is quite prepared to suppress competence when it tends to produce outcomes which do not appeal to modern progressive aesthetic or moral sensibilities, and that this tendency is extremely bad. However, I don't think that your criticism shows hypocrisy - to the contrary, it shows the dangerousness of the earnest belief in bad ideas.

Depending upon what you need people to accept for the first part, I’m not sure that you can do both. If I want kids to accept an ideology that says the earth is flat, then competent understanding of physics would work against that.

Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.

I think it’s a problem of weakness of the underlying dogmas under scrutiny. If you have a dogma that absolutely falls apart on contact with reality, it isn’t good to create a population that is able to think carefully about reality. In fact, you’d want a population almost exactly like our own, in which people are taught trades and given university degrees, but aren’t actually taught to observe or think and who are basically scientifically illiterate and unable to read and understand complex texts.

It’s not hard to get right, as high levels of scholarship were achieved quite often before the modern era. Teach kids how to learn, give them tools to observe and interpret their own data, to think carefully about ideas. It’s borderline criminal that we aren’t doing that: teaching logic and statistics and philosophy would create a generation of thinkers with the tools to question narratives.

We aren’t doing that, and judging by how things are, it’s being torn down on purpose as anything that actually produces a good outcome seems to end quickly because of accusations of racism.

On the other hand, my father never got homework until grade eight, so maybe we are returning to how things used to be.

I was actually in a similar situation about 20 years ago. We used to stay in the schoolyard after school to play sports or games. When I was 12, I was there with my friends preparing for a snowball fight as we usually did in the winter, when some older kids (about 13 or 14) from another school showed up and one them attacked me because I threw a snowball at him after he asked me to.

His friends pulled him off me, but not before I got a few kicks to his face and he got a few punches to mine, so when I got home, I had a few minor bruises. This led to my parents contacting the school and the vice principal pulling me out of class the next day to ask what happened.

Nothing came of it. I only knew the kid's first name. The rule that said we could do what we wanted on school property after 4:00 PM remained in place. It never would have occurred to me to think that incident meant we needed adult supervision. I was already embarrassed that the adults felt they needed to anything about it. I felt like we kids handled things pretty well.

There was another incident where some roughhousing with friends led a neighbour to call the school which led to another talking to with the vice principal. Again, I just felt embarrassment and I was confused about why the adults were overeacting and wondered, as I often did, if they didn't remember what it was like to be a kid.

Again, I just felt embarrassment and I was confused about why the adults were overeacting and wondered, as I often did, if they didn't remember what it was like to be a kid.

I definitely remember thinking it was weird when at some point as a kid I realized that assault was illegal for adults but utterly ignored for kids.

I have a sort-of inverse experience where in I as a 17 year-old got in a fist fight with an adult and found myself in the awkward position of trying convince the cops not to arrest him.

See also, campus rape tribunals.

With the one caveat that residential colleges - particularly ones with affiliated hospitals - should be serious about providing the kind of medical support which can lead to, e.g., timely-taken and well-preserved rape kits for evidentiary purposes, and/or treatment of wounds. As the providers of both supervised residential services and healthcare, they're uniquely positioned to be able to connect the two.

One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent.

While we're confessing to pro-forma parental activities... my kid's difficult-to-get-into, otherwise lovely preschool had a parents workshop over the weekend recently about talking to your kids about racism. I felt obligated to go so that they wouldn't think I was some kind of person who merely believes in color blindness. I made sure to bring up a traumatic bigotry-related thing from my childhood that had to do with honor violence, with a vow to not let my kid grow up in a world like that. I even almost shed a tear.

I think I'm safe, for a little while.

I remember doing homework every day in high school.

Also I had years I got beat up everyday. Also had years where we can played outside everyday at the local field - football, basketball, baseball. I’ll take getting beat up everyday for the good times of playing games compared to modern kids.

Some reason made me think of metoo. Getting raped doesn’t sound that bad by some Hollywood exec versus getting beaten for a few months everyday in gym class. But that was probably far more common for boys.

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.

Compare this with the universal revulsion heaped upon Shkreli for breaking rules which are apparently frequently broken, but without losing any investor money.

He did raise the price on a life saving drug, but he was sticking it to insurance companies that were obligated to buy it. For Medicaid and the uninsured the price was either about the same or lower than before.

Yeah, if not for the drug price hike, no one would have cared about this guy. He may have still gone to jail but it would not have been a national story. The amount of money he handled was peanuts in the grand scheme of corporate/investor fraud.

Is that the truth of it? I remember the narrative at the time implied that patients would be getting screwed by the price hike (and yes, I know, don't always trust the narrative, but popular sentiment is very hard to ignore).

Yes, it is true.

His conviction had nothing to do with raising the price of the drug. He broke the rules handling investors' money and investing it without giving notice and was sentenced for that. His bets turned out good and he returned the money with profit but rules are rules and he could have easily lost the money.

SBF most likely is going to jail for long time.

Like most drugs that cost thousands for insurance companies, daraprim had a program for the uninsured to provide the drug at little to no cost. Many interviews quote Shkreli on this, here's one of them: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/martin-shkreli-pharmaceuticals-ceo-interview

The Wayback Machine confirms that the site for the drug assistance program, Daraprim Direct, was live on September 15, 2015, which was a couple of days before a story on Healio kicked off the news cycle: https://web.archive.org/web/20150401000000*/https://www.daraprimdirect.com/

Highly recommend Matt Levine's article on FTX's balance sheet. There is no way to read this balance sheet and come away thinking that Bankman-Fried, FTX, and Alameda were merely incompetent.

In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.

I am not saying that all of FTX’s assets were made up. That desperation balance sheet lists dollar and yen accounts, stablecoins, unaffiliated cryptocurrencies, equities, venture investments, etc., all things that were not created or controlled by FTX. 5 And that desperation balance sheet reflects FTX’s position after $5 billion of customer outflows last weekend; presumably FTX burned through its more liquid normal stuff (Bitcoin, dollars, etc.) to meet those withdrawals, so what was left was the weirdo cats and dogs. 6 Still it is striking that the balance sheet that FTX circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up! Stuff it made up! You can’t do that! That’s not how balance sheets work! That’s not how anything works!

"It was obviously in good faith that we exchanged customer funds in actual things (dollars, bitcoins, whatever) with coins that we made up and whose supply we control and that could not be sold for even a fraction of their claimed value." Or having an account labelled "Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account."

At best they had "good faith' in the same way that Theranos did: telling themselves -delusionally- that they'd make it all right eventually and make all the lying worth it.

Has anyone posted this yet? It’s phenomenal.

https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175

Of note is the evidenced theory that SBF was on Parkinson’s dopaminergic drugs which led him to making ridiculous risks and purchases, and other information that can lead one to think the Bankman literally Fried his brains.

Thanks for the link, which includes a link to the NYT piece. It's hilarious in parts; Bankman-Fried tried to use his influence to get his rival clobbered by regulatory bodies in the USA, which pissed off the other guy and he then pulled the pin on the grenade. Too much arrogance due to (possibly) frying his brains on drugs and believing his own hype about being a wunderkind:

Perhaps Mr. Bankman-Fried’s most ambitious aim was to shape crypto regulation in Washington, where he testified to Congress and met with regulators. He also used his growing influence in the capital to criticize his biggest rival, Mr. Zhao, in private meetings, people familiar with the matter said.

Attacking Mr. Zhao “was not a good strategic move on my part,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said on Sunday. “I was pretty frustrated at a lot of what I saw happening, but I should’ve understood that it was not a good decision of me to express that.”

A former investor in FTX, Mr. Zhao still owned a large amount of FTT, a cryptocurrency that FTX invented to facilitate trading on its platform. On Nov. 6, Mr. Zhao announced on Twitter that he was selling the FTT, spooking customers who rushed to withdraw their FTX deposits.

“We won’t pretend to make love after divorce,” Mr. Zhao wrote on Twitter. “We won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs.”

When FTX collapsed, Mr. Zhao initially agreed to buy the exchange in what would have amounted to a bailout. But soon the deal fell through, after Binance found problems in the company’s financials. In a Signal group chat that included Mr. Bankman-Fried and other FTX representatives, Mr. Zhao posted a curt note, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” he wrote, “but we won’t be able to continue this deal. Way too many issues. CZ.”

Mr. Bankman-Fried scrambled to line up new financing. “I shouldn’t throw stones in a glass house, so I’ll hold back a bit,” he said in a message to employees obtained by The Times. “Except to say: probably they never really planned to go through with the deal.”

Listen, Binance is probably dodgy as fuck itself, but you have to admire the size of the balls on CZ for pulling this off 🤣 Revenge is a dish best posted on Twitter, indeed!

If SBF hadn't fucked up so badly we'd be speaking more about what was essentially a supervillain move by CZ.

Didn't batman do essentially the same thing?

I was thinking this was the more highly-apropos Batman clip

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:

Contributions for the year 2022, through August 15, 2022, also went to members of both parties, with $105,000 donated to conservatives (0.3%) and $35,872,000 to liberals (99.7%) .[81]

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

There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time

Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk

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.

libertarian political beliefs

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 Blue / Red / Grey tribe distinction is explicitly cultural rather than political.

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'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.

More comments

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.

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.

Being an effective altruist basically makes him grey, no? He's certainly politically aligned with democrats, but so is Scott, and that doesn't make him blue tribe.

His parents teach at Stanford. His gf at MIT. His mothers been a Democratic and Biden bundler for a long time. His Aunts like Harvard and work in public health. Deep administrative state people with Democrat connections.

I remember asking a question a while ago on whether effective altruist were just Democrats who came up with new branding so they weren’t Democrats but the upper class Democrats to seperate themselves from the peons in the party.

Honestly EA just looks like Democrats to me now even more. People who want to say the ends justify the means to take other peoples money and spend it. Old school tax and spend Dems.

Perhaps grey tribe just doesn’t exists. Thiels just a conservative with edgier branding and libertarians are just conservatives.

She talked about HBD on her blog! Both of them were scott fans! A lot of the gray tribe came out of elites and top universities.

I mean, a lot of white nationalists came out of top universities. Jared Taylor went to yale. just being democrat-related doesn't tell you everything.

Sounds like you are just describing grey tribe as being a bit smarter than your tribe and a little autistic so able to think outside of social pressure.

But I basically defined him as claiming grey tribe as it lets him be in the upper intellect of blue tribe and above the peons so are definitions don’t really disagree.

After reading through his ballot discussions, there is nothing that makes me thing Scott is anything other than a party-line blue triber. In every case he is maximally charitable to the D candidate, and maximally uncharitable to the R candidate (ex: he states anyone disputing the 2020 election is an automatic no vote from him, yet conveniently forgets a large number of Ds did the same in 2016, and as happens in every presidential election). While he discusses and presents the issues in a very thoughful manner- why most of us read ACX in the firet place- I dont see him ever voting a majority not-blue ballot.

What has he done or said that makes him grey?

I dunno about Fried, but Caroline was an active part of the tumblr ratsphere under worldoptimization for a few years, to the point of getting linked from Scott as an effortposter. While bluer than the reddit side on average, she was still willing to do (and able to get away with) no small amount of Darkly Hinting.

From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe

Whose?

Read his and caroline's twitter history. They talk just like themotte posters. HBD, IQ maximization, nootropics, alternative lifestyles, AI risk, game theory, all the trendy topics.

They're fucking nerds dude.

But are all nerds "Grey Tribe"?, as I said in another comment, at least in the Scott piece some of the signifiers of grey tribe is using Uber, but that seems nonsensical to me when you can't afford a car but need to go somewhere on a timely manner.

"Grey tribe" is blue tribe (often the very bluest of the blue tribe) who just don't happen to agree with a fair amount of typical blue-tribe-associated political views for whatever reason.

so, blues that sometimes vote republican/third party in a nutshell?

That of the people who aren't confused by a term like "grey tribe", i.e. rationalist-adjacent people.

This sounds like consensus building more than any other thing, considering the pushback affirmations like yours got in the recent thread about this topic in the main page. Is there anything significant that separates a blue triber from this so called grey one?

It's from this.

Like any tribal or sectarian squabbles, "significant" is relative. I'm grey and I think there's significant difference. That a lot of people here were discussing the EA angle is kind of how you can tell.

I kind of agree with your comment on consensus building though.

What would you say is the characteristics that separate you from the average Blue triber?

Haven't been able to read the article, but I have seen comments elsewhere that it is indeed going soft on him.

I wonder how much of that is the lawyers saying "Well you can't even breathe a hint that anything criminal went on, or even wrong-doing, before or until the cops slap the cuffs on him, else that will be considered libellous" and how much is whatever reporter wrote it genuinely believing since the guy was a donor to the Democrats (though the company hedged its bets by donating some to the Republicans as well) and good causes, how can he be a criminal?

First Elon Musk dominated the news cycle 2-4 weeks ago with twitter, and now this guy, but Elon still heavily in the news. Just more evidence that billionaires (or ex-billionaires) run the show. Hardly anyone cares about Biden that much, who is like the incredible shrinking president. Oh, war still going on in Ukraine /Russia too, which also has become background noise.

Last week people were speculating that somehow SBF hacked his own exchange or was fleeing with money; I didn't believe any of it. If he wanted to drain funds from the exchange, he didn't need a malicious app update. He could have just made a transfer of $100 million or so quietly from a cold wallet to a wallet in which he controlled the keys, and then if the money is ever discovered missing, which given that FTX is privately owned would be almost impossible short of a federal investigation, he could just say he was hacked or lost it. Given how big FTX was, and still is, this would likely go unnoticed. He's still on twitter, giving interviews. This is not typical of felons running from the law.

I think this whole thing was just a big mistake of risk management on his part, and possible mishandling of customer funds and lying about the dollar backing of FTX deposits. He was screwed either way: had he been forthright about FTX's actual financial health, the ensuing panic would have made a bad situation way worse. Thus, there is an incentive to lie and hope that the market will recover, which in the case of Bitcoin it didn't. This makes him unethical and he may go to jail, but I don't think he profited from this personally.

I think this whole thing was just a big mistake of risk management on his part,

I don’t buy it. He was already a multi-billionaire, what normal incentive did he have to risk it all on high leverage plays?

There’s something else going on here. Either behind-the-scenes polyamorous status-jockeying, or a calculated high-risk high-reward play for something BIG.

He was likely never a billionaire, or at least not for long. His wealth was based on hypothetical , private Alameda/FTX holdings, which were probably illusory long before the very public collapse. FTX/Alameda was probably running out of money long before last week.

I think this is the case, because I can never understand why anyone who gets that big and that rich doesn't immediately diversify a minimum of 25% of their holdings into other assets, such as blue chip shares, real estate, commodities, bonds etc to financially protect themselves in case of company collapse. This goes for companies like Tesla, but especially for companies like FTX operating in unstable high risk sectors.

Risk-averse people usually aren't the ones getting this rich in the first place.

Also, trying to diversify out of your own company looks bad to investors and risks a crash by itself.

Also, trying to diversify out of your own company looks bad to investors

This is universally reported to be true, but it's so strange to me. Should they also refuse to get in a taxi if they see the driver wearing a seatbelt, because a really good driver wouldn't need one? Should they be suspicious if they see your software going through integration tests, because that means you're not hiring really good coders who don't write bugs?

At some point the population of "people super confident that they can't fail, because they've accurately assessed that they're just that good" you're shooting for has to be a fraction of the population of "people super confident that they can't fail, because they're fools".

I'd guess it's not just about confidence/commitment but also preventing downright scams. Theranos-style fake businesses would be a lot more common if it was easy to cash out before the fraud gets uncovered.

Hence why I said only diversify out ~25%, but I take your meaning. Investors seem to expect all in, ride or die from the builders.

People who make reasonable decisions like that never become temporary crypto-billionares in the first place.

This apparently had nothing to do with risks management and it feels like straight theft.

The kid had the best advisors in the world. His parents are literally at the top of the regulatory game.

He should get a sentence of about 500 years. There should be no forgiveness for people who commit a crime of this magnitude who was fully informed and capable. This is plain and simple Madoff.

i still want to wait and see how this plays out before meting punishment . he lied but there is still a lot more to find out

On the less bad side he just felt a lot of pressure when Alameda blew up and did some very illegal things. 10-20 is probably the ball park.

On the very side he was raiding customer accounts far earlier to fake billionaire when he was not and funding promotions, politics, etc with customer funds and then Alameda blew up and he took way more customer funds. This would be much worse and straight up Madoff.

And he’s tough to have sympathy for. His parents were great advisors and he had plenty of smarts.

Hardly anyone cares about Biden that much, who is like the incredible shrinking president.

Do you believe that Biden is the person actually making decisions in his own administration?

No. I think his leadership has been outsourced to focus groups. He does not inspire the confidence as someone like Bill Clinton did. He fills a role, but does not lead.

With regard scammers and frauds , it's always asked " why didn't anyone warn anyone, how did this happen?"/ People do warn, it's just that no one listens . See Madoff and Harry Markopolos for example. It's possibly more profitable or net-positive to let frauds fun and accept some losses, than try to stop them and possibly cause less economic growth. For example, why does the Fed let bubbles expand instead of preemptively pop them? Because even after the bubble pops, the net gain is still higher than had they tried to stop it earlier. I have found most people do not care about frauds, only the victims care, but otherwise who cares. Let the good times roll and we will pay the tab later. I know that coinbase users are being scammed for millions due to a certain type of giveaway fraud and offered a solution to fix it but was rebuked. Society deserves the fraudsters its gets, I suppose, unless fraud prevention is valued more highly like it is in China, or fraud is tolerated less. America's approach is to administer sometimes very punitive punishments if fraud is found, but otherwise not be too vigorous in stopping it. I am not sure if this is the best approach as a deterrent.

unless fraud prevention is valued more highly like it is in China.

Is there a story about this, sounds vaguely interesting. It certainly doesn't seem like China cares about companies or consumers in other countries being defrauded by Chinese companies (which is to be expected from a national interest perspective, but it still means my main experience with China is a certain level of casual fraud).

A few weeks ago I wrote about a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example. Since 1980 Saudi Arabia has gradually loosened many of its old restrictions on women, women have become more "empowered", and correspondingly fertility rates have dropped from a sky-high 7+ to just over 2 (replacement level).

User /u/2rafa objected to my claim, saying:

The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on. If anything, Saudi declines in TFR match much more cleanly the rapid enrichment of much of the population with oil money.

I decided to go down a rabbit-hole tracing the history of patriarchy and liberalization in Saudi Arabia.

The first thing I found is that there is a lot of lying going on. For instance the current young prince of Saudi Arabia says:

In an interview in March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, said that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia."

This is apparently just false. Religious police patrolling the streets for vice was a practice going back centuries. Saudi Arabia Women were banned from driving in 1957.

An Jamal Khashoggi (later assassinated, allegedly by Prince Salman) wrote in the Washington Post in response to the Prince:

I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia. My memories of those years before the twin disasters of 1979 — the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Iranian Revolution — are quite different from the narrative that the 32-year old crown prince (known as MBS for short) advances to Western audiences. Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Ariz., in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift, like American drive-ins except much more informal. The movie was beamed on a big wall. You would pay 5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.

The first rule that affected Saudi women’s rights was not the result of a campaign by Wahhabi religious authorities or a fatwa. Many Saudis remember the sad story of a 19-year-old Saudi princess who tried to flee the country with her lover. They were both executed in 1977; the episode was the subject of a 1980 British documentary drama “Death of a Princess.” The reaction of the government to the princess’s elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe, and no woman could travel without the consent of a male relative.

We can also corroborate this from articles at the time. Here is a NY Times article from 1975:

Princess Hussa, a slim, attractive woman of 26, is married to a senior Government official. They have one child. Like many other young women of Kuwait, she insists on a life of her own. The Princess, who speaks several languages, studies English literature at the University of Kuwait and, when she so chooses, goes out unescorted to tour the art galleries, shop for her designer clothes or visit her friends.

Such freedom for women is unknown in Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden to drive cars or hold office jobs. They may work only as teachers in girls’ schools, aides to social workers or as doctors. Women may not mingle with men other than their husbands or relatives in any public place. Even the zoo is open on separate days for men and women.

On the street and in the market places of the cities and villages, women pass by as dark shadows, veiled in black from head to foot. The veil may not be lowered even for a passport photo and photographers are forbidden to take pictures of Saudi women on the street.

In Saudi Arabia, if a Saudi woman dares to venture out without the traditional garb, the matow'ah, who are the religious police, are empowered to spray her legs with black paint. Not many years ago women could be whipped for what the matow'ah considered excessive exposure and those charged with adultery might be stoned to death.

Such attitudes toward women are colliding, however, with the efforts of the Saudi Government to modernize swiftly and, with its billions of dollars in oil revenues, to develop the structure of the society. The Government is under pressure to enlarge the role of women simply because many of its ambitious programs are being frustrated by a critical shortage of manpower.

For Saudi women, this has meant seclusion, no political rights, and, until King Faisal intervened, no schooling.

King Faisal, who mounted the throne in 1964, is a Moslem fundamentalist and the chief protector of the Islam faith in the Arab world. When he sought to introduce education for women, he was bitterly opposed by religious conservatives. He finally declared there was no law in the Koran barring such education and opened schools for girls. In some areas, he had to back up his decree with a show of military force. Today, there are as many schools for girls as for boys —but coed.

At the University of Riyadh in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Dr. S. A. Melibaky, the secretary general, said in an interview that about 20 per cent of the enrolment of 5,200 are women. They are registered as extension students in the departments of arts and commerce.

Women are accepted as full‐time students in the College of Medicine, but there are no coed classes. Women receive instruction in special ectures, some through closedircuit television, and they ake separate examinations. Drily in the final years of heir graduate studies are vomen medical students pernitted to work alongside of men in the hospitals.

It's unclear what the "conservative backlash" after the 1979 uprising amounted to. The only clear policy change I can find is banning women from roles on TV. However, this may have been more of bone thrown to the conservatives, while as a whole society continued to slowly march leftward and more feminist. Overall, seems the country gradually became more feminist as the birth rates gradually declined:

Year     Fertility Rate    Gross female college enrollment rate
19707.30%
19807.24%
19905.911%
2000425%
2010339%
20202.274%

(I use college attendance as a key metric of feminist advancement because it is one of the only metrics that is easy to quanitify and it is one of the most important institutions for tipping the scales from patriarchy to "women's liberation": 1) it takes women away from the oversight and tutelage of her father and family 2) it represents a big investment in skills unrelated to being a wife or mother 3) it immerses her in messaging from the universe that these job and academic skills are super important 4) university and the years preparing for university are extremely central to life.

(...part 2, in which we travel through time via newspaper articles, to be continued as a reply...)

(...part 2...)

Newspapers articles seem to corroborate this narrative of gradual movement toward women's lib. As I read these articles, one thing I noticed is that in general it seems like the King and the government were trying to please both sides. They were trying to show the U.S. and the West that they were becoming more "modern" and treating women well, but also trying to show Islamic conservative critic that they were still obeying Islam. So maybe while the government would throw a sop to the conservatives by banning women from TV, the government would at the same time push women's education and employment -- but would say this is for economic reasons and not social reasons and not in violation of Islamic law. Ultimately, the latter was far more important toward ending patriarchy. Let's review the history through some articles.

From a 1981 article:

Expatriates call them ''religious police'', but a better term would be vigilantes. The House of Saud licences their busybodying as a useful release valve for the fundamentalist religious fervor which the Shah and Sadat both tried to suppress. And the honor and respect they are accorded by the Saudi Government helps to conceal the reality of change.

The House of Saud is getting ready for the 21st century. There is a singer on Saudi television who remembers when he used to have to sing in secret. Veteran expatriates remember how, 20 years ago, it was not permissible to smoke in the street, and how cigarettes were purchased under the counter, in plain brown envelopes. In April 1981, a committee of Islamic legal scholars ruled that a Saudi woman must be allowed to unveil in front of her prospective bridegroom: ''Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,'' the committee declared.

Italics mine -- note the government is playing a double game of assuaging the conservatives while telling the NY Times and Westerners that they are "progressing."

From another 1981 article:

As the Saudis race to invest their oil riches in ambitious economic-development programs, the roles played by Mrs. Fawzan and many other urban women indicate that the traditionally conservative Islamic social structure is gradually yielding to change.

What this means is that beyond the overall Government policy of encouraging female literacy and education, there are few specifics concerning the promotion of employment or career opportunities for women. A Government commission is reportedly examining areas of work to be officially approved for women. Women who run boutiques or beauty parlors may run the risk of having their businesses closed down, even if temporarily, by the so-called religious police or members of the Society for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

...The recently disclosed third five-year plan calls for the participation of women in the development of the country, although few specifics are offered. Officials such as the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazir, one of the most prominent technicians, are known to espouse the position that since more than 50 percent of the potential labor force of 2.5 million are female, the increased employment of women could help Saudi Arabia become less reliant on foreign labor.

...A number of women say that the key to change is more education. ''Education is the basis of the change that is taking place in Saudi society for women,'' Mrs. Rouchdy said. ''But for the most part Saudi women do not want to change their social norms. They don't want to run away from Islamic values and from religion. They are saying, We don't want the superficial aspects of Westernization but only the scientific part of it.''

In 1982 Saudi Arabia got a new king, who was depicted "as the leading figure in a progressive, modernizing faction within the tradition-minded monarchy."

We should keep in mind that of course Saudi Arabia is still very patriarchal and has very high brith rates at this point. The changes described in the previous two articles are just a beginning.

Leading on to 1989 we see more of a movement leftward, which is supported by the King and the government:

While this remains a country where women are veiled in public, cannot drive cars and must seek permission of husbands or other men who are relatives before traveling abroad, education and modernization have made Saudi women a force that neither the Government nor the religious authorities can ignore.

Elegantly dressed and armed with a doctoral degree in education from Ohio State University, Miss Dekheil, who uses her maiden name, is, at 28 years old, the director of an interdisciplinary program at a Government institute that trains women for jobs by sharpening their skills or teaching new ones.

She is one of a new breed of Saudi women dealing with the Saudi Arabia of 1989: A country with nearly a million girls going to school, 100,000 of those in higher education. They are graduating into a conservative society where traditions holding them back from an active role in the economy are slowly coming down. Saudi Arabia's women are becoming doctors, engineers, social workers and computer operators.

...Miss Mosly, who is also married and uses her maiden name, has defied many customs, going to a boarding school in Lebanon at age 4 and studying engineering, then coming back to find a job at Aramco nearly 21 years ago. She runs a department of 186 people, including 50 Saudi men who report to her.

In the battle between progressives and traditionalists, the Saudi Government, known for moving ever so cautiously, appears to be leaning toward a slow integration of women in the work force.

The Saudi Government gave a clear signal when it conferred its most prestigious award, the King Faisal Award for Islamic Studies, on Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali, an Egyptian religious scholar who has taken a strong stand defending the rights of women to work and seek higher education.

From a 1990 article, Saudi Arabia is officially extremely patriarchal, birthrates still very high, but women's lib creeping in:

Although almost 30 years old, she is still forced to live with her family, since in Saudi Arabia it is against the law for her to live alone as an unmarried woman. If she chooses to leave the country, she said, the only way she can get a passport or board a plane is with her father's written permission.

Legally, neither she nor any other single Saudi woman can go out alone, drive, work with men, travel alone, stay in a hotel, go out to eat, or do anything else alone that might allow them to somehow encounter a man on their own.

The woman who said she was frustrated sipped a whisky at a private party, danced and, after a long conversation, confided that she was divorced and recently had a lover.

But, she said, Government officials had found out about the relationship and investigated her. Her father threatened to lock her in the house and one of her brothers threatened to kill her.

...Drinking alcohol, dancing, mixing of the sexes and a great deal else is officially prohibited here as non-Islamic. In spite of such formal strictures, drinking, dancing and a great deal else that is non-Islamic regularly goes on behind closed doors.

...A Western diplomat told of his astonishment on attending a private party of well-connected Saudis recently. Wine flowed and the men and women were arguing loudly about everything from politics to food when, his Saudi host said, "Watch this."

The lights dimmed and two beautiful women, veiled and clad in sheer but discreet dancing robes, appeared and "danced the most sensual dance I have ever seen," the diplomat said. After a few minutes, he said, he realized that the dancers were the wives of Saudis who were present.

"I still can't figure this place out," the diplomat said.

Again, Saudi Arabia is still more patriarchal than the West (and has higher birth rates), but being "investigated" and "threatened" is still more liberal than being executed (as the adulterous Princess of 1977 was) or stoned (as the New York Times claims was the practice in the 1950s and 1960s).

From 1991, now in debt to the West after the Gulf War, the King is liberalizing by forming citizen councils:

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has announced a series of changes in the Government to take place by January, including the formation of a council of Saudi citizens with whom the royal family is to consult in ruling the country, the introduction of a written body of laws and greater local autonomy for the provinces.

He told Saudis for the first time that Saudi Arabia had to borrow billions of dollars to meet what he described as the huge cost of the gulf war. He asserted, however, that the debts would not affect the welfare of citizens.

(...part 3 continues as a reply...)

In 2000, as part of opening up Saudi Arabia to new capital markets, the government signed conventions on human rights. Presumably, these conventions had stipulations about women's rights:

The government has said it intends to set up a capital market, which would require new standards of openness for Saudi companies. It has also started work on reforming its legal system and trade regulations, all in pursuit of membership in the World Trade Organization. And it has signed international treaties and conventions on human rights.

...Saudi Arabia has ratified four conventions on human rights and discrimination against women, though it submitted formal reservations. And prompted by its acceptance of international treaties and trade rules, the government is considering creation of an appellate court and a codification of defendants' rights.

in 2001, Saudi Arabia ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), although they did so with reservations that it would only do so when not in violation of Islamic law.

In 2002, Saudi women talk about how discrimination against women still exists, but "progress" is being made:

Maha Muneef, a female pediatrician, emphasized that Saudi Arabia is progressing, albeit more slowly than many women would like. ''My mother didn't go to any school at all, because then there were no girls' schools at all,'' she said. ''My older sister, who is 20 years older than me, she went up to the sixth grade and then quit, because the feeling was that a girl only needs to learn to read and write. Then I went to college and medical school on scholarship to the States. My daughter, maybe she'll be president, or an astronaut.''

Another doctor, Hanan Balkhy, seemed ambivalent. ''I don't think women here have equal opportunities,'' she acknowledged. ''There are meetings I can't go to. There are buildings I can't go into. But you have to look at the context of development. Discrimination will take time to overcome.''

In 2005, the Saudi King started creating cities "free from the influence of Wahabi clerics":

Within the first months of ‘Abdullah’s term as King, the Saudi government pursued a number of policies to improve the Kingdom’s economic profile.... finding jobs for young Saudis, and opening up foreign investment. But they had another function too, one that was more transparent in a centerpiece of the early period of ‘Abdullah’s reign: the establishment of “economic cities” where, freed from the influence of the Wahhabi clerics, Saudis would live, work, and study as productive members of a modern economy.

....The lead project was the King ‘Abdullah Economic City, which was announced in December 2005. Three more have followed for Jizan, Hail, and Medina.

...With images of men and women in beach wear, its developer Emaar Economic City, a subsidiary of Dubai’s Emaar, proclaimed in 2005 “the dawn of a kingdom in a new colour.” Officials let it be known in foreign media that women would be allowed to drive cars, schools and universities would be co-educational, the gender restrictions in public places would be relaxed, and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s entertainment firm Rotana could operate cinema houses. Housing two million people by its completion around 2020, the city was to be a model of urban renewal and modern education, as well as a zone where the rules of society were put in abeyance. Though no one has said so publicly, the city was intended to be a liberal enclave in Saudi Arabia’s sea of religious conservatism.

The economic city/liberal enclave innovation was part of a wider shift engendered by the hijacking of civilian airliners in the United States by an al-Qa‘ida cell on September 11, 2001....‘Abdullah’s calculation was that Saudi Arabia needed to offer a better image to the world if it wanted to challenge the idea fashionable among some circles close to the Bush Administration of toppling the regime, as was of course planned for Iraq. That meant smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyya, though nothing as drastic as breaking the historical alliance with its ‘ulama’.

...The Saudi-Wahhabi state contains other liberal zones where Wahhabi social control is relaxed. They include parts of the city of Jeddah where some restaurants play music and allow unrelated men and women to sit together, on the assumption that the religious police will not drop by. Jeddah’s summer festival has included a cinema section since 2006, and concerts have featured rappers, reflecting the more liberal social attitudes of the Hejaz region compared to the Najd. The religious police generally avoid the diplomatic district in Riyadh and the town of Dhahran on the Gulf coast that houses state oil firm, Aramco. They maintain a light presence in neighboring Khobar, but a strong presence in the more conservative Dammam in the same Eastern Province vicinity.

...King ‘Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has been fêted in Western media as one of the final gambles of an octogenarian monarch in his twilight years to outflank the repressive clerics.[2] KAUST breaks with tradition on many fronts. It is run by Saudi Aramco, widely seen as the country’s most efficient and modern corporate institution. It has a foreigner, from Singapore, as its President, and faculty hired from around the world at immense expense. It opens with a huge $10 billion endowment said to be from the King’s own pocket. Its curricula are designed by Western consultants rather than the Education Ministry where, despite the hype, Wahhabism still reigns. There is no question of marauding religious police seeking to impose gender segregation on the premises.

...Domestic media has never presented the economic city concept in the way it was described to foreigners. When foreign media used the phrase “liberal enclave” in 2008, there was a visceral reaction from conservatives.[3] The government has not even hinted that the subsequent economic cities announced for Hail, Jizan, and Medina would be similarly segregated from Wahhabi power

In 2005, Saudi Arabia banned forced marriages.

In 2009, first women minister became member of the cabinet.

In 2012, government ministries are actively helping women to seek work:

Now the Saudi Ministry of Labor has asked him to help encourage women to find work. The government turned to the start-up because many of those seeking jobs in the kingdom are women.

The government has even announced plans to form a “woman friendly” city in the eastern province of Hofuf next year, aiming to bolster employment opportunities for women without transgressing religious boundaries.

In 2012, domestic abuse is now criminalized. Male guardian consent is no longer required for women to seek work.

Women voted for the first time in 2015.

2017 women allowed to drive.

2018, the King restricted the powers of the religious police, women no longer forced to wear the hijab in public.

2019, guardianship system is mostly rolled back. Women are allowed to travel abroad without male relative permission. "Women will now receive standard employment discrimination protections. They now also have the right to register the births of their children, live apart from their husbands, and obtain family records. And along with her husband, a woman can also now register as a co-head of household."

2019 -- marriages under age 18 banned.

2021 -- women can marry and divorce without permission. Single women now can live independently without a male guardian.

Saudi Arabia is now more feminist/liberal than 1950s United States -- and accordingly, its birth-rates are significantly lower than 1950s United States.

We can still debate a few things: 1) to what extent did "women's lib" happen as a result of government support and policy, and to what extent it was the result of sattelite TV and the prestige of American culture? 2) Could the government have stopped "women's lib" if it wanted to, or is it an inevitable result of being wealthy and having modern technology? However, whatever the role of government policy, it does seem clear to me that over the last 40 years there was a gradual process whereby patriarchy eroded and women did become more liberated/empowered.

(end of posts)

Saudi Arabia is now more feminist/liberal than 1950s United States

This is actually amazing. Shows you that the paranoia of religious conservatives in Islamic countries is not unwarranted. Change happens very fast. One wonders if the reversal can also be done as easily. People may try to bring up Afghanistan as proof that it can, but I am skeptical about how much real change there was outside a small comprador Westernised class in Kabul.

Would also like to note my appreciation of your high-quality comment(s).

In general it seems like people accept extreme religious-conservative ideologies as a way to enforce social order in a ‘basic functionality’ way. I read a report not long ago about the taliban taking territorial control by showing up to schools and hospitals with a list of conditions: censoring textbooks and gender segregated waiting rooms, yes, but also ‘teachers show up and grade papers fairly, or else message us on WhatsApp and we’ll come and beat them’. And I have spoken to missionaries for very conservative sects of Christianity who report that in Latin America, parents are eager to send their girls to religious boarding schools even if they’re far less feminist than they would prefer, because the government is unwilling to do anything about sexual harassment of adolescent girls on roads and buses.

Obviously you can in theory have a system where teachers show up to class and grade work fairly and the bus is safe for adolescent girls without that system being religious-conservative in nature. I mean, that’s more or less how the USA works. But it seems like people would prefer a system where women are veiled and textbooks must be sufficiently Islamic/Christian/whatever to one which lacks those basic things.

An interesting related aspect: I was watching this interview with the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on his Vision 2030 project, basically aimed at propelling Saudi Arabia forward and lessening its dependence on oil (you might have heard of parts of it like NEOM or, most recently, the Line). Right in the opening few minutes, he goes into detail how such a transformation is necessary because (paraphrasing) the Saudi population has grown at such a rapid pace that the living standard secured by fossil fuel wealth is in danger.

He doesn't directly draw a connection to his social reforms, but I was wondering if there might be at least a partial intent there: increase women's liberation, reduce the birth rate, stop his barren desert country from becoming overpopulated.

As a KAUST resident, I can say that this place is very interesting for Saudi Arabia. Most people here are foreign (including yours truly), this place socially can be compared to a southern european/ coastal Turkish city. The veiling of women does happen but it is rare, what is semi common however is the hijab but there are local Saudi women without hijab. The social climate is fairly good and the community seems to have decent levels of social trust. In Jeddah you will see more traditional behaviour combined some western elements, KAUST is the opposite.

It is also interesting to see how KAUST is a harmonious multicultural environment, probably caused by the good standard of living for all residents in combination with the fact that this place is an amalgam of the best each country has to offer in terms of people.

Nice effort-post! And thanks for doing the hard work of examining qualitative evidence.

Your main point is: (A) there's been a lot of female empowerment in Saudi Arabia over the past half-a-century, and (B) that's what explains the coincidental drop in fertility rates.

I agree that evidence indicates a substantial rise of female empowerment. To back up your qualitative evidence: Gender Inequality Index has a sharp drop in 2013, going from higher than Iran to on-par with Russia. "This index covers three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status." For comparison, I have included other countries: USA is lower than Russia but higher than Japan, which in turn is higher than South Korea, which by 2015 is on par with Sweden.

I looked at other measurements in Our World In Data, but many of those measurements don't take into account that almost 40% of people in Saudi Arabia are migrant workers, most of whom are men.

However, I am far from convinced that female empowerment is the main cause of the drop in fertility rates.

There is a strong correlation between fertility rate and child mortality rate, and this is likely causal. If you want to eventually have three adult children and each baby is likely to reach adulthood, then you only need to have three babies; but if half of babies die before adulthood, then you better plan to have six babies.

In Saudi Arabia, child mortality starts dropping in the 60's and 70's, and fertility rate start dropping in the 80's. That's the kind of generational delay I would expect: people get used to the fact that kids aren't dying like flies, and adjust accordingly.

The correlation between female empowerment and fertility rate could have the opposite causal explanation: as it became less necessary for women to have lots of babies in order for a few of them to survive to adulthood, the society can empower women to marry later, get more education, and participate more in the labor force.

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:

Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This is a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline.

...

Everyone wants “magic bullets” - drugs that can increase dopamine in one of these ways, but not any of the others. Treat attention problems without causing hallucinations. Cure tremors without causing hypersexuality. But it’s tough. There are dozens of dopamine-based drugs, and all of them succeed in some ways and fail in others. Adderall mostly helps attention but sometimes causes a little paranoia on the side. Antipsychotics mostly prevent hallucinations and delusions, but also cause anhedonia. If a good doctor carefully chooses the right drug and dose, you’ll mostly get what you want. Otherwise, choose 2d4 random side effects from the appropriate side of the table.

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:

If I were one of the psychiatrists who will one day buy second houses from the money they make as expert witnesses on this case (DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT ASKING ME TO DO THIS9), I would focus on what doses were involved. Adderall 10 mg will help treat ADHD and give you a nice motivational boost. Adderall 200 mg will cause paranoia and sometimes hallucinations. There are similar considerations for modafinil and Emsam. All of these drugs are compatible with “probably didn’t matter” or “probably the main cause of everything” depending on what doses we’re talking about.

(and of course there could be other drugs I don’t know about)

The other free advice I would give these witnesses is to think about sleep. The most common way stimulants cause psychosis (this is my personal opinion, I haven’t checked if the literature agrees with me) isn’t by some kind of direct dopaminergic agonism. It’s by making it feel possible to operate on two hours of sleep a night. This is not actually possible and will land you into some kind of very exotic and maladaptive mental state. Someone who takes lots of stimulants during the day and then manages to sleep fine at night might do better than someone who takes the same amount of stimulants in order to work 130 hour weeks.

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.

This is why I was never a rationalist. Not because I'm smart or perceptive, I've just been alive long enough to see the fads that smart people go through to convince themselves that their own rapacious greed and obsessive status competition is really "altruism". All these movements have some good ideas. They all have bad ones. And in time, they all fall victim to the humanity of their believers. Altruism is not a human trait. It's an ideal, failed in 100% of cases by the people who believe in it. When someone tells me about their pure intentions and desire to better the world, I check my wallet and my weapon.

To paraphrase the great mind of the 20th century: All intellectual movements start as a cause, become a business and end up as a racket. If this was your first, buckle up sunshine. It only gets dumber the longer you live. Smart people are morons.

If human traits are normally distributed and to some degree innate, it's reasonable to assume that some people are probably more altruistic than others. But altruism is conveyed through actions, not a label.

I would say some people feel the need to find an altruistic explanation for their base motives more than others, but perhaps we're talking about the same thing.

… Two elderly superhumans were competing for the presidency of the planet's foremost nation, USA: a 70-year-old schemer with obvious signs of sexual-pharmacological degeneration, and a 70-year-old demagogue, showman and professional bankrupt who had never been in politics before. […]

For a European, any medicine is poison: an evil which treats an even greater evil. This has been the basis of European medicine since antiquity. It is clear that no Europeans will take pills without a great and pressing need, especially if those pills affect the inner sanctum of man - his psyche.

Americans gobble up drugs by the handful, since for them they are not poisons but enhancers and dietary supplements. By the age of 50 an average American has enhanced himself to the stage of psychopathy, and then it gets worse and worse.

– 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.

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.

In fairness it worked pretty well for Paul Erdös and Francis Crick too.

If performance-enhancing drugs actually had zero side effects, there would be no need to worry about fair play. It's not a fair play problem when an athlete has to wear shoes to participate in most sports, even though shoes give athletes an unearned advantage over athletes who don't wear shoes.

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.

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.

there's video of SBF jittering in his chair like a crackhead

Honestly I think a big part of that is Sam knowing his accounting is fraudulent and he's about to be fried, and desperately putting up a front of a weird whiz kid who's got it all under control.

I dunno, seems like he rode this horse into the ground, and seems to have had a pretty good time until now.

It is part of the branding. If he looked like some boring guy in suit he probably would not have gotten as much media coverage.

there's video of SBF jittering in his chair like a crackhead

maybe he's autistic?

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.

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

LOL, are you curating a Stereotype Paragon of the Race collection?

No, but well, now that you've suggested it..

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.

Some people can tolerate drugs well; for others it destroys them and even those around them. It's like a coin toss as to how someone will respond. With alcohol there is not as much variability compared to the more serious stuff, but it can still be pretty bad.

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.

I'm largely in the same boat as you, philosophically -- I go cold turkey on caffeine regularly to make sure I can, don't and can't take more than a single serving of alcohols at a time, have a bit of internal resistance to even prescribed non-psychoactive drugs, and think people are too quick to dismiss the psychoactive risks of 'soft' drugs -- but I'm gonna push back a little bit, here.

I don't like the existing drugs, but I also don't think there's some particularly holy nature of the unaltered biochemistry. The snarky side is that we're already doing a lot of alterations to it, for better or worse: people worried about fluoride in water stealing their essence are probably a little nuts but it also probably does have some minor neurological impact, removing lead from everything is probably overstated but also not trivial, the amount of taurine you get in your diet probably effects memory even if you can separately synthesize it internally.

But the deeper part is that I'm extremely skeptical that even if the modern natural brain biochemistry was once well-optimized for the ancestral environment, that it currently is for our current one. Depression and obesity are popping up at ranges that are simply nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective. A significant portion of the male population can't successfully initiate sex to completion with any partner, nevermind one they can reproduce with. Modifications should be met with extreme skepticism because they're so hard to evaluate from the inside, and shouldn't be exploited for stupid or valueless reasons, and if there are available non-pharmaceutical interventions that work even moderately well I'd favor them.

But shit's broke already.

But the deeper part is that I'm extremely skeptical that even if the modern natural brain biochemistry was once well-optimized for the ancestral environment, that it currently is for our current one

Agree strongly here. For all the benefits of modernity it is clearly driving us 'crazy' in large numbers.

I don't like the existing drugs, but I also don't think there's some particularly holy nature of the unaltered biochemistry

There clearly isn't in a broad sense - genetic differences between humans that lead to great differences in intelligence or some other traits are themselves biochemical. But the particular mechanisms of psychoactive drugs are strong enough that they aren't doing the kind of thing that, like, a gradient descent of fine modifications would, but more just 'making you focus really hard on some specific thing' (stimulants, bad because - naturally - you'd be considering if you should do that thing and how you should do it in relation to larger-scale structures), or 'kinda feeling good or having crazy insights while actually just being dumb' (alcohol, weed, psychoactives). In the particular case of stimulants for 'not being able to focus', I really do think it's just a 'natural' lack of desire to engage in various aspects of school, work, modern life that is in great part justified, but poorly developed, rationalized, and then treated with the drug

The ironclad rule is that there is always going to be a cost associated with the benefit of a drug. When you’re dealing with pharmaceutical drugs that are not totally tested in normal humans, the cost is likely much greater than the benefit. But it’s easy to feel an immediate benefit, and much less easy to feel the longterm benefit that has imperceptibly small differences day by day.

If SBF were actually serious about maximizing his mind, and not just looking for an easy solution, he would go on a fasting regimen to lose weight, hire a personal chef to give him nutritious meals, start training for a marathon, quit league of legends, and never sleep on a bean bag chair. But really, he just wanted to get high. He was motivated by the same desire as meth addicts.

"The ironclad rule is that there is always going to be a cost." I'd have ended the sentence there. TANSTAAFL.

fasting is a bad way to lose weight, from what I have read. It causes metabolism to crash, hence rapid regain. Better to do it slowly.

However it is very good for brain health and reversing diabetes

What gets me the most is that he prescribes to family members in emergencies. This pisses me off pretty severely. For people who don't know a doctor, getting the drugs they need can be a huge struggle. Rather than try to fix the amount of red tape in the system, doctors what, make sure that it never affects the people they care about, and let the rest of us just deal with it? this ability to avoid the consequences of their own inaction is typical of doctors and part of why the US healthcare system's problems aren't just caused by faceless bureaucrats.

Doctors can prescribe to family members in almost all countries. It's not what's causing the US malaise.

Exactly how should Scott fix the red tape in the system? (Except for running his own experimental shoestring clinic, and talking loudly about the problem to his big and influential audience, both of which he already does.)

I agree, I strongly resent the paternalism of a system that even requires a prescription in the first place (if your concerned about drug abuse a good start would be that prescriptions are required for controlled substances and that insurance doesn’t have to cover drugs purchased without prescriptions)

I didn't say that it was breaking the system, I did say that it was removing their incentive to fix it.

Exactly how should Scott fix the red tape in the system?

Refuse to do business by fax.

Counterpoint: the obnoxiousness of the medical system is beyond Scott's marginal ability to fix, and in such cases one must tend to one's garden.

But every doctor thinks this way and they're the only group with the collective power to do anything about it.

But no individual doctor actually controls that collective power.

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

I don’t think we can conclude this early that he enriched himself with billions of FTX customers proceeds

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:

REPORTER: you were really good about talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers

SBF: hehe

SBF: i had to be

SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent

SBF: I feel bad by those who get fucked by it

SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us

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 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.

He posted on Twitter that he didn't think the convo would be published.

Prosecutors aren't limited to reviewing what has been published...

SBF--secretly based? Were people wrong about him being a Democratic operative hoping to advance globalist interests?

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.

I think he is an operative of a single interest, himself.

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?

My thoughts more or less exactly.

“SV venture capitalist detonates spectacularly”...isn’t really newsworthy. Not to me, out here in Texas. I’m sure it’s absolutely miserable for those who lost everything, and rather unpleasant even if one was tangentially involved, but most of us are neither. So—my sympathies to the victims, and I wish everyone could shut up about it so I can stop defending EA from the Worst Argument in the World.

Someone making earnest attempts that go bad isn't the same thing as intentionally misleading depositors and taking their money without their knowledge for various speculative bets. I think people who wish to whitewash what he did haven't frankly read up enough on the details.

I don’t want to whitewash him. It sure seems like he was negligent, if not predatory.

“Spectacular detonation” was intended to include massive fraud and other happenings which are not normal, not okay...but not unprecedented. EA critics have been eager to jump on SBF’s weird extremism and blame EA. Never mind the amount of crypto and finance meltdowns under similar circumstances.

Most Silly Valley blowups are not banks. FTX was, in reality, a bank (although it fraudulently claimed not to be, by saying that customer deposits were fully backed by cash and crypto reserves in specie). Bank blowups cause a lot of innocent third parties to lose money - FTX/Alameda didn't just lose all of Sequoia and Softbank's money - it also lost $8 billion of customer money.

In the sane world, we don't let people run a bank the way they run a Silly Valley juice startup.

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

Why? Humans have been experimenting with drugs like alcohol for tens of thousands of years. Many argue that civilization, language, art, etc would be impossible without these substances. What makes it so viscerally disgusting to you?

SBF story in its full ridiculous caricature of how utterly bankrupt of basic morality and humanity the whole suite is

Not to pull a No True Scotsman, but do you really think that one bad actor makes all of rationality/EA/utlitiarianism bad? If that's the case wouldn't virtue ethics or deontology be bad 10,000x times over by all the bad actors those ethical systems have produced over the centuries?

Seems to me as if you're just ranting based on feelings here, which is fine, but you literally admit to drinking caffeine and alcohol daily. Seems to me like this is not really a rational position, just you hating on your outgroup because they do different substances than you.

Not to pull a No True Scotsman, but do you really think that one bad actor makes all of rationality/EA/utlitiarianism bad?

No, but I'm not convinced that this is an issue of "one bad actor". This is rationality/utlitiarianism going wrong in exactly the way it's critics keep predicting it will, and not for the first time. This is the "uncharitable strawman" of the EA movement as a bunch of drug-addled sociopaths and grifters selling secular indulgences to their drug-addled tech-bro friends being revealed as not a strawman at all.

Why? Humans have been experimenting with drugs like alcohol for tens of thousands of years. Many argue that civilization, language, art, etc would be impossible without these substances. What makes it so viscerally disgusting to you?

I don't know. My intention was to speak frankly about something that I'm still trying to parse. As noted, I'm not a pure abstainer, but I am a skeptic of synthetic pharmacology. I cannot presently articulate the moral difference, but I have a very strong feeling that coffee and beer are quite different from whatever the SBF crew was doing.

Not to pull a No True Scotsman, but do you really think that one bad actor makes all of rationality/EA/utlitiarianism bad?

I don't and that's what I was trying to get at in my last sentence.

Got it! Maybe I didn't see some of the nuance. I'm also against the idea of medicating away any issues with your life, but I think modern society errs too far in the other direction at the moment.

Part of the reason that so many have issues with drug use, imo, is that we aren't free enough to experiment with them. So there's a sort of allure to illicit drugs.

Do you feel like regular use of Tylenol is wrong?

I suspect that people transpose a dislike for the medical system onto the things the system controls. If you had to cajole an ethanol prescription from your PCP every 3 months your relationship to booze would seem craven and desperate, even holding the quantity and quality constant. If you could pick up amphetamines at your local gas station, would it still feel so gross?

Why? Humans have been experimenting with drugs like alcohol for tens of thousands of years. Many argue that civilization, language, art, etc would be impossible without these substances. What makes it so viscerally disgusting to you?

Yeah, drug use was surprinsgly common in the 18-20th century America, such as opiates. Medicine was quite rudimentary and to ease pain of untreated chronic conditions and pass the time, drugs were often used, which would be considered illicit today

Brains already regulate their neurochemistry. How is this not just more of brains regulating their neurochemistry, via a much longer control loop?

To be clear, I can see the pragmatic argument of "your biology is a lot better at it than your cognition". I don't see where the aesthetic argument comes from.

How is this not just more of brains regulating their neurochemistry, via a much longer control loop?

This reasoning applies not only to phamaceuticals, but also to lobotomies and to shooting yourself in the head.

There's an implicit "by an evolutionary process which would result in failures being selected out of existence".

I mean, yes. Sometimes we commit suicide, sometimes cells commit cancer. I didn't say it was good, I'm saying it's not unusual. It's the sort of thing the brain does, just by a longer path.

I’ll admit that I didn’t read the whole thing, but why would he use an MAOB instead of just taking a stimulant? (Or was he being treated for depression)

Sounds like he was doing both, possibly with the idea that they'd work synergistically.

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.

I found this to be the most interesting part of your post to me: I feel the opposite way about alcohol/weed. I find myself disgusted at the idea of taking alcohol/weed and when others take them, but would be happy to take (less exotic concoctions than whatever SBF was using) strong nootropics.

My intuition for the disgust I have for alcohol/weed is: Why take something that lessens your ability to think? Why slow yourself down? I'd choose improving my abilities to do what I enjoy over inducing relaxation / euphoria.

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.

Darren Beattie claims coming crypto crashes will make FTX look like small potatoes. He's probably unusually smart for a journo, so there might be something to it.

Also, yeah, SBF might get away with it, or more likely suffer mysterious heart failure. Dude was on so many stimulants, not weird at all.

Apparently, FTX seems to look like a BCCI like situation - a fraudulent bank that operated for far, far longer than made sense because it was useful to spooks.

Coinbase and Binance are the two big ones. If those start to fail, sparks are gonna fly.

Nouriel Roubini attacked Binance recently, but it's unclear what it's about - whether Binance is really insolvent, or Feds are trying to punish it for some reason..

(I don't trust Kim Dotcom further than I can throw him, and he's a heavy mofo. )

This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.

He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it. The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting. He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:

I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.

He throws shade everywhere:

The FTX.com platform grew quickly since its launch to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Mr. Bankman-Fried claimed that, by the end of 2021, around $15 billion of assets were on the platform, which according to him handled approximately 10% of global volume for crypto trading at the time. Mr. Bankman-Fried also claimed that FTX.com, as of July 2022, had “millions” of registered users. These figures have not been verified by my team.

(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)

The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”

Ouch. As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already. Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁

What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day. I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome. He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy. Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:

I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup? The one thing everyone told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t. Chapter 11. If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.

Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again. Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray. But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it. He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.

At the same time, negotiations were being held between certain senior individuals of the FTX Group and Mr. Bankman-Fried concerning the resignation of Mr. Bankman-Fried and the commencement of these Chapter 11 Cases. Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School. A document effecting a relinquishment of control was prepared and comments from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s team incorporated. At approximately 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday, November 11, 2022, after further consultation with his legal counsel, Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the Debtors’ CEO. I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis.

I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on. There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him. He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million"). Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.

And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.

I had always wondered what would happen if you hooked up 4chan boys with tumblr girls. It turns out that it creates an autism singularity with the power to destroy global financial markets. Allegedly there’s a sex tape set to be released tomorrow. A week ago I would have dismissed this as utter horseshit, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised. We know their cybersecurity was godawful, so if a sex tape exists, it’s getting leaked.

I precommit not to watch the sex tape, nor discuss Bankman's intimate life, beyond what has been said, unless it has clear relation to the central issue.

Bankman's actions, for all their clown world texture, have been serious and highly damaging to a large proportion of people I care about, and he (together with Kelsey Piper and other do-gooders) keeps doing damage and saving the face of the project I believe has largely motivated his actions, which is to say, EA-directed centralized «global governance». It may be that he'll be deemed a hero in the timeline where they succeed. And even if this accusation is unfounded, he is not a kid but a major scoundrel.

I refuse to let this devolve into a parasocial relationship with wacky awkward «polyamorous» autistic microblogging celebrities.

Was the relationship between Justinian and Theodora irrelevant? Of course it’s relevant. The top two figures responsible for this whole fiasco were in a sexual relationship with one another (and possibly others). That matters. It affects incentives. It affects decision making. One of the criticisms of EA is that it’s just a front for nerds to get laid. The fact that the people involved may in fact have been nerds just trying to get laid is a factor that must be taken into account for a proper analysis.

Theodora was a hell of a lot more competent (and allegedly more attractive) than what this lot got up to. I don't think Caroline Ellison actually did much more than "Okay Sam, you want me to sign off on the billion dollar 'loan' to you? Sure thing!" since the bankruptcy filing by John J. Ray is clear that Bankman-Fried was the guy in ultimate control of everything (and boy is Mr. Ray not one bit impressed by Bankman-Fried's comments as reported in Vox):

Finally, and critically, the Debtors have made clear to employees and the public that Mr. Bankman-Fried is not employed by the Debtors and does not speak for them. Mr. Bankman-Fried, currently in the Bahamas, continues to make erratic and misleading public statements. Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose connections and financial holdings in the Bahamas remain unclear to me, recently stated to a reporter on Twitter: “F*** regulators they make everything worse” and suggested the next step for him was to “win a jurisdictional battle vs. Delaware”.

I don't imagine Theodora did a lot of "Oh Justinian, whatever you want is fine with me" in ruling the empire.

Everyone seems to be dismissing the idea that Caroline had any influence on Sam. Is it because people think she’s ugly? No one wants to admit it, but she is in fact “nerd hot”. I don’t want to start unironic normies-will-never-understand-the-thrill-of-pinning-the-weaselposting, but I will if I have to.

I am ashamed to say I understand that reference.

Whatever influence she had on Sam, it does not seem to have extended to stopping him from doing what he was doing, or objecting to it, or leaving the entire project. We don't know all the facts, and what part Ellison and others played is going to be very important. But she was, in name at least, CEO of Alameda Research. She seems to have gone along with being a catspaw for him:

Bankman-Fried insisted in an interview with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper that his claim FTX didn’t “invest client assets” was “factually accurate” because Alameda Research, not FTX, actually made the investments.

Bankman-Fried added that he “also thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonable [sic] cover it.”

While Bankman-Fried exercised ultimate control and only a few people were permitted to do things along with him, that still leaves a lot of "Why did you do things this way? Why didn't you have structures in place? Did you know what was going on? How could you not know, given the tight links between your firm and FTX?" for her to answer.

I don't believe there is a sex tape, and if there is, I very much do not want to see it. Apologies to all concerned, but Caroline and Sam are not the most attractive looking people in the world.

I haven't seen many sex tapes, but judging by how bad the thumbnails and screenshots usually look I dunno that people are watching them for attractive people with good camera work. Think it's more like how people (other than furries) share Bugs Bunny x Elmer Fudd porn: "lmao look at this shit, it's that guy/chick from X"

Don't kinkshame please. There are people out there who think ugly people are just the sexiest. This tape will absolutely make their month.

Different people have different 'pinions;

Some like apples and some like inions.

I precommit to the sex tape not being real, although I'll certainly post it on rdrama if it is. TheMotte prediction markets when?

TheMotte prediction markets when?

My money is on Sam being the only one who has to face criminal charges. Ellison is going to take the Thielbucks and we’ll start seeing Dark Caroline show up at backroom Bay Area parties with Curtis Yarvin.

EDIT: Holy shit, I got scooped by Forbes. I swear I didn’t read that article before posting this.

I'm loving all the recent Forbes pieces on this entire steaming mess. They are so bitter that they were slapping all these jabronis on their "Thirty Under 30" lists before the ugly truth came out, so now they're getting their revenge 🤣

EDIT: Yes, I'm a bitch. But I love this snippet from the link in the Forbes article to a Sequoia piece titled "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too" (ROFL about that, it aged like milk didn't it?)

Not long before interning at Jane Street, SBF had a meeting with Will MacAskill, a young Oxford-educated philosopher who was then just completing his PhD. Over lunch at the Au Bon Pain outside Harvard Square, MacAskill laid out the principles of effective altruism (EA). The math, MacAskill argued, means that if one’s goal is to optimize one’s life for doing good, often most good can be done by choosing to make the most money possible—in order to give it all away. “Earn to give,” urged MacAskill.

...His course established, MacAskill gave SBF one last navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer.

The same MacAskill I was informed didn't have kids because they would distract from the work he was doing for the good of the world? Like - giving advice to fraudsters, Will? Yeah, great decision making there, friend!

EDIT EDIT Yes, I'm a bitch Part Deux: The amount of Schadenfreude I am getting from the names of all the Great and the Good being dropped in that Sequoia piece who are now going to have the splashes of the mud spattered on Bankman-Fried ending up on their faces is off the charts. The boot-licking adulation is gold, especially the 'precocious kid' bit which is a standard in "I became an atheist at a young age because I was smart enough to figure out how dumb religion was even as a kid" stories, this time round abortion:

One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.

Phew! Good job he didn't, like, come to a different opinion on abortion than his friends, family and peers, huh? He might have been subjected to ostracism and shunning for badthinking and denial of what is a human right! How very convenient that he logicked his way to the conclusion he had been brought up in!

Still, when SBF analyzed the bright future that lay before him, something wasn’t right. He was, he realized, too secure. SBF’s mind had been trained almost from birth to calculate. As a schoolboy the hedonic calculous of utilitarianism had him trying to maximize the utility function (measured in “utils,” of course) for abortion. During his teenage gaming years, his mathematical abilities allowed him to sharpen his tactics—and win. And, of course, every trade SBF ever made at Jane was the subject of a risk/reward calculation. All of it boiled down to expected value. The formula is fairly simple. If the amount won multiplied by the probability of winning a bet is greater than the amount lost multiplied by the probability of losing a bet, then you go for it—irrespective of units. Utils, euros, dollars were all subject to the same reckoning.

I gotta stop rolling around the floor so much, the floorboards are gonna give out under the convulsions of laughter I'm experiencing here.

Oh man, that Sequoia piece is pure gold, gold, I'm telling you!

Ellison is a freckle-faced redhead with a personality that splits the difference between bubbly and nerd-ball. She’s partial to a pair of designer frames that make her look a bit like Edna Mode, the superhero stylist in The Incredibles.

About six months after SBF dropped out, Jane Street sent Ellison on a recruiting trip to California, so she decided to call on her old friend. They’d been office buddies at Jane, but they’d also occasionally socialized outside of work, too, being fellow EA acolytes. Ellison wanted to catch up, but from the get-go, SBF was acting uncharacteristically shifty. There were several canceled coffee dates, and when the two finally did get together—at Jumpin’ Java, an old-school Berkeley coffeehouse with hand-painted murals on the wall and whimsical art in the windows—SBF evaded even the most innocuous of questions.

“So,” Ellison asked after joining SBF at a table, “what have you been up to in the last few months?” Ellison, it should be noted, was dressed as a sultry wood nymph—she was on her way to a LARP (Live Action Role Play) party.

Photo here of her in that costume, which if this is your notion of "sultry" then good God you are even more vanilla than I am, and I live under a rock

BorfRebus, plainly you are not the only one whose monkey hindbrain went "yes".

Curious, SBF had started looking into crypto—and almost immediately noticed something strange. Bitcoin was trading at a higher price in Japan and Korea than it was in the U.S. …SBF was incredulous at the numbers he was seeing on his screen. This is probably not real. But then came the second thought: If it is real, then there’s $5,000 just lying on the ground. Instead of wasting time on internal debate, SBF decided to create some accounts on different exchanges and see if he could execute the trade. He couldn’t. But, interestingly, it wasn’t because the arbitrage opportunity wasn’t there—it was. But there was so much red tape with the banking system and currency controls that it was a difficult trade to execute.

…The first job was just getting the money into the system. The operational challenges were huge. Not just anyone can walk into a foreign bank and start wiring money out of the country every day. …Fortunately, SBF had a secret weapon: the EA community. There’s a loose worldwide network of like-minded people who do each other favors and sleep on each other’s couches simply because they all belong to the same tribe. …Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.

…There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. …After just one conversation with SBF, Singh decided to leave Facebook to take on the more meaningful work of building FTX. Caroline Ellison came, too, quitting Jane Street and moving to California only weeks after SBF described the operation to her over tea. The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. …But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

“This thing couldn’t have taken off without EA,” reminisces Singh, running his hand through a shock of thick black hair. He removes his glasses to think. They’re broken: A chopstick has been Scotch taped to one of the frame’s sides, serving as a makeshift temple. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”

Wow, those stodgy old banks with their red tape and distrust of crypto, putting the brakes on the good FTX could do! Lucky the EA community was there to be behind Sam all the way and get around them, huh?

If I was anyone named in this piece, or anything to do with EA, I'd be fleeing to Bolivia right now, because this does tie Bankman-Fried in tight with the EA community despite all the distancing they've been trying to do, and it makes the movement sound like the most cultish, dodgy set you could hope to meet.

“Everything was rickety—there was no avoiding the ricketiness. Obviously, the line between rickety and shady is a little unclear at times, but the places that seemed like they were going to steal customer funds outright, we didn’t touch,” Singh says. “Even the best players in the space were having big problems.”

Should have been looking in the mirror when it came to shady outfits, Nishad!

He wanted FTX to be known as the respectable face of crypto. This required ad campaigns, sponsorship deals, a charitable wing—and a war chest to pay for it all.

FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers.

Oh, gosh. Oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh.

Can Sun, FTX’s in-house legal counsel, tells me that his main job is to cement the many deals SBF makes on a handshake. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Sun says, the terms favor the other side. It’s another corporate policy derived from a rigorous logical argument: In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the best first move is always to cooperate. And, if the counterparty defects, “it’s better that I know this guy will screw me over now,” Sun says, “rather than later.”

As they say, comment would be superfluous.

The main point here, to be serious for a moment, is how the jargon is the same rationalist/rationalist-adjacent sort of talk I've seen discussed on here and the other SSC-sites. Bankman-Fried at least absorbed enough to be able to sling it, and it's hard to say how much he meant or believed it. "Not at all" seems to be the current take by people who, naturally, desperately want to disassociate themselves and their movements from anything to do with him.

But it's a failure mode that needs to be addressed. This guy talked all the talk, then turned out to be dodgy as hell. And he seems to truly have believed and operated on all the risk calculation, utility calculation, game theory, prisoner's dilemma scenarios everyone else is talking about and recommending as guides.

It's easy to No True Scotsman Bankman-Fried. But what if he was a Scotsman? And what if it turns out all the fancy jargon about seizing risk is not, in fact, the winning way to operate? What if we stodgy types with our rules and regulations and red tape are, in fact, correct?

EDIT: Okay, returning to "just how far up Bankman-Fried's backside can this reporter fit his head?" times, the excited admiration of what is (at best) extremely rude behaviour from Bankman-Fried does a Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff:

The next day, I finally get a chance to interview Sam Bankman-Fried. We meet in a tiny conference room. I’m prepared with a mic and an MP3 recorder at the ready. SBF comes in with his laptop and opens it to start playing his new favorite computer game, Storybook Brawl, before he even sits down. It’s an obscure title, an “auto-battler”: an emerging genre that combines elements of trading card games (like Magic: The Gathering) with chesslike moves and strategy. The game was released only a few years ago by an equally obscure low-budget “indie” game company, Good Luck Games.

Though we’re face-to-face, SBF makes no eye contact at all—zero, not even a glance. His eyes are glued to his screen. His fingers are tapping on the keys, sometimes furiously, sometimes hardly at all. His right knee is bouncing at 100 bpm: a nervous tic, the result of a forgotten fidget spinner. The interview starts.

I open with a doozy: “Am I,” I ask, “talking to the world’s first trillionaire?”

…This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.

Wait for it....

…SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank!

Are you impressed? Wow, so impressive!

All this is still with not even a glance at me—his true focus is on the screen. He’s playing the video game. But, to be fair, perhaps “playing” is the wrong word here. Perhaps he was play-testing: looking for ways to incorporate crypto into his favorite game because, unbeknownst to me at the time, as we were talking, Good Luck, the indie game company behind Storybook Brawl, was being absorbed into the FTX empire—the latest in a string of FTX acquisitions.

Does this behaviour convince our Star Reporter, one Adam Fisher, that Bankman-Fried is, in fact, talking out of his ass? You be the judge!

…After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

…The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

Let's hope for his sake that Mr. Fisher did not sink every cent he possessed into FTX trades, else he'll be working till he's eighty to clear off his debts 🤣

Yeah the article is pretty bad. Good thing it was memoryholed so few people will find it heh...

On the other hand SBF must have some insane charisma to be able to get all these people in line. I mean lord, I know some people that are charismatic but it sounds like he is next level. Despite being kinda ugly.

Yeah, I can't figure it out simply by how he looks in photos, but he must be something special in real life so that even when he is being rude (or autistic, take your pick) about avoiding eye contact and playing games while supposedly talking to you, people who should know better because they're dealing with guys who are trying to sell them on get-rich-quick-schemes for years just fall down at his feet in adoration.

On "The Top Ten List Of Things I Regret Writing" in the future for Adam Fisher, this Sequoia article is going to take the Numbers 1-5 slots.

Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar

Seems pretty obvious to anyone paying close attention, but SBF has gotten swooning media coverage which desperately wishes to whitewash what he did by going along his explanation of "it was just a big mistake". We'll see how many dumb people fall for it.

It's kinda odd how soft the NYT has been on SBF, but claims that it's the democrats/establishment/media 'protecting him' like this ignore the very harsh coverage from every other mainstream non-nyt source - vox/financial times/bloomberg/reuters/cnbc / many others. So ... the 'mainstream' isn't protecting him, and nobody significant is gonna be misled! And claims that he'll not be investigated because democrat money donation (FTX actually donated a lower but similar-magnitude amount to republicans via ryan salame, co-ceo) / the media loves him just aren't true given that.

I have a question. Why, after this fiasco with FTX, should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk? My impression is that this management of existential risk is a substantial part of EA's brand. Especially William MaCaskill and longtermism as a movement. Some of the leading lights of the EA movement (like MaCaskill) were apparently unable to manage the well defined risk of "maybe this guy running a cryptocurrency exchange is a scam artist" but I'm supposed to believe they have a handle on the vastly more nebulous and ill defined risk of "maybe an unfriendly artificial intelligence extincts humanity." Why should I believe this?

Existential risk is a hack job for human psychology. Once you can convince someone (especially yourself) that something is an existential risk to all life, why you can do goddamned anything you can convince yourself has even a tiny chance of preventing it. It's "Deus Vult" for atheists. The further into the future this dystopia lies, the less likely you'll ever have to deal with the fallout of your failed predictions. We've been on "ten years to save the world from global warming" for a good forty years now.

My stupid moron religious parents think the world is going to end because people are sinful and God is vengeful. Really smart people believe the world is going to end because.......people are sinful and (AI) gods are vengeful. Environmentalists believe the world is going to end because......people are sinful and mother earth is vengeful.

None of that makes their claims wrong. Is this even a psychology thing? Things like 'existential risks to all life' do exist (for historical examples: atmosphere oxygenation "caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth ... constituted a mass extinction", Chicxulub "a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.", ice ages, human population bottleneck), and technology makes it easy for us to do similarly bad things. Preventing such things is important, and it would be stupid to write them off. So this isn't even a psycholoical "hack", it's just ... something important that one can be wrong about. But it's not any more worth ignoring than it is to ignore the doctor saying you need surgery or you'll die, because faith healers say you need to get a protection spell or you'll die. That X-risk leads people to make difficult and complex decisions is good

Yes, all predictions of the apocalypse up until this very second have been wrong.

Yes, the next one might be right.

No, it won't be, but it might.

Sooner or later, it's either the big 'ol HDU or something else.

There is an absolutely unbroken line of apocalyptic dreamers who prefer their fantasy to dealing with the reality of the world. It goes back to the beginning of time when the first dipshit looked up at a shooting star and said "that means the gods are mad at us, we're all gonna die".

I'm doing a rationalist calculation. What are the odds that I meet the first Jeremiah in the history of the world to be right? I mean, a lot of people have lived a lot of lives and most of them thought the world was going to end in their lifetime. I'm pretty hot shit, but I doubt I'm lucky enough to even be alive at the same time as that guy, much less live in the same country, speak the same language, share enough personality quirks with to wind up in the same internet forums etc. What are the odds?

Pretty goddamned good, since I've lived through fourteen to twenty apocalypses (apocalypsi? apocalyps'?) to date. What a life. Fire, flood, the return of Christ, acid rain, Y2K, nuclear war (several times!), the Macarena, Global Warming and now AI? Bring it on, I say.

I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though

Again, it's entirely possible for massive technological change to make apocalypses possible. There clearly is a difference between 'god will fire lighting boom everyone for not being religious enough' and 'the billions of dollars and millions of man hours of the smartest people on the world are being invested in AI, what if it works'.

There is an absolutely unbroken line of apocalyptic dreamers who prefer their fantasy to dealing with the reality of the world

Given that EA spends more time and money on malaria nets than AI risk, this is clearly not an accurate statement about them. More generally, that doesn't actually make AI risk false.

Even if EA and lesswrong were - entirely - irrational and religious cults around AI risk, that wouldn't make AI risk false. And there are stupid, illogical cults around AI - there was and still is a lot of popular scifi larp about "the singularity", "mind uploading", etc. This doesn't make the AI go away.

I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though

Yeah, but those occurred on the rough timescale of once every billion years, and all prior to anything anywhere near humanity existing. The ratios on apocalypse-level events Humans have worried about to things that have actually happened during a timeframe that concerns us is therefore at least that high.

Technology has increased the rate of change of everything, though. a million years of hunter gathering, 100k years of fire, 10k years of agriculture, civilization ... 300 years of industry, 60 years of computers... If AI doesn't happen, what does happen in 10k years, and why hasn't AI taken power from humans yet?

I got raised on "we must avoid nuclear war, if it ever happens it will doom humanity, never mind the hundreds of millions killed by the bombs, the nuclear winter afterwards will mean we all starve and freeze to death in the dark". Nuclear war was the existential risk of the 60s-80s. This animated film frightened the life out of a generation of kids.

Now I'm reading "eh, nuclear war isn't that bad, sure it will kill a lot of people but not everyone, it will not be the end of civilisation much less humanity, and even nuclear winter was over-exaggerated".

What changed about nuclear bombs in the meantime? Nothing, so far as I can see, but the attitude around that risk has changed. Now it's climate change that is the existential risk of our time. AI can just take its place in the queue of "This time for sure, says Chicken Little" about the sky falling.

Nuclear risk is actually one of the EA Big Four - AI, Bio risk, Climate change, and Nuclear war. I have met far more people in EA that actually care about nuclear war than anywhere else.

The reason AI is getting more salience is because it's perceived as more neglected which is one of the key criteria of an EA cause area. Nuclear war is mainstream and nobody wants it, so it isn't as neglected as the other areas.

I'd like to note, though, that when I asked this question from the perspective you've mentioned, I got at least one reply to the effect of "you could still be boned." Nuclear war might not end all human civilization immediately, but even post-Cold-War media still tended to portray the post-nuclear world as pretty bleak even if there were still some people alive (after all, in such a world, the living might envy the dead). That is to say, even today, nuclear war could get pretty bad, we just have reasons/copium to believe the possibility space also contains scenarios that aren't "rubble and deserts everywhere."

Your argument goes like 'society was wrong and people lied about nuclear war, and used that to manipulate people - so that must be what's happening now'. Which ... sure, that can happen - it constantly happens - but the reason people even have a desire to avoid x-risks is because it is important to avoid disasters when disasters exist, and disasters sometimes exist.

This is like saying - "you're worried about high crime? people in the 1900s were worried about racialized crime destroying society, and they were wrong, and racist. Therefore crime doesn't matter". You can't write off the entire idea of 'bad thing happening' because people misuse the idea!

What I'm saying is, this is not my first rodeo. If all the x-risks that were sure-fire guaranteed gonna happen as prognosticated over the course of my life had even one of them happen, we'd be disposed of by now.

So "Oh no AI is gonna doom us unless!" talk is nothing special. "But AI is different" - yeah, well, so were nuclear weapons. It's not AI that is the risk, it's humans. We are the greatest threat to ourselves.

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I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though

I did too. They all were considered possible, likely or certain by millions of geniuses in their day (except the silly ones, of course). They all had a reason why this time it was for real. They all happened, for some definition of "happen", and they all did not result in the end of the world, humanity, life or anything else so dire. I'm sure AI is dangerous. I'm sure we'll have some colossal fuckups with it that will probably damage something important. When this happens, the frenzy will begin in earnest. Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found, and we will learn to live with it, as we have with nuclear weapons.

Whichever generation of asshole eschatologists alive at the time will write a million books saying they averted the apocalypse. Ten seconds later, it will be something else, and everyone will forget about it. The End of the World is dead, long live the End of the World.

Maybe I'm wrong. Tell you what, if the world ends due to AI, I'll give you a million dollars.

Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found

Have you read any yud or lesswrong writing on AI safety? They put a lot of effort into addressing the exact concerns you've laid out, in a way that you don't seem to acknowledge. But leaving that - why though? Why will the competent people find a solution? It's clear how we are able to find a solution to, e.g. nuclear weapons, religious conflict, etc. But AI will be - it's argued - not a simple mechanism we can intelligence and coordinate around, but smart on its own. As a random example - what is the political solution to "AIs now control the global economy"? The AIs are going to be the one "finding solutions", not "human politicians". You can't psychologize your way around a gun to your head, and no amount of "you're just scared its ok the grownups will handle it" will physically prevent the complexity of AI!

Yes, yes, very smart people disagree with me. Your argument is to handwave me at the vast canon of AI scribbling? I've read the big ones, and they are as unconvincing as they are hysterical. It's a very specific style, one I recognize well from my upbringing in a millennial faith-healing cult. It all sounds very convincing, if you haven't been down this road before.

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FWIW, I think AI x-risk is real, and this doesn't match my psychology. I am unhappy about this, and wish I could just go back to thinking about purely technical problems. I dislike the flavor of AI risk work (qualitative research, politics, and activism) and also dislike being seen as a self-important, deluded ninny (which others are right to suspect of me).

The answer seems obvious: instead of taking someone's word for or against ai xrisk being a thing, the arguments for it have to be evaluated on their merits, and you can decide for yourself whether it is something to be concerned about based on that.

I don't see why FTX should really change your views there. SBF is just one person and doesn't define the movement. Fraud existed before FTX and will exist after it.

The bigger question is why you should have any faith in the EA movement to begin with. I would argue you shouldn't. I certainly don't. Their arguments are IMO naive and the millenarian fervor certainly doesn't give them a veneer of respectability. I mean, they're patting themselves on the back for rediscovering charity. Wow, congratulations, that concept has only been around for a few thousand years. As far as I'm concerned EA is just a honeypot for self-important status-seekers trying to feel good about belonging to a cause. They're this generation's flower children.

I largely agree with your criticisms, but my impression is that most mainstream charities maintain a cultivated ignorance about their actual impact. I don't think much of our ability to define or measure the things we care about achieving, but at least EAs are pushing for a norm of trying to do so.

I don't think much of our ability to define or measure the things we care about achieving, but at least EAs are pushing for a norm of trying to do so.

Yeah, if you're measuring "Did Curtains For The Congo really do any benefit for the people there with their fundraising campaign to send soft furnishings to Kinshasa?" you can certainly set up a norm of defining and measuring.

But AI is now the same kind of "we don't what effect, if any, our efforts will have or if we're even trying the right approach, but we believe passionately in this cause so we are determined to throw money, time and effort at it" case as the traditional charities they twitted for not being very effective. They may be right to be concerned, and what they are doing might be right - or the completely wrong approach and they are looking the wrong way while the real threat is coming from a different direction. We'll only find out in 10-50 years. But never mind that we have no way of defining or measuring if this is effective, think of the risk! Pour all your money and energy into it!

I agree with your framing of the difficulty of measuring progress on AI risk, and I think most EAs would as well. They would say that we should still try to measure such progress, or at least recognize that most of our efforts will probably go to waste because we can't, as you point out.

I think most EAs would say that even though we know we're going to waste most of the time, money, and energy we put into AI risk (because it's so hard to measure) it's still worthwhile. So I don't think this is an instance of hypocrisy, just an instance where plan A doesn't work.

should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk?

My personal guidance has long been that faith in individuals (and small groups) is almost always misplaced. Faith in principles can do pretty well, but IRL humans are quite fallible and rarely live up to our expectations. There is no living person whose word I would treat as sacrosanct without a willingness to do my own research.

IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.

IMO nobody has satisfactorily explained why AI risk outweighs, say, the existential risk of an extinction event by anthropogenic (nuclear war or catastrophic ecological disaster) or other (asteroid, supervolcano, nearby supernova). I don't think we have good handles on the relative magnitudes of risk on these. At some point you're really just acting on your priors.

I feel like we actually DO have a pretty good handle on these existential risks. Definitely we can model the likelihood of extinction level asteroids and supernovas. The base rate here is very low, and we're improving our odds by tracking asteroids. Supervolcanoes are not extinction level events.

Nuclear war or ecological disaster seem unlikely to be extinction level events. Nuclear weapons are just not powerful enough, although they could potentially reduce the population by a lot. Global warming is centuries away from being an existential concern.

Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years. But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close. It combines high likelihood in the near-term with the potential to kill ALL humans, not just 5% of them or whatever.

Rogue AI on the other hand has the potential to kill all humans. We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years.

There are people who also argue that it will happen "never". Anyway I'd say this is a threat in similar ballpark as "being invaded by alien species". What is a chance that humanity's technological progress woke up some Von Neumann probe from some ancient civilization somewhere in Oort cloud which is now ramping up self-replication capacities and building up an invasion spacefleet set to destroy Earth? Existence of such probes throughout the galaxy could definitely be one answer for Fermi paradox, whatever the chance you assign to such a possibility multiply it with existential threat and you are Pascal mugged toward giving it a lot of thought.

But similarly to the AI problem, it is hard to conceive what to do about it. Maybe not search for ancient civilization by Active SETI and maybe increase manufacturing of nuclear rockets capable of targeting things on our orbit?

Going back to AI, I have yet to see any material results of the supposed "friendly AI" research. We do not even know what technology will lead to such an AI which means it may be hard or even impossible to imbue it with certain morality. Not to even talk if EA people and affiliated researchers are the best people for that job given their own morality. In fact if one is as serious as you are here about it, probably the best course of action would be to go full Terminator 2 and assassinate all leading AI researchers and bomb all the research laboratories with hope that we will eventually land upon some form of AI Inquisition type government banning all research into the area under severe penalties. Of course this looks too crazy even for AI types, but it would be logical conclusion here.

I almost put aliens in my comment. The threat from extraterrestrials is similar to AI in that it is difficult to quantify but at the same time the potential damage is 100% extinction. And since, in either case, we have no base rate we have to make assumptions of likelihood from first principles. This is what some people have difficultly accepting, probably the same type who weren't worried about nuclear weapons in the 1940s.

I also agree that there is not much that can be done. Although actively trying to get aliens to find us does seem uniquely stupid. I guess I just get frustrated when people conflate "minor" threats such as climate change or supervolcanoes with things that are much more serious.

I mean, huge amounts of talent and capital are being poured into building AGI, and we know it's physically possible (because human brains exist). So to be sure that it'll never happen seems like a stretch.

There are people who also argue that it will happen "never".

Well they're not serious thinkers, are they? Where is the law of physics that says it's impossible to make a rogue AI? Even if such a law did exist, never is a very strong word. I'd be cautious before saying we would 'never' find some way around thermodynamics, the most solid foundation we have. Who knows what could be achieved 500,000 years after the Scientific Revolution? We're only 300 or so years in, there may be a few revolutions to come.

It's outrageously silly to say 'never' when we have so many questions still unanswered, when AI is advancing at such a rapid pace.

But if we're drafting talent in the NBA draft of extinction events, AI gets drafted #1, and it's not even close.

Not really. At least we know those other things are actually within the realm of possibility. We have no reason to even believe (yet) we can invent an AI that could kill us all, let alone one that would. AI risk is just not worth taking seriously at this point in time.

It seems important to consider before you create something that could (because if you wait it might be too late).

We can argue about whether the chances are 1% or 99%. And we can argue about whether it will happen in 10 years or 50 years.

Yeah, but that's not the Drowning Child, is it? They charity-mugged everyone with that nugget from Singer: if you saw a child drowning right now, in front of your very own eyes, wouldn't you save it? What kind of heartless monster would not? And so if you accept that you should save the drowning child, then you must accept that you should save the children who will die without malaria nets.

I know the malaria nets projects have now got more money than they know what to do with, so it's not hypocritical for EA to move to a new good cause. But it is hypocritical to move to a cause where the advice now is "Forget about that drowning child, if you jump into the pond you might catch a cold and be home from work sick and then your contribution to stopping AI from paperclipping us all will be lost for that valuable period of a week! Sure, we don't know if the AI is coming in ten or fifty years, and the kid is drowning right now, but imagine all the kids in fifty years time instead!"

Humans 'took over the planet' and displaced billions of other animals just by being smarter. Why wouldn't AI agents do the same? Our intelligence relates to physical mechanisms somehow, and computers are a much faster and more efficient way of implementing similar things, so why wouldn't computers be able to do so better? Look how rapidly technology is integrated into human life and the economy, won't that just continue to accelerate as it has over the past 300 years? What does a human do, what happens to the economy, when complex AI interactions drive more and more of it?

There's some debate on that, there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness.

there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness

Transformers and large neural nets generally are universal ML system that can do moderately-intelligent tasks like create images, play games, optimize all sorts of real-world tasks, and also understand language. Human intelligence is similar - use and understanding of language depends and is made of general intelligence. If dogs could talk, they wouldn't be smarter. And - they can talk, sort of, they have verbal and body-language signals that mean things, they just can't do larger-scale things with that.

This feels like affirming the consequent/assuming the conclusion.

If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter? How much rougher would the lions' life be if the Buffalos and Gazelles could collude?

If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter

yes, dogs can't play sports (even if they had the right physical form factor) or compose music as well as humans despite neither requiring language. buffalos can communicate, and do, the ability to understand complex communications wold require intelligence, and even if they had that minimal intelligence that doesn't get them to toolmaking, let alone physics or military planning. is this a bit?

Is this a bit?

No, because it seems equally clear that intelligence doesn't get you that far on it's own.

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Many people within EA are also not convinced that AI risk outweighs all other risks. This is more of a strawman that gets heaped on EA because the most visible EA detractors latch onto the wackiest part of the movement.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. If Sequoia and others are willing to invest hundreds of millions of their own money into FTX, why should someone receiving charity expect to be able to do better due diligence? Why should they try? "Existential Risk" specifically refers to humanity's existence, not any particular replaceable entity that might go under.

yeah this. doing diligence is hard enough with a public company. it's way, way harder with a private one

First of all ... EA doesn't claim to 'have a handle on AI risk'. EA claims to be worried about AI risk, and not have a handle on it, hence the worry.

from @moskov on twitter: "The other day a very close friend said "of course I believe pandemic and AI risk are huge problems, but you've got them covered" and I screamed "NO WE ARE FAILING". That wasn't even about money per se, just making any kind of attempt."

Second, why do you need to have 'faith in EA'? You should evaluate their actions individually. Entirely possible for GiveWell to be good but their AI risk work to be bad, even if FTX didn't go down.

Well, no one else is taking the issues seriously.

Stuart Russell wrote a whole book.

And what came of it?

The point is to change the word

-Marx

Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry will be in charge of the house committee for FTX.

He's going to get away with all of it. Fuuuuck dude. This is hard to stomach.

No he won't. Now that he is broke and his reputation and company is gone, there is nothing to gain by protecting him. Throwing him under the bus the politically expedient move now.

Maybe the Republicans will do it again when they're in charge of the House in a couple of months, and I bet Maxine Waters won't figure prominently in that effort.

Also, no, I think the ultimate accountability will be the criminal courts, and failing that, civil courts.

See here - huh? Why? The mainstream/cathedral/dems have been plenty harsh on ftx. It's not like madoff didn't donate to politicans, and if the dems/govt were as corrupt as that would imply the US would've descended into third-world chaos decades ago, as every large corporation that committed massive fraud, causing economic stagnation, would be rewarded.

Keep in mind this is the guy who oversaw Enron's dissolution, so it's not like he's new to corporate malfeasance shitshows.

Yeah, and he still said "I never saw anything like this". I think he was used to, even in corporate hokey-pokey, if they were cooking the books they at least kept books. FTX etc. had a mess where nobody was keeping track of anything, so they probably simply lost money by sheer stupid carelessness and not deliberate fraud in some instances. They can't even figure out how many people worked/are working/were working there, since there wasn't proper records kept. Any hog, dog or divil could be a disgruntled employee who hacked those missing millions.

I swear, you have to be really smart to be this dumb. This all reads like the very worst strawman of the rationalist/rationalist-adjacent/EA Bay Area types. They thought they were too cool for school, and that learning off some game theory and some problems about one-boxing strategy meant they didn't have to do boring old traditional usual corporate and business stuff. They were making millions with cutting-edge finance of the future! They were smarter than the average bear! They had thrown out conventional social morality around relationships and all that jazz, they were building the new model of community, why have tedious stuff like "have to have an expenses claims system in place" when you can have kewl fun emojis instead?

The Debtors did not have the type of disbursement controls that I believe are appropriate for a business enterprise. For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.

Honestly, I'm reading the Chapter 11 filing and you wouldn't let a bunch of six year olds in a kindergarten carry on like this. How the ever-living purple people eating fuck did this selection get people anxious to hand over billions to them????

In future this Bahamas luxury compound of idiocy is going to be what I point to when responding to "legalise drugs! nootropics are fun and healthy! what harm does it do anyone to hack their brains?" talk.

I bet a movie is already in the works. Reminds me of Rogue Trader, or War Dogs or similar films.

Young dodgy maverick gets into $industry and makes bank by not playing by the rules until things spiral out of control. The hedonistic lifestyle and law eventually catch up to him. Audience feels good that Icarus is punished for his audacity. The End.

Edit: Just saw Tanista beat me to it. You just know Hollywood is already on this.

I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in ages, but if they make one about this, I'll make a point of watching it.

I just hope they don't try to romanticise any of this shit (e.g. Bankman-Fried was just a guy who wanted to do good but went down the wrong path).

I want sweaty, chubby nerd Bankman-Fried slapping on stimulant patches and downing nootropics while playing League of Legends in his beanbag seat while he's supposed to be keeping track of where the hell the payments are coming in, and giving permission via "personalised emoji" to some mook in chat asking can they have half a mil to do shit without even knowing if this mook actually works for him or not because nobody knows who works where.

This whole thing is almost too perfect.

I don't know how to describe it other than I can almost feel the beats in Adam Mackay's inevitable film with every new headline.

can almost feel the beats in Adam Mackay's inevitable film with every new headline.

TIL that the man who wrote and directed The Big Short also wrote and directed Anchorman

Casting suggestions? Who is "Hollywood ugly" enough for the Caroline Ellison part? Ordinarily I'd pick Tatiana Maslany for the "quirky oddball smart girl" part (as distinct from the "manic pixie dream girl" which is, or was, Zooey Deschanel) but she's too pretty for this role. You need someone who is the female version of a chinless wonder, but I don't know any actresses who look like that.

Suggestions for Bankman-Fried and his unfortunate friends/unindicted co-conspirators 'Gary' Wang and Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame, who haven't appeared in any photos over the stories in the media so far as I can see, also welcome!

Casting suggestions? Who is "Hollywood ugly" enough for the Caroline Ellison part?

I don't think she's ugly so much as just goofy looking, but my first thought was to put Maisie Williams in some BCGs

I do feel bad judging her on her looks, because outside of "Okay Sam, my on/off boyfriend, you want me to be in charge of a trading firm? That you basically use for shuffling money around like a three card trick? Despite the fact that my sum total of experience is 'worked my first and only job to date in a quant firm for six months'? And all I have to do is sign off on whatever you tell me to sign off on? Sounds great!", she may be a nice and even smart person.

But I think most people are wondering about "This guy was allegedly worth billions and this is the type of woman he was dating?" when it comes to her. I mean, I can understand why they would be in a relationship before the whole "making billions upon billions" thing took off, but in general you then dump the first wife and upgrade to a hotter, younger, trophy piece of arm candy. Maybe Bankman-Fried just didn't know that many women, but I'm sure there were plenty of hot Bahamian women who would have been delighted to date a rich guy. It does look like they all just stayed in their own little bubble in the compound, which is part of the entire downfall.

Might have something to do with it being public knowledge now that she's already into freaky shit?

Maisie is good too, but a bit too pretty. Though I guess they could ugly her down for it. Caroline Ellison is plain; she has thin, fine hair which she really should cut shorter, her face is small and underdeveloped, she has a not very tall, average body (she's not fat but she's not curvy in the hourglass lingerie model style) and those glasses are not doing her any favours for the shape of her face. She's not ugly but she is plain.

She has thin, fine hair which she really should cut shorter

Bad take IMO, but I’m a sucker for girls with long hair.

Long hair suits thicker hair. When your hair is as fine as hers, it ends up looking stringy as here. Cutting it shorter (even shoulder-length) lets it 'thicken' up and would go better with her shape of face. She would look a lot better with this kind of styling.

Josh Gad for SBF

If America Ferrera can be Ugly Betty I don't think this is a problem.

PS. maybe she can just reprise the role.

Oh, that's a good suggestion!

I confess that I might be misremembering but wasn't Bankman-Fried associated with the whole "external loci of control" and "free will is a myth" branch of rationalism/decision theory? I seem to remember something about that from one of the old SSC link round-ups. If so I'd be surprised if he did accept any responsibility.

Edit: NM found it, Looks like I was confusing Bankman-Fried with Barbara Fried but if I'm reading Wikipedia correctly I think this might actually be his mother.

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you. And sure enough, I searched on LessWrong and found that not only does Eliezer Yudkowsky not agree with those like Barbara Fried, in 2008 he called it so trivial that it served as a "practice question" for aspiring rationalists, then later elaborated on his solution at further length.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will

It's not like this is even restricted to one of the more obscure "sequences", I've seen "Dissolving the Question" cited elsewhere. Look, I'm sure there's people on /r/badphilosophy who would mock the arrogance of thinking you have easily dissolved a famous philosophical dilemma, and that would be annoying in its own way. But at least it would display at least some surface-level engagement with what was said. Grouping LessWrong in with a philosopher arguing that some inane sophistry about "free will" means we should adopt her preferred criminal-justice policy positions reflects an incredible lack of understanding of what they believe and how they think. Barbara Fried is engaging in the exact sort of thing that makes LessWrong people have such a poor opinion on the health of philosophy as a field.

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility?

No, I'm claiming that even if rationalists dismiss debates about free will as irrelevant, such debates are in fact relevant, and that there is a non-trivial portion of rationalists/EA activists who believe in external loci of control and act on that belief. I am implying that regardless of what Rationalists might classify as relevant or irrelevant that the beliefs of Bankman-Fried's mother might have had something to do with his observed behavior. and I am suggesting that the "strawman characterization" of utilitarianism as promoting sociopathic behavior is not made out of straw at all.

We shall know them by their fruits.

I don't think this is a good understanding of what LessWrong thought means when it considers the 'question' of free will 'solved.' And at the risk of saying Read The Sequences, there a Sequence Post on exactly that.

I have read it and to be blunt it rings a bit hollow when taken in the context of the wider corpus, and the general popularity of guys like Singer and Watts. As I've maintained for years now, I suspect that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has much more to do with fundamental issues with rationalist/utilitarian mindset than it does with anything intrinsic to intelligence artificial or otherwise.

Yes, we've had this discussion recently, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument. And I think that just hand-waving that a core part of the rationalist text specifically says the failure mode you warn about is obviously something clearly and obviously wrong with references to Singer and Watts (wut?) manages to be even less compelling.

Yes, we've had this discussion recently, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument.

Yes we have, and I don't think you made a particularly compelling argument either.

As before, I will say that my take is similar to that of @IprayIam, ilforte @DaseindustriesLtd and others. The problem with utilitarianism is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in any multi-agent game because their prime directive is to throw you under the bus/trolley the moment the they think that doing so might increase global utility.

I will freely admit that I am the crayon-eating retard of the bunch, and so I don't expect you to find my arguments particularly compelling, but I have yet to see you or anyone else offer a proper counter-argument to the above. It just gets dismissed as a strawman or a "that would never happen in practice", which I don't buy.

For what it's worth, I do not endorse the "external locus of control" attack on Lesswrong. I am not familiar with the scholarship of Barbara Fried, but (going by the abstracts) @gattsuru and @sodiummuffin aren't shitting you when they say this isn't what Eliezer and his followers preach.

There is a strain of no-free-will demagoguery associated in academia with certain progressive political propositions; it's very loosely related to Consequentialist ethical theories (only in the sense of the corollary «well, we'll have to increase the odds of behaviors we like without much hope to shame people into them») and Utilitarian moral philosophy, and perfectly independent from the newfangled Singerian Rationalist/Effective Altruist cluster. If Barbara Fried also agrees with Singer, she arrives at that through some path not advised by Lesswrong sequences.

There are many different sets of people and many traditions in the group you distrust and lump together, and they have differences in their beliefs on many dimensions which are invisible in the sketch a disinterested layman can observe at a glance.

The problem with utilitarianism is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in any multi-agent game because their prime directive is to throw you under the bus/trolley the moment the they think that doing so might increase global utility.

That's a fairer critique of utilitarianism in general, and while a lot of both Sequence-era and modern rationalist thought has been focused on solving problems related to it (most famously Parfit's Hitchhiker, but it underlies the strict version of Newcomb's Problem and some related matters that aren't as obviously tied to honesty), there's a reasonable complaint that even if you're running off a 'better' decision theory, outside of thought experiments it's really hard to prove it.

And then there's the reasonable rejoinder that the same issues exist for other foundations of morality : there's no way to prove that a deontologist's virtue of honesty doesn't have an asterisk for 'unless under duress' or 'unless I really want otherwise' or some other exception.

If you're interested in that discussion, we can have it. I've actually got mixed feelings on a lot of it!

But this isn't particularly related to FTX, or to your misunderstanding of what locus of control means, et cetera, or even that in terms of being dismissed because it would never happen in practice, that We've Seen The Skulls here to the point where Yudkowsky spent (too much, imo) time and focus on it!

FTX isn't someone throwing people under the bus the second they think it might increase global (or even personal!) utility; they're garden-variety scammers who caught the car they were chasing, and then fell off at sixty miles an hour. They donated more to their personal funds than they did to outreach, and hell, they spent more on a concussionball stadium endorsement than any individual grant. And that's the numbers if they'd managed to hold onto the bumper another few months: as is, they're extremely likely to end up in jail, with their (claimed) cause discredited, and many of the individual charities they said they were going to donate to broken.

You're claiming rationalism thinks that philosophical debates about "free will" are meaningful and have relevance to assigning personal responsibility? By "rationalism" meaning LessWrong people? I don't believe you.

To be fair, there was some [discussion about separating where internal and external locus of controls are accurate, which misses the point of the entire term. But it also was a tiny subdiscussion which none of the big movers and shakers spoke on, and which was not highly upvoted or supported.

I wonder if Mrs. Fried applies that logic to badthinkers, or just murderers and rapists.

Yes, it's his mother.

Somehow I'm not surprised. This is why culture matters people.

Honestly the only thing interesting in the whole thing is FTX had 24 engineers and supposedly their tech was very good. While fb and twitter are at a different scale it still likely means they have an extraordinary amount of too many people.

The rest is just a tale as old as time. Idiots bought into a Ponzi scheme.

regular people who had money on FTX were not part of the scheme but still lost.

I will be honest I don’t care about those people. I don’t care if people investing in a Ponzi get rich scheme like bitcoin lose money. Satoshi and me are basically the same tribe but what crypto has become is just a pyramid scheme not the libertarian fantasy.

Doesn’t libertarianism lead to pyramid schemes, though? It’s all voluntary. Lula Roe hasn’t violated the NAP.

Why insert the state and have it prohibit companies from basing their staffing model on having 99% of their workforce as independent contractors, the supermajority of which don’t end up taking home the equivalent of minimum wage for the amount of time they put in?

I guess your point is there is no one to protect someone from themselves. To that I agree and as I said I have no sympathy for people losing to a Ponzi scheme.

Maybe libertarians leads to more Ponzi schemes. I’ve become more of a state capacity libertarian but I still don’t feel like crypto is anything like the founders dreams.

From what I read, there is good reason to believe this isn’t true

https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175

I don't dispute the situation is bad, but this is the usual hyperbole that the media loves to eat up. He has a very important and presumably high paying role, and it's in his interest to exaggerate or play-up the extent of the problem.

I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup? The one thing everyone told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t. Chapter 11. If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.

FTX was $8 billion in the hole and customers fleeing and reputation irreparably tarnished. No one was going to plug that hole.

FTX was $8 billion in the hole and customers fleeing and reputation irreparably tarnished. No one was going to plug that hole.

Absolutely not, so he's either delusional or trying to float some kind of dodge for responsibility. I lean towards delusional, actually, since this seems like the reaction of a character who engages in fraud and betrayal of trust and is a swindler; they're never guilty, it was just bad luck and bad timing and they could have made it all okay if only other people hadn't let them down.


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