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suy  1yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3830 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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Many rationalists support crypto because they consider that it will help to avoid government control to buy nootropics, participate in prediction markets etc. My advice is that instead of supporting crypto it is better to lobby politicians to allow to do these things legally and openly. That may take longer time and be harder to achieve but it will be much better because negative externalities from crypto are too severe and damaging that they cancel all the benefits that crypto could give us.

Many of these things are legal in other countries and they are not as great as many rationalists think. I am in Latvia now; piracetam and phenibut are manufactured by a local pharmaceutical company here, they are not only legal but doctors routinely prescribe them. What I think about them is that their effectiveness is very low. Healthcare professionals consider them as low class antidepresants/anxiolytics. They have very few adverse effects but basically they do very little.

If 50% of antidepressant effect is due to placebo effect, then prescribing something to people with moderate depression/anxiety will have 50% improvement rate. Doctors initially select medicines with less side-effects and switch to more serious antidepresants when they are not effective. It would be good if other countries used them as well but in the big scheme, they matter very little that it is not worth to use crypto to illegally buy them.

But FTX is not crypto. FTX was a mixture of the old and the new, which is precisely why it failed.

The whole point of crypto is to be completely detached from old systems, so there's zero surface of attack from government. If you use pure crypto (no exchange), then you are immune to these kinds of failures.

I cannot imagine how crypto could work without exchanges.

Once I wanted to install bitcoin wallet just for interest. At that time the wallet file size was 2 terabytes large. I decided not to waste my resources on this. The same is probably true for most people with the exception of a small number of motivated people.

Without exchanges bitcoin would never get to the usage levels it has now. If you want to buy drugs with bitcoin, the seller needs to be able to use those bitcoins to buy something else. Even today there is not much use for them and most likely one needs to use exchange to get another currency that one can use to buy legal things.

I understand the original idea was that everyone mines bitcoins with their own hardware and then engages in commerce with other people. In reality as soon as exchange was started, professional miners started earning real (fiat) money.

But even if bitcoin community had managed to ban exchanges (not really sure how) and had captured sufficiently large economy to be self-sufficient (I sell pizza for bitcoins that I use to buy drugs or whatever), the government would have controlled it, to collect taxes if not for other reasons. Did you know that you have to pay tax even for barter transactions?

There is nothing special about bitcoin as originally intended. It is nothing more than digital cash. That is not sufficient to avoid government control because the government controls physical things. Not fully, not entirely but sufficiently to make it hard enough to discourage the majority.

I cannot imagine how crypto could work without exchanges.

The exchanges don't need to work like the do now. The exchange could transfer the bitcoin to an external wallet, it doesn't need to be a wallet controlled by the exchange.

It's perfectly doable to buy bitcoins with Binance, and then transfer those to an external wallet you have 100% control of. That way if Binance disappears you still have your bitcoins.

I cannot imagine how crypto could work without exchanges.

Decentralized exchanges powered by smart contracts.

Once I wanted to install bitcoin wallet just for interest. At that time the wallet file size was 2 terabytes large. I decided not to waste my resources on this. The same is probably true for most people with the exception of a small number of motivated people.

You erroneously tried to set up a validator node. A crypto wallet is just a pair of 256 bit keys. You genuinely seem to not know anything at all about crypto, I find it strange that you are willing to comment so confidently on it.

What purpose a wallet will have if I cannot mine or otherwise participate in decentralized network with validations? No, I didn't make a mistake. I just decided that I don't have enough available resources for this.

You don't need a validation node to "participate in decentralized network with validations", much like how you don't need to own a supercomputer to run your code on one.

I am not sure what do you mean by this. Why would I even want to run some code on a supercomputer?

Why would I even want to run some code on a supercomputer?

From time to time I'm doing a work project that needs a lot of compute to properly converge. Now this isn't that common an occurrence, to the point that 95% of the time I'm not using one, but for the other 5% of the time it's absolutely necessary, unless I want to wait six months running the code on my office desktop, by which time the signal I'm investigating may well have disappeared. Hence we rent out compute time on a supercomputer from Amazon and this works well for the firm even though owning a supercomputer is not practical as 1) We're not in that line of business and 2) The majority of the time It'd be lying idle doing nothing.

You have a specific job but I don't. Although you could say that by posting here and on reddit I am probably using code that runs on some Amazon cloud services or whatever but that is too indirect.

I just wanted to see if I could be a part of bitcoin network without any extra expense by using my own laptop. It wasn't really possible.

FTX was a mixture of the old and the new, which is precisely why it failed.

I'd argue that FTX failed because it made risky bets with depositor funds without consent or disclosure, repeatedly; it could have been completely dollars or completely *coin and had the same problem.

Sure. I am not particularly interested in FTX blow-up. I am saying that whole crypto is misuse of talents and waste of energy, time and money(!). Sometimes we criticise that the smartest minds in Silicon Valley instead of searching for a cure of cancer and other good things, work hard on how to make people to click on ads. But crypto is much worse. Ads at least can help to connect sellers and buyers and improve economy and ultimately our standard of living. But what can crypto give us?

In comparison, Theranos failed and was fraudulent and many hundreds if not thousands of biopharma startups fail. But one of those gave us mRNA vaccine and another Harvoni (highly effective HepC treatment).

I'm very skeptical about crypto, and I agree that the majority of this crap tends to be scams or worse.

But I think people underestimate and badly underestimate the flaws and vulnerabilities in modern centralized systems. People elsewhere have pointed to the issues with financial centralization at time where governments are shutting down bank accounts of dissenters, but it's not the only one. If you don't pay Cloudflare or Akami their due, literally anyone on the internet can burn your site so bad it'll charge you rent. The hosting companies who literally name their company over free speech went from "A lot of people are for it, as long as it’s for them." to "The “Free Speech” in our company name is not a secret dog whistle to you." in less than a decade, and I still trust them better than almost all of the competition, which is to say I trust them a little less far than I can throw their entire server farm.

And there's endless piles of this stuff, in ways that might surprise you! The same clawback consumer protection mechanisms that patio11 argues in favor for traditional finance are why doing anything as a direct seller or commissioner online, no matter how safe and clean, risks getting absolutely steamrolled by chargebacks (and note that Stripe a) won't play with a lot of businesses and b) won't actually guarantee the protection so much as be better than getting fucked over all the time). E-mail and snail mail communication is getting sketchier. The not-very-subtle implication from many messages from OpenAI has been that every regulator anywhere near their field or general policing is breathing down their neck. Search is getting worse by the day; proving identity or ownership of digital media as anything less than a multi-million-dollar corporation is basically just shrug-world.

Again, I'm very skeptical: on top of the fraud, there's a deeper fault that crypto isn't there yet and might not be technically capable of getting there. The oracle problem alone makes a crypto-DNS just as vulnerable to centralization failures as traditional DNS, none of the extant chains can get even 1990-levels of compute power together at any latency, it's extremely vulnerable to poisoning, and it's never been particularly clear that the attempted solutions for any of the most trivial of the above problems actually work or could ever work even on toy models.

I'd also prefer more emphasis on atoms than bits -- I love that we're in a world where people are building transistors in their garage, or even marginal stuff like DIY haptics for VR. Getting away from digital providence for everything and anything worth doing would be another solution, albeit one that's probably even harder to solve.

But it's very nearly the only thing even trying to get close to a solution in this problem space. Maybe it'd be better if people realized it was a bad choice, and started fresh; maybe it's not a solvable problem in any way. It's weird to just dismiss the problem space as a whole.

I think that modern finance is complicated and may not be optimal but overall it is working fine. It could be improved but only by people who really understand how it works and what are the actual problems. The crypto essentially proposed to restore the gold standard in a digital format. It completely ignores all the reasons why the gold standard was rejected and tries to solve non-existant problems.

The second aspect that worries me is that most crypto supporters are so much against the government that it could be called anarchist movement. I agree that any government can become dictatorship. But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.

But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.

I'll make the same response I do to more general "but we live in and should reform society" ones: I don't think the math works out for it. You can and should make the democratic arguments where you can win them.

But the truth is you can't win them all. You probably can't even win a majority. Not just in the FCFromSSC sense that multipolar tolerance failed, but the deeper issue where even if it had survived, you need to get to 50%+1. The smallest minority is the individual, and for any politician is willing to serve a market of one, there's a few dozen businesses willing to take commissions for a thousandth of the price.

You cannot win every fight, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't put efforts to support democracy and freedom of speech.

I cannot blame EA or rationalists for not taking greater stance against the government restrictions including vaccine mandates. That's everyone's personal decision to choose the hill to die on. But I am annoyed for them to actually support restriction of speech during the pandemic out of fear from disease. When I tried to speak out in the beginning that forced lockdowns are extremely damaging and will not prevent the spread of covid significantly, they called me names. At the end I was vindicated and the governments that forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates and fired unvaccinated people from their jobs were proven wrong, and that's not even acknowledged properly.

Possibly we got into this situation because dissenting voices were subtly and unjustly suppressed on all levels, including on social media. Alex Berenson was kicked out from Twitter for saying that vaccine does not prevent the spread of infection when this information was already publicly known. I don't agree with everything he says but clearly the overzealous fact-checkers had no understanding of nuance and scientific details.

In spite of all these setbacks, I believe that the only way forward is to foster debate, free speech and democratic norms. We need to learn from these mistakes. It is not too late to fix Canadian customs law and make them to respect minorities. Concentrating too much on technical solutions makes us to lose the focus on these important aspects.

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