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suy  1yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 1yr ago   3856 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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If Alameda had been totally separate, they might even have managed to come out of that. But they were both tied so closely, nearly literally at neighbouring desks, that the problems of one swamped the other. And what is coming out about his habit of shifting funds from FTX wallets to Alameda and back is not looking good; his entire project was built on sand.

I think there's more than enough blame to go round, and it's not all on FTX/Friedman-Bank. The VCs, the regulators, the auditors/accountants - everyone should have been looking at this and wondering where it was all coming from. But the simple answer is greed: as long as the numbers looked right and the profits seemed to be rocketing up, nobody wanted to question the golden goose.

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