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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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Reading Scott's post about feeling anxious and betrayed made me think back to Zero HP Lovecraft's tweet about the quokka, the Australian mammal. I don't have much else to say besides how frustrating it is to see a full grown adult act so naively. Don't have much charity left for someone so easily manipulated.

I think you kinda underestimate how easy is to manipulate a grown adult outside of their area of expertise. Especially if the manipulation is towards the result that they want to achieve (which is how any skillful conman would do it). Especially if the target is commonly living in a low-threat environment where it's usually ok to trust people and most of people you encounter aren't actually out to get you. It's probably easier to manipulate a very smart professor than a very dumb prison inmate - because the latter won't just believe any word you say regardless of what you say, just on general principle that they don't know you.

I think you kinda underestimate how easy is to manipulate a grown adult outside of their area of expertise.

Completely agree. I've devoted my previous posts to try to get people to doubt things they assume as 100% certain, and the end result is that no one wants to do that.

It seems pretty clear to me that even the most rational and intelligent people on the planet will believe whatever they want to believe as long as it feels good.

I think the point there was not that no one wants to do that, but no one wants to assign a profound importance to banalities.

Are you 100% certain it was a banality?

I'm 98.45730468302835030019% certain.

Good. So you accept it's possible there's importance in the nuance.