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This is only true a priori in a world where economic power is either the be-all and end-all or completely separated from matters of any import – the world where money can, at most, buy you more money. And not, like, unregistered weapons, strategic amounts of compute, or tools for fabricating a stronger sort of COVID. I suppose you genuinely believe, based on a wealth of experience, that this is the world we live in.
But it takes active effort, mainly non-financial, on part of system maintainers to keep the real world similar enough to this nice quantitative image.
I know what normies are, thank you very much. They wouldn't have started to use any data encryption either, if it wasn't forced on them by a tiny minority of humans who can both parse technical writing and care about others (and, of course, spillover damage from normies immolating themselves).
I just believe that people of this sort are a liability for the spark of consciousness and beauty that is humanity; them being endowed with unmerited equal right to weigh in on matters of political power is making this liability lethal; and the class of people who cultivate this vulnerable, exploitable, dependent, atomized mass with the intent to wield them, their childish needs and easily inflated fears against peer competitors is the apex of evil on this planet. Carving out a meaningful niche for sentient human beings where these merry people and their self-appointed psychopathic shepherds cannot infringe upon is hard, probably impossible despite rosy appearances mere decades ago, and that makes my blood boil on a daily basis.
Pardon me this banal pathos.
Maybe not a very skillful one. Certainly not the violent sort. I condede the term may be inapt.
You know, I don't see the smart part. Rather, don't hear it, since we're talking of verbal IQ. It strikes me as a very Hoffmanesque story, specifically Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober, known to all half-decent Russians through Shenderovich's puppet show fable of Putin's rise to power by the grace of Fairy Godmother Berezovsky. But I digress.
Did he get some cool math papers published, or ace Putnam, or what? How is he like Buffett or, say, Simons? In every interview he comes across as an overconfident goofy midwit with shallow takes, whose mom told him he's the smartest boy; his opening capital allegedly originates in a two-bit (and probably illegal) arbitrage; and other than that, it's just «oh, he used to work at Jane Street» and the very pile of brazen schemes that made jaded finance analysts go «bruh», which has now unraveled.
Caroline on the other hand – this girl is verbal-smart. Maybe as smart as you. But, sorry, that's still not quite 26 billion USD net worth smart. They truly needed a ton of chutzpah to pull it off. And chutzpah on that scale has to involve some psychopathy.
I don't know about psychopathy. Well, not inborn psychopathy anyway; maybe their weird trajectory turned them into psychopaths, if such a thing is consistent with the definition. I think they demonstrated some skill in locating the original arbitrage and building institutions around it, and a lot of luck in starting in the opening innings of a massive boom market; but from there, Main Character Syndrome explains the rest. Sure, they crossed a red line when they bailed out Alameda with stolen customer reserves, but all of their nonconformist iconoclasm so far had been rewarded by the universe, and by that point their whole identity was "brash entrepreneurs who do what it takes to bring home wins for the good guys." Who were the authority figures to impress upon them the wisdom of the gods of the copybook headings? SBF's parents were well known law professors at Stanford Law School and apparently they were themselves busy buying $70M vacation properties in the Bahamas: not, it would seem, stentorian voices for discipline and humility. Every signal they got from the world, during their less than three decades on this planet, was reinforcement.
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