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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.

But, less facetiously, I'd like to lay out my default assumption here, based on what I've seen of SBF's work and statements so far; he is not IQ <90, and he has ruthlessly exploited the high-trust presumption of society, and because of that, I trust not a single word or explanation that comes from his mouth, nor those of people who would plausibly gain by his own gains. Given his willingness to spend money on regulators and punish dissenters, the general halo effect, and the fact that I know well how easily the job interview process gets twisted in general, I am not willing to assign Jane St. the same impartial evaluation trust that I would a math SAT scantron machine, or a compiler attempting to compile code he wrote.

Again, I don't think that he is an idiot. But I do think that he has absolutely adopted the appearance of smart nerdy things consciously, as part of a presented image, and that I need to consider everything about him from an adversarial position.

I feel like the fact that Jane Street paid Sam a very nice salary to manage crypto trades for them is pretty strong evidence against their own smarts.

The crypto trades came much later, in 2018, and with his own money. Jane Street was 2014.

Fair; I am operating entirely off of a few article summaries which specifically mentioned that he traded crypto at Jane Street, and if there is evidence that Jane Street wasn't trading crypto at the time, I certainly don't have either any specialist knowledge of Jane Street or notable faith in the article summaries.

The point remains, however; if my (hypothetical) investment manager was bragging to me about how much money he made with Bernie Madoff, I would seek another investment manager, even if said investment manager decried buying into the Ponzi scheme specifically and even if Bernie had other legitimate investments. It doesn't matter if they came out ahead (plus, I, being a suspicious bastard, would figure that a smart investment manager would make damn sure to conceal the fact that they lost money by not doing basic due diligence on Bernie's fund if they did lose money in it); no matter the outcome, my own trust in someone who put money down on Bernie would go inexorably down.

But he didn't steal from them, did he? They were smart enough to know how much leash they could give a man like that to safely make use of his talents without him getting ideas. Which is probably the most important part of managing finance guys.

Did he? I honestly don't know. Has anyone done a post-fall post-mortem deep dive on SBF's time in Jane Street?

If I go by the Sequoia article, the timeline goes something like this:

(1) Bankman-Fried is doing his physics/maths degree at MIT

(2) Meets Will MacAskill, who was recruiting for earn-to-give, via people in his fraternity

(3) MacAskill steers him towards an internship in Jane Street

(4) He seems to have done okay there (but as you say, we have no idea what really went on). Meets Ellison there. Article fanboys hard over him, so take the following with a grain of salt:

In 2017, everything was going great for SBF. He was killing it at Jane Street. He was a trader’s trader: so fluent with transactions that others would come watch him work, like one might watch an esports athlete streaming on Twitch.

(5) Quits, for whatever reason (article says it's all in the service of his devotion to utilitarianism yadda yadda but again, we don't know if he was asked to leave/let go/decided to quit for unknown reasons)

(6) Goes back home to the Bay Area, gets a job - courtesy of MacAskill - as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism

(7) Ellison is sent on a recruiting trip to California by Jane Street, decides to look up Bankman-Fried

(8) Turns out he set up this thing called Alameda Research with a grubstake of $50,000 (could be his own money, his parents' money, who knows) to exploit the 'kimchi premium' and is coining it

(9) But he could be making much, much more! So he goes looking for $50 million loan and gets a good chunk of that via EA contacts

(10) He puts together an admittedly ramshackle operation to exploit this hard

(11) Ellison quits Jane Street and signs up

(12) MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!

(13) But of course, all good things come to an end, and so the next step is "Hmmm, maybe I should open a crypto trading exchange, there is probably easy money to be made there, too"

(14) Founds FTX and the rest we all know

That would interesting, but JS is very secretive too. Employees are incentivized to stay quiet .

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