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I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud
So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.
In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.
Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.
So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.
The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.
But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)
Well, yeah. But the important thing to remember is that he's a smart moron. The embarrassing Sequoia fanboy squee article hit that point, too:
As an aside, anyone who coins a cutesy neologism like "mathletic" should be rolling around on the floor, clutching their ears, in agony. But what is my point here?
Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.
Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".
I agree that he doesn't have some grand legal plan, but I do think he is relying on "negligence or ignorance". The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties". Everyone seems to have had an instinctive mindset that the conventional way of doing things - even business - was somehow icky, somehow.... normie. And they weren't normies! They were supersmart EA types who were going to save the world by making tons of money and having fun doing it!
So whether or not Bankman-Fried set out from the outset with fraud in mind, the setup was so chaotic, it was conducive to it. I think there is something suspicious there, because Bankman-Fried had so much ownership and control behind the scenes, but he may genuinely have thought he was a supersmart cookie who could find a new way to make zillions after his One Weird Trick dried up.
His parents are lawyers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he imbibed some half-baked notion that "if I say X was separate from Y, and it was Y did all the fiddling around with funds, then I'm in the clear" when it comes to his technicality about "it wasn't FTX that did it, it was Alameda". I do think he's relying on technicalities to save his skin, which just shows once again that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
I really hope one of the lessons people in the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent sphere, including on here, take away from this is to lose the ugly attitude around the idolisation of 'intelligence' and the corresponding denigration of 'normies' (this constant assumption, as I've said, that ordinary people are all 90-95 IQ and not the average of 100 IQ or even up to 105!).
I think that this is an affliction that affects all intelligent people, but the concentration of people who think of themselves as "underappreciated geniuses" is probably higher in EA and other nerdy spaces, fortifying the walls of the echo chamber to the point where reality can rarely penetrate to bring people back down to earth, and so you end up with midwits who think they're geniuses getting mugged by reality. It's good to have some friends who aren't college educated, don't work in tech, etc. if only to ensure that you're not completely trapped in such a bubble.
I acknowledge that there genuinely are a lot of Really Smart People in these spaces. And it's not everyone who does it, but the automatic correlation some make between "ordinary person" and "95 IQ" really annoys me (as someone who hits 105 IQ only on their best days, if I believe that Ravens Matrices test I took online). Yeah yeah yeah, "Most people (about 68 percent) have an IQ between 85 and 115. Only a small fraction of people have a very low IQ (below 70) or a very high IQ (above 130). The average IQ in the United States is 98" so really X is not being dismissive when they reach for "95 IQ" in their imaginary ordinary person.
But when we're talking about ordinary people, we are talking about "the average" which is set at 100 IQ. So a glib "95 IQ normie" is being dismissive, is saying "those dumb people are really dumb, so much dumber than me" and that's no way to think about or talk about your fellow citizens. You can disagree with the presumed opinion of the man in the street, but there is no cause to presume he's stupider than the average.
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