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I'm about 40% through Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bankman-Fried, and so far I find it intensely frustrating.
Yes, hindsight is no guide to what people knew or thought at the time, but putting what Lewis is describing with how Bankman-Fried operated is making me want to tear my hair out. Of course the guy isn't one bit interested in how other people feel or if he makes them feel bad, of course he's convinced that if out of 100 people, 99 say "black" and he says "white", he's right and they're wrong. But Lewis, even at this early point, is so clearly enamoured of Bankman-Fried that he can't bear to criticise him directly; even at the places where it finally looks like he'll have to admit "Yeah, Sammy-boy screwed that one up", at the last minute he swerves to how Bankman-Fried was actually in the right, or it wasn't his fault, or or or.
That being said, there is useful information here, if Lewis can't help white-knighting for Bankman-Fried he also can't help being the investigative author that he is. Armchair psychology is a dangerous pastime, but I have to say that my snap judgement of "So what is going on with SBF?" is that he's a child. He can't cope with boredom, and anything that doesn't interest him is dumped into the bin of "boring and irrelevant". There's indications that something was going on with him as a kid; possibly on the autism spectrum, possibly ADHD - that would account for the kind of stimming he does (bouncing his leg, fidgeting, as well as the after-the-fact knowledge that he was hopped up on stimulants). And yet his parents seem to have done nothing about it.
Oh, the parents. Wow, that's some description of the Bankman-Fried family life, and makes me understand even better why they were so greedy about stripping everything they could out of FTX/Alameda Resources as Sam's, and hence their, personal cash cow as described in the law suit against them. They seem to have (emotionally) neglected their kids and been totally incurious about them, or at least about Sam, but very conscious of their own adult interests as Stanford academics and liberal, Democrat, supporters.
Maybe I'm biased by where I'm currently working, but the description of kid Sam makes me wonder why the hell the parents weren't bringing him for psychological assessments? Maybe they were, and that part of the story isn't being told to Lewis by Bankman-Fried, but they just... weren't very much there, from what I'm reading:
If you take one thing away about explaining how and why Bankman-Fried acted the way he did, it's that line:
And so, as long as he does okay in school and doesn't get into trouble, he is just left to get along. They do put him into a fancier school since he's smart - and again, Lewis is good on that. Bankman-Fried is smart, but he's not super-smart, and he finds himself later on among kids who are just as smart as he is, or even smarter. And Bankman-Fried seems to have constructed his sense of self around always being right; everyone else can be dumb and stupid and boring and wrong, but he's right.
That's where Lewis frustrates me. He doesn't seem to see where he - or his hero, Sam - is contradicting himself. So the arts, for example English, are stupid and dumb and academic shell-games. (But his parents are academics - are they and their work, too, only engaged in "a bullshit distinction dreamed up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs"?). Having airily dismissed Shakespeare, later on Lewis gushes about a game Bankman-Fried and a colleague at Jane Street play, which shows how smart Bankman-Fried is: a bog-standard word game based on puns, which requires some quick thinking but isn't that extraordinary. And at another point in the book, we get Bankman-Fried dismissing any attempts by adults at nuance about religious beliefs as more bullshitting, that belief in God is a binary question, yes or no.
Hold on to that thought, because then later on we get Lewis tut-tutting at the co-founders who, not unnaturally, panicked over four million in a cryptocoin gone missing and want to tell the investors that money is lost. But Bankman-Fried wants to go ahead and keep trading because maybe it'll turn up, who's to say that it's not there? Now, "do we have the money?" is a pretty fucking binary question, yes or no, but this time Sammy-boy, in Lewis's telling, is all about the nuance or the inherently probabilistic situation.
So things like that, where Lewis or Bankman-Fried or both of them turn on a dime when it suits the narrative purpose for Bankman-Fried to be The One Guy Who Is Always Right, are very frustrating. But I can't say the book is bad, because yeah, it's helping me understand some of what was going on in Bankman-Fried's mind.
A guy with a low boredom threshold, very probably a couple of neurodevelopmental disorders that never got addressed in childhood because his parents were so out to lunch, who only cares about a set of things he finds fascinating and judges those around him by the same yardstick: if you like what he likes, then you get paid some of his attention. Anything else? He just ignores, because he learned as a kid that he could ignore the boring shit school and other places tried to instil in him, and get away with it. Hence why he plays video games while on video calls and similar behaviour, or why he says "yes" and then never shows up - he learned that the quickest way to get people to stop nagging was just agree with them, but you have no intention of doing the thing. No matter how Lewis tries to dress it up as some kind of constant calculation as to best use of time, "assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time", what it really is, is Bankman-Fried lying because he doesn't care about you or making commitments you think he will carry out when he has no intention of doing so, because he can't see the point in trying to imagine what someone else might want.
And that's how you end up with a massive financial fraud trial - because he doesn't care about anyone else, since he can't manage to quite see other people as real or valuable, and he's a child who never grew up.
Not care about anyone? But what of all the EA stuff - is that a lie, too?
I think Bankman-Fried is a good example of what Chesterton said about modern philanthropy and Humanitarianism:
Bankman-Fried loves the theory because you can play all the number and math games with it, working out probabilities and maximum values and so forth. But humans as humans? Messy, confusing, boring and stupid.
Am now 46% of the way through the book and increasingly frustrated, because Lewis is so far up Bankman-Fried's backside. He pretty much describes Bankman-Fried deciding at this point (after the four co-founders leave) that he's going to keep lying to people to get them to stop criticising him because they now think he likes them, and Lewis writes about this as if its some amazing stroke of psychology by a genius who can read other people like open books but who they just can't understand with their puny little brains.
No, guy, the way to get people to trust you is to stop lying and being a deceitful shit, not to double down on it! Everything that happens from now on is inevitable thanks to Bankman-Fried having an inflated ego, no shred of scruples, and treating reality as if it's some kind of video game, but Lewis is still slobbering over his shoes about how poor Sammy-boy is just too pure for this fallen world.
I want to hit somebody. Everybody involved, except the EAs who got burned by Sammy-boy being a cheating no-good lying deceiver and got out early, and double the beating for Lewis.
EDIT: Even with all that being said, the book is still informative. Bankman-Fried's edge was that he got in first, but of course eventually the big boys followed and he couldn't compete with their own clout and resources, so he had to keep finding new ways to finagle the markets. He started off with the Kimchi Premium, but once that hole was plugged he had to find a new way to keep making the fast cash and he did that first with setting up Alameda Research for crypto trading, then as the big players in Wall Street trading became interested in this new money machine market and moved in, he created his own crypto exchange and token. So he survived and kept piling up the profits by jumping on to a new element of the market before the big guys moved in and took over, but naturally that couldn't last forever - FTX/Alameda Trading was just too small, never mind that they were (allegedly) making billions. That's why he was cosying up to Binance, and why CZ decided that if this was a good idea for Bankman-Fried, he'd turn down any alliance and do the same thing himself as a copy-cat.
EDIT: Three-quarters of the way through and it gets a lot better as we get into the meat of the collapse - basically because Bankman-Fried was a lying liar who never told anyone anything, refused to actually manage, dumped responsibility without information onto others and when it all came crashing down tried to displace the blame onto everyone else with his version of "I know nothing, it wasn't me". Even Lewis has to admit that his plan to resurrect FTX was stupid and unworkable, and that he was to blame because in the end he doesn't care about other people or see them as quite real, but Lewis still is convinced that the money wasn't really stolen or what have you, it's all mysteriously still there somehow in cyberspace, or maybe down the back of the sofa, if everyone just looks hard enough for it.
EDIT EDIT: Have just got to the part where John Ray appears and oh man, he's wonderful 😁 I don't care if Lewis thinks he has it in for Sammy-boy, finally there's an adult in the room!
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Michael Lewis has long been just a worse Ben Mezrich, who is both a better writer and covers more interesting stories. Ugly Americans and The Accidental Billionaires are better than anything Lewis has ever written, and probably some of the few good works of modern non-fiction about business.
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A friend of mine argued that Michael Lewis' strange sympathy for his man-child subject, and for the parents poised to lose their child, might have more than a little to do with Lewis' own grief at recently losing his daughter. Relevant? I have no idea.
Possibly, it's difficult to know. What puzzles me enormously is that people who met Bankman-Fried in real life seem to have been charmed by him, and I cannot for the life of me imagine how he did that. Lewis seems to have fallen for it in the same way: once you let him lecture you, he seems to have this amazing ability to convince normal people that up was down. Even people looking to invest funds, who surely were dealing with plausible rogues every day in their business, seem to have put down all their guards and just thrown money at Bankman-Fried once they'd talked to him.
I imagine that is why he testified on his own behalf in the trial, because he was so accustomed to letting the stream of bullshit wash over people and get them nodding along with him, but being questioned by a prosecutor in a criminal trial is not at all the same thing as being allowed to talk people into agreement with you, and the magic failed him there.
This is going to sound like a very weird and overwrought comparison to make, but I imagine Hitler must have had the same kind of uncanny ability to charm people face-to-face, because you look at this guy from Austria who wasn't much of anything and how the hell did he get to where he ended up as? How did he talk people into taking him seriously? How could enough people go along with what, when looked at in isolation and written down, are plainly preposterous actions?
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Zvi has an excellent review of the same book, with additional observations including some you've noted
From Zvi's review:
I read The Big Short by Michael Lewis, which is about the 2008 housing and financial crisis, and the 4 hedge fund managers that predicted it and profited from it. I relished in Lewis' writing style; emphasizing how the world had gone mad, how the so-called experts knew nothing, and how the people who made accurate observations were ostracized and punished up until the minute that they were proven right.
The book version of "The Big Short" had more details than the star-studded 2015 movie, including details about the day of the collapse of New York's financial industry, how that day compared to the 9/11 attacks, and how one of Steve Eisman's employees (Eisman was re-named to Mark Baum in the movie, for those keeping track) was hospitalized for a heart attack during both the 9/11 attacks and the day that the stock market crashed.
Based on my enjoyment of The Big Short, and the similarities between the writing style of The Big Short and the writing style of Going Infinite that people here are criticizing, I'm being led to conclude that I would enjoy the latter, and that everybody here is selling this book short (no pun intended).
Although, I do have this nagging feeling that Going Infinite sounds a lot like a version of The Big Short where the 4 prescient hedge fund managers ended up being wrong and losing all their money; I probably would not enjoy a version of the Big Short that ended similarly to the SBF saga.
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Once I saw his parents were academics from Palo Alto that did the hyphenated last name thing I knew exactly who they were. I grew up with people like this in the Bay Area. Boomer parents who were part of "The Movement" i.e. New Leftism in the 1960's and 70's. They are so irony pilled and into post modernism that they think that no traditions matter and are obsessed with rationality (sound familiar to Yud lol). This is very common among these kinds of people. For example, see the kind and queen of the Weather Underground raising that social justice obsessed DA that got recalled in SF. This is the kind of people that people really into the 1960's radical movements raise. I've seen it so many times in the Bay Area when I was growing up.
The Bankman-Frieds weren’t really new leftist radicals like Chesa’s parents. His dad is a tax law prof who wrote textbooks on taxation law, that’s a pretty different milieu to the actual Berkeley-retired-radical humanities scene that you find on some sociology, gender and philosophy (and indeed sometimes law) faculties. They were pretty mainstream PMC libs politically, maybe with some unorthodox views on family life that seem more autistic than political.
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There is one question I still need answered: It’s pretty clear at this point that SBF does not care about other people in the sense of having normal “empathy”. He lies, cheats, and screws people over all the time. And yet, he doesn’t seem particularly selfish? The guy was working 18 hours a day, ate vegan food, and had an ugly girlfriend (okay, he was def banging hot chicks on the side, but still). What was the money for? His actions don’t make sense if he was trying to maximize his own wellbeing. Why would he go on Twitter spaces and admit to fraud while under house arrest? Why take the stand at trial and almost certainly get years added to his sentence? He wasn’t trying to get out of jail. He was trying to restart the grift. If he got the chance to do it all over again, the only thing he’d change would be not paying CZ in FTT tokens.
So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part. Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy? I can understand being an uncaring sociopath. I can understand being driven by empathetic reason. I cannot understand what base human impulses drive SBF. He is an enigma, the Joker, a man I don’t fully understand.
Absolutely that, the maximising utility bit. He found a theory that meshed with his quirks around maths and probability games, and he fastened onto it like a limpet. And I am beginning to think that it filled, for him, the space that ordinary people have around rituals like Christmas and birthdays. Again, this is me taking my own impression from what is only short mentions in the book, but it struck me that the parents didn't celebrate his birthday, for example, because there was a good chance they simply forgot it.
If you're possibly developmentally disordered and you're growing up the weird, oddball kid the elder of two kids where your younger brother is more 'normal' and more popular, even with your own parents, in the kind of household where the parents go "Oh, it's your birthday? Huh, who knew?" and the model of interpersonal interactions you are getting is "give them money to shut them up/make them go away so we can get on with the important stuff" (like fancy dinner parties) - then yeah, I can see the attraction in a shiny theory where you can do good and get all the validation and praise by "give them money to make them go away".
There's a sort of fox-and-sour-grapes comment about physical attractiveness which made me smile, because it is very much a teenager's view of dealing with rejection (but then again, Bankman-Fried was in his late twenties when Lewis was writing the book, and I do think it's telling that he's still stuck at this middle-school level):
I mean, you're this rather scruffy, not the most handsome, slightly chubby and unfit kid in high school, you're already something of a weirdo or not fitting in, of course you're going to downplay the importance of looks: "I don't care if the pretty girls aren't interested in me, I'm not interested in them first, so hah!" But there's a deeper problem there; he's not interested in much of anything except the few things that seem to hit the dopamine receptors for him:
So yeah, I'm leaning more and more towards the view that while he certainly is a crook, it wasn't avarice driving him, or not as ordinary people would define it; he wanted the money because it was a symbol of success, and to him, success means "Mom and Dad approve of what I'm doing, plus I get to live how I like and people have to do what I want" as well as the ego-boost of "See, I am the Only Guy Who's Always Right" from the approval of the EA crowd. And I think he picked EA as his philosophy because his younger brother (the popular, normal one, remember!) was already involved in that, it was the kind of nice liberal 'right side of history' values his mother would approve of (again, I'm feeling like Herr Doktor Freud with the mommy issues but uh, yeah, I think some definitely there) and the theory behind it all, which revolved around Bayes Theorem etc., fitted into the slots in his brain that he reserved for "worth paying attention to".
Also, yes I'm blaming the parents because he should have been brought to child psychologists and so forth from an early age since I do think that there's autism spectrum/ADHD/worrying lack of empathy going on there, not treated as Mommy's Little Echo:
Yeah, no. I don't care how bright your eight year old is (and Bankman-Fried is smart but not genius-level smart), he's not going to be doing a law paper critique better than adult reviewers. What he is doing parroting back to you the things he's learned, from listening to you talking at those adult dinner parties, that you think and like and defend.
Caveat: I may be being massively unfair to the parents as I haven't read the entire book yet. They may indeed have been sending him to therapists and what-not. But so far, I get the impression that Barbara was the main parent, and both parents just accepted that little Sammy was weird and not like other kids, but he was doing okay in school and not in trouble, so whatever. Let him stay in his bedroom, we've got Pointless Virtue Signalling to get on with:
Never told anyone, huh? If I believe that (which I don't), then it's not really an effective protest about unfair and unequal treatment, now is it? Imagine in the Civil Rights Era a white proponent of equal rights going "Well, I'm not going to drink out of public water fountains if black people can't use them too, but I'm not going to say a word to anyone about it so no-one will ever know that's what I'm protesting. That will certainly show the government what's what!" Pointless. Virtue. Signalling.
EDIT: Honestly, Babs, you should have thrown your kid a few birthday parties. Make him feel special. That you, as his goddamn family, cared enough about him to give a damn in taking time and trouble to consider what he liked and then prepared it for him, instead of "yeah, if you want something, tell me and I'll buy it" (and that will get you out of my hair when I can't even be bothered to remember your birthday). Then he wouldn't have grown up with such a desperate need for approval that he did what he did with FTX/Alameda Research.
EDIT EDIT: I'm not saying I'm getting Mrs Jellyby vibes here but I'm not saying I'm not, either.
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...constantly playing video games at an unusually poor level of ability.
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Who was he banging on the side? I haven’t heard anything.
Not too much detail in the book as far as I've got, but he has unnamed girlfriends at some time, plus romantic interest in Tara MacAulay, one of the co-founders of Alameda Research, and then Caroline Ellison.
So even if he wasn't a Chadly stud, he wasn't having trouble finding girlfriends, either.
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Not 100% confirmed, but I think the COO Constance Wang plus some other Asian crypto hedge fund lady. Plus you know, we men, we can assume.
/r/nbacircirclejerk is apparently everywhere
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SBF also (commit to) spend a hundred million dollars on a sportsball stadium endorsement deal for a game he didn't care about. It's like the hours spent being awful at League of Legends that probably pad that workweek, or being vegan except for a shrimp accident, or not caring how hotel rooms or schedules worked. He banged a bunch of not-supermodel-tier women because he didn't need (and probably wouldn't have benefited from) a supermodel to get what he needed.
I'd like to think it was the same problem as Ayn Rand going from long speeches about honesty and fidelity through relationship to having an abusive affair: both were simply corked out of their gourd on the finest medicinal accellerants available, with corresponding monofocus on whatever was in front of them, augmented by the feeling and demand that this task was the right one.
But most people on these drugs don't do that, and there's no small number of teetotalers who do. It could well just be an addictive personality to a particularly boring sort of addiction, and I'll admit it's something I've seen as a temptation myself. It's the sort of thing that makes Expert Roulette in FFXIV not-boring, or arguing on the internet irresistible, and it's not always bad on the margins. Emphasis on that last bit.
Now you've got me wondering about the vegan bit 😁
How much was genuine conviction, and how much was copying others/agreeing with what they said but not meaning it (which he's been doing a lot of up to as far as I've read)?
So he started off vegetarian, but that might have been more 'easy' vegetarian than his friend assumed (e.g. would eat eggs/shrimp). The vegan part may simply have been that he was around a lot of vegans and it was just easier for him to do the "Yup, vegan too!" bit (then go out and eat whatever the hell he liked) than have discussions about it every time anyone ordered a meal.
I'd believe he was vegetarian, or semi-vegetarian, but as for the veganism - I think possibly just copying others/letting them assume, by his favourite trick of agreeing while interiorly not intending to keep his word, that he was all the way vegan.
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Wasn't there also a video where he was being interviewed about his vegan lifestyle, in front of his open fridge, that had eggs in it?
Yeah. Could have been for other people using the fridge, but hard to tell.
Where's Thomas Jane when you need him?
Scott Pilgrim was a chillingly accurate documentary.
One of the most memorable and surreal moviegoing experience of my life was going into Scott Pilgrim vs The World completely cold and then this scene happening.
No trailers, and no prior knowledge of the property beyond that it was directed by the guy who did Hot Fuzz, and that my date wanted to see it. I thought I'd been talked into a quirky hipster rom-com a la Garden State, and rarely have I been so pleased to be wrong.
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"Sam, isn't it "shrimp want me, AIs fear me"?
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That seems the easiest to answer: because maximizing multiversal expected utility means making a number go up, and a particularly hard number to make go up at that. If empathy isn’t necessary to drive a Tetris world champion devote his life to getting the highest possible score, then it isn’t necessary to motivate SBF’s actions either.
Obviously, the correct way to maximize multiversal expected utility is to make as many paperclips as possible. Make number go up!
/s
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I haven't read Michael Lewis' book, but I enjoyed reading this really long review of Lewis' book, which is practically a book on SBF in its own right.
I have no idea who is more accurate, Michael Lewis or Zvi, but it's a fun read in any case.
One thing I would note is that I think you might be making too big a deal out of the line:
From what I can tell, in the context of the text that you quoted, it means that Sam and his parents were more into the idea of "just ask me directly if you want something", as opposed to trying to guess what presents it would be best to buy people as part of a social ritual.
It is not saying that Sam and his parents did not care about other people's wants, although of course that could well be true.
It's only impressions I'm getting, so someone else reading that part might think nothing of it. But I do get the feeling that they just didn't care. If you're a sort of outsider/loner at school, and you see all the other kids get birthday parties and presents, while your parents don't even remember the day - how does that make you feel, do you think?
It's not even about getting gifts, it's about little rituals of caring, of demonstrating affection. "I'll buy you shit to get you out of my hair" is not at all the same as "Happy birthday, we're glad you're alive because we love you".
I mean, fuck it, my parents were not Stanford professors with famous dinner parties and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, and I sure didn't have a ton of friends either, but at least every year as a kid they got me a cake and put candles on it and got me a card and made a goddamn effort for that one day that this wasn't just ordinary tea-time, it was celebrating my birthday. I feel more sorry for Bankman-Fried about that then I do about anything else, because while relationships with my family as I grew up may not always have been untroubled, my parents did demonstrate - even by rote participation in mandated social rituals - that they gave a damn about me. "Today is just the same day as any other day, we don't even privately celebrate this date, and it wouldn't matter anyway because you don't have any friends to invite over for a party, oh and we're not even going to put ourselves out for five minutes of 'what kind of thing does Sam want as a gift?' " - damn, that's cold.
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It does suggest that "I don't care to think about you enough to have an idea of what you want, so I'm going to eschew that responsibility altogether." A key part of gift giving is the thoughtfulness that went in to getting the right gift. Not doing that sends a message.
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Based on this comment, SBF's blog, and his professional achievements it seems pretty clear that Sam is extremely smart. Specifically, he is very good at manipulating formal systems - math, software, games, etc. He is merely smart is once you leave the world of formal systems.
Unfortunately, in a move common common among STEM-nerd, I'm guessing he realized that all non-formal-systems contain subjectivity, which means you can use them to argue anything, which means they're "bullshit". Indeed, much of this forum is built upon a similar syllogism, but with a more explicitly political lens (e.g. the law is so vague that you can prosecute anyone with selective enforcement). None of this is completely wrong and it is often useful in some contexts, however...
I strongly believe that a large part of a STEM-nerd maturing into an healthy adult is learning
Or, to use Robert Kegan’s model of development: to move from Stage 4 to Stage 5.
Like, take Socrates. Is Socrates the greatest philosopher in the history? That question doesn't have an answer. However, there is value in reading Socrates that puts him above a typical philosopher - namely that understanding Socrates makes it much easier for you to understand a myriad of other philosophers. If you're interested in digesting philosophy as a field, that is valuable. If, on the other hand, you're interested in how philosophy applies to doing the greatest good for the fewest dollars - not so much.
Or take Freud. I assume SBF would say Freud was pseudoscientific bullshit. To be fair, (1) I have yet to find value in some of his writing (particularly on sexuality) and (2) Freud was hardly a beacon of science qua science, and yet... Freud
both of which are not really "provable", but are self-evidently true/useful.
Likewise, Freud popularized the framing of the Id, Ego, and Superego, which, when stripped of its mysticism essentially boils down to:
It is literally impossible to prove the above framework is "true". However, a great number of people find the framing useful.
Anyway, I've gotten off track... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
By some accounts yes.
By ranking no, not at all. He maybe had some addiction problems with gaming, but was bad at it.
I’m talking more about boardgames and card games.
Lol is technically a formal system (ignoring lag), but, at SBF’s level (bronze) skill is largely determined by “softer” skills like last-hit-clicking minions.
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Dang, you're not kidding. I haven't played LoL in ages (Dota 2 is the superior game by far) but it looks like he peaked at Bronze II.
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Oh, he is smart, and he has a knack for the kind of weird, cut-throat gambling games that Jane Street allegedly engaged in (and again boy, does that explain subsequent behaviour when he was the guy running the entire show).
But he's not the super-genius that some have made him out to be, and (so far in the book anyway) a lot of his behaviour is a combination of rudeness because he now is so rich, other people have to smile and put up with it, some spergy (to use an old online term) ways of doing things, and plain not caring a damn about anything other than whatever stimulus is engaging him at the moment.
Keep him working at a place like Jane Street but for God's sake don't make him a manager, he'd have done okay. He might have made some colossal bad trade and sent a few thousands of millions down the tubes, but overall he'd have been another smart, mathy, finance guy.
Letting him loose to play in his own sandbox was the worst thing ever, because he very much does not give a damn about other people (never mind all the doing good stuff, that's... complicated). He wanted to make a big impact on the world, for whatever reason (again, armchair psychology says that was the only way he could get the attention of his parents, but I'm not Herr Doktor Freud) and EA was the bubble he fell into so that is where he diverted his energies. Make an absolute shit-ton of money - and clearly he thought he was the guy who could never go wrong - and put it into EA projects, make a huge impact because nobody else is doing exactly this, and bingo, you are now both filthy rich and everybody is calling you a secular saint.
Lewis says Bankman-Fried doesn't care about money, and I think that's right so far as it goes; he doesn't care about money as money or what it can buy, he cares about money as "ha ha I win, I'm better than you".
There's one stunning example from the early days of Alameda Research where Bankman-Fried has developed his own automated trading system and wants to play with it, but the spoilsports working with him won't let him:
Exactly. That's the point where, if you were in any doubt, you realise that this guy is a lying cheat who doesn't listen to anyone else because he is convinced he really does know it all, will say anything to make you think he agrees with you, then goes behind your back and does what he wants anyway. And is massively, massively careless about it, because he hasn't got the attention span of a goldfish.
I'm only two-fifths of the way through the book so I am very interested to see if Lewis's opinion changes as events change, but man. That right there is 100% why the management team left, and even though Lewis tries very hard to paint them as villains - that they tried to ruin Bankman-Fried - I am left agreeing with them that he should have been shut down and never allowed trade ever again, and a lot of the bad things down the line would never have happened if they had won.
The Modelbot that is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking - Sam was exceptionally smart within formal models (epitomized by HFT crypto algorithms) and not really exceptional outside of formal models (e.g. the verbal argument of "what if something goes wrong")
Smart in a dumb way. "Okay, I promise I won't run this untested model that could blow all our money unless two people are here to turn it off once it makes a loss" and then immediately turns it on and lets it run unsupervised? You wouldn't let that guy park your car in case he ran it into a wall, or drove it off to sell it online because he's a lying cheating deceiver, never mind give him millions of dollars for risky, unproven trades.
Except a lot of supposedly savvy people did exactly that, and that is the great unsolved mystery of this entire story.
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Thing is that you don't have to be exceptionally smart to exploit a formal model as formal models are much easier to exploit than informal ones. It is why teaching a computer to play chess better than a human is relatively straight forward while teaching a computer to figure out if it's looking at a picture of a bird is not.
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You didn't need super fancy models to make money in crypto arbitrage back then. I wasn't old enough to have capital at the time, but I remember noticing price differences on different exchanges.
That was his advantage: the big companies were moving slowly because they were wary, his idea was to deliberately run the risk because move fast, break things:
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