This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link