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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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