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.
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.
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.
"Sam, isn't it "shrimp want me, AIs fear me"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link