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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.
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 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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