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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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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:

The Bankman-Frieds weren’t big on the usual holidays. They celebrated Hanukkah but with so little enthusiasm that one year they simply forgot it, and, realizing that none of them cared, stopped celebrating anything. “It was like, ‘Alright, who was bothered by this fact? The fact that we forgot Hanukkah.’ No one raised their hand,” Sam said. They didn’t do birthdays, either. Sam didn’t feel the slightest bit deprived. “My parents were like, I dunno, ‘Is there something you want? Alright, bring it up. And you can have it. Even in February. Doesn’t have to be in December. If you want it, let’s have an open and honest conversation about it instead of us trying to guess.’” Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want. The family’s indifference to convention came naturally and unselfconsciously. It was never, Look how interesting we are, we don’t observe any of the rituals that define so many American lives. “It’s not like they said, ‘Gifts are dumb,’” recalled Sam. “They never tried to convince us about gifts. It didn’t happen like that.”

If you take one thing away about explaining how and why Bankman-Fried acted the way he did, it's that line:

Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want.

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:

The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions, including the opinion that men are unlovable.

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.

So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part.

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):

His whole life, as far back as he could remember, he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives. “You start by making decisions on who you are going to be with based on how they look,” he said. “Then, because of that, you make bad choices about religion and food and everything else. Then you are just rolling the dice on who you are going to be.” Anna Wintour, now that he thought of it, represented much of what he disliked about human beings. “There are very few businesses that I have strong moral objections to, and hers is one of them,” he said. “I actually have disdain for fashion. I have general disdain for the importance that physical attractiveness has, and this is one thing emanating out of that.”

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:

[Anna Wintour] looked like a million bucks, but her art, like all art, was wasted on Sam. When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance — even a person he’d slept with — he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

...He felt nothing in the presence of art. He found religion absurd. He thought both right-wing and left-wing political opinions kind of dumb, less a consequence of thought than of their holder’s tribal identity. He and his family ignored the rituals that punctuated most people’s existence. He didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. What gave pleasure and solace and a sense of belonging to others left Sam cold. When the Bankman-Frieds traveled to Europe, Sam realized that he was just staring at a lot of old buildings for no particular reason. “We did a few trips,” he said. “I basically hated it.” To his unrelenting alienation there was one exception: games. In sixth grade Sam heard about a game called Magic: The Gathering. For the next four years it was the only activity that consumed him faster than he could consume it.

[Early FTX employees] And they pretty much all shared, or said they shared, their boss’s utter indifference to grace or beauty.

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:

By the time Sam was eight she had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s. She remembered the instant that happened. She had been at Stanford for over a decade, a frequent contributor of difficult papers to academic journals. “I was walking him to school, and he asked me what I was doing,” recalled Barbara. “I told him I was giving some paper, and he asked, ‘What’s it on?’” I gave him a bullshit answer, and he pressed me on it, and by the end of the walk we were in the middle of a deep conversation about the argument. The points he was making were better than any of the reviewers’. At that moment my parenting style changed.”

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:

None of what the Bankman-Frieds did was for show; they weren’t that kind of people. They just really thought about what they did before they did it. In his twenties Sam would learn that his parents had never married. In silent protest of the fact that their gay friends could not legally marry, they’d joined in a civil union. And they never said a word about it to their children, or to anyone else, as far as Sam could tell.

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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