An odd question, but: why is he like this? Even from the start, before the criminal charges, his press tour was so bizarre. Is he just a delusional narcissist who thinks he can talk his way out of anything no matter what?
I feel like even very, very long into his prison sentence he's still going to try to talk your head off insisting it was all a big misunderstanding. And he's going to be denied parole because he's going to try the same thing with the parole board every time.
Work for enough SF startups and you would meet a ton of SBF clones. I wasn't surprised by any of his actions at all. I don't know what it is, but there are so many SBFs in the startup world who think they know everything and don't think there are any consequences for their actions.
I've seen enough people like this in BigCos. Some of the worst offenders are a certain kind of ex-FAANG employee -- the super brash know-it-all who actually doesn't.
He was raised at Stanford by two Stanford professors and surrounded by blowhards that subscribe to the insane concept of “effective altruism”. It’s really no surprise he ended up this way.
I feel effective altruism is just another word for "make as much money as possible but call it something else to make us feel better" for various so-called elites or wannabe so-called elites.
Effective altruism (like most -isms) has sincere adherents but also tends to attract oddballs who make it look bad. Here's a great post from a well known EA who explains why he donated his kidney to a stranger:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney
He explained it himself in one of interviews. He mentally went from “helping mow” (like fighting diseases and making sure everyone has water and food) to “helping with future”. That is making sure AI will not end humanity.
Actions speak louder than words and history shows us that the movement exists for people who hoard obscene wealth to justify their hoarding retroactively while playing cowboy on a tropical island.
It seems to me that this is flatly untrue; most "effective altruists"[1] are not obscenely wealthy, the founders of the movement are not obscenely wealthy, and I'm not sure I know of any examples of what you say "the movement exists for" other than Sham Bank-Fraud himself.
[1] There isn't really a clear definition of the term. I mean something like "people who call themselves effective altruists".
Well, then it wouldn't be easily demonstrably false, but it would still be crying out for some actual evidence which doesn't seem obviously forthcoming.
"Actions speak louder than words". "History shows us". Well, what actions and what history show that "effective altruism" exists for people who want to hoard obscene wealth and feel virtuous about it?
The founder of the movement, in so far as that's an identifiable single person, is William MacAskill. He (allegedly, but I've not heard any claims that it's a lie) donates everything he earns above the UK's median income, which is something like £26k/year.
(MacAskill surely deserves some criticism for helping to set SBF on the path he took -- so far as I know he didn't at any stage suggest or endorse lying, cheating, and stealing, but he did suggest something along the lines of "earn as much as you can and give as much as you can" and we know how that ended up. But I think we should distinguish "gave one person advice that ended incredibly badly" from "primarily wants to help rich people feel good about hoarding obscene wealth".)
Another candidate for "founder of effective altruism" is Peter Singer. He works as a philosophy professor, which I can't imagine is an especially well paid job, and I know he gives away a substantial fraction of his income. (He got a $1M prize not so long away and gave away all of it.)
Another is Toby Ord. Like MacAskill, he's set a not-very-high threshold and gives away any income he gets beyond it.
It doesn't seem credible to me that these people's intention was to help people justify hoarding obscene amounts of wealth.
So maybe the claim isn't that that was the original purpose of the movement, but is that that's what today's typical "effective altruists" want. I'm not sure how best to evaluate that. We could take a look at effectivealtruism.org and see what advice it gives -- does it say "you should get into a highly lucrative career and give a bit of money away" or something of the kind? Well, no. They say e.g. "A common misconception is that effective altruism is only about donating money to global health charities or ‘earning to give’. But community members support many causes besides global health, only a minority are prioritizing earning to give, and effective altruism is as much about how to use your time effectively as your money. In fact, the organization 80,000 Hours argues that for many people, their career decisions matter more than their decisions about where to donate."
There's an annual-ish "EA survey" (insert here all the usual caveats about surveys giving you unreliable and biased information) which suggests that between ~15% and ~25% of self-identified "effective altruists" think of themselves as "earning to give", which is what I would expect anyone to say who was in it to hoard obscene amounts of wealth and feel good about it.
Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. What's your evidence (or callalex's) that EA exists for people who hoard obscene wealth or want to?
You could say that about a lot of followers of belief systems. If someone 'ardently' believes effective altruism & they are confident they will one day save the world; wouldn't committing crimes once in a while be worth the long term result of the world being saved?
Effective altruism is just a way for sociopaths to mask their actions while they burn down the world.
I listened to wondery’s multi part podcast “spellcaster” about sbf.
One of the most fascinating takeaways I had from that show was the fact that he used to play the game Diplomacy with a specific strategy: he would intentionally make alliances with other players, then stab them in the back. He would do this over and over. Why nobody figured this out, I don’t know.
So when I go back and view his actions through this lens, it makes perfect sense.
If you surround yourself with yes-men/women, you will eventually believe them. Most normal humans literally cannot afford to do that because you can't buy groceries with ego, but if you disconnect yourself from normal life by being one of the privileged few born with a silver spoon in their mouth and connections before leaving the womb, you can avoid reality for a long time.
If SBF was born to an average family, none of this would have happened and he might even be a normal person, maybe a little cocky. Or he would be constantly struggling to live a basic life between jobs as he keeps being fired or let go for being insufferable.
I highly doubt he would have gotten into Jane street
While Michael Lewis never says it outright, the picture painted in his book Going Infinite suggests that SBF has a few things going on. Self-delusion and rationalization, ego, etc., but he also might be on one or more neurodivergent spectra.
He displays many of the tendencies of a narcissist or sociopath: never wrong, what benefits me is what matters, I'm the smartest one in the room, willing to flout societal norms, frequently lying or shading the truth to benefit themselves. All of this was testified to in court by the people who worked with him.
To be fair, he was clearly quite smart. But...not as smart as he thought he was.
I'm not a doctor or a psychologist, so I'm not making a diagnosis, just offering the possibility that that may be what is at the root of the situation.
He had so much working capital to play with, and he could have gotten huge amounts of more money to invest based on his crypto genius reputation, he could have probably gotten 100 million to make more of those random investments and hoped one would hit. Meanwhile, he could have paid himself a few million dollar salary. I read somehow a few of his random investments did succeed in having much larger value, maybe it was anthropic. Instead he'll be a prisoner for a long time.
His parents are charged too, will they end up in prison?
I feel like even very, very long into his prison sentence he's still going to try to talk your head off insisting it was all a big misunderstanding. And he's going to be denied parole because he's going to try the same thing with the parole board every time.