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FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

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Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is being a Harry Potter fan a pertinent detail? Plenty of people still like things they picked up when they were kids.

Quoted post unavailable.

If saying she’s a Harry Potter fan is a “micro-aggresssion” what do you call her stealing $95 million from public school teachers in Ontario?

What a ridiculous thing to be offended by.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the very very base level of EA (consider the relative good/efficiency of various charitable giving options; per-dollar things like mosquito nets save lots of lives) is not unreasonable, but the steps beyond are outrageous. You've got people saying that the only ethical giving is to AI organizations so that we either don't create the AI apocalypse or somehow convert all of our minds to digital form and th…

Most EA’s are just donating to givewell(global health and poverty). The long termists are a small portion of the movement and ai safety even smaller.

I have followed EA for ten years and there is absolutely no doubt that its most prominent voices - Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, Rob Wiblin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, not to mention Sam Bankman-Fried - ascribe enormous significance to AI. I myself have yet to see a compelling argument as to how AGI is possible, let alone dangerous.

If you look at 80,000 hours' list of 'most pressing problems', AI safety is first:

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

Open Phil has donated $250m to AI safety according to its website:

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advan...

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#124
> It’s just SBF, his family (his mother, father and brother are all in town) and close friends. A small team dedicated to fixing the world—via the magic of quantitative reasoning and the overwhelming force of goodwill. (...) It’s not worth the salt in one’s tears to be sad for the plight of the oligarchy—but there is a downside to billions. Reciprocity becomes difficult between the post-economic and the merely civilian. What do you give a man who has everything and wants for nothing? What do you expect to get? But within the inner circle at Apartment V—a community of family and friends united by a philosophy that’s almost Pythagorean in its rule—there’s no unit of account. Love is the currency. Love is infinite. And infinity is a problem.

This reads like satire. It's amazing anyone would write this seriously. Money does really rot the mind; not just the money you have, or the money you don't have, but also simply being in the presence of money.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#125
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corollary to this is that the average citizen is likely to believe that the average billionaire cheated their way into money. The recently passed prop 1 in MA is likely just the start of efforts to tax/regulate the activities of wealthy individuals.

Would the average individual be wrong about that? Is there a single billionaire who's beloved by their employees?

The costco cofounder James Sinegal is possibly the only one that comes to mind off the top of my head.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#127
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is being a Harry Potter fan a pertinent detail? Plenty of people still like things they picked up when they were kids.

Quoted post unavailable.

The LoL reference (apt acronym in this case) was an enormous red flag for me. It was a loud and clear signal about the type of 'investor' that SBF was being marketed to.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#129

For anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the atmosphere, it's good to know that in the series B round, they raised $420.69m from 69 investors. https://blockworks.co/news/sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-raises-pre... I don't know what those numbers mean, but those investors probably thought it was the funniest thing on earth, and they created history.

Can anyone explain what is special about this number?

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#130
post #94
post #61

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actual…

There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality f…

Investors were offered chunks of FTT token that would vest long before any company liquidity event, in addition to company equity. So they were also buying into a speculative directional bet with faster returns, that they’d almost certainly get to dump on the market when insider info hits their networks. Not sure what the original source is but it was reported by Barron’s today.
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