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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#381

Post by jl2718 »

55555 wrote: post #375
jl2718 wrote: post #365

He's being honest here, and we should listen to him. Point 1: Most personalities are shams. Ethics/politics among the powerful is a lie/shibboleth. Instinctively you know this to be true, but hope in a great savior is deeply ingrained. Point 2: Regulators make things worse. They are actively working against our interests. He would know best; they created him. Again, we want to believe in the great savior myth, but th…

> Irving Picard recovered $9.3B from Madoff and paid only $5.4B to depositors. Is this accurate? That's absolutely insane. _That_ sounds like fraud/theft.

Did you know that Madoff didn't charge fees? His crime was faking the numbers, but the way he made money is, much like SBF, through leverage of managing that money.

I don't know much about it, but until the lawyers got involved, the only losses were the made-up gains. Then they took $4B in real money.

So, who's the real crook?

https://money.cnn.com/2013/05/06/news/companies/madoff-picar...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#382

Post by Quarrelsome »

lazide wrote: post #380
Quarrelsome wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is only using the half of the source that backs up the assessment (of sociopathy) and ignoring the other half that contradicts it. That is not fair, balanced or even good guessing, its just seeing what you want to see in the data by excluding what doesn't support your theory.

Are you responding to me, the original poster who was claiming sociopathy, or responding to the world in general? All I was doing is pointing out that if person A claims person B is lying about their motivations and good deeds and actually causing harm because they are a sociopath, saying person A can’t claim that doesn’t make much sense. I have no particularly strong opinion in if anyone is or is not a sociopath. I’…

hn_throwaway is the user that wants to use this as a source to prove SBF's sociopathy but then mocks another user for taking anything he says in the same source at face value. That's why I'm commenting, because that looks to me like a double-standard.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#383

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jl2718 wrote: post #365

He's being honest here, and we should listen to him. Point 1: Most personalities are shams. Ethics/politics among the powerful is a lie/shibboleth. Instinctively you know this to be true, but hope in a great savior is deeply ingrained. Point 2: Regulators make things worse. They are actively working against our interests. He would know best; they created him. Again, we want to believe in the great savior myth, but th…

I fail to see how regulators made this worse. I see loud and clear how the absence of regulators made this worse, whatever SBF says.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#385

Post by Siira »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #97
chrchang523 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing? BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, w…

The whole point of the paradox is that if you keep playing it’s impossible to end with anything but nothing. Sam laid out no exit point, not sure how he comes to the conclusion that he can end with an enormously valuable existence.

This is not true. The probability of ending up with nothing is only one in the limit. The probability for any finite tries is close to one, but not one. The EV keeps growing exponentially, as the rewards are growing even faster than the probability of ruin.

It is extremely risky and ill-advised, but as SBF said, it’s possible to end up in a very (very!) good position. The crux is that infinity doesn’t exist. You will place the bet at most a finite number of times.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#386

Post by Siira »

molsongolden wrote: post #211

The comments here and the entire slant of the story are interesting. None of those messages read without the accompanying article seem particularly damning and they all make sense to some extent. The collapse is terrible, there was mismanagement, etc. but these specific DMs don't really make him seem the monster sociopath other commenters are calling him. 1) He pandered to regulators but doesn't believe regulators (a…

I had this thought, too. Most people probably haven’t read the article at all. They are repeating what others have said the article contained.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#387

Post by wging »

origin_path wrote: post #357
SilasX wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah when I saw it was Piper as the journalist, I was expecting to see a massive disclaimer/disclosure on the article. There still isn’t one. My own disclosure: I have many mutual friends with Piper and participate in the local EA group and contribute to EA causes.

There's a disclosure that SBF actually gave Vox money as part of a journalism grant. This business of billionaires buying journalists outright by calling payments philanthropic grants is way out of control. It's bad enough when Gates does it.

A grant alone should not count as "buying journalists". They clearly aren't acting in his interests (as they shouldn't!).

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#388

Post by yeet_yeet_yeet »

bboylen wrote: post #91

Not seeing much remorse here, but what can you expect from a guy that gambled with billions of dollars worth of people's savings. Don't buy that he didn't realize what they were doing until it was too late. He admits in this interview to lying about previous public positions, so wouldn't trust anything he says here either. I just hope crypto learns from this and normalizes Proof of Reserves

What about you just keep custody of your own damn coins? Isn't that the point of cryptocurrency, that it's like cash except you don't have to physically carry it.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#389

Post by yeet_yeet_yeet »

fisherjeff wrote: post #141
engineer_22 wrote: post #3

The guy's lawyers need to get him to shut up.

Oh my god, I upvoted you before reading the DMs. I... wow, yeah, they need duct tape. EDIT: Okay I just cannot get over this, obviously I'm exaggerating but it's pretty much "I didn't want to do bad stuff because that would be bad, and then after I had personally done all of the bad things, I realized that I had, in fact, done something very bad."

Pretty sure he's given up at this point. Nobody would do something this dumb otherwise. And then confirm it the next morning.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#390

Post by yeet_yeet_yeet »

sdwr wrote: post #333
expazl wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surely a skilled manipulator would know better, or could at least present himself in a positive light? My bet is that he lost his back country. He was until recently the front-person for a hugely successful enterprise who donated money extremely broadly. Back then he could have yelled "I run a goddamn ponzi scheme" into the loudspeaker of huge credible news outlets and they would have edited to "Master genius is go…

Great take. Off topic, but I really love the post-history vibes from this guy, elon, even trump a bit. There's something beautiful about living in public, and not hiding your flaws. No PR or corpo speak or defensible positions, just rawdogging life. And not even behind the 7-11 dumpster, right out there in broad daylight.

There are consequences of this. For sbf, orange man, elmo, maybe not yet, but there will be. Which is why most people stay in line.
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