Book Review: Going Infinite
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Book Review: Going Infinite
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Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#2Zvi Mowshowitz also worked at Jane Street Capital and I found his take on SBF's rise and fall pretty compelling and detailed.
Interesting how SBF seemed to almost be running around in a sort of dissociative state. He was sorta aware that there was a whole world out there with consequences but he just completely ignored it. Screw the consequences, just kept doing whatever dumb stuff he wanted to do.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#3This is a great review, sounds like its better than the book to be honest.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#4Molly White also wrote a review of this book:
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/review-michael-lewiss-go...
The book exists in a strange space where it was mostly written before SBF's downfall (FTX collapsing and SBF fraud charges).
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#5Zvi Mowshowitz also worked at Jane Street Capital and I found his take on SBF's rise and fall pretty compelling and detailed. Interesting how SBF seemed to almost be running around in a sort of dissociative state. He was sorta aware that there was a whole world out there with consequences but he just completely ignored it. Screw the consequences, just kept doing whatever dumb stuff he wanted to do.
Something most of the think pieces, and interviews with Michael Lewis, discount is just how geeked out on amphetamines this guy was.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#6Zvi Mowshowitz also worked at Jane Street Capital and I found his take on SBF's rise and fall pretty compelling and detailed. Interesting how SBF seemed to almost be running around in a sort of dissociative state. He was sorta aware that there was a whole world out there with consequences but he just completely ignored it. Screw the consequences, just kept doing whatever dumb stuff he wanted to do.
> He was sorta aware that there was a whole world out there with consequences but he just completely ignored it.
Well, this is bog-standard psychopathy. It’s not really that interesting. If he had been born into a lower station in life and gone around doing check-fraud or something, no one would really care. The SBF story is just really one about how class and connections act as an insane multiplier for unrestrained criminality.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#7Lewis has had a real knack for picking problematic protagonists in his later career:
* The Tuohy family for Blind Side
* Kahneman and Tversky --- not really problematic as people! but right in the middle of the reproduction crisis in their field
* Brad Katsuyama, yeesh, who is also the reason Lewis was set up to do a hagiography on SBF
* SBF, of course.
I agree with the "man, can Lewis write" sentiment! He can! You know who else can write, extroardinarily effectively? Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is less problematic than Lewis (I can't even imagine Gladwell dismissing Michael Oher as suffering from CTE the way Lewis recently did), but it's an article of faith here that Gladwell isn't worth reading, and not so much with Lewis.
So I think your problem with a book like Going Infinite is: SBF is obviously an interesting subject for a book, and, because Lewis was pre-sold on/to him, he had extensive access, and Lewis can definitely write. So if you're the kind of nerd we all are, you're inevitably going to get a bunch of "good stuff" from the book, and you're not so much going to get bogged down in the deeply problematic circumstances of its authorship and intent because you've already got all that context in resident set in your brain, you know SBF is a crook, you don't have to worry that Lewis is trying to paper over that stuff.
But I think when you're considering the book purely on its merits, that context starts to matter just as much as how good the writing is. This book is getting trashed for I think very justifiable reasons.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#8This sort of shoddiness with facts is becoming a concerning pattern for Michael Lewis. He's a great writer, but he really doesn't seem to have a close relationship with the truth. Two other examples:
* Everything about the blind side that is now coming out in court.
* The founders of IEX who are now begging the market making firms to come to the exchange which was designed to get rid of them... and creating a much worse two-tiered system in order to do it.
The next time I try a Michael Lewis book, I am probably going to approach it as a puff piece for a local Bond villain to get a more accurate picture of what's happening.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#9Given that SBF had worked at Jane Street, it seems strange that he either didn't know about martingales or believed they didn't apply to him.
Re: Book Review: Going Infinite
#10Given that SBF had worked at Jane Street, it seems strange that he either didn't know about martingales or believed they didn't apply to him.
as someone posted above
> just how geeked out on amphetamines this guy was.
I'm starting to buy into this theory.