Imagine giving this man your money. https://t.co/X9Lozq83Ws
— Not up for trouble, please stop asking (@agraybee) October 7, 2023
There’s a temptation for people who do extremely well on IQ tests to turn themselves into performative contrarians, creating ‘logical’ arguments they can use in social settings to demonstrate that they’re just smarter, i.e. better, than the common herd. It’s a special danger for children whose parents prize this brand of intelligence, because it’s easy to fall into a bad habit of training their kid to perform at their grown-up parties, the way other parents demand guests listen to their kid’s latest piano piece or TikTok rap. And that mutual temptation, IMO, is why Sam Bankman Fried’s Stanford-professor ‘ethical specialist’ parents are also going to lose everything that’s important to them.
Just sloppy? Give me a break. Here’s How FTX Executives Secretly Spent $8 Billion in Customer Money https://t.co/4q2bTgYMDd
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) October 8, 2023
Rubbernecking, with the help of the Wall Street Journal:
The crypto exchange FTX went bust last year after executives spent billions in customer funds they had promised to safeguard.
The tab was $7.7 billion, a Wall Street Journal analysis of company disclosures and legal filings shows. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and senior staff spent customer funds on technology investments, luxury real estate and political contributions, among other things…
Customers say they had $16 billion in funds on the exchange before its collapse. So far, FTX’s new management has found $7.3 billion that could go toward paying them back…
So where did all the money go?
FTX spent big on investments in technology startups. For example, FTX paid $1.15 billion to acquire around 20% of Genesis Digital Assets, a crypto miner that ran a number of mining facilities in Kazakhstan.
The firm spent $243 million on real estate in the Bahamas…
There’s still around $1 billion of missing customer money that isn’t accounted for, and which could have been used by FTX to fund bad trades at its affiliate hedge fund, Alameda…
… Bankman-Fried took around $10 million from an Alameda account and directed it to an account owned by his father, Joseph Bankman. FTX lawyers said in court papers that Bankman has “been using this gift to finance Bankman-Fried’s criminal defense.” …
Puck‘s Theodore Schleifer, who’s been performing his own slightly-more-detached version of Michael Lewis for the last several months, on “S.B.F.’s Expected Value Calculation”:
… Prosecutors said Tuesday that a plea agreement was never offered, but even if there was one, this trial is happening for two reasons. First, don’t underestimate S.B.F.’s ego. Sam, as I’ve learned over three years of conversations with him, is supremely confident in himself, and a steadfast believer that plenty of the people around him—lawyers, other executives, some reporters—are idiots, or at least can be manipulated. The decision to not settle, in my view, is rooted partially in a belief that he can somehow weasel his way out of this, just like he has weaseled out of so much before.
But it is also a belief, some people close to him have posited, in the math—in the expected-value calculus that undergirded so many of S.B.F.’s choices and eccentricities. In short, is there a sufficient probability that he can find a single juror in the courtroom who believes he is innocent, unfairly targeted, or even just plain sympathetic? “I wonder if it’s his insane views on risk. Like, he might just think the E.V. is there and be committed like that,” one (former) friend said. “He might think a 20 percent chance of zero [time] is better than a 100 percent chance of 20 years.”
Only Sam can answer just how much Expected Value he would extract during prison—though in my time with him, I’ve always gotten the impression that he cares more about his reputation than about prison time. But let’s be real: Whether he gets acquitted probably doesn’t really matter, reputationally. How many people convicted Elizabeth Holmes before a jury even heard a single witness? There is little absolution coming based on the preponderance of information that has been unearthed about FTX, Alameda Research, etcetera. Whatever the jury finds is unlikely to change that impression etched into our culture. Perhaps Sam thinks that flipping the coin, as weighted as it may be, is the only option he has left…
And then there are the parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. Could they testify? Joe and Barbara are essentially part of Sam’s legal team, but plenty of people also hold them responsible for FTX’s risk-taking in Hong Kong and excesses in The Bahamas. And what about Sam’s brother Gabe, who oversaw his political and philanthropic operation, even though the campaign-finance charge is no longer on the table?
One person who worked for FTX told me that Joe and Barbara’s fall from grace made him more sympathetic to Sam. “I mean, I think it’s sort of worked on me in viewing him more favorably. Kinda like a variant of the ‘affluenza’ defense,” this person told me. “I’ll be honest, I’m pulling for him. Not that I think he has much of a chance of avoiding a long sentence.”…
Postcard Writing & Music Thread
piratedan
I’m pulling for him too, I’m pulling for him to be convicted, incarcerated and divested of any assets that he has ownership of.
NotMax
First read that as Genital Digital Assets.
Which on that name alone sounds like a potential gold mine.
elliottg
I think Elizabeth Holmes is doing just fine all things considered. So is Donald Trump. So is Rick Scott.
mrmoshpotato
One can only hope.
Well, prosecutors can draw up a case that’ll slap this shady shithead’s parents six ways to Sunday too.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I run into this on occasion. Someone is an expert in something (degreed, doc, dentist, lawyer, machinist) and they use that position to argue from, as if being a dentist makes that person an expert on IT too (to give one real example I have dealt with). I like nothing more that attempting to deflate their overinflated ego and am sometimes successful in letting the air out of the smarter ones.
It’s the dumb experts who move the goalposts, change the argument and so on to throw up enough chaff in the hope that I give up so that they ‘win’. Most times I do (because you can’t educate the willfully stupid) but not after a bit more fun with them just to watch them twist a bit.
Baud
Never tell me the odds.–Han Solo
mrmoshpotato
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Ahh yes. And then they know that you know that they’re a narcissistic horse’s ass.
Baud
Jeez, it’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Gabe, not the Island of Nauru.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Han only wants the evens.
Ishiyama
Every defense attorney knows that even an airtight case for the prosecution can fall apart for unforeseen reasons. And when they are so confident that they don’t bother to extend a plea offer, rolling the dice with the jury is the rational choice.
Mr. Bemused Senior
This American Life: The Middle of Nowhere
Act one is the story of the island of Nauru.
Dorothy A. Winsor
This guy strikes me as a potential repeat offender if you let him go. His ability to justify himself is too strong.
It’s bad for people to be the smartest in the room too often, especially bad if they grow up that way.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Han shot first. Period. Full stop.
Ken
I admit to some curiosity about the defense strategy. The prosecution has (at least) four people from the companies who have already pled guilty and are describing, in detail, exactly what they did and why (the “why” usually being “Sam told me to”). I don’t see a defense claim that they’re all lying, and/or using him as a scapegoat for their own crimes, as working.
Ken
@NotMax: George Lucas sometimes reminds me of George Orwell. “Your memory is defective, Winston. You remember things which the State says never happened.”
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
How many decades, now, has this obsession been going on? ;-)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: Well, but he did.
matt
@Ken: I wonder how much the move to freeze all of the cryptocurrency the employees were vesting to keep them working played into them snitching.
SFAW
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s only an “obsession” for those poor benighted souls who believe he didn’t. The rest of us know that he did, and don’t waste brain cycles on it, because we have a firm grip on objective reality.
SFAW
It has been my (anecdotal) experience that offspring of therapists end up being particularly fucked up (i.e., in the head). Not axe-murdering-serial-killer level of course, but not persons you want to hang out with, ever.
I wonder if that “theory” applies to more than shrink/therapist children.
Ken
Oh, definitely, but at least other kids don’t have parents who occasionally toy with the idea of a Skinner box.
Phaedrusonbass
I used to think I was the smartest guy in the room.
Then, I celebrated my 11th birthday.
Sheesh.
NotMax
@SFAW
The tales of PKs (preacher’s kids) are far from apocryphal.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Watching the attack on Israel stuff, it just occurred to me; the MAGA twits convinced themselves the US-Mexican border is just like the Gaza Strip. it fits MAGA hats own image of themselves as being the biggest victims in the world.
RSA
By coincidence I came across an analogy for this just a few days ago, which I’ll pose as a question:
“What are the odds that the most important car of the 20th century would have gone into production in 1908?”
That is, obviously one reason for greatness is influencing so much that comes after. This guy seems to be imagining independent dice rolls.
NotMax
@RSA
For all we know, the greatest pianist of all time was born in 99 B.C.E.
Sadly, no pianos. ;)
Craig
@lowtechcyclist: I think it’s since the 90s rerelease when Lucas cut in a bunch of crappy digital backgrounds. I think this is where he recut the cantina scene to make it look like greedo pulled on Solo, but Han was faster. Dumb. Lucas has been trying to destroy Star Wars since around that time. Obligatory
lowtechcyclist
@SFAW:
Well okay then, that settles it! ;-)
Gvg
@RSA: Yes, I noticed that his “argument” didn’t have anything to do with what or how Shakespeare wrote, or why we think he is great or…anything to do with actual analysis of fact or literary opinion. It was just completely missing all the points, unless he was making some kind of joke.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@SFAW: my older sister used to occasionally babysit the only child of two psychotherapists. The kid had a nervous breakdown at nine… parents possibly should not practice their theories on people close to them. There’s a reason most hospitals do not want surgeons operating on family… in the end though SBFs parents are not responsible for his adult decisions. He’s a grown adult who decided to use investors money for personal use.
Llelldorin
@RSA: I’ve seen that style of argument before — a combination of, as you say, imagining independent dice rolls and imagining “writing skill” as a line on a character sheet from a role-playing game. No concept of “how significant was this writing” or “what was the social environment in which the person was writing” or “how well could a writer be paid in their era” or anything else that you might imagine might be part of what “greatest writer” might mean — no, “greatest writer” just means having rolled the biggest “Skills – Writing” stat at character creation time.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Gvg: I recall reading a report that he (SBF) disdains reading books. I suppose that goes for plays as well.
Perhaps in jail he will discover the value of reading.
His is also a warped view of statistics.
Roger Moore
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It’s bad for people to think about being the smartest person in the room. The real world doesn’t work that way. For one thing, intelligence is multi-faceted. The idea there’s a single IQ that determines how smart you are in every situation is one of the dumbest ideas of the past couple of centuries. For another thing, experience can trump raw brilliance every time. You see this all the time when a supposedly brilliant outsider moves into a new field set to shake it up. They need to learn everything over from scratch, and when they do, it turns out the people working in that field actually knew what they were doing all along.
CliosFanBoy
@Craig:
Sigh. I wish the original 1977 cut were available on DVD. THATS the one I want to see again.
Llelldorin
@Mr. Bemused Senior: It’s a view common in people who only ever did basic probability and had Bayesian statistics explained to them drunkenly at a party.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Words to live by.
PJ
@Dorothy A. Winsor: SBF was never the smartest guy in the room. There were plenty of people that saw through his BS. He’s just a con man with flowery phrases who appealed to the get rich without working (or by ripping off other people’s work, or by ignoring regulatory systems) belief that Silicon Valley has inculcated over the last 30 years.
CliosFanBoy
@Roger Moore:
My apologies to anyone here who joined MENSA for kicks. But a few years ago I was asked to give a history talk to a DC-area MENSA Chapter. I made excuses about lack of availability but that was to be polite. In reality, I just didn’t want to associate with people whose lives center on passing an IQ test. In my (somewhat limited experience) anyone who brags about their IQ score is almost always a total jackass.
CliosFanBoy
@Roger Moore:
For another thing, experience can trump raw brilliance every time.
“Age and treachery beat youth and skill.”
Roger Moore
@CliosFanBoy:
There’s nothing wrong with having an IQ high enough to join MENSA; there’s a problem with thinking MENSA is a worthwhile way to spend your time.
CliosFanBoy
@Roger Moore:
Which was my point, but you expressed it better. thank you.
Jinchi
Flashbacks to 2012 when noted physicist and Fox news skeptic Richard Muller decided to use his superior skills to debunk global warming theory and was shocked to discover that the climatologists got it right, after all.
These days he’s busy arguing that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan China.
Jinchi
True, but weren’t they involved in helping him launder and hide money during the criminal investigation?
trnc
My money is on “missing the point.” SBF’s rant is a good example of faux intellectualism, which unfortunately translates straight to ANY kind of intellectualism for way too many people. As you say, he used a completely arbitrary measurement and apparently fails to grasp that it doesn’t matter how many awesome writers have been and will be born after 1564. Will is one of the very few writers from that time that is still very popular, and many modern writers who are currently considered the greatest of their generation will probably be out of print in the next 40 years.
And as with all things SBF, it’s the height of arrogance to not make any attempt to understand why so many people think Will is great. He doesn’t like him, and that’s as far as he can see.
trnc
Years ago I went through a book of brain teasers, and there was a MENSA membership ad a the end of it. Fortunately, I’m smart enough to know I don’t belong in MENSA regardless of how desperate they may have been for members.
Jinchi
@Craig: @lowtechcyclist:
The obsession keeps going because Lucasfilm keeps re-editing the scene.
youtube.com/watch?v=3g6pDeGG8oc
Eolirin
@Roger Moore: I think one of the things that unfortunately happens in the real world with very smart people is that they’re not frequently interacting with other high performers or experts, especially during their younger years where their personality starts to set, they’re mostly interacting with “normal” people.
And the people in the middle of the bell curve tend to be very slow at everything comparatively. It takes an awful lot of self awareness to recognize that that doesn’t mean you’re uniquely special and more capable than everyone. And unfortunately we’re quite bad at teaching self awareness in our culture.
Carlo Graziani
@Gvg:
I know. Here is this guy, posing as a deep-dive philosopher, and he structures his argument on a wishy-washy undefined word, imagining that the term “greatest” has a definite, agreed-upon meaning when applied to writers, and proceeding to use an argument based on a high-school-level understanding of the exponential growth phenomenon to establish the low “probability” that this philosophical ghost applies to Shakespeare. He might just as well offer odds on the existence of human souls.
Eolirin
@Eolirin: Should also note, the peer groups of these people growing up can’t compensate for a lack of raw brilliance because they fundamentally lack adequate experience. So it’s doubly distortive to development.
That things equalize and the gap stops mattering so much once everyone’s older is a bit too late for a lot of people.
Carlo Graziani
@Eolirin: Very common among physicists, too. It can be hard to persuade someone who mastered quantum mechanics and relativity, and who speaks at seminars and colloquia that they know little of modern pedagogy, and that as a consequence they suck at teaching undergraduates.
EriktheRed
Translation: I’m either a paid shill or an absolute moron.
Anoniminous
@Roger Moore:
Binet devised his test so teachers could find students who needed extra help learning. Then people at Stanford University got a hold of it and used it to promote White Supremacy and eugenics.
The cream of the jest is we do not have a consensual scientific definition of “intelligence” so an IQ test is, scientifically speaking, “measuring” (sic) nothing.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Carlo Graziani: I have been fortunate to learn from a few great teachers. The joy in seeing the light go on in a student’s head is, I think, what motivates them. Alas, they are rare and not sufficiently appreciated.
Anoniminous
@Carlo Graziani:
Obligatory
Subsole
@trnc:
He’s not stupid.
He just can’t see past his own skull.
Eolirin
@Anoniminous: You don’t need to get terribly hung up on the IQ test part of things; there’s a billion ways to evaluate relative performance on a whole host of metrics and some people are genuinely not just a little better at some/most of them than the average person, but a whole lot better.
“Smart” people are legitimate outliers, no different than pro athletes, even if there are issues with the tools commonly applied to determine intelligence. Some other kinds of people who aren’t as well recognized are also outliers; things like emotional intelligence are very important and undervalued, but most people are bad at that too. Most people are “bad” at everything beyond what they’ve spent a couple of decades doing, and some are bad that that too.
The problem is thinking that being an outlier gives you an advantage against significant gaps in experience and education. Or that your skills and knowledge transfer into a different domain, or that your success in one field somehow makes you an Important Person. Or that there aren’t a ton of people who are one in a thousand or one in ten thousand. Or that you’re one in a million when you’re really one in a hundred. Or that worthiness has anything to do with any of this.
All issues of self awareness.
Geminid
@Carlo Graziani: A friend decided to take an introductory Calculus class at Georgia Tech this summer.* He says the teaching skills of the professors ranged from bad to worse. The grad assistants teaching the small sections were not too bad though.
*The friend is 70 years old and was availing himself of Georgia’s tuition-free program for residents over 65. He also wanted to use Georgia Tech’s big swimming pool but he was too busy studing calculus to swim. Now he’s retaking the course and hoping he’ll some swim some too.
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani: And EEs, and BASIC programmers…
Phys.org:
Gates and his ilk have done, and continue to do, a lot of damage with their hoarded billions.
Grr…,
Scott.
Eolirin
@Geminid: I suspect another reason why these kinds of teachers tend to be really bad at teaching is because they didn’t really need a teacher to learn that level of topic in the first place and consequently have a completely divergent view of how leaning works from what most of their students need.
Teaching is a very particular skill, and education of people who don’t think like you do is even harder, requiring a ton of not only domain specific knowledge on the topic and teaching best practices, but also very high amounts of emotional intelligence and empathy. Also really strong language skills.
It’s not terribly surprising that people drawn to math and physics would tend to be bad at at least a few of those. There’s less overlap in their core competencies.
Anoniminous
@Eolirin:
I work in Artificial Life – constructing Biomimetic Animates, to be precise – so I’m well aware of the dynamic nature of human biosemiosis of Self, Other, and Environment.
Geminid
@Eolirin: My friend wasn’t complaining exactly. But he is a student of communication and quite a good one himself. He thought a basic public speaking course would help the professors a lot. He also said that one problem was that the professors did not want to be teaching introductory Calculus, which is another problem. But he thought the public speaking course would benefit these guys anyway.
Now my friend’s plan is to excel at Calculus courses and wrangle a job as teaching assistant. He intends to be running Georgia Tech’s introductory Calculus teaching program in 3 years, and he just might do it.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Geminid: my best wishes to your friend. In that subject in particular I think a good teacher makes all the difference.
Eolirin
@Another Scott:
People are in fact presenting this as a primary means of carbon offset, especially in the circles Gates exists in; so yes, they pretty much are. And it won’t work for that. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to do for other reasons. But it’s not a viable carbon offset solution.
I would also suggest that it’s a very bad thing for reforestation to get devolved to just being a carbon offset because while that may lead to an immediate increase in investment, the long term damage to reforestation projects will be quite significant. We aren’t going to need large investment in carbon offsets one way or another in a decade or two. If reforestation has become associated purely with that, as it’s beginning to, all of the money will leave once we get to that point.
Soprano2
@Roger Moore: I see this at my job. New people want to do things a new way without first understanding why we do it the way we do now. It drives me crazy! If you understand why we do it that way but want to propose a change, I’ll listen. Change just because you want to change isn’t usually a good idea. I work where the bosses are mostly engineers…sigh….
Geminid
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Being an engineering school, Georgia Tech really needs good calculus instruction.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
They need to learn everything over from scratch, and when they do, it turns out the people working in that field actually knew what they were doing all along.
How often when they do learn everything, they still think they know more than anyone else? I’d bet the answer is close to 100%.
Another Scott
@Eolirin: With respect, the circles Gates chooses to be in are his own making. He could be in any circles he chooses.
This is yet another instance of Gates making some sweeping pronouncement about everyone else being stupid. He did it in education and other areas. And because he has zillions, the press and politicians treat him as always being right.
It’s dangerous.
I know that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, but the US and the world would be a lot better off by taking his and the Gates Foundation’s billions and sending them to the NSF, ARPAe, DARPA, NAS/NAE, etc, etc.
[/rant]
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@SFAW
I wonder if that “theory” applies to more than shrink/therapist children.
It does. Or better yet – yes it can.
moonbat
Never understood the “Han shot first” controversy. He was in a gun fight. If he didn’t shoot first, he’d be dead. Han is alive. Ergo, he shot first. What’s the problem?
I know that George Lucas has been jiggering and rejiggering his original creation forever, but that just seems like basic gun/blaster fight probability and outcome. The whole scene was about establishing Han’s badass cred. He wouldn’t be much of a rogue character if he waited for some bounty hunter to get the drop on him.
Dopey-o
IQ tests measure how well you perform on IQ tests. I took the Mensa test because I met a beautiful redhead who was going to take the test. School teacher from a small town in Illinois. She sailed thru it.
The most brilliant man I know would flunk that test. He just isn’t ‘wired’ that way.
We don’t know what intelligence is. But sitting on his porch, drinking coffee and smoking cigs, it became obvious.
He is also an amazingly kind, humble and generous human being. And funny.
Ruckus
@Jinchi:
Are they responsible for teaching him how to make decisions, how to look at things and automatically come to the “right” decision?
IOW how to be a pompous, arrogant ass?
Or did he get there all on his own?
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
I imagine that a lot of the “smart” people with money are respected because of their money rather than how they made whatever it is they do, make them money. It is a guide we often use as to how smart one is – how much money does one have. (started to write how much money does one hoard instead of have – which may be the better way to state the premise) Money is the one thing we almost all need and desire and often falsely respect. It helps to have enough but it really doesn’t do much other than to boost the ego to have way more, unless you actually do reasonable things with it, rather than hoard it. Owning more than one 20K sq ft home on 20+ acres is an example.
scav
@Soprano2: My favorite young kid episode involved a newly graduated employee explaining I shouldn’t do a current task using Excel and formulas because ESRI had a module for the task under development.
Connor
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
And especially when it isn’t actually true.
Chris Johnson
@CliosFanBoy: Silver Screen edition (or indeed the more recent 4K77 or 4K83). Bootlegs are the way to go :)
I found the Silver Screen and it’s quite an experience. It’s like an OLD movie. It feels like a 1970s movie, which takes it into this incredible Alien-like heightened realism space. I’m given to understand those 4K ones are because Silver Screen is just too crude.
Soprano2
@Eolirin: When I was in college there was a girl two grades ahead of me who was a fantastic trumpet player. She told me she needed to go to grad school where people better than her would critique her; she knew it wasn’t helpful to be told she was perfect all the time. She’s the dean of students at my alma mater, and first chair trumpet in our symphony.
Tehanu
I was always the smartest kid in class … until I wasn’t. I was lucky in that I didn’t make a total fool of myself when dealing with people who were smarter than me; I just slowly came to realize that people I thought were dumber might not be, and that there were more important things in life than being praised for being smart.
It would help ANYBODY a lot. The 2 years I had in high school were the most valuable classes I ever took, bar none.