idk, when people explicitly endorse your ideology as why they endorse “high leverage and double-or-nothing flips” I think it’s at least worth taking a look at yourself. Now quite probably the person in question has misunderstood your ideology and doesn’t understand why EAs do in fact care about the risk of ruin and why stealing money isn’t ok, but then perhaps try to correct them?
Fwiw I think it very unlikely that the decision to use customer funds was a one-off decision made in 2022. My view is that that FTX was set up from the start to use customer money as a source of cheap capital for Alameda. In 2018 Alameda was offering potential investors a 15% guaranteed return on loans. It seems fairly likely that at some point SBF figured “fuck this, why are we offering these dorks 15% when we can just set up our own exchange and access huge amounts of capital at 0%”. Never mind that the fact that privileged information from the exchange may well have opened up for Alameda more ways to make money!
The plan, imo, was always to accrue as much as wealth as possible as fast as possible with as few ethical constraints as possible. This worked for a while because Alameda’s trades were profitable and crypto was in a bull market. This plan may or may not have been a EA-aligned, but if you have short enough AI/pandemic timelines (I don’t), it doesn’t seem obviously non-compatible and given the career backgrounds and interest set of all the major people involved, yes, I think they were committed and sincere EAs who really believed this stuff. SBF’s own weird version of EA, at least, seems to have played a fairly large role in why they took on so much risk, as he himself explained in an overly long and boring twitter thread somewhere and Caroline also mentioned on her blog.
It also makes zero sense to compare FTX’s spending on stadiums vs the Future Fund as a sign for how much they cared about these respective things. The Future Fund would almost certainly have got way more money in subsequent years, while the stadium rights purchase was a form of advertising designed to help grow the business faster. I can’t imagine SBF is a big sports fan and was doing that sort of thing because he really enjoyed seeing the FTX logo on umpire shirts.
Not to Godwinpost, but this isn’t really “were Nietzsche and Wagner at fault for the Nazis”, it’s more “were Nietzsche and Wagner at fault for the Nazis if they’d actually lived throughout the 1930s and worked in prominent cultural education posts in the German state bureaucracy.”
I mean he is a big sports fan, at least baseball, at least when he was younger. I got linked to his blog from 10 years ago from something, and the number one and two sets of posts were about baseball statistics.
idk, when people explicitly endorse your ideology as why they endorse “high leverage and double-or-nothing flips” I think it’s at least worth taking a look at yourself. Now quite probably the person in question has misunderstood your ideology and doesn’t understand why EAs do in fact care about the risk of ruin and why stealing money isn’t ok, but then perhaps try to correct them?
Fwiw I think it very unlikely that the decision to use customer funds was a one-off decision made in 2022. My view is that that FTX was set up from the start to use customer money as a source of cheap capital for Alameda. In 2018 Alameda was offering potential investors a 15% guaranteed return on loans. It seems fairly likely that at some point SBF figured “fuck this, why are we offering these dorks 15% when we can just set up our own exchange and access huge amounts of capital at 0%”. Never mind that the fact that privileged information from the exchange may well have opened up for Alameda more ways to make money!
The plan, imo, was always to accrue as much as wealth as possible as fast as possible with as few ethical constraints as possible. This worked for a while because Alameda’s trades were profitable and crypto was in a bull market. This plan may or may not have been a EA-aligned, but if you have short enough AI/pandemic timelines (I don’t), it doesn’t seem obviously non-compatible and given the career backgrounds and interest set of all the major people involved, yes, I think they were committed and sincere EAs who really believed this stuff. SBF’s own weird version of EA, at least, seems to have played a fairly large role in why they took on so much risk, as he himself explained in an overly long and boring twitter thread somewhere and Caroline also mentioned on her blog.
It also makes zero sense to compare FTX’s spending on stadiums vs the Future Fund as a sign for how much they cared about these respective things. The Future Fund would almost certainly have got way more money in subsequent years, while the stadium rights purchase was a form of advertising designed to help grow the business faster. I can’t imagine SBF is a big sports fan and was doing that sort of thing because he really enjoyed seeing the FTX logo on umpire shirts.
Not to Godwinpost, but this isn’t really “were Nietzsche and Wagner at fault for the Nazis”, it’s more “were Nietzsche and Wagner at fault for the Nazis if they’d actually lived throughout the 1930s and worked in prominent cultural education posts in the German state bureaucracy.”
I mean he is a big sports fan, at least baseball, at least when he was younger. I got linked to his blog from 10 years ago from something, and the number one and two sets of posts were about baseball statistics.