Q: But it’s still illegal to mislead a bank about the purpose of a bank account.
Michael Lewis: But nobody would have cared about it.
He seems to not understand that this does not make it not a federal crime? That ‘we probably would not have otherwise gotten caught on this one’ is not a valid answer?
Similarly, Lewis clearly thinks ‘the money was still there and eventually people got paid back’ should be some sort of defense for fraud. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be.
...
Nor was Sam a liar, in Lewis’s eyes. Michael Lewis continued to claim, on the Judging Sam podcast, that he could trust Sam completely. That Sam would never lie to him. True, Lewis said, Sam would not volunteer information and he would use exact words. But Sam’s exact words to Lewis, unlike the words he saw Sam constantly spewing to everyone else, could be trusted.
It’s so weird. How can the same person write a book, and yet not have read it?
And it occurred to me that all SBF had to do was find a few people who thought like Michael Lewis, and people like that don’t seem rare. I mean, don’t like 30% of Americans think that the election was stolen from Trump, or that the cases against Trump are a witch hunt, because Trump says so and my friends all agree he’s a good guy (and they seek out pep talks to support such thoughts)? Generally the EA community isn’t tricked this easily, but SBF was smarter than Trump and he only needed to find a handful of people willing to look the other way while trusting in his Brilliance and Goodness. And since he was smart (and overconfident) and did want to do good things, he needed no grand scheme to deceive people about that. He just needed people like Lewis who lacked a gag reflex at all the bad things he was doing.
Before FTX I would’ve simply assumed other EAs had a “moral gag reflex” already. Afterward, I think we need more preaching about that (and more “punchy” ways to hammer home the importance of things like virtues, rules, reputation and conscientiousness, even or especially in utilitarianism/consequentialism). Such preaching might not have affected SBF himself (since he cut so many corners in his thinking and listening), but someone in his orbit might have needed to hear it.
You know what, I was reading Zvi’s musings on Going Infinite...
And it occurred to me that all SBF had to do was find a few people who thought like Michael Lewis, and people like that don’t seem rare. I mean, don’t like 30% of Americans think that the election was stolen from Trump, or that the cases against Trump are a witch hunt, because Trump says so and my friends all agree he’s a good guy (and they seek out pep talks to support such thoughts)? Generally the EA community isn’t tricked this easily, but SBF was smarter than Trump and he only needed to find a handful of people willing to look the other way while trusting in his Brilliance and Goodness. And since he was smart (and overconfident) and did want to do good things, he needed no grand scheme to deceive people about that. He just needed people like Lewis who lacked a gag reflex at all the bad things he was doing.
Before FTX I would’ve simply assumed other EAs had a “moral gag reflex” already. Afterward, I think we need more preaching about that (and more “punchy” ways to hammer home the importance of things like virtues, rules, reputation and conscientiousness, even or especially in utilitarianism/consequentialism). Such preaching might not have affected SBF himself (since he cut so many corners in his thinking and listening), but someone in his orbit might have needed to hear it.