There part where SBF committed to something important in his trading company and then broke the agreement also seems more predictive of fraud than suggested by the phrase “management dispute”.
People rarely leave over one thing and different people leave over different reasons. But I expect people hearing “left over ethics disputes” to walk away with a more accurate understanding than “left over a management dispute” (and more details to either sentence would be welcome).
I think if all he’d said was “My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there”, I’d have found that a satisfactory answer. It’s also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn’t looked into it very much. I’m inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important.
Matt Levine is quoting from Going Infinite. I do not know who Michael Lewis’s source is. I’ve heard confirming bits and pieces privately, which makes me trust this public version more. Of course that doesn’t mean that was everyone’s motivation: I’d be very interested to hear whatever you’re able to share.
My understanding is that this wasn’t a benign management dispute, it was an ethical dispute about whether to disclose to investors that Alameda had misplaced $4m. SBF’s refusal to do so sure seems of a piece with FTX’s later issues.
I disagree with that quote but I do think the fact that Will is reporting this story now with a straight face is a bad sign.
My steelman would be “look if you think two people would have a positive-sum interaction and it’s cheap to facilitate that, doing so is a good default”. It’s not obvious to me that Will spent more than 30 seconds on this. But the defense is “it was cheap and I didn’t think about it very hard”, not “Sam had ideas for improving twitter”.
thanks, I appreciate all this info.
I’m so glad someone wrote this. EA has real gaps caused by selecting a narrow group of people and demanding they only work on the most important things. Tasks that are unglamorous or just don’t make sense as a job duty accumulate like housekeeping when you’re sick. People who have the slack to do these without displacing a higher priority task have some highly leveraged actions available to them.
(understanding you are a guy betting $5 on manifold)
re: #3. Does this get blurred if the company made an explicit marketing push about what a great guy their CEO was? I imagine that still wouldn’t affect statements on him as a role model[1] , but might matter if they said many positive statements about him on a platform aimed at the general public.
legally
Not well. I only have snippets of information, and it’s private (Habryka did sign off on that description).
I don’t know if this specifically has come up in regards to Lightcone or Lighthaven, but I know Haybrka has been steadfastly opposed to the kind of slow, cautious, legally-defensive actions coming out of EVF. I expect he would reject funding that demanded that approach (and if he accepted it, I’d be disappointed in him, given his public statements).
Comparing write-ups of incubatees (that CE has invested months in and would like to aid in fundraising), to grants seems completely out of left field to me.
make sure your CV, LinkedIn, and cover letters are as polished as possible and clearly outline experience that’s relevant for the role you’re applying for
AskAManager has a great guide to writing resumes. The most useful thing I got from it is how to write specific accomplishments, not just list job duties.
Eli, can you say more about what counts as relevant experience, for junior generalist roles?
Could you say more about what counts as high quality for writing or a work test?
How big is the legal risk for a high profile EA person who, say:
knew SBF was an asshole, incautious, and lived in a luxury villa, but had no knowledge of any specific fraud
publicly promoted him as a moral and frugal person
?
Is this automatically tort-worthy, but hard to prove? Laughed out of court no matter what? Does speaking about it publicly extend the court case, so it’s more expensive even if the promoter will ultimately win?
what I am criticizing here is not operating the venue while the sale is going on,
I really did not get this from
the sale of Wytham does not actually make any economic sense for EV in terms of its mission to do as much good as possible
and suggest editing it into the original comment.
Most of these are just “people in space knew this wouldn’t work”. Could you share more specific criticisms? As Aidan said, the biggest successes come from projects no one else would do, so without more information that seems like a very weak criticism.
It sounds like your true argument is a first-principles belief in the power of omnivorism. I think that’s a fine reason to believe something, but you should say that instead of science washing with low quality studies[1].
I feel like I put in my time checking the wikipedia studies and haven’t read the new beagle study
The Wikipedia article on veganism for dogs basically concludes that vegan dog diets can be approximately as nutritious and palatable as meat-based alternatives, and though poorly constructed vegan diets can be bad for dogs, reducing red meat consumption is linked to lower risk for certain kinds of dog cancers.
When I looked at the wiki article today, this isn’t what I saw. It says vegetarian diets can be safe for dogs, and that it should be theoretically possible to provide a healthy vegan diet. When I check their references, the lit review on canine veganism says approximately “there are a handful of badly designed studies with a huge adverse selection problem, but they haven’t technically found health issues”. This seems at best a proof that there exist dogs than can be vegan, not that it can be assumed for all dogs. The other source is a technical analysis of vegetarian food, which isn’t relevant to a discussion of veganism. .
I don’t know that I think having more profile 2s will fix the problems you list, and other people have addressed that there are more profile 2s than you would think. But I do think that having profile 2 (or a hybrid) feel like a more available option would be good for people emotionally and improve overall EA productivity.
Isn’t a lot of FB’s revenue generated by owning a cookie, and cooperating with other websites to track you across pages? I don’t think it’s fair to count that revenue as generated by the social platform, for these purposes.
Your argument also feels slippery to me in general. Registering that now in case you have a good answer to my specific criticism and the general motte-and-bailey feeling sticks around.
that makes sense, sounds like it wasn’t the concern for at least your group. He does describe it as “The rest of the management team was horrified and quit in a huff, loudly telling the investors that Bankman-Fried was dishonest and reckless”, so unless there were multiple waves of management quitting it sounds like the book conflated multiple stories.