Someone on Twitter said, "he just got his perfect ending."
It's gonna be a fantastic book.
But SBF? The last interview I saw him give was I think with Levine; it was shocking because SBF was describing whence crypto derives its value. And Levine remarked that SBF was describing a Ponzi scheme.
For me, that interview showed two things. First, that SBF quite obviously has no morals whatsoever. And second, he's not nearly as smart as he's portrayed to be.
His whole cred derives from his MIT degree combined with his experience at Jane Street. Jane Street is a great firm, but what they do is really specific, and not necessarily the "coolest" way to make money. It's a lot of tech and infrastructure, less finance and trading chops. (The real badasses are RenTech, for example.)
Anyway, I watched a few videos that he made while working at his crypto hedge fund, Alameda. He described the strategies, and they sounded like the typical market maker stuff - arbing exchange discrepancies yadda yadda. Not the most inspired stuff.
There's also just the fundamental stupidity of thinking you can reduce something as complex as human morals and ethics to a karmic checking account balance...
How is that something that can be seriously engaged with? Other than trying to talk some sense into these people about limiting their EA calculations to a reasonably observable time-space continuum?
For instance, you push someone in front of a trolley to save 5 lives, but the trolley isn’t stopped and you end up with 6 dead.
There’s no privileged neutral really. Consequentialism just owns that. Now, that might be a separate question from whether society should act as if there’s a privileged neutral (ie be nonconsequentialist).
All I know is that when humanity faced the decision with respect to WWII medical experiments , the decision was made to not utilize the data, regardless of potential benefits.
See the problem with utilitarianism?
Unlike other hypothetical examples given here (Skynet, cancer cure), this scenario is possible today.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/renaissance-executi...
The article says they were advised by Deutsche Bank that they could classify certain trades in a way as to pay long-term instead of short-term capital gains taxes.
The IRS disagreed, RenTech went through an appeals process and eventually decided to settle instead of continuing the process.
There’s nothing evil about trying to legally lower your tax obligations and then being told by the IRS “Nope, you can’t do it like that.”
he's just one player in the ecosystem, trying milking as much as possible
good job building FTX into one of the largest CEX but.... :)
The real "badasses" if you insist on calling them that, work about a dozen years for a fund, hit their number, and promptly retire to do whatever the hell they want for the rest of their life. You don't read much about them vs the obsessive people who keep playing the game for the high score contest though, because there's no drama to cover.
Filming was in 2007, the 2008 financial crisis hit, and the documentary devolves into watching this mogul go bankrupt.
I remember a quote from the mogul, something like "I have nothing but the business. I've re-invested nearly every dollar I've ever earned."
It's funny that they seemingly weren't in on it -- "No it's not at all like the other things you wrote about".
These big corporate traders are being paid millions to be the best at what they do (managing stock portfolios) and then it turns out they're actually awful at it and a bunch of genius math kids are running circles around them in the dark. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for the lazy, clueless, suit-wearing, trash-talking traders?
Look, Michael Lewis is like the Stephen Gaghan of (semi-fictionalized) socioeconomic zeitgeist: he chronicles concepts paradigmatic of an entire generation, people and personalities that affect or transform an entire decade or generation (usually in or about the US, and often Wall Street). And he nods towards the societal implications with a sense of urgency and inevitability but also dark theater. Sure he Hollywoodizes people and quotes, not dissimilar to how the screen adaptation of Mark Bowden's superb 'Black Hawk Down' merged characters and their story arcs, or how loosely 'War Dogs' (2016) was based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article [0] and 2015 book [1]. [As to 'War Dogs' and Lawson's writings, there's an obvious similar moral fable to three potheads from Miami Beach becoming in 2007 one of the Pentagon’s largest weapons suppliers, by reselling Chinese bullets to US-occupied Afghanistan, and noone at the Pentagon actually wanted to know where private contractors were getting their supply, as the scale of the contracts became increasingly insane.] If you want to more accurately label Lewis' genre "semi-fictionalized socioeconomic zeitgeist", then do.
To be blunt, people have short attention spans, people in the US only read average 15.6 books/yr or median 4 books/yr [2], and moral ambiguity seems to sell worse than clean-cut tales casting characters as good guys and bad guys, certainly on the big screen. But these writers are still fulfilling an important service. Noone actually sits down and reads Inspector-General reports, CSPAN is occasionally great but usually dull to watch, and what now passes for US mainstream media is hopelessly coopted and long ago abandoned investigative reporting [3]. Writers like Lewis, Bowden, Lawson(, Crichton, Grisham [4]) fill a very real cultural void in interpreting what's going on.
[0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers... [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-comple... [2]: https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do... [3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-wit... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995
The joke is supposed to be that he's being comically clueless to do so, because it follows a series of shorts[2] of him not "getting" the point of advancements like the wheel, the fork, the toilet, the Walkman, etc. But now he just looks wise!
[1] https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136
[2] Full ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ