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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

lmaooooo. EA has always seemed like a bullshit larp for extremely online and naive people. i dont know how anyone took it seriously.

in the end this is just another retelling of the same old boring finance lessons Buffet or Taleb or Burry or hundreds before them know. high leverage is the only way to get rich QUICK but it can wipe you out just as quickly. crypto is generally bullshit, the leaders are mostly grifters and its good to see the tide finally revealing them for who they are.

no one seems to talk about how all the underlying concepts of finance apply identically to crypto as they do to any boring old currency, asset, stock, option or any financial instrument. but they do.. moving to a blockchain does not change any of that in the slightest.

Sam is basically George Bluth now

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Uh, what? SBF being a fraud and a criminal doesn't indict EA in any way. He was also an avid wearer of t-shirts and unkempt hair, are those things are discredited now as well?

He didn’t wear that stuff as motivation for his money and power chasing. Nor did the tshirt and unkempt hair community galvanize around him and accept his purported billions.

He was funding a lot of it and they didn’t seem to particularly care that he was obviously a fraud. Their earn to give position actually commands you to become such a fraud to give them money.

Which they spend on castles (https://twitter.com/simpleteo/status/1591069362076590081) and pretending all other charity is “ineffective and selfish” because it doesn’t have “effective altruism” right in the name.

I mean, was he *obviously* a fraud? You could easily short FTT if you thought that was the case. Additionally, any number of hedge funds could have, and it would have collapsed if they had (the reason this unravelled was a big sale of the token)

Maybe you mean in hindsight he was obviously a fraud? But then that criticism doesn't apply to people who took the money before the fraud was revealed.

It’s hard to short something when you can’t trust the exchange. You shouldn’t short USDT either even though Tether is a fraud, because they can fraud harder and blow you up first.

Just avoid the business, and don’t grow your nonprofits relying on him paying you.

My point is that actually while everyone knows tether is a fraud, it was not actually obvious SBF was a fraud. Unless you're relying on a generic "everything crypto is fraud" heuristic (which, fine, but not clear why SBF would merit special attention before this week)

I didn’t know this until just now (since I was avoiding the industry and didn’t need to research anything), but it seems like “the company is run by a polycule of stimulant abusers in the Bahamas” is a bad sign.

https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1173351344159117312

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/13790363463003054...

yeah, I mean that's the definition of hindsight. Once something happens, you can look back and comb for warning signs.

But that doesn't mean it's reasonable to have a rule like "If someone does stimulants and is polyamorous, dont let them give you money, they're definitely running a scam"

The VCs who goosed FTX and Scam BF with hundreds of millions, resulting in 4 years of feckless tech and finance media fawning over this moron and his supposed "genius" as well as furthering the cancerous spread of crypto into mainstream consciousness, these elite ur-capitalist gatekeepers of gererational wealth - had the 'benefit' of due dilligence before jumping on board. They are now writing down their investments to $0.

Their due diligence includes

- listening to him claim he’s never read a book in his life

- noticing he was playing League of Legends during the pitch meeting while presenting FTX as an everything app like WeChat

Which are also things I think I could preemptively say are bad.

Though, Sequoia’s also known for firing founders from their startups, so they probably benefit from seeming very generous to new pitches.

I just dislike how SBF and many others of approximately the same moral fiber use EA as a way to build up their reputation as some sort of noble philanthropist. Its an old and obvious trick.

EA itself is not necessarily bad or discredited, but ultimately im not interested in some theoretical definition of EA. What matters is who the real people practicing EA actually do with the money, and many of those people are like Sam in my opinion. Many are NOT frauds and genuinely do want to help people too, so of course it doesn't completely discredit EA either.

Its just sort of stupid how much its talked about as if the idea of trying to do the most good with the least resources is some kind of gigabrain idea. No, thats literally what any sincere charity aims to do.

I'm sorry but these two points are extremely disconnected. EA really has no bearing on the financial mechanisms that undid SBF. Furthermore, although he was a prime donor to EA, I don't think his involvement with it necessarily discredits them.

He’s one of EA highest profiles adherents. EA style thinking permeates SBF.

This is the world EAs want - the one they’ve been advocating for a long time.

It’s just in this iteration it failed. If the chance of success was higher than X% vs the risk of failing, it was all worth it. That’s the kind of morally bankrupt philosophy EA pushes.

> EA really has no bearing on the financial mechanisms that undid SBF.

It had bearing on the ethical/moral decisions he has been making. EA has allowed him to justify doing blatantly illegal acts.

It’s more likely he tried to cover up massive Alameda losses due to all the usual reasons people turn to illegal acts: shame, myopia, gambling addiction. One core EA principle is integrity. If he was actually “EA”, this wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

That’s no true Scotsman.

Doesn’t discredit them but it does bankrupt them. What does discredit them is them claiming “we’re going to go on making charity effective and rational” as if everyone else who works at a nonprofit makes decisions with an Ouija board.

There's a Twitter thread where SBF said he's willing to take unlimited risk, far beyond what is theoretically optimal, because it's for the good of humanity.

easy to say when youre taking on that unlimited risk using other people's - err, humanity's - money.

No wonder SBF went hard into the social capital accumulation game almost immediately, buying off politicians and grandiose charitywashing gestures. His window to establish a network of elite string pullers was short and closing fast.

> crypto is generally bullshit, the leaders are mostly grifters and its good to see the tide finally revealing them for who they are.

All the grifters who hopped on post 2020, yes

But the actual implementation of a p2p electronic currency that cuts financial institutions out of the equation? This isn't bullshit, just math. There's a reason why the NYT is so hostile to crypto, and it isn't "the environment"

What is EA?

Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism. It’s a jumble of buzzwords used by insanely wealthy people to justify why they should have all of the money.

Isn't it about giving away money?

It involves first having a bunch of money, then giving it away. The general trend is that most people fail to move past Step 1.

Ostensibly. One critique is that it's a justification for accumulating wealth at all costs because purveyors of EA style themselves as uniquely capable of utilizing that money for good.

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