Jesus Christ…does this guy not know that you should keep quiet when you’re the subject of a criminal investigation from multiple government agencies?
COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?
BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.
COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.
BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.
COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?
BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie...
(See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.)
Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.
Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently:
"""I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives.
Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""
>BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"
The original thing being referenced is St. Petersburg lottery, and each round of that is 50/50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
I'm actually somewhat impressed by someone who articulated a stupid logic about how to live life and then actually followed through.
I was quite frankly shocked that I didn't see more people questioning his judgement/ethics after this and other strange statements
It is extremely risky and ill-advised, but as SBF said, it’s possible to end up in a very (very!) good position. The crux is that infinity doesn’t exist. You will place the bet at most a finite number of times.
You know, "Sometimes life creeps up on you" and then the customer deposits you stole are gone!
He's clearly innocent, so he has nothing to worry about.
And for another linked CEO they'd been a trader for three years, and then were made CEO at Alameda?