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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

Author: "so the ethics stuff - mostly a front?"

SBF: "yeah"

Absolutely gobsmacked.

I saw these screenshots on Twitter and I thought they were fake until I read the article. The rest of the messages from him are pretty terrible as well.

I thought he just fucked up, but no. He was wilfully unethical and maintains he did nothing wrong: "Sometimes life creeps up on you".

And the thing he regrets most is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy...

What a cruel fucking joke for all the people who invested with/in FTX.

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The ethics discussion along with the FTX/Alameda discussion is such a fascinating juxtaposition for me. It makes the article so much more interesting in my view.

On the one hand, you’ve got this ethics discussion, which in context happened previously, about the ethics of running an immoral business to do good things. Then an ethical discussion about how that answer was BS and all that really matters is perception, and how perception doesn’t mirror reality.

And here I’m trying to reflect on these topics. How do I feel about these things, how would I answer?

Then the next part begins soon after with “messy accounting.”

I view it the way I’d view Michelangelo’s David if it were displayed at a local county fair.

I'm wondering if there is some kind of mass insanity occurring in the world right now with this and the behaviour of numerous influential figures.

Something to do with neo-nicotinoid.

It would explain a lot.

Money is a helluva drug!

cheap money and low interest rates, to be precise

Yep. It's a spectrum. At one end you have normal companies, in the middle you have pseudo-companies like Uber or Lyft or perhaps even Twitter where they're just indirectly guzzling printed money for decades after it's laundered through several different intermediaries, and then at the end you have FTX which is a fully fraudulent non-business. Where does all the crazy money come from? Ultimately from the central banks.

Wealth reveals. Just like alcohol.

No, it is wrong to think it is a "mass" phenomena. A very small group of people around the planet are involved here.

What is happening is what happens in all long running systems where the generational selection process becomes ineffective due to (typically) nepotism, hedonism, and corruption. What was once, if arguably ethically challenged, but competent elite gives way to an openly corrupt and incompetent set. Healthy systems check this phenomena -- it happens in all power entities historically -- and correct it. When they fail to correct it, they suddenly collapse.

You might be interested in Adam Curtis' documentaries. Check them out.

He doesn't say he thinks it is okay to act unethically, he says that in general acting unethically doesn't matter the way he previously said it did because public perception is shaped more by winning than it is by whether the winner was ethical or unethical.

Elsewhere in the DMs he says "I didn't want to do sketchy stuff [...] and I didn't mean to" and "it as never the intention".

None of this reads like bombshell level "Wow this guy is terrible". He comes across as maybe terrible or maybe someone who played a little too fast and loose with an explosively growing business of which he lost control.

Wow...

> He comes across as maybe terrible or maybe someone who played a little too fast and loose with an explosively growing business of which he lost control.

Same type of statement would be like... They came across as maybe terrible or maybe someone who just had a few too many drinks and then lost control of a new sports car that they were not familiar with and accidentally drove into a crowd of people.

Yes and that's a great analogy because it's possible that your person driving the new sports car did not intentionally get drunk and drive into a crowd of people.

Most people wouldn't call that driver a sociopath who intentionally murdered a crowd of people, they'd say "wow, that person made a couple of really poor decisions and they really messed up and ended up ruining a lot of lives".

You do realize that states recognize ignoring the risk means that person was intentional and they are convicted of murder? Anything can be seen as a poor choice. By your logic Hitler made really poor decisions and ended up ruining a lot of lives.

It's possible for SBF to be both guilty of a variety of crimes and also not an intentionally terrible human.

I don't know if he is or isn't a sociopath who lied to everyone while stealing billions. I just find the "wow, this guy is a monster" outrage interesting as the source DMs here don't really uphold that portrayal.

Yes they do. They show classic narcissistic and sociopathic behaviors.

You could argue there’s no such thing as a “terrible person”, we are all at the mercy of our sensory inputs and the innate properties of our neurons. In order to keep society functional we need to enforce boundaries on human behavior, and in some cases label people as untrustworthy and possibly lock them up to stop them from doing more damage. If “terrible person” is the wrong label, we could pick a different one.

LoL, exactly. "Well, it wasn't pre-meditated 1st degree murder... just good old grossly-negligent homicide."

Most non-sociopaths would experience a huge amount of shame/stress from stealing billions of dollars from trusting people and losing it. SBF shows none of that.

He says in the DMs that the most important thing in his life now is making customers whole and returning their funds.

"that's basically all that matters for the rest of my life"

Are you f'ing kidding me, taking this at face value?

Note in other tweets he said he was trying to "raise capital". The man is likely going to prison for years, he is either delusional or trying to promote his delusions to pretend the he didn't know what he was doing was wrong.

> Are you f'ing kidding me, taking this at face value?

Well we can't cherry-pick the sociopathy as real and then start second guessing the bit where he sounds a lot less like a sociopath... can we?

Considering that sociopaths (by definition) do damaging things to people while also:

-Using intelligence, charm, or charisma to manipulate others.

- Not learning from mistakes or punishment.

- Lying for personal gain.

It seems fair to call out that you can’t trust their statements this way, if that is what is going on. It’s pretty much the nature of the disorder.

My issue is only using the half of the source that backs up the assessment (of sociopathy) and ignoring the other half that contradicts it. That is not fair, balanced or even good guessing, its just seeing what you want to see in the data by excluding what doesn't support your theory.

Are you responding to me, the original poster who was claiming sociopathy, or responding to the world in general?

All I was doing is pointing out that if person A claims person B is lying about their motivations and good deeds and actually causing harm because they are a sociopath, saying person A can’t claim that doesn’t make much sense.

I have no particularly strong opinion in if anyone is or is not a sociopath. I’m just pointing out that lying about your intentions and good deeds while causing harm is a pretty textbook element of ASPD. It’s certainly not unique to ASPD of course!

Do you have specific elements of sociopathy you think can’t apply?

Or more just pointing out all of this is bullshit speculation anyway because no one can diagnose someone off a couple of tweets in the middle of a scandal anyway?

hn_throwaway is the user that wants to use this as a source to prove SBF's sociopathy but then mocks another user for taking anything he says in the same source at face value. That's why I'm commenting, because that looks to me like a double-standard.

Looks like pretty classic desperation, which is an expected response to this situation for plenty of personality types that aren't indicative of anti-social personality disorder.

For HIS life, meaning he’s likely to go to prison if he fails to make his depositors whole. He doesn’t care about his customers which is why he embezzled the money, didn’t do any accounting, created a backdoor in the finance software, and tried to keep the charade going for as long as he could.

I don't interpret it that way. I interpret this as "the most important thing is getting myself out of this jam - because otherwise I'm going to prison and my life is fucked."

I agree that after all of his lies, and they are numerous, today is the day we should start trusting what he says. /s

The next bit of that exchange is: "each individual decision seemed fine and I didn't realize how big their sum was until the end".

That's a classic "ends justify the means" slippery slope.

And even if he didn't want or mean to, he was more than happy to engage in that kind of behaviour if needed.

Someone like that is absolutely a terrible person in my book. I would not trust or be friends with someone who has that attitude. He is more concerned with "winning" than behaving ethically.

Imagine if you were an FTX employee, customer or investor who was in the dark. Would you really just chalk this up to playing "a little too fast and loose with an explosively growing business"? Would you be happy to work with SBF again? I know I wouldn't.

"each individual decision seemed fine and I didn't realize how big their sum was until the end"

This reads to me as "I was viewing all these situations in isolation instead of looking at the full system" not your reading which seems to be more "I thought I could get away with each individual thing".

To your last point, Parker Conrad was dragged through the mud and shunned everywhere when Zenefits imploded but he came right back with Rippling and is a tech darling now.

They are effectively the same reading to me. He's the CEO. It's his job to understand the whole system. Whether he looked at things in isolation, or thought he could get away with each one he was still reckless.

From a quick reading of what happened with Zenefits (Was not keeping track of tech back then), it seems bad but not as bad as FTX.

I'm also not saying that everyone would not want to work with someone like that again. I'm sure some (Most?) people would, but for me it would take lot to convince me they're not going to repeat that behaviour.

And "more careful accounting". Not accurate/right accounting. Just "be more careful".

How can you think he "just fucked up", and not unethical? He was selling magic beans. He was going "this thing I just made up, I declare it with billions".

I understand what you're getting at (Though this is not really about printing FTT in particular). What I'm trying to verbalize is that before, I gave him the benefit of the doubt in regards to intention.

He mentions that he didn't mean to do sketchy things, but he was definitely more than willing to engage in unethical behaviour.

Previously, I did not think he was being brazenly unethical. Now, I have the impression he will do anything it takes to "win".

> he was definitely more than willing to engage in unethical behaviour

> Now, I have the impression he will do anything it takes to "win".

Not sure what's the distinction you're making here.

The guy is likely a psychopath. I mean just compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde... and see how many boxes he checks. When a high-skilled evil psychopath gets going, he (or she) usually leaves a trail of people asking themselves "how could we not see it for so long?!".

the yeah could also be the answer to the second question in the bubble!

I think there is a word for it. Sociopath.

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