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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I watched the full NYT interview today and he's either an amazing well-coached liar (very possible) and or he really is a kid in way over his head, who got to take advantage of reputation circles (VCs, media, politicians, etc) to make reckless massive gambles without any adult risk-adverse old-school finance guys in the room.

Basically demonstrating zero personal responsibility for the the money he had control over.

Maybe more will come out to show he's is in fact a modern Bernie Madoff, with a grand hidden scheme at work to directly enrich himself, but that's not 100% obvious yet. I'm looking forward to what comes out in the future.

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"I was too ignorant to run a giant investment company/pseudo-bank correctly" shouldn't get you off though. He needs to face the same charges regardless of whether he was malicious or stupid.

The day the "too dumb" defense works is the day we can open all the cell doors and close down the prisons, because that's everyone's defense.

There's more to it being a defense:

> Delinquents and criminals average IQ scores 8 to 10 points lower than noncriminals, which is about one-half a standard deviation. IQ and criminal behavior are negatively correlated at about r = -. 20 (Hirschi and Hindelang; Wilson and Herrnstein).

Did they adjust for dumber criminals being more likely to be caught?

How does one adjust for uncaught criminals?

Get a control group of smart people and have them start doing crimes and see if they get caught.

We call this “financialization”.

Elapsed time between crime and capture might be a good regressor.

Chronic unsolved crimes gets some of it at least. If say, thirty percent of murders are cold cases then you know they aren't all getting caught. Other constraints would hint at the possible count potential murderers. If two people are killed on the same day two days of travel apart then you have at least two murderers.

That doesn't help with estimating levels of non-detected crimes of course.

> Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students. He attended high school at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California. From 2010 to 2014, Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. In 2014, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics and a minor in mathematics.

There's no way he can plead stupidity.

That’s not a given. The #1 criteria of fraud is intent. If you can’t prove intent, there was no fraud.

We may not like it, but that’s how the system is set up.

Yes, it's intentionally set up like that to facilitate crime.

The “intentional” part of your claim is extremely dubious, even if I agree with it if you omit that word.

I don’t think there’s an unintentional relationships which facilitates and under-punishes fraud, but I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot.

The gov't says 'reckless indifference to the truth' qualifies as intent.

Reckless indifference to the truth, then, should condemn both SBF and his aggrieved.

All involved knew what they were doing, or took extraordinary measures to blind themselves to knowing.

Fraud requires intent.

And he absolutely will... People are ridiculously acting like he got away with something because he's not in Federal prison yet. It hasn't even been a month since it all blew up.

>He needs to face the same charges regardless of whether he was malicious or stupid.

We're not gonna invalidate a huge amount of legal precedent spanning centuries for one dude. Intent matters.

(That said I think he's lying and knew what was going on the whole time)

Being dumb never got anyone off of a crime. I'm pretty sure he will face serious consequences regardless. The "bumbling kid" narrative won't help him there.

But it's relevant in discussions when I've seen him called worse than Madoff who engaged in a very overt crime. Again we don't know exactly how much SBF tried to directly profit off the business yet and how much it was a concerted plot to scam people. ...And since the internet requires you to be extremely obvious, that is not saying he's not a bad guy or absolved of responsibility or whatever.

> Again we don't know exactly how much SBF tried to directly profit off the business

The article has some large numbers. "Bankman-Fried received an incredible $1 billion in personal loans, as well as a $2.3 billion loan to an entity called Paper Bird in which he had 75% control."

Even if true, wouldn't that mean he was defrauding the VCs by representing that he could run a pseudo-bank correctly? Out of the frying pan...

I’m a year older than him and in finance without an Ivy League education or any pedigree and I can swear to you that innocence act fools no one except people outside the field. This is like a programmer saying he drowned the company because he didn’t realize how much he was spending on cloud costs as he left the auto scaler on. It is the stupidest excuse, except the autoscaler was running on infra the programmer created and owned so he just took all the money. Which is just basic fraud.

It is such basic fraud that it happened even in 2008 and it’ll keep happening. Cherub faced little fucks will evolve to fool you out of your money until the end of all time. Don’t fall for it.

I think the thing that confuses a lot of people is that if he's actually savvy, why on earth has he agreed to do so many damaging interviews? He's either (a) naive in at least some respects, (b) actually doesn't care about his legal liability - what he told the NYT today, or (c) is playing some sort of long game where he parlays his apparent innocence into a shorter prison sentence. But I think a lot of savvy people don't see (c) working out for him.

Because he thinks, that he can get away with it, thanks to political donations.

After all unlike Holmes and Madoff he didn't steal from the rich.

Huh? A ton of rich people got burned by this. Probably way more than Madoff or Holmes ever dealt with.

> why on earth has he agreed to do so many damaging interviews

It seems to be working, at least on some margins. Even here he has his defenders.

I think the interviews are a misstep. He’s taking too much meth to think clearly even though he was once obviously a very smart person. The insistence on innocence reminds me of a small child shouting indignantly that they didn’t do anything even if you catch them absolutely red handed. They also totally believe it in the moment and refashion their world view and their truths around that statement.

An adult - in general - will recognize when the jig is up and take it on the chin. Or just lawyer up if they think they can get away with it despite being culpable. This is a 30 year old who thinks he knows better than his lawyers (assuming his lawyer didn’t actually advise him to go to interviews and claim he did it against their advice for some reason). I’ve yet to meet a 30 year old that stupid. It’s the gradient between 25 and 30. You understand the world so fast that a 25 year old seems like a child if they insist they’ll go at it without lawyers.

> I can swear to you that innocence act fools no one except people outside the field.

Full agree. But when I see this, I assume his target market is the single juror at his criminal trial who needs to buy it in order to prevent a conviction.

Edit: Unless it's a Bahamas jury trial (for a crime not punishable by death), in which case, he will need to convince four out of nine jurors to prevent a conviction.

Its easy to look like a sheep when you have not internalised any sense of responsibility. It was literally a game to him

Not segregating customer funds isn't a gamble.

the proof would be to find how many people he fired and blackballed because they disagreed with him or told him he was wrong.

Agreed. That was a huge part of the Theranos story. Balwani fired anyone who was critical of him or the idea (he was even worse than than Holmes and IMO deserves a longer sentence).

The book talked about a security guard who would be responsible for the daily firing, walking the person out of the building with their box of belongings was as normal as lunch.

MIT grad, ex Jane Street trader, comes from lawyer-professor family, garnered VC capital from big names like Kevin O'Leary and lead the pitches.

Dude knew what he was doing and if he didn't it was done out of such criminal negligence that he's still to blame.

To be fair, he has said some things about risk and finance that are completely idiotic - like always valuing EV over utility regardless of stakes. It's the kind of detached-from-reality crap that a teenager whose brain hasn't developed yet would say. So he might be a scammer and a complete idiot regardless of where he went to school and where he worked.

Or something someone getting high on Parkinson’s medication that is known to cause extreme risk taking behavior might say.

I wonder if he started taking emsam after he knew his goose was cooked several months ago. Might be the only way to keep going with a straight face while you bet the farm on red hoping to get the deposits back.

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