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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

SBF's public conduct over the past weeks, and alleged conduct over the past years, reinforces an image of unintelligence. Be it genuine stupidity, stimulants or both, he isn't top-of-the-doghouse material. (Granted, easy to say ex post facto.)

The elephants in the room are Binance and Tether, together with certain high-profile investors. Taking some of these out could likely be worth a plea bargain. (For optics, he has to go to jail. But sending him to jail for a long time while letting the others go free for lack of evidence is a bad trade.)

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My opinion is that it's all faux stupidity. I think his whole "I really didn't know what was going on" spiel is going to fall apart quickly in court. Anyone with a couple brain cells to rub together would know to shut the hell up. He seems desperate enough to try lying and manipulating his way out of hot water. That's what his whole media tour has been about. He's not giving interviews to people that will give him tough questions and follow up on his responses. He's giving interviews to people that are going to ask "so, what happened?" And follow up his half-baked response with "Wow, you didn't know what was happening, that's wild!"

He’s even more stupid than the stupid guy he pretends to be. What kind of criminal talks to the media about their crime before their trial?

The fact that he’s done this would give his stupid guy story credence... if there wasn’t already a boatload of other evidence that he’s a conman.

It’s a little bit innocent to think that SBF isn’t intelligent; he’s extremely adept at lying and manipulating. And on top of that, intelligent enough to create a large crypto exchange. It’s his morals and impulses that got him into trouble.

He’s the latest example of why many RPGs have separate stats for intelligence and wisdom. He’s clearly not stupid but his lawyers must be sitting at their desks sobbing “stop giving interviews!”

I was thinking something similar, that being intelligent doesn't mean you're smart, but I think "wisdom" says it better.

I won’t claim it’s an original idea but … wow, would I have snickered at an author for laying on too thick if he’d been a character in a novel.

> He’s clearly not stupid but his lawyers must be sitting at their desks sobbing “stop giving interviews!”

TBH I don't think the interviews hurt him much, and I think more than likely they are a strategy trying to reduce his culpability. The common thread among all his interviews is "I'm really sorry for being such an idiot", basically trying to play stupid to make it difficult to prove intent.

I’d look at it from the other direction: how does an interview help him? Nothing he says is going to keep him out of a courtroom and he’ll have time to present his version there, so I’m not seeing any upside to potentially saying something which the prosecution can use, find a lead from, or simply point to as evidence of duplicity — immediately pivoting from “I’m a genius who’ll stabilize this out of control field” to “I had no idea what was going on and ignored my staff” just days after being caught is going to be a hard sell.

Well, the other possibility is that he has high charisma and low intelligence.

I tend to use the classical definition of charisma - in which case his charisma stat is 0.

I think that this illustrates the problem with EA's consequentialist worldview. You can justify pretty much anything if you do the math right.

He could be intelligent but distressed (who wouldn't?) or he could be just a front for more sinister people.

> Binance and Tether

Binance is the elephant in the room. They might have their finances in order, however. The fact that they were enabling shady deals doesn't mean they were cooking their own books. For Tether, I think it's more solid than you think. These guys have been cooperating with NYAG from day one.

It is a feature of social media society that there is such a large body of actual evidence ex post facto that is so damning. I am thinking of SBF tripping on stimulants on meet the press, the CEO of a multi billion $ hedge fund talking about how many of their investments were scammy.

Yet these raised no red flags, and were even cited as proof of their genius, how this time it is different - you can pitch at a 30bn valuation while tripping on drugs and playing a game at the same time. Genius (or Idiot?)

Anything less than 20 years will be a joke.

He is intelligent enough to understand what he's doing and he's going to jail regardless of optics.

All the separate companies plus the code that hid transactions speak to much of the conduct being intentional, no?

I can’t wait until tether finally implodes. That will absolutely destroy the crypto market.

Being intelligent at math is quite different than handling a crisis well. IMO he's spent the last few years with everyone sucking his nuts and going on about how smart he is and it's gotten to his head.

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