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Comment by rhaway84773 | Hacker News Reader

SBF didn’t believe in his effective altruism slogan. He basically admitted in the texts to the reporter he thought would be private that the EA stuff was BS.

Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “treated kindly”.

If you’re talking about why he wasn’t arrested yet, it’s obvious because the SEC was building its case, and more so because he was voluntarily going on public forums and publicly admitting increasing levels of guilt.

I never understood the people complaining about why he wasn’t arrested yet. If you’re a prosecutor making a case against someone, why would you stop them from going to the media and publicly boasting about new crimes?

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> SBF didn’t believe in his effective altruism slogan.

That's not what I meant.

What I meant is that before FTX's implosion, anything you would read, hear, or see about SBF would make it seem as if he actually believed in it!

Positive PR can be bought. SBF had tons of money. I'm not surprised.

Rather than vaguely alluding, it seems simple enough to provide at least a handful of links to sources with references to the passages in question, no? Nothing that I have read seems to be as breathlessly gushing as commenters repeatedly claim them to be.

they are referring to this: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/15/lets-talk-about-t...

> “Disgusting complicity on the part of the New York Times. He has ruined countless people's lives by theft and fraud, and NYT is now helping him to delay or evade justice by whitewashing him in their prestigious, influential newspaper. I doubt this is just a mistake on their part,” Zcash co-creator Zooko Wilcox said.

This is a dumb take. They did not help him delay or evade anything.

One could argue that the old way of journalism needs to be modernized for people who have challenges with context and understanding, like this quote demonstrates. Maybe expand on the concept of trigger warnings that detail things to consider while reading an article. Things that were common knowledge years ago, but seem to have been left in the dust.

Or maybe the NYT tried, but failed.

I sat down and read the NYT article. It's not that glamorous for SBF--at best, it paints him as someone in way over his head, but I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. It's somewhat humanizing, but largely in a "what is the CEO thinking as their business falls to ash around them?"--it intersperses the interview with notes about how the company was probably lying at times, and the most contentious questions are summarized as "interviewee doesn't want to talk about them." I wouldn't characterize it as a puff piece, but I think the complaints are largely that people wanted it to be a thorough evisceration of Crypto Enemy Number One.

This is a good point. Journalists get dinged for trying to pull out the truth. Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview with SBF seems like a case in point.

>He basically admitted in the texts to the reporter he thought would be private that the EA stuff was BS.

interested, source?

they may be referring to this article...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...

Interesting, though that seems to be talking about “ethical” vs “sketchy” behavior, which is not quite the same as Effective Altruism principles.

I too am interested if anyone has a source that quotes SBF saying that his EA involvement was in any way inauthentic.

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