And one of whose first acts as things broke was to publicly fire his lawyers for telling him to shut up about it instead of digging his own grave with social media posts.
"The USD is going to go to zero someday so I might as well steal everyone's USD today"
He's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Rational for him may be much different than you or I can comprehend?
His risk tolerance is either infinite or, more likely, he doesn't have a clue what it is so he treats it as infinite.
To be sure, Trump's own counsel adheres to an entirely different standard than that which they seek for their client, arguing in one brief that a meme tweet of a smug Joe Biden sipping coffee and saying he likes his dark was evidence that the current administration is out to get the defendant.
This is mixing up different things.
The protective order is about disclosing information obtained from discovery provided by the prosecution. No one is arguing that the tweet above was contempt of court for violating the protective order. As you note, it was written before the protective order was in place, but also obviously before they obtained discovery from the prosecution. So he was incapable of leaking anything from the discovery at that point in time.
The complaint about witness tampering or intimidation doesn’t stem from the protective order. Rather, it was a condition of his release after the arraignment, which did happen before that tweet. Witness intimidation is actually a violation of federal statute (18 USC S 1512), so is _always_ not allowed, regardless of the timing of any instructions or orders from the judge.
It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend")
But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style.
That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way?
Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices.
He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out.
Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc.
His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck."
In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction.
(This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)
This is a remarkably generous framing. Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?
There were about 26 billion reasons for that, at one point.
e: to be clear, I am pointing out a fact of how the world works here, not condoning it
If you are looking for a stereotypical "bad person" example, IMO it's at least a good idea to have an accompanying "bad context" or "bad environment" condition, or your own assessment will tend to be full of ethical blind spots.
Every single one that caught is an idiot - they misunderstood the system they were trying to rip off, they misunderstood and/or didn't think through what checks and balances exist in the system to catch things after they happen. They are idiots.
I mentioned the same thing, it doesn't seem to make any difference in situations involving extreme consumer-advocacy flex, I mean who are we to attempt to get two completely separate lines of thought to coexist ;-)
If literally describing how SBF's mind seems to work is "giving", then I have to say...
...damn you must judge people so hard. :D
> ...damn you must judge people so hard. :D
I'm advocating for not judging hundreds of thousands of people more harshly than you appear to judge SBF. Again: what makes him different?
Eh, it's not excessive or obeisant. It's simply a straightforward commentary on how the guy seems to think.
Written in earnest, mind, for other community members, some of whom are awkwardly attempting to Judge-Judy their way through the situation.
What does that really contribute, all the commentary on how evil this person is?
Is it supposed to _not_ look like projecting? Eh...I don't think that's working too well. And the news headlines do a way better job anyway.
> I'm advocating for not judging hundreds of thousands of people more harshly than you appear to judge SBF. Again: what makes him different?
This doesn't make sense.
Also, give me someone to compare him to if you are looking for comparative logic. Otherwise do the comparison yourself, it's clearly not that kind of comment.
If you think he's not different because you think just like he does, then you may have an everybody-thinks-like-me problem.
Oh well, hate the puzzle, not the puzzler.
Unfortunately, ignoring moral perspectives & decision points is effectively the same as "being without morals". And I really mean unfortunately--this is a problem for all of humanity and we keep looking for individual evil scapegoats, but eventually we need to reconcile this.
In practice there's also this extra innovator's dilemma: Yield to known industry practice and reap ethical rewards as a natural part of the process, or lean into the novelty & growth curve and possibly reinvent huge swaths of custom, ethic, and morality which were previously vague.
I don't think people appreciate how close we've come to that happening at various points in history, and to what degree.
If you do take that second path, almost by definition you immediately blind yourself to huge swaths of moral decisionmaking. This is more especially true if you are forced to look at your customers as "audiences" or similar groups.
These groups are effectively perceived at higher levels as cohesive organisms. Groups are known to demonstrate a more primitive subjective morality than most any individual (i.e. individiuals may be smart, humans in large groups not so much), and this can greatly restrict a founder's own willingness to address morality-related issues by more than a couple inches, so to speak, here or there.
I think most any business owner probably understands this view, though in the context of this huge story I'm sure it wouldn't be easy to admit.
But you are right that in terms of individual human perception, the puzzle _must_ be solved, and often in a very subjective manner no matter what resources may be available. That's a huge issue.
Also, think about businesses where morality simply isn't a day to day concern of customers, not because they are rotten customers, but because their set of concerns is another facet of the benefit spectrum. "I am their customer because of X and Y." Not _your_ X and Y, but theirs.
In that light, perhaps you can see how much of a blind-spot crutch it can be to end up defending morality as a kind of forced issue by dint of your own subjective focus, which while commendable, isn't the point here.
It's an issue of what else there is.
This is also probably very difficult to understand if you yourself naturally focus extremely hard on giving a clean deal to your customers. As is common in that mindset, maybe you often find yourself the martyr, taking a loss here or there to quietly test your own generosity in that way, for example. Or maybe you enjoy mentally pairing yourself with "good people", those you rate via your conduct system as individuals with whom you feel more free to conduct the generous business that makes you see the world in a better light.
In such a case, of course you have a good argument for branding around that personality facet.
And at the same time, you are still way different from a lot of other businesses...
...which from even this beneficial-morality lens can't be said to come out the worse by some basic psychological calculus. "Be like me" still isn't a fair business assessment tool.
(I know it can be a bit of a frustrating heartbreak to have access to those morality tools, and enjoy demonstrating that benefit in a crooked world...and then hear that a successful business can focus on entirely different facets and psychological processes without cheating their customers...)
It’s also important to remember that customers are not the only agents that matter to an entity’s survival. Public opinion, regulators, employees, shareholders, etc also matter. One instance of this in crypto is the lack of assassination markets. There’s been theoretical work on how to build anonymous assassin markets since the early 90s but no one has done it even though there’s proven customer demand. Why? Because for someone with the ability to build such a market, there exist better options that have higher payouts due to lower regulatory enforcement, easier access to capital, cheaper labour, etc. Again being “pure” has nothing to do with it since people with those skills do build dark net markets that sell other illicit services which are viewed as not really wrong by a large percentage of the population and as less severe to regulators than assassins.
It's the issue of "which sets of perspectives have you basically ignored all your life, which are also relevant right here, now" that tends to make a person appear stupid in a given context.
Imagine though, if SBF had a reasonable, nuanced opportunity to understand his blind spots long before he got into business.
I've coached people who think just like SBF, discussed the same blind spots, and most of those people were grateful to reach a new understanding. But you'd never get that far if you said, "you have the mindset of a trust fund kid, end of story."
So, that's definitely a thing, to be able to un-simplify a broad generalization, and turn that into problem-solving leverage where others may fear to wade into details.
Your post seems like a pretty long winded way of saying he is a fool. It's not hard to understand that when you are facing a federal criminal trial, you shouldn't make the judge mad.
One of his first principles might have been (example):
"Leaks really work well. I leaked some stuff, it got me good results, and so logically this path is open to me for problem-solving."
This is how subjective logic works for millions of people every day.
Obviously to you and others, if you don't combine that with some wisdom and foresight derived from broader knowledge on the context in question, it might backfire.
But what happens next is probably this: He'll stay in the game and adjust his subjective logical foundations.
"Leaks can also be very risky AND therefore..."
That's a huge difference between him and other people, he is a speculative theorist by nature. Even now he probably won't discard leaking out of hand.
It's not a life lesson about leaking for someone like that, it's a lesson with specific parameters in a specific context.
Is he reinventing the "leaking" wheel in a dumb way? Possibly. But, he's also making the logic his own, which is extremely powerful as experience accrues.
Especially if it turns out that leaking is basically an art one can master, he could probably find a way to master it, because there's no big-picture roadblock in his mind that says "leaking private info to help your case is bad, the end". This is not nuanced enough, i.e. smart enough, for the way his logic operates.
Since he is amenable to working with details, his thinking style has strong long-term flexibility and leverage advantages. Even if it fails hard sometimes.
Just for illustration purposes though. And, once again, I'm not here to talk about his moral character. I also do not believe that he's consciously choosing how to use his personality characteristics. He's working naturally with what he's got, these comfortable, reinforced patterns of good, bad, and everything in between.
Galaxy Brains: Masterful gambit, sir
There's no logical reason to do this. I think the answer is that no matter how smart he may be in some areas, he has emotions like anyone else which sometimes lead him to do stupid things. I think many of his decisions are also rooted in a copious amount of pride which leads him to think he will get away with anything.
> There's no logical reason to do this.
Given your experience IOW. Given his lack of it, there absolutely can be. Again, it's contextual, subjective logic he's working with. Not broad experience or broad knowledge of legal affairs. The comparative strengths are there in both cases, but completely different.