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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

To be fair SBF convicted himself on a platter. Only he knows what made him think he'd get away by facing trial. Maybe he was just dumb, overconfident, ill-advised, or a combination of everything.

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He is one of those people who think they can talk their way out of everything. Everything is not only negotiable, but the only possible "truth" is what they are saying right now (yesterday's "truth"? "You're remembering that incorrectly - I never said that!"). I hated working for people like that, and I'd feel like I needed to take a shower after every meeting. If you only encounter them occasionally, a normal person would just think "wow, they're really charismatic". Daily, repeated contacts with them crawl under your skin. I'm grateful that the word "gaslighting" has entered common vocabulary as I didn't have words to describe them (back then).

You can only hear you're a genius so many times before you start believing your own press.

Gaslighting is a such a great phrase. It's a very specific kind of cognitive dissonance that is so common in the workplace. I find the worst gaslighters are "leaders" who surreptitiously change their stance on something without communicating why. Over time everyone under them just loses the motivation to do more than the bare minimum because they don't know if the goal will match the leader's requests.

I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's description of Rhetors and Incantors in 'Anathem' - "Rhetors could change the past and were eager to do so, Incantors could change the future and were very cautious using that ability". Could be a parable about leadership styles.

the term your looking for is narcissist, or maybe "charismatic sociopath"

Wow, amazing phrasing. I work for this person now!

It's not really a "thing people do", more "how their ChatGPT works". Holding consistent state over a long time period is pretty advanced brain stuff. E.g. mice and even monkeys don't need that capability much. We delude ourselves into believing that human brains have filesystem-level persistence, but really they don't. SBF is just a bit more sigma from the mean.

A 100 yr and a 70 yr jail sentence are basically the same thing. My guess is they knew they could win at trial pretty easily so they just didn’t offer him much of a deal, and from his perspective it was all or nothing so he might as well give trial a shot.

Why would they have offered him ANY deal? (Do we know they did?) All the co-conspirators agreed to testify, and it was a slam dunk case. He could have plead guilty of his own conscience, of course, but no reason for the prosecution to offer any incentives in this case.

It actually seems that they did not. The only reason would be to spare the expense of a trial, which isn’t much in the grand scheme of things in this particular instance. They can probably extract money from him in fines, presumably he has some left somewhere.

My money's on a bad case of grandiosity, he's clearly got an unusual appetite for risk.

It seems he was pretty convicted before deciding to appear so it probably couldn't make things much worse.

Take from Tiffany Fong who was at the trial: https://youtu.be/wpKQWJFA3aw?t=850

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