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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are. He has a way with storytelling and manages to get access to some serious players sometimes in fringes of the market that are not being written about elsewhere.

He has a bias for scrappy little guys vs big guys across his books, but the little guy, on balance, is not always the "good guy".

Often in the type of tales he writes, there is no good guy.. Sometimes it's just a bunch of guys at a poker table and one of them is going to go home with the money. I'd try not to derive any moral lessons from that.

I also do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad now rather than deciding on their own.

It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.

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The issue is Lewis going out of his way, in so many pubic forums, to present SBF as a good guy genius with only the best of intentions. At worst, as a good kid who made a couple of sad mistakes that you should forgive him for. Before and throughout SBF's trial, Lewis's biases were displayed more and more in his denials and ...fanciful interpretations and justifications of the things SBF did.

It is not that his book should have painted a bad guy as an unequivocal bad guy. It is that you cannot trust Lewis' accounting of events and people because of his known extreme bias in the matter; his descriptions of events and emotions at play during them are filtered through a very biased lens.

It can still be an entertaining read and story, it just can't be a trusted one.

Yeah completely fair to point out that in this particular case, Lewis is completely over the top in his support of SBF, even well past the point that his crimes are clear.

I really like his books, but Lewis also had this issue in Flash Boys. For half of the book, he writes about Aleynikov, someone accused by Goldman Sachs of stealing high-frequency trading code. Lewis writes a thorough and uncontested defense of Aleynikov. Around 3/4 of the way through the book, Lewis reveals that Aleynikov did actually transfer the computer code in question out of Goldman, but contests that this is immaterial because Aleynikov told Lewis that he'd taken it to contribute to open source efforts.

The prosecution for Aleynikov's crimes was definitely heavy-handed (and that in itself would have made a good book), but there's really no doubt that he transferred the code out of Goldman, breaking the law while doing so.

I've enjoyed Lewis's books, but I also noticed this about his unfaltering defense of Aleynikov. In one passage that stuck out to me, Lewis argued that Aleynikov was not guilty of taking anything important as Aleynikov claimed not to have taken any code related to specific strategies, only that code related to infrastructure, which arguably is the most important code that he could have taken. In other passages, Lewis used Aleynikov's defense, that he not only wanted to contribute to open source efforts, but that some of the Goldman Sachs code used open source code, so it should have been okay to take, as if high frequency trading infrastructure code was just floating around in the open source world in the early 2010s.

It wasn't the only issue with the book. Lewis also didn't seem to understand the dynamics of national best bid and offer, and that if a large market order was submitted, it will not be executed at the original nbbo necessarily because of nefarious activity, but because there are not enough bids or offers at the original nbbo to execute the buy or sell for every order at the original nbbo. So much of the book hinges on a misunderstanding of this idea. There is also no discussion of the fact that spreads and liquidity used to be worse prior to electronic market makers. Instead there's this idea that market makers are competing with institutional investors submitting large orders, when really, they are competing with other market markers/liquidity providers, such as how Goldman Sachs e-trading(where Aleynikov left) would have been competing with Teza Technologies (where Aleynikov was invited to). I think that either Brad Katsuyama, who seems to have fed much of the electronic trading related information to Lewis, was misled himself or was possibly intentionally misleading Lewis.

I don't imagine Kaysuyama is that naive, he just had a product to sell.

That product is a differentiated market that makes nbbo latency arb more difficult.

Agreed the big anti-HFT/electronic market making bias is funny since we now have decentralized market makers competing for penny spreads. Versus the alleged "more fair" world we are supposed to yearn for is the pre-RegNMS days of 25cent spreads guaranteed to a guy on the NYSE floor.

Where do people think their cheap/free trading commissions come from (that and PFOF).

Also the idea that large holders of assets should be able to de-risk (or put on risk) without market impact by buying/selling huge lots at the bid/ask is interesting. It's the opposite of defending the little guy. NBBO was put into place to protect small investors more if anything as the first 100 share lot is protected. There is no constitutional right to buy a million dollars of some midcap stock at the ask.

I agree. After reading Flash Boys, I started doubting the credibility of his previous works.

In flash Boys, Lewis asserted:

- Pushing confidential codes to a personal SVN hosting (or sending them to your personal email account) is perfectly fine.

- Deleting .bash_history is a normal practice.

- Also he clearly did not understand how GPL works.

Wes Big Short (or Money Ball) a legit work, or just a fun-to-read story?

I would check this out: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-... (https://archive.li/KDdls) It links to some deeper dives into issues with his other books.

I don’t really understand how this relates to the article. Nowhere does the author suggest that we should be spoon-fed moralisms. Instead, it argues that Lewis’s perspective and approach missed a fundamental part of the story he’s trying to tell. You don’t even need to read the article. It’s right there in the subheading: “Michael Lewis is not interested in how or why people make mistakes”

> The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are.

The purpose of most books (like this book or by a similar author or topic) is to sell books and entertain. The value to most readers is not knowing the truth but to be engaged and entertained. Similar to movies based on real events (which take liberties with happenings and story telling to make the movie interesting and watchable and profitable).

The true purpose of books is to subsidize Big Forestry via inflating sales of printing paper, subsidizing large economies of the pacific northwest and Canada, but no one is ready for that conversation.

Right, but a lot of this is also the purpose of fiction.

I read the book. SBF doesn't come across as a good guy (or a bad guy either). He comes across as a smart/dumbass, who doesn't understand probability and risk beyond the math level: given 51% odds of making the world better or 49% of destroying it, he says repeatedly "I would take the 51% odds every time". That to me, basically explained his entire, dumbass, business plan: just be slightly better at crypto at scale, assuming that's all you need to 'win'. No risk mitigation, no management whatever, because that's boring. Just keep playing until you win.

Now, that's not Evil with a capital "E", it's just dumb; in fact, criminally dumb because being a dumbass with other people's money (even if it turns out 100% of it can be recovered), is still fraud. SBF belongs in jail. Lewis' book, although not satisfying in the end, actually explained the whole FTX shitshow for me.

"I do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad rather than deciding on their own."

The gist I got from reading this "book review" is that the author works in "EA" and did not like Lewis' treatment of "EA" in the book.

It's got some strange comments like where he is telling us how FTX had someone running communications with zero experience in that field, then he quotes some programmer with a Twitter feed as a "finance writer".

Or when he mentions getting the opinion of his "Wall Street lawyer" friend and then seeking counsel from his "homeless friend" on apprently the same issue.

Right, people who are complaining about his whitewashing are failing to see why his books are so successful in the first place. Had he told the story everyone wanted/expected, the book would have been forgotten.

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