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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

What about this story seems cinematic to you? This is a Ponzi scheme participant who didn't even deny being a Ponzi scheme participant in interviews.

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It's like that scene in The Big Short: "I don't get it, why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing - they're bragging".

Right. But (1) The Big Short was not a very good movie, and (2) it was about the collapse of the entire housing market. This is about the collapse of an abstract metaPonzi scheme.

The Big Short and Boiler room are incredible movies. The only real competition is Wolf of Wall Street, which goes too deep into the debauched party lifestyle at the expense of the more interesting financial story, and Margin Call which has the opposite problem since it’s completely inaccessible to most people.

I quite liked Margin Call.

It's an amazing movie and for a good reason. It explains the complexities involved in the 2008 market crash using simple and humorous analogies making the problem comprehensible.

It's good on simple and humorous analogies and bad on explanation (and plotting).

I think the connections with the Effective Altruism community would make for a really amazing think-piece on conflicting ethics, circuitous reasoning, and moral rationalization.

I don't understand it. I haven't ever done a deep dive on EA, but at first blush it seems like such a benign, banal idea: direct charity money effectively and pragmatically. Sure! How does it end up so weird and broken?

How does it end up so weird and broken?

Rationalists, basically. It sound thoroughly glib but is the actual answer.

You get the usual brainiacs who integrate over the total happiness of imaginary future humanity (trillions of generations colonizing the galaxy) and decide that safeguarding that future justifies doing basically anything in the present day.

Yeah, I didn't dig into EA that much after asking, but then I read the insane Sequoia-commissioned Bankman-Fried piece and it clicked immediately after the part about how William McCaskill convinced Bankman-Fried to go work for Jane Street so he could "earn to give". Oh. You can justify anything that way! You could murder hobos, if it jazzed you up for really hardcore day of trading or whatever.

I get it. Like utilitarianism itself, it makes a lot of sense in the small and like zero sense at all generalized.

Boiler Room is a movie, you can make an interesting movie about anything

Do you need to see it twice, and the second time without Vin Diesel? It wasn't that good of a movie to begin with.

Sequoia already deleted the fluff piece they put out about SBF so they’re clearly embarrassed / afraid of legal fall out. And sequoia being embarrassed doesn’t seem interesting to you? And this is just one of the VCs putting crazy money into a scam. This plus the Bahamas coed dorm and the political ties is already enough for a 2 season Netflix series.

No, in fact, I do not think Sequoia disavowing an investment is especially cinematic.

Oh, I'm sure there's a good story there.

Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547102

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