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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

SBF has 2 options:

1: Admit to himself that he was incompetent, stupid and greedy. Admit he wasted a huge opportunity. Admit he may well spend the rest of his life in jail. Admit others tried to stop/warn him and he ignored them. Accept that the buck ultimately stops with him. Accept that almost everyone now has to testify against him.

2: Keep pretending nothing happened and everything was overblown and pretend people will eventually realise this despite all evidence and logic.

I see a surprising number of people pick option 2 in this case. And it often works: people get bailed out. Everyone loves an underdog. I don't think it will happen for SBF. But it's a weird mix of flawed and brazen logic and group and individual Psychology and politics...

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Narcissists are incapable of picking #1. Between these 2 choices they are only able to pick #2.

Nepotism and "failing upwards" are so widespread that a reasonable person could easily pick #2 even when it is not anywhere near the right answer.

The fact that a person can spend a life in jail without having physically hurt another person is grotesque, though his case is obviously not the most egregious.

Enh… I don’t think I agree. Financial fraud can do serious harm.

I’m also not sure why there’s a sense that the crime has to be violent to deserve such a sentence. Imagine if I methodically went house to house, ensuring everyone was safely out of it, and then liquidated the house until there was naught but a hole. And I did that thousands and thousands of times.

It depends on how you view prison.

Is a life sentence about punishing people for causing harm? Or is it about preventing future harm?

Why not both?

I actually think the opposite: people commit huge frauds, stealing money that could have saved 100s or 1000s of lives, and then get suspended sentences.

Ironically for SBF, Effective Altruism itself equates such actions with murder (or at least manslaughter). And his actions were culpable too. This was not an accident or a misunderstanding or human error or bad luck. He stole (and squandered) billions.

Consider the alternative. In an environment where prosecution can merely inconvenience the perpetrator, every action is just the basic math of “gain - (penalty times chance of getting caught)”.

We already see that calculus in many corporate wrongdoings. It is not beneficial for the rule of law.

I'm not sure whether I would call crushing fines necessarily less of an inconvenience than jail?

That is a false dilemma between 'a life in jail' and 'merely inconvenience'. For non-violent but severe crimes, single-digit years in jail seems to me as adequate punishment. Severe enough to blow away rational calculation, but not life-destroying.

Some of the people he has hurt financially will no longer be able to cover medical expenses or rent. It'd be unsurprising if some number of people he impacted commit suicide over losing their life savings.

He has physically hurt people. There will undoubtedly be a body count which can directly be associated to SBF's actions.

Enough money is worth a life. Eg when building high way safety features the engineers typically do some cost-benefit analysis that assumes a life is worth about something like 6 million USD (in the US).

Sorry, but that is a guideline not a fact. That is something we use to decide when we stop engineering something. If it was literally true then I should be able to just buy a human life or avoid a murder sentence with a fine.

Morally, hurting people is categorically worse than stealing money.

> Morally, hurting people is categorically worse than stealing money.

That's also not a fact. It's just something people sometimes agree on. But it's not always a useful crutch.

See the other replies like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34789096 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34788866 They explain what I was trying to express better.

Regarding number 1 - in many countries, you still can! It used to be in the US you could too no problem, for both. Doesn't take going back very far in almost any country for it to be true.

Regarding number 2 - what happens when the money you steal was necessary for someone to survive, or causes such disruption and heartache to enough people, it adds up to more than if someone died?

Right now, things are abstracted enough, we just can't see the actual impact of these large frauds. But it's not uncommon for someone to commit suicide, marriages to end in divorce, kids to be severely impacted (sorry, no College fund for you anymore!), etc.

> Morally, hurting people is categorically worse than stealing money.

I Would rather be a victim of violence whose effects disappears after week (i.e. no long-term effects) than victim of theft of money equal to my yearly income.

For most people, money is quite literally their time, as they have to spend their time working for it. And since your life consists of nothing but time, time is just partial life.

He have made lots of people losing years of their life. It’s fair for him to lose his.

Just because they don't directly wield a knife, hammer, or gun and personally extract blood does NOT mean that insufficient damage is done.

A number of the victims of Madoff's fraud committed suicide. Sure, Madoff didn't pull the trigger.

But he sure as hell enticed them to put their life savings with him, and when they were retired, had no real prospects of any new income, and were suddenly destitute with no hope of recovery, Madoff sure put them in that utterly hopeless situation, with the same end result as if he had pulled the trigger.

As they say: "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.".

Many people are relieved and rightly so, that Madoff spent the remainder of is days and died in prison.

Same for SBF.

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