He's a pretty smart guy.
Which is why it's so bizarre that he expected to get away with blatantly "borrowing" billions of dollars without permission. Even if he didn't lost one penny he would still have gone to prison for many years.
Which is why it's so bizarre that he expected to get away with blatantly "borrowing" billions of dollars without permission. Even if he didn't lost one penny he would still have gone to prison for many years.
People keep saying this. I’ve seen literally no evidence of it. Open to having my mind changed. (Working for Jane Street for three years is insufficient without knowing what he accomplished.)
Yes. Very deeply, yes.
The day we can define it is the day we can create it. Until then, genius and insanity will be indistinguishable until after the fact. (That said, there are clues.)
I suppose you can't; not definitively. I find it very hard to tell whether someone brighter than me is only a little brighter than me, or dramatically brighter than me.
My heuristics are:
* Nobody is dramatically brighter than me; I don't believe in geniuses.
* Bullshit is a giveaway. If I detect bullshit (e.g. "word salad"), then he's not brighter than me.
[Edit] In my experience, barristers/courtroom attorneys tend to be very bright, and also very good with language. Language is "what they do". Word salad doesn't seem to me to be a good strategy, when facing a good lawyer.
Social media has dragged us out of that infancy. But the bias, particularly among the pre-digital generations, remains. Bankman-Fried's word salads played that bias, which generated social proof. That, in turn, played into others' bias towards judging character by social proof. That generated wealth, which played into still others' quick filters.
So he takes the concept of having a paper trail of communications can put people in jail to heart - smart.
He then sets up their instant messaging to auto-delete such that there is literally no paper trail - dumb.
A smarter fraud version would have been to have clean paper trail of communications that were legal & a secondary channel where all the sketchier stuff goes on.
The even smarter version is to not discuss anything illegal in electronic form.
The smartest version being to just not do illegal stuff and run a legal business that makes money.
He should have read far more Matt Levine.
Well, yeah. But he belongs to a social circle that lurves technology; his generation does everything via mobile devices, AND all his buddies are into cryptocurrencies and fintech. They discuss everything electronically.
I wouldn’t say SBF is dumb, just that he was intelligent enough to get a crypto startup out of the ground, then he was sociopathic enough that the business ended up being a giant fraud machine.
He’s not like dumb dumb. It’s that his sociopathic tendencies prevent him of doing or continuing in any serious endeavour without taking supreme advantage of it. He was smart enough to make a business, but since he’s a sociopath he couldn’t deal with the fact that that business had to be reasonably honest, because to him people and money are just tools for him to get what he wants.
Im convinced by the trial and other info he is actually an EA, he just has a radically different understanding of what that means than you or me. For him, killing 500 people to save 500,000 is a no brainier, the same way stealing from millions of customers to save a company that can help tens of millions is just obviously correct.
He doesn’t care because he can’t care. It’s not in his DNA.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=failson#1748...
Really? It seems to me all evidence points to the opposite.
Anything related to executive functions, like like impulse control, irritability, attention problems, mental disorders, personality disorders, and many other things–including bad attitude and too much self confidence–can make smart people act foolishly.
Clearly, it is possible for the same person to be both quite smart and deeply, profoundly stupid.
To use a relatable metaphor, there's a reason D&D splits mental stats into separate components: intelligence, wisdom, charisma and alignment aren't the same! Except in real life there's probably way more variables even than those and they're often correlated or anti-correlated in various ways.
This is the primary reason conversations on HN involving SBF, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Eliezer Yudkowsky etc can be so tedious.
It is certainly something everyone needs to be reminded of. Being (or sounding) smart on one subject doesn't make you smart on others by definition.
As someone who has surfed the Dunning-Kruger wave myself many times, I'm super cautious of looking out for other people doing the same.
It's totally possible for someone who is exceptional in one way (e.g. rich and famous) to be quite pedestrian, boring and mundane otherwise.
Depending on your views you might see Thiel as an exceptionally good tech exec but an exceptionally bad political kingmaker (unleashing forces he regrets & can't control).
But yes, also terribly mundane. Musk for example seems to fall for every midtwit conspiracy and agitprop post on the social media platform he owns, like your random poorly educated uncle.
And I think I’ve identified the cause: lack of continual contact with reality. I’ve yelled on a conference call with a bunch of Honeywell engineers “STOP FUCKING HYPOTHESING AND CHECK THE LOGS!” Smart people are prone to forming their own little bubbles; groups of smart people even moreso. They suffer from a lack of continually having their bubbles popped by abrasive facts, or dumb people who point out the obvious.
I’m having work done on my house, and my contractor is an endless source of simple, “this is how it works” data. I conceive of interesting structures for my wife’s greenhouse, and then he explains why it won’t work in single syllable words.
This is the primary reason conversations on HN involving SBF, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Eliezer Yudkowsky etc can be so tedious
Exactly.
Really smart people sometimes get lost in the structure of narrative and forget to do basic queries. I also learned that you gotta be careful who you criticize even if you are totally right. People won't change their opinion on your statement when the evidence vindicates you.