Sam Bankman-Fried: A Manufactured Dysfunction

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Clarissa

November 16, 2023

It’s very true that it is important always to hear the other side. I was convinced that nothing would ever persuade me to feel compassion towards Sam Bankman-Fried, a woke billionaire and a fraudster. But Michael Lewis shares some anecdotes about Bankman-Fried’s childhood in his book Going Infinite, and it becomes clear that the man’s psychological dysfunction was carefully manufactured by his far-left hippie professor parents.

One story shows how Bankman-Fried’s parents, who were too busy to parent, convinced the poor boy that the reason why he was deprived of birthday celebrations, family outings, and friends was because he didn’t want them. Another anecdote features an essay written by a 12-year-old Bankman-Fried where the miserable kid tries to argue away his disgust with abortion to please his woke mommy. At the age of 12, an opinion about abortion doesn’t have much to do with abortion per se. It’s much more about the child’s right to exist outside of the mom’s will. In his essay, a pre-teen Bankman-Fried arrives at a conclusion that even though abortion is murder, it should be ok to commit that murder if it’s convenient to the mother. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out what the boy was actually trying to say and who was the addressee of his essay.

Of course, Bankman-Fried is completely responsible for his actions as an adult. He’s a piece of shit human, and that’s 100% on him. But I can’t avoid feeling a stab of pity for a boy who, at the age of six, was begging his mother to give him permission to enjoy an amusement park and at 12 was still begging for permission to enjoy his own life.

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2 responses to “Sam Bankman-Fried: A Manufactured Dysfunction”

mitchellporter

November 16, 2023

I think one has to assume that anyone who can lead anything in a treacherous environment like big business, big finance, or national and international politics, has a carnivorous side to their personality, regardless of their public persona.

I haven’t read Lewis’s book and have no particular opinion about Bankman-Fried’s upbringing. I do think he combined an earnest belief in the utilitarian utopianism of effective altruism, with the calculating trickster personality of someone capable of not just working in finance, but of playing the frontman role of unworldly boy wonder; a role that his backers were only too willing to promote when he was rising, but which became a liability once he was in court. And maybe that combination of traits does derive directly from the circumstances of his upbringing.

I do strongly suspect that his crimes were neither as bad nor as unique as they have been made out to be. I assume that the financial world is riddled with all kinds of things that might count as immoral or illegal, but which are hidden away and/or excused by the prevailing culture. And the post-bankruptcy management of his company has actually managed to recover a lot of what was allegedly lost. A lot of things were just hidden in disorganized undocumented accounting. As with Trump, the trial of Bankman-Fried strikes me as highly political, maybe even a kind of intra-elite politics that is arcane to outsiders.

This essay on “the tragedy of SBF”, by a brilliant computer scientist who is also something of a culture hero in the rationalist circles that SBF sponsored, might interest you.

The Tragedy of SBF

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Post Alley Crackpot

November 17, 2023

It’s narcissism with a financial focus.

SBF didn’t get what he needed from his family except lessons involving score boards, so how did he structure his life?

People don’t really matter to those afflicted, they’re usually used instrumentally in ways that enhance the score boards or to provide dopamine-enhancing ego stimulants to encourage risk taking to play more score board games.

Carl Jung was right about these people in the American context when he wrote about them in 1912.

I would love to tell you how rare this malady is, except that would be outright lying, as it is so commonplace across social strata as to be utterly banal.

And so in polite society it rarely gets a glance, let alone a mention.

If you really want to cover the social diseases of neoliberalism, financially-focused narcissism should be near the top of the list.

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