To be clear, I’m incapable of understanding Bankman-Fried’s financial machinations and can’t pass judgment on their legality. I say he’s a poor excuse for a human because of his personal qualities, not his business decisions. He’s a guy who has an excellent brain for math. That’s all he is. He’s extraordinarily uneducated and just downright stupid in everything else. Yet he’s never been able to comprehend his limitations. He decided that his gift for math gives him the right to judge what’s good and what’s bad and refashion the world with his money.
Bankman-Fried has no humility, no desire to learn, and no self-awareness. Somebody referred to him in the comments to my previous post as “a financial narcissist”. That’s exactly what he is. A huffy, pouty narcissist who is unable to notice anything beyond his permanently wounded fee-fees.
It’s scary to observe these man-children with pots of money who, instead of just running their social media companies, launching rockets or selling crypto, start meddling in politics, buying elections, and refashioning society to make their extreme sexual and personal dysfunction stand out less.
What lies at fault here is our messed up understanding of intelligence. We don’t see the difference between hardware and software. Bankman-Fried has superior hardware that he got as a fluke of nature or a gift from God. But he never bothered to download any software onto his outstanding hardware. As a result, his brain produced defective results.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Bankman-Fried has superior hardware […] [b]ut he never bothered to download any software onto his outstanding hardware”
I tend to be extremely wary of comparisons between the human brain and computers, as I do not think they fit the reality of human reasoning or the complexity of the human brain’s neural system.
I’ve read only the first two chapters of Michael Lewis’s biography-cum-elegy of SBF. As I understand it, SBF presents several traits found among people on the autistic spectrum as well as others typical of borderline personality disorder. That he is the result of a maladjusted childhood is indubitable, but not all maladjusted children turn out to be pathological narcissists bordering on the psychopathic. That he was exceptionally gifted at mathematics, logic and non-verbal reasoning is, again, beyond doubt, but none of these qualities, in and of itself, makes a man: you can be Einstein and still be a piece of shite and an a**hole as a human being.
What struck me, instead – but that may only be because I am not totally familiar with US culture – is how thoroughly despicably he was treated by his entourage: all the people around him simply used him, in quite the same way, though perhaps not as obliviously, as SBF used them.
One other major take – and very ominous at that – is SBF’s grandiose Saviour persona, with his delusions of solving the world’s problems by throwing money at them. Even the idea of using $9bn of his company’s equity to pay off the Bahamas’ national debt is a decidedly psychopathic trait. He is definitely the result of his parents’ (lack of) upbringing, injected with the usual wishful pieties of Left-wing socialist parents. Somehow, all traits shared by ethnic Jewish activists: the Freedom Riders and other Civil Rights activists, the Gay Liberation Movement, the Radical Feminist Movement, the Weather Underground and the SDS. If you look at it, it won’t escape your notice, same as Jewish Voice for Palestine and other virulent anti-Israel movements like BDS: why are so many American Jewish liberals so dysfunctional?
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…because intelligence has no relation to good parenting?
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The funny thing is that I’m already 2/3 into the book, and I’m not seeing any stories about any money actually being donated anywhere. It’s all plans and projects. These people talk about altruism but start murdering each other for every dollar.
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For example, office workers at Bankman-Fried’s company have an argument about a door and whether it’s good for feng-shui. To satisfy both of these incredible snowflakes, SBF spent a million dollars to create two doors that would be feng-shui-compliant for both of them. Does this sound like people interested in donating money for good causes?
This is only one of the stories. These people talked endlessly about wanting to solve world hunger and help sick kids in Africa while spending outrageous sums on utterly ridiculous things.
They are all liars. And it’s typical leftism that keeps blethering on about solving world problems while wasting money and only making everything worse.
God, I despise these people.
SBF was the second largest donor to Biden’s presidential campaign, by the way.
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The actual beneficent work that SBF did consisted of “getting more pandemic warriors into Congress” and lobbying the US government to create “a global pandemic forecast system”.
I mean. Yeah.
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Contrast with someone like “Mr. Beast” who has a really grating screen presence, no college, made/makes a bunch of money doing incredibly dumb stunts on YT, honestly doesn’t seem all that bright… but has used his weirdly-gotten gains to pay for thousands of people’s prosthetic legs, eye surgeries, cochlear implants… well-digging in Africa, a bunch of that sort of simple, high-impact-for-investment project, stuff that makes a huge difference in actual people’s lives. He seems very much the sort of “look at me, look at me!” person that I can’t stand to be around in real life, but… channels it better than most? Some narcissist tendencies there too, but I’d take his sort over SBF’s any day.
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That’s the thing about pipe dreams: they’re usually attached to infinite sections of pipe.
Happy you liked that turn of phrase, BTW, but have you considered how neoliberalism functions as a foundation for memetic and social diseases?
Change the score boards and it’s the same disease still: what’s the difference between SBF and gambling addicts?
Except with SBF, it’s like 3:30 Ramp Capital on Twitter, every morning it’s CASINO OPEN with the market bell.
SBF gambles with other people’s money.
That’s the difference.
Gambler’s Ruin was supposed to happen to other people, not SBF.
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The SDS … yeah, that checks, knew one of them.
So deeply neurotic there toward the end that I couldn’t get him to come out of his cave of a basement, even after the post-Rona lockdown couture was well on its way out.
Stayed over from a layover, tried to make contact, eventually gave up.
It’s like these people want a perfect world, not some sort of model society that they know is aspirational and would never be fully achievable, but could serve well as the model, and they just lose the plot when they work out how they will never have it.
One morning he woke up dead from what I can only assume was a fatal morning catecholamine surge, still hiding out in the basement.
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On the issue of “Why were so many Jews active in radical movements”, this is straight from the horse’s mouth [Mark Rudd of SDS]: https://www.markrudd.com/indexcd39.html
After reading it, I think I got a better understanding of the issue.
Mark Rudd says: “it occurred to me, like happens to so many other Jewish kids, that God probably doesn’t exist, that He’s a social construct, just like all other gods. In retrospect I realize that I never had the faith very deeply.”
He got the word wrong. It’s not that he didn’t have faith: he didn’t have BELIEF. He did not believe in Israel’s messianic role among the Nations, in G’d’s promises to Israel, in the Mosaic tenets, which cover belief as well as behaviour. But he did have the FAITH. Faith in the salvific role of humans to change the world, faith in the human aspiration to justice, faith in the concept of human equality.
And that’s how you turn some highly intelligent, idealistic, intellectual, nerdy Jewish adolescent who hasn’t got much use for shul into a radical activist ready to sacrifice lives on the way to his dubious mission of transforming the world into the promised land of the socialist dream.
I am Jewish but when I think about things like these I can see why so many goyim have nothing but contempt for us.
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This comment is weirdly synchronistic with Scott Alexander’s current post:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-i-saw-satan-fall-like
Where he’s grappling with the problem of religious goods “progressing” beyond religion into something dysfunctional. He’s a rationalist materialist himself, so he completely fails to get it: the things that work in Judeo-Christian religion do not work outside the context of a relationship with the Judeo-Christian God. To continue being good requires that people continue to prioritize their lives with God at the top– committing their wealth, time, devotion, labor… first to God, then to everything else (thus, cathedrals etc). You need saints and prophets to keep it going, fight entropy and stuff. All social good that comes from the practice of religion, is necessarily downstream from the practice of religion. Try to re-create the social good without the religion, and you simply create a dysfunctional pseudoreligion with self in place of God– narcissism.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C0KWaLeE5H0
🙂
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“extraordinarily uneducated and just downright stupid in everything else”
Galeev once write that the contempt that russian STEM types feel for the study of the humanities leaves them vulnerable to believing all sorts of dump pseudo-science that the more well-rounded immediately see through.
Without reading the book (irony) and just based on what you’ve written and the tiny bit I know about the case (I know it exists…) This seems like the same thing. His lefty parents filled his life with dumb social theories… did they fill it with any art? Any ideas that weren’t pre-digested leftist pap?
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That’s so beautiful, methylethyl!
Radical activists are so invested in their activism that their lives tend to be messy even when not totally dysfunctional.
Instead of fostering a life in which they can focus on personal growth, joy, love, family, hard work and creation, they believe that all those positives can be subsumed in their activism: what are all those things compared to their mission of saving the world?
When their delusion eventually meets reality, as it is bound to unless they are killed first, the feeling of disappointment and emptiness is overwhelming and sometimes so depression-inducing that it may lead to suicide.
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Isn’t that always the problem of wrapping your life around something you don’t want? Like, to build anything worth having, you have to build the thing you do want– otherwise you’re molding yourself to the shape of the enemy you attack, you know? Then what happens if you win? You’re silly putty with a hollow enemy-shaped core and slump into a puddle.
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“… never bothered to download any software …”
Write your own, but there’s a catch: the Entscheidungsproblem awaits.
Wikipedia: “[Alan] Turing reduced the question of the existence of an ‘algorithm’ or ‘general method’ able to solve the Entscheidungsproblem to the question of the existence of a ‘general method’ which decides whether any given Turing machine halts or not …”
When I joked about you having been reduced to lambda calculus, I was actually thinking about this and the conventional model of someone having “broken software”.
Maybe it just stops working and halts, somewhere along the way being a decision the system could not be built to understand.
Ever seen Godard’s “Alphaville”?
Think of the meltdown of Alpha 60.
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