Tbf he didn’t just scam EA people, he scammed all the rest of the FTX
customers and VC/investors. That he became the face of EA and hyped up
as some 5D chess-playing genius (League is the inferior Moba btw), and
his close ties to MacAskill, now that’s funny. He was the chosen one..
🥲
All this stuff about FTX is a little over my head, or maybe I’m just
not following it closely enough to understand what it has to do with the
usual sneer club targets. but i’m glad everyone is having fun
Now if only we could the UK horrorshow also involved, then he and cstross could start dating for the worst team up ever ;). Move over Dark Enlightenment, the Dark Puppy Predictors are here, Apollo gave them the gift of prophecy as a joke.
They're rationalist community members. One of them apparently has a Tumblr that's a HPMOR reference. I'm not sure "scammed" is right (though I haven't been following super closely). It didn't sound to me like the FTX guy ran off with a pile of money, I think he's broke too. So it's more like they're all morons than some of them being rubes.
Scammed seems like the right word here.
As best we can tell, SBF took customer money from FTX and gave it to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, so that it could take huge positions out on crypto. Alameda Research ended up losing a ton of money and hiding that fact by packing their balance sheet full of FTX’s shitcoin FTT. Eventually Binance caught on to this fact and called them out on it, collapsing the whole thing. On the whole it seems like SBF took like $10B worth of customer assets, gave it to his hedge fund, and then lost it on leveraged bets. That’s fraud.
Yeah, SBF is broke now, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t dupe a lot of people for a long time. Ponzi scheme runners also end up broke when they eventually run out of new victims, it’s still a scam though. Getting away with it permanently isn’t a prerequisite.
As best I can tell, EA is just a post hoc rationale to explain why being (or trying to be) rich is Good Actually. Since SBF was rich, even though it was fundamentally fraudulent, it must have been Good since he also said the magic words.
It seems a lot like prosperity gospel in that way. The truth about how you made money and whether or not you adhered to the professed tenants of your belief system don’t matter as long as you’re rich and you perform the appropriate public rituals. It’s all style over substance, as long as you’re rich.
So it started off from two directions, one was the givewell type angle where they tried to be utilitarian about charity, and maximise the financial benefit to the recipients of their charity. That led to the famous mosquito net campaign. The utilitarian angle comes across as misguided to many people but they mean well, and are actually putting their money to helping people, right now. The other angle is from the rationalist community themselves, which is where the effective altruism forum comes from. They on the other hand believe instead of maximising your impact now you should maximise the wellbeing of the trillions of potential future people, and therefore the best way to do that is be very rich and funnel your money into your hobbies (sorry “ai research”). Unfortunately the latter won out in the end and took over the former
Because they secretly (or [not so secretly](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ysnzvh/writing_on_the_wall_recently_deleted_essay_on_ftx/iw1yyzp/)) think it was worth it.
> if this is a killing blow for Crypto
Ow you sweet summer child. [You cannot kill that which does not live.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnipGV5W0AYDn7R?format=jpg&name=small)
(Crypto has been declared dead so many times after big scams happen that I now assume it will not really die due to that. EA otoh)
Lol, [this song sometimes pops into my head](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeqW3uG-rbQ)
Wtf, watched 2 songs from lovecraft, moldbug clips pop up in my mentions. After quite a while of the algorithm not serving me constant fash type content, it is now back to doing it. (youtube trying to pivot to more tiktok type content really did a number on my recommendations).
Tbf he didn’t just scam EA people, he scammed all the rest of the FTX customers and VC/investors. That he became the face of EA and hyped up as some 5D chess-playing genius (League is the inferior Moba btw), and his close ties to MacAskill, now that’s funny. He was the chosen one.. 🥲
All this stuff about FTX is a little over my head, or maybe I’m just not following it closely enough to understand what it has to do with the usual sneer club targets. but i’m glad everyone is having fun