"I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but I really shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable." [Going Infinite, p29]

Now I get that Shakespeare doesn't appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste, but to judge his work on probability when the work itself is right there to judge on its own merits is like the joke about an economist who sees a hundred dollar bill on the street and says, "If that were a real bill, someone would already have picked it up."

He also dismisses the "plot twist" in Much Ado About Nothing (when Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio) as "illogical" and the province of characters who are "one-dimensional and unrealistic" because "I mean, come on—kill someone because ... his fiancée is cheating on him?" As if no actual human being had ever killed out of jealousy, when it's usually one of the main motives for murder. It's like he's visiting from another planet or something.

I don't mean to lower the tone, but honestly - what an absolute bell-end!

He's visiting from planet Adderall. If you have $26 in your pocket then you're a tweaker but make it $26B and you're an eccentric genius.

Blame the "mainstream media" all you want but as long as we refuse (for good reason) to give audit power to journalists, mainstream or specialist, you'll keep reading positive pieces about frauds if they stay hidden purposefully.

I'm not sure why you would have wanted to NYT to destroy every company it interviews just for the sake of it. Wouldnt they need proof ? And how do you get them, when they're hidden by a conspiracy ?

Plus, the police in the US, Hong Kong and the Bahamas found nothing and waited for Coindesk to publish a leak by CZ, a competitor, to start looking...

I say that because at the peak of the crypto fever I couldnt distinguish SBF from, say, the CEO of Kraken, and I suspect it's hindsight convincing you something could have been done.

The FT did an impressive investigation of Wirecard, for example. There is a difference between destroying a company and making a couple of common sense questions instead of parroting whatever the interviewee wants. Some basic journalistic practices. It is really not so much to ask.

EDIT: interviewer/interviewee

Again you re asking someth that had been done several times: many people did dig a bit deeper and couldnt find the Alameda hole or the real balance sheets, or the parents siphoning millions and all that stuff that took even time for prosecutors to find.

The role of the media isnt to uncover fraud I think, it's to give you a chance to expose one if you know one. If nobody was willing to talk, what s a journo gonna do?

Carreyrou, a personal hero, had tons of witnesses coming to him for instance.

You don't become a media darling. get billions in investment, and work tirelessly for the greater agenda, by accident.

Someone was in charge of him. Now to him, that might have looked like a range of advisors due to his overinflated ego and lack of intelligence to figure out that he is actually being tightly controlled. In some way he was the perfect puppet, if only he had been a little less of a criminal...

One thing he was used for is to destroy Luna - and I am 100% sure that wasn't his idea either, that attack was extremely sophisticated and done by someone very intelligent. ie, not SBF. But they used FTX and SBF to pull it off.

FTX always seemed like it was set up to control and if necessary destroy crypto.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/bankman-fried-used-customer-fu...

Here's an interview he gave a few months before the FTX collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6nAxiym9oc

Now Tether on the other hand.. I would not be surprised if that has a lot to do with it.

Well, what's the difference between an unhinged, drug-addled loony and an eccentric visionary genius?

The difference is having $26 billion.

Why not call him out on what seems like bullshit? That bullshit has convinced "informed" tech investors like Softbank and Sequoia Capital. And elsewhere at the same time, Andreessen Horowitz is investing $450 million in ape jpegs.

This is absolutely gourmet, Grade A, top quality wagyu bullshit.

Not to mention that a big part of investing in start ups is just ape jpegs with extra steps (i.e. "greater fool" theory).

>>Bankman-Fried’s error was an extreme hubris that led him to bite bullets he never should have bitten. He famously told economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that if faced with a game where “51 percent [of the time], you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears,” he’d keep playing the game continually.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23500014/effective-altrui...

One big factor is who your parents are. SBF coming from an upper-class background, that tilts the scales towards eccentric genius. After all, we know that the children of these families are all extremely special.

-- Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), Speed, 1994

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...

https://twitter.com/Alfred_Lin/status/1720240388311810382

Is he just completely incapable of reading the room, or is it a lvl 10 cynical FU?

SBF has an impeccable pedigree, so the thought that he was a Michael Fenne type was never even considered. Why would he lie, when he could live an honest life and be fabulously rich and comfortable (Jane St, wealthy connected parents, etc)

It is not brought up too often, that often one of the most important differences between them and the viewer of mainstream media is, that this person is vastly more ruthless with regards to ethics.

> Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.

> Obviously there’s still some sense where he benefited from a privileged upbringing or whatever, but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made.