I get your point, but that was the exact logic of Effective Altruism and Sam Altman is now jailed for the Largest Fraud of All Time. It's a slippery slope.

Sam Bankman-Fried. And I think he’s a bit of a special case, others do not need to be worried they’ll succumb to multi billion dollar fraud schemes if they try to earn-to-give.

I'm not defending SBF, but I think you may not be completely taking into account how strong the pressures are on someone like that. I'm pretty sure he didn't set out to commit a multi-billion dollar fraud, he was sucked into it as a consequence of the expectations on him and so forth. My point here is just that this is a symptom of a societal problem, and SBF is just a well-positioned scapegoat.

SBF was really unusual in that he claimed to be a pure expected-utility maximiser. He admitted that he would take 51% coin-flips forever on Conversations with Tyler in March 2022, long before everything blew up:

> COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what's the chance we're left with anything? Don't I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

> BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That's the other option.

I'm not saying the pressures are absent, but they are hopefully vastly less compelling for any normal person with a more standard view of risk and utility. ("Sure, I'll just cover up this little bit of fraud, because that's got a better than 50% chance of success" is a course of action SBF all but said he would take, months in advance!)

If you have a billion dollars to give me, I'm pretty sure I can manage to not to use them for outright crypto fraud. You'd have to give me a billion dollars to be sure, but I promise really hard.

Freudian slip?

If you’re only make on average 500k/year after 10y — you’re not really in the game at all

there are a lot of quants who aren't at T1 firms or in the hottest seats. plenty make less than this. obviously if you are top of class and getting headhunted by XTX, your offers will be much bigger than $500k ... but it's kind of obnoxious to claim that QRs making less than this aren't even players

The term "player" tends to imply something more than just someone employed in a field. I don't support all this insane inequality, but the other commenter is not wrong on the relative value assessment.

Feel free to do more accurate math! I don't think you'd be doing $500k right out of college either, so it was intended to be a rough average. The person I know I'm finance is doing well over $1,000,000/yr, but I have no idea how average that is.