alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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fragmede • today at 4:41 AM
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.
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!)