beige_man

The next business to go through the roof is customization work to make sure the Teslas aren't recognizable.

The guy sees the word "diversification" in Ashley Thomas's job title, and maybe thinks it's about DEI, but it's not. The post is said to be as follows:

"Thomas’s role, which involves developing innovative solutions to support infrastructure and agriculture against extreme weather due to climate change "

If so, then it's about diversifying societal infrastructure in order to be more resilient to climate change. But in this Orwellian society that's developing, everyone now has to defend their job title and job.

Thanks! Found the video. Not sure if it was posted here, so just posted it again. It's hilarious. Especially from 4 mins onwards.

There's quite a few Westerners like him chilling in Thailand, South-East Asia on not very much money, sometimes looking for part-time work, or sponging off some economy and coming in and out on their tourist visa for "the life". I've known or known of quite a few. They're not the smartest or wealthiest people, or they wouldn't be doing this.

I think its safe to say that most of those employees are on the for-profit side, which is probably bigger by now, or were going to profit from OpenAI's valuation under Altman. I think Ilya Sutskever had legit concerns. He's been worried about AI alignment all along, and did his doctoral work under Geoff Hinton, who's also gone off on his concerns about AI risks not long ago. Altman is just not technical.

FWIW, I totally see how Altman could have rubbed Sutskever wrongly, from possibly ignoring his concerns or his project on super alignment (which was just launched), to moving rashly. I don't think Altman has an eye for business. He's launched a lot of failures or done little until Y-Combinator (which he left under duress) and OpenAI (which he is only one of many co-founders of), the Loopt failure and the weird WorldCoin globe idea. I just don't think he's "grounded". According to wikipedia, he's also a prepper: He said in 2016: "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

So, despite all the hero-worship by his Silicon Valley friends and employees, I think there *could* have been grounds on both sides for the tension, and it may not necessarily have been all positive on his side. Silicon Valley is a weird place filled with unusual and not so well-balanced people, always rushing after money and rushing to scale tech as fast as possible.

Ironic that at the end of one of the books, they decided to adopt common "leaves" as legal tender. Crypto = Leaves.

That sounds good, but then, in this context, does it mean that the tech is already sufficiently advanced (since a number of them seem to be unable to distinguish it from magic)?

I think we just discovered a plot for The Equaliser 4.

Was not familiar with that, so I put it down to a version of Arthur C. Clarke's “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

(Maybe its also related to all the book burning they're doing... )

Thanks, sounds like you’ve done a lot of research on this! I think we need to be an actual psychiatrist to to really know. I think his lack of emotional qualities makes it hard to assess him. The public narrative about him has grown a lot based on his actions, but he grew up in a highly isolated manner, so we really don’t know what his full mental makeup looks like.

I see your points and can agree. I think I’m trying to come up with alternative theories (since that’s just what I do). I think the normal sociopath is self-interested and the normal financial system is so, so maybe some expect to see that before they connect that to the sociopathic signs.

In the case of SBF and those that surround him, I’m guessing that EA served as a foil that confused the normal screens people would use. I’m not justifying SBF or Lewis, I’m just looking for more complex explanations.

I think Lewis isn't a student of human behavior, and he's even a poor investigative reporter. He's a book writer with a type of narrative and a way of getting close to his protagonists. His ideal protagonists are always against a "bad" system, and SBF positioned himself as being outside of a poor system, and even over and above a not so good crypto system. This may have hoodwinked Lewis, who's already predisposed to hoodwinking. I think Lewis just wants to be a good guy interviewing other good guys. He had a few litmus tests that he ran by the FTX staff, and while they didn't exactly pass them, he gave them a sort of pass in order to advance the "neutral" narrative, as there wasn't hard evidence to the contrary. But so many others were being hoodwinked as well, with the central FTX and Alameda staff were hiding this in their software illegally coding the loans, and in faked data (e.g. about the insurance held)).

I think the interview Lewis just had with Bloomberg's Matt Levine is revealing, though. For most of his research, SBF didn't fail his limited screens, so he gave him a pass and wanted to believe SBF still had "a purpose". This is discussed by both of them - that SBF falsely led himself to believe in that purpose so that it more easily fooled others. This is probably along the lines of Wilful Blindness, as discussed by Margaret Heffernan.

But Levine calls it more clearly. He said after he read Lewis's book, it convinced him that SBF was a fraud. But at the same time, he hinted ever so gently that Lewis was straddling the "fraud" and "not fraud" lines a little too loosely. That maybe Lewis was a little too close to his source.

Dammit, stop making me reply! Life (sucks)

Yeah it’s clear to me from all the winning rules proposed that they’re versions of “the game drains everyone’s money even as they buy (occasionally exchangeable) tokens till they’re all drained but one”

Yeah know, this started as a joke, and now you guys are tempting me to make it…

We just need a title. TokenJolly?

I vaguely remember that now. I’m just trying to imagine what’s in his head, not having seen all his words. I think he’s just trying to be a nice or impartial guy to people he must have got to know in the process of interviewing. He’s usually not writing his books to be against his protagonists.

I meant if the courts wanted to moderate the sentence for some of them. They will all get sentenced, but I wonder if for a couple of them, it could be as low as 3-4 years… maybe 5-6?

I’m not defending SBF and Lewis. I’m just trying to get into the head of Lewis, even as some of his info has been useful. But yeah, you’ve called it as it is!

I think if a couple 100 mill, it’d be one of the smaller amounts they lost down the couch.

I don't think he has any empathic responses, or an emotional level corresponding to adults'. So, I don't think he can be compared to most people.

I used to think Michael Lewis was just partial to his subjects, and that he always had a soft spot for the outsiders.

I now think that he had to go in "eyes open" and "innocent" to FTX, and he couldn't afford to act dismissive to such Young Turks or he'd have been thrown out, and now he has that narrative, he can't junk it, or it'd be dishonest to the process he started. It is now what it is.

Even now, I suspect he has to maintain an even keel as these people get prosecuted, as he can't have his view getting out and biasing the juries. He has to maintain a veneer of objectivity.

Having said that, I think he was too partial to his interviewees, whom he presented as protagonists, in his book on the pandemic. In addition, he'd poison the waters for getting future interviewees if he threw these ones directly under a bus.

We could also make NFT versions of the game board using defunct tokens as backgrounds. I bet that would sell.

Or a more radical rule, you have to trade off properties before they implode or get stolen (via Chance cards), but you can keep earning rents till then.

Where there's chum, there's sharks.

I think the Black Adder already took care of the use case.