Rationalist literary criticism by SBF, found on the birdsite - eviltoast

original is here, but you aren’t missing any context, that’s the twit.

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespear… but really I 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 that that. When Shakespear wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people 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.

edited to add this seems to be an excerpt from the fawning book the big short/moneyball guy wrote about him that was recently released.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    I’m really interested in this book. Lewis has gotten a lot of flack for (allegedly) not portraying SBF as a scheming monster, but as most of that flack has come from people losing crypto money, I really can’t feel anything but schadenfreude. It would be hilarious if SBF beat the rap, even though he’d be in real danger from unhinged lunatics wanting revenge.

    Here’s a New Yorker piece about his viewpoint: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/michael-lewiss-big-contrarian-bet

    From what I hear about the trial it ain’t going SBF’s way however.

    Edit Molly White is covering the trial: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/ftx-defrauded-its-customers-says

    The defense team asked [a witness] whether he understood that cryptocurrencies were volatile and risky, which he said he did; however, prosecutors later gave him the opportunity to clarify that he believed crypto to be risky because of his tokens’ volatility, not because FTX might disappear with the tokens entirely.

    LMFAO

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      It would be extremely convenient for Sam “16 million dollar penthouse” Bankman-Fried if this whole deal was just an “oopsie, silly me.” I get the schadenfreude angle but this guy totally doesn’t deserve freedom.

      What I’m the most thrilled about, however, is how he has effectively dismantled the rational case for “effective altruism” by showing how mind-bogglingly stupid the idea “earn to give” is. It’s so easy to shut them down now with 3 magic letters: SBF