I never paid a single moment of attention to FTX or Sam Bankman-Fraud when they were riding high, partly because I don’t understand the whole crypto world, and partly because of my growing and well-founded contempt for the presumptions of Silicon Valley. I can’t figure out if Bitcoin and other blockchain-based products are really a potential rival currency to the world’s unstable fiat money system, or merely a high tech version of the South Sea Bubble. I’m trying to keep an open mind, but gold still seems like a better backup than Bitcoin.
In any case, Michael Lewis’s new book about Bankman-Fried and his FTX debacle, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, includes this remarkable quotation from the boy genius with the chia-pet hair and smelly wardrobe:
“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 people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upward of half 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.”
“The failings of Shakespeare.” What are the odds that such a clueless clown could fleece billions of dollars from credulous tech bros? Actually, pretty high, given that this kind of self-assumed genius is typical of our would-be tech overlords (and censors). If I had read a sentence like that before the thing blew up, I would have instantly shorted FTX, knowing the inevitable outcome of the story. Never mind Shakespeare’s Bayesian priors: I expect SBF’s Bayesian posterior will come in for attention after his trial.
Let’s not forget, by the way, that Bankman-Fried, and his Stanford Law professor parents, are deep leftists, who believed their kind of self-described “effective altruism” was so much smarter than, say, the Ford Foundation, because people like the Bankman-Frieds are so much smarter and better than the rest of us.
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