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Michael Lewis' latest II


Here is another fascinating passage from Lewis' book, GOING INFINITE. In this passage, chapter five, Lewis is telling his story through the eyes of Caroline Ellison. For those of you new to the subject: Ellison was Samuel Bankman-Fried's sort-of love interest, and at this point in our story she had joined his project to create a crypto oriented hedge fund.  (This project evolved into the FTX exchange and an affiliated hedge fund, but we aren't there yet.) 

One more preliminary note: an "EA" is an "effective altruist," a member of a group of usually quite bright people committed to a very long-range sort of utilitarianism which produces some counter-intuitive results. We don't need to get further into it than that.  

Anyway, the passage:

"In late March [2018] she started the job. The situation inside Alameda Research wasn't anything like Sam had led her to expect. He'd recruited twenty or so EAs, most of them in their twenties, all but one without experience trading in financial markets. Most neither knew nor cared about crypto, they had just bought into Sam's argument that it was this insanely inefficient market in which they might use [an efficient] approach to trading to extract billions. They were now all living in Sam's world, and they weren't hiding their unhappiness." 

This is fascinating because it portrays SBF in much the same way that Walter Isaacson, the "biographer of genius," famously portrayed Steve Jobs. Jobs comes off in Isaacson's book as an eccentric genius who had many ideas that were simply off-the-wall. But he also exuded a "reality distortion field." when caught in its grip you could lose contact with how off-the-wall any of it was. In the case of Jobs and Apple, this guru had some positive results. But there were important negatives too -- his life was shorter than it would have been had his reality distortion field not kept him away from effective contemporary medicine. 

Lewis seems to be suggesting that SBF also created a reality-distortion field. At this point, the EAs whom he had recruited still had enough a sense of the unreality of his field so that, even though they were caught, they were perceptive enough to be unhappy about it. 

[The Jobs analogy is my own, not Lewis'.]  

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