Conversation

Been sleeping on this thought. I’m surprised by how much people are willing to indulge SBF’s weird EA ideology/funky math ideas as some sort of meaningful mitigating factor that moves him from scammer bucket to good/well-intentioned. To me it puts him into the terrorist bucket.
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When fedayeen do suicide bombings you don’t say “oh look, this is how this decision works out by the non-Kelly-criterion logic of ISIS” You don’t look at the legitimacy of the actions within the terrorist’s moral calculus. You apply your own.
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Building on this thought, EA is strongly adjacent not just to one but *two* of the major technologies of the day: crypto and AI, and it brings a similar strain of religious thinking to each.
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Within the EA sphere of influence (which is a small but non-trivial subset of each), the two technologies are less like libertarian vs. communist, and more like sunni vs. shia. Or protestant vs. catholic. Yesterday, I heard FTXgate described as the "crypto 9/11"...
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Exactly. Lots of super earnest hair splitters. Also most "tech" are stable pieces of software with a userbase. Crypto economics are like real estate. Equilibrium = small towns w/ dedicated boosters. Generative AI works like cooking recipes, lots of natural forking.
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