Here's a better journo calling out Lewis' shameless SBF peepeeriding
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-going-infinite-book-michael-lewis/675609
Archived in case of paywall:
https://archive.is/v38jt
!r-slurs and !bookworms I'll tag both because this book is bad enough to get ridiculed by both.
Choice Lewis Apologia
>Sam dindu nuffin!! He was just a wittle boy who was just misunderstood. All the evil Wall St bros just didn't let him win.
>They didn't have any polycule you guys. They just lived in close quarters.
>If FTX's assets were properly assessed, we would all find the missing amounts. I don't think any of them would ever lie.
>SBFs parents are just big mama and papa taking care of their wittle boy
>SBF is a super savant bro. You just don't get it. He fidgets with board games and plays Vidya during press conferences, wears cargo shorts and flip flops and wears a wrinkly suit when he meets big DC people. He's so humble!!
>When asked whether he'll go to Vegas, he says 60%. OMG! Did you see the nuance? He just sees the world in an absolute quantifiable way!! Woah!!
>"I don't feel anything. Emotions are a hindrance." Woah Sam is so intelligent. (I wonder how emotionless he would be if I broke his arm)
>Effective Altruism totally works bro. You just don't get it. Consider a doctor in Zambia working against malaria. He can only spend 10 months there because he has family to feed. Let's say there are 50 doctors like him. So in total they can spend 500 hours to fight malaria in Zambia. However if I become an billionaire by defrauding investors I can hire doctors who can spend 501 hour there. Therefore it is ethical for me to become a billionaire. Lewis says, no cap, it sounds good in theory.
Fricking BIPOC.
And many more.
Worst book of 2023 by far.
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At the end of the day, the most insightful work on SBF, FTX, and ethical altruism as a whole is the "pinning the weasel" pasta. You don't need anything more than that.
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I was so disappointed about this because I was really hoping for a Liar's Poker style blow-the-doors off exposé. Like goddarn, imagine if Lewis had gained SBF's trust promising to write a peepeesucking hagiography, and then he'd turned around and shanked him good and hard. No subjects would ever trust Lewis again, but for real the dude is not getting any younger. This could have been a career- and era-defining hitpiece of a book.
What a goddarned waste.
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Gotta respect sitting to his guns tho, the popular path was so very obvious but he refused to buckle
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Didn't he start writing it before the blow up and was just like frick it I already drank the koolaid and like the kid, and I don't get this crypto stuff but it sounds exciting and already wrote half the book so why virtue signal now
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I've only listened to interviews but I think he reckons he already has enough stuff to convey that SBF took silly risks and didn't care about compliance, he just couldn't be arsed to rewrite the book with a moral valence
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I respect that
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Yeah that is what happened. Hes still dumb af for buying into him tho
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Well, I already wrote 350 pages about a bold iconoclastic genius changing the world, and editing and rewrites are annoying.
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SBF was clearly willing to talk to anyone and everyone about every little thing he could and it was obvious he was lying about everything.
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I saw that piece of shit movie Find Big Shorty which I guess was based on his book and no wonder he got it all wrong that movie stunk. Placed on the blame on the cartoonishly evil stock Wall St characters instead of the real people to blame which is the poor
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Just the latest in a series of rationalist Ls
They they wonder why their philosophy isn't very popular
I vaguely like rationalists, but goddarn
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I vaguely like you too sirpingsalot
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I read it and I thought the picture it painted of SBF was strikingly negative. He comes off as a low-functioning menace who cannot assess risk and who harms every person in his life. Over and over, it shares stories of SBF being a complete dumbfrick, and the EA stuff gets derided as sci-fi stories which help nobody at all.
So like a lot of readers, I was baffled when Lewis suddenly began advancing Sam's obviously false defense at the end. He talks about doing envelope math and finding all the money is still there, which doesn't make any sense because there were no real books and the money wasn't there. And then Lewis kept doing it after the book came out, and now after the trial. A big
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My understanding is that the books do show the money is there. Unfortunately for those FTX owes money to, it was in the form of its own crypto stabe coin which of course was completely illiquid. It's price would never survive long enough to offload it for value. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of finance would know the situation for what it is. Why Lewis is selling throwing his credibility away for SBF could be its own investigative book at this point.
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Wait, do you really?
Can I just have a couple?
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I think Lewis on some level sees SBF as equivalent to his bosses in Liars Poker or the guys who got rich in The Big Short, with the only difference being that SBF didn't pull it off. I think I broadly agree with this except the conclusion should be to condemn all three, not idolise SBF as a paragon of rational action.
Lewis frequently talks about SBF doing funny bets at Jane St or that time early in FTX where they misplaced a few mil and it eventually came back as examples of SBF taking risks which were frowned upon but +EV so correct to pursue, and again the correct answer is simply to uphold the taboo.
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If you haven't, you should read Matt Levine's pieces about why all of SBF's Jane Street bets were rslurred.
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Money stuff is awesome
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ft alphaville for similar vibes
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I don't think that one is free entertainment? I read FT articles sometimes but no way I'm ponying up for a sub
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You just need an account for the blogs, no subscription
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Will also say their trial account period was fricked up, years ago I'd cancel the payment and get at least a year before they restricted the account
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Blessed FT scam coins
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The part where Lewis eats up SBF pretending not to know how to wear a suit is so fricking dumb.
Then he has a point about Sam not tying dress shoes. R-slur never noticed SBF wearing sneakers which he does? Peak 2023 journ*lism
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Like having your mom call you a genius cuz you know how to program
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Michael Lewis loves his neurodivergents
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So I take it whenever lewis sarcastically repeated back something SBF said, you took that as full throated agreement rather than a subtle attack on him, and decided you didn't like the book based off that?
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He's literally doing interviews defending SBF I dont think OP misinterpreted at all
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Eh, hasn't been very long since Lewis's daughter died in that accident.
I'll give him a pass on this one.
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He rolled out her corpse to promote the book in his 60 minutes "interview."
It was so off-putting I am never reading anything that fricker writes again.
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Check out https://scottaaronson.blog?p=7605 though.
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I mean, I'm a mentally handicapped moron who spends my time posting on this terrible board and I've known that cryptocurrency was a scam since at least 2017 because magic internet money that always increases in value isn't a real thing that can exist. Is this MIT guy somehow more rslurred than me? Is he used to weird theoretical maths where uncountable infinities pop up all the time?
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It's good that central banks have instead enforced magic internet money that always decreases in value!
!nooticers
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This is the real economics pill.
All money is fricking imaginary. The only things in this world that have actual tangible value are guns and bullets.
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Goobments specifically make their money depreciate over time, so that you aren't tempted to "invest" into it by buying and hodling. 🤔🤔🤔
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This is why I only use currencies that I print myself, so that nobody can mess with them.
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How about food, dingus? You probably don't want to eat a bullet...
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People with guns shoot people with food
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I haven't trusted crypto since drug lords stopped backing bitcoin with cocaine
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Other people definitely noticed, but the right politician and journ*list palms were sufficiently greased that made too much noticing less profitable for them. Throw the right buzzwords out and the rest of the
that like to larp as part of the elite crowd ran to fall inline.
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Rationalists are all fricking r-slurred.
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I couldn't wrap my head around NFTs. I still can't.
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Its like trading certificates of authenticity for thise spock dinner plates you bought in the 90s
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Only the certs? No plates change hands?!? What would McCoy say!
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What a trip, so apparently ea people literally bought castles and this Scott guys is actually claiming that was more cost effective for holding meetings than just renting a conference room at a fricking hotel. Also https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/30/ea-scrut. Lol
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I only know him because of Curb Your Enthusiasm and his role is basically the same as Funkhouser: be pissy about something minor Larry did or didn't do
Oh wait, that's Richard Lewis. Nvm. I'd delete this but i hate that greenish Brown color deleted posts get
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From my reading the point where he lost the ripple was a massive tipping point. Before that he was a guy with a legitimate upperhand running an arbitrage firm, but afterward everyone that was at all reasonable left and it was only people that were totally sucked in by his bizarre anti-charisma.
Also John Ray is a hero and was totally correct on everything, including pinning Lewis as a pigeon.
https://x.com/liron/status/1710193485763289469
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The book tried to portray Ray in such an unsympathetic light. As if he wasn't brought in to stop gap a 10B mismanagement in a 4 year old firm which didn't have any oversight and Lewis is slightly pissed off that Ray doesn't have the same manchild volatility as Sam.
I couldn't believe what I was reading for a second. It looked less and less like investigative journ*lism every page towards the end and felt like Lewis was trying to end it on an uplifting note about how everything will work out. Then when he realised it wasn't possible and the long arm of DoJ is finally going to fist Sam he just ended it abruptly (which was the funniest part to me).
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Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, Boomerang, and this article of College Football legend Mike Leach. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/coach-leach-goes-deep-very-deep.html
This dude is my favorite writer. Michael Lewis is a god and you WILL suck off anything he releases. I might decide to skip out on this one and pretend it didn't happen if it really is bad
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All a bunch of horse shit
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Fawning Boomer X Neurodivergent Manchild is the best pairing. Get the canabalism game people on it.
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I've posted my created memes for over a decade(s) across the chans, and onto almost EVERY FREE SPEECH SITE. So much of the internet's humor is from me for a very long time.
So many memes that are world famous are MINE. Mine mine mine.
Snapshots:
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-going-infinite-book-michael-lewis/675609:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://archive.is/v38jt:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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