👁️ FTX and Effective Altruism: 5 New Unlocked Reads

A Thank You to (and for) more than 2,000 subscribers.

The past two months have been an inflection point for Dark Markets, and in the last week subscribers rocketed past 2,000. I’ve handed out free subscription upgrades to the subscribers who pushed me over the top, and I’m also unlocking 5 older premium posts for everyone to enjoy.

As I hope I mention here often enough to be annoying, I am profoundly grateful for every single one of those subscriptions, both as signals of support and as actual support in what has been the tumultuous but exciting 18 months since my departure from CoinDesk. The past week in particular has been difficult but enlightening - finishing a book (even a draft) turns out to be very emotionally draining, something that I hope to write more about. I’ve been struggling to remind myself that what I’m doing here is good and matters, and seeing interest via this newsletter continues to be crucial psychic reassurance.

Material support also helps, of course. If you are in a position to contribute to a project ultimately aimed at debunking the techno-authoritarian logic that has now taken over the United States, please consider it.

For example, premium subscribers gain immediate access to The Sickness Unto Death: Depression, Anxiety, and the Palo Alto System and Harry Potter and the Mantras of Authority: "Pop Bayesianism" and the Rationality of Power

The Drafts

I’ve unlocked five previously paywalled newsletters. It’s important to understand that these are drafts of book chapters, which means that A) they contain errors, lacunae, and omissions, and B) they’re quite different than what will appear in the final book.

Scroll down for excerpts and overviews of each of these, or dive right in:

• Techno-Rationalism and the Denial of Death

• A Lever Long Enough: Predictionism and Overinvestment

• The Racehorse Who Gambled: Expected Value, Discounted Future Cash Flows, and Stealing from the Future

• So Bored I’m Going to Die: The Miseducation of Sam Bankman-Fried

• Making the Cages Bigger: The Peter Singer-Alice Crary Debate on Effective Altruism

Numbers, when deployed in this cross-realm and improvisatory way, become little more than totems or fetishes, superficially ‘scientific’ and rational, but in substance, primitive and ritualistic. In fact, they become more dangerous than a primitive ritual because they imply a precision and certainty that isn’t there.

One way to think about this is as the difference between “risk” and “uncertainty.” Sam Bankman-Fried was a compulsive gambler, but he seemed to be operating out of some degree of rationality because of the way he assigned numbers to long-run, unpredictable outcomes. This is a terrible trap to which the scientistic and “rationalist” mind is uniquely subject: there is no such thing as a numerical “probability” when it comes to the truly uncertain.

His theft-fueled expenditures reflected his sole vision of the future, for himself, and for the world. Both in their direction and their fundamental fraudulence, they are a map of Bankman-Fried’s mind and thinking. What is most clear is that he saw himself not merely as a financial titan, but as something far grander: as a savior of society itself, ready to take the reins of wealth and power and do things better. While he stated this outright in the grade-school fantasy of becoming President of the United States [He gave himself, with typically improvised precision, a 5% chance of becoming President someday], in practice he knew that the power of money trumped any democratic institution.

“Largely because it's so much based on intangibles, discounting and valuation in venture capital is a material locus of power struggle between the founder of a company and its venture investors - and if things go well, later, the investing public joins the fray. Venture investors want to put their money in an idea when its valuation is as low as possible, allowing them to buy a larger percentage of company equity. Founders, at this stage, instead want a high total valuation, because they want investors to pay more, in real cash, for a smaller percentage of the company.”

Compared to Pascal’s careful risk-assessment, Bankman-Fried’s just-so atheism shows staggering hubris, an ironic irrationality, and a characteristic blindness to risk. The existence and nature of a higher power is perhaps the single most important question that has ever faced the human species, but Sam knew he was “completely right.” Even the possibility that he might be wrong never nudged him to second-order thinking, Pascalian hedging, self-reflection, an examination of his biases.

In essence, Yetter-Chapel asked Crary whether she worried that her “derisive” comments about EA risked indirectly killing children currently being aided by EA-funded programs.

This frankly offensive proposition reflects many things that are diseased about Effective Altruism as an ideology. Obviuously Yetter-Chapel’s question amounts to a pretty “derisive” rejection of the idea that trying to change society is a good way to help people, seemingly supporting her critique of EA as an apologetics for stasis.