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

Sam Bankman-Fried's unsentimental, materialist upbringing helped prepare him to rationalize his crimes.

Welcome to the many new subscribers arriving after my post on the Zizian Rationalist killings. That story is at the far edge of my main current project, a book on Sam Bankman-Fried and Effective Altruism currently titled Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Corruption, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. It’s coming, inshallah, in October of this year from the legendary Repeater Books.

Each week at Dark Markets, you’ll get one free news post (not usually so in-depth as the Ziz piece) and one draft excerpt from the book. I welcome supporter feedback in the comments, as well as via the small but growing Money and Death Social Club Discord. A link to that group can be found below.

Supporters gain access to dozens of excerpts. Highlights include:

The Logic of the Code: Money, Time, and the Fatality of Reason

The Racehorse Who Gambled: Expected Value, Discounted Future Cash Flows, and Effective Altruism

A Lever Long Enough: A Forensic Accounting of the FTX Fraud

FTX and the “Imperial Chinese Harem”

The Palo Alto Stock Farm, where Leland Stanford developed principles of breeding and rearing that would trickle down from horses to children. Courtesy Punch.

The Farm

Sam Bankman-Fried grew up in a house located on the Stanford campus. By most accounts he was an indifferent student all the way through his graduation from MIT, interested in very little aside from mathematical puzzles and utilitarianism. Even with free reign over Stanford’s 8,000 rolling acres south of San Francisco, Bankman-Fried suffered near-crippling anxiety and depression - conditions which, like his chronic indifference to learning, persisted into adulthood.

Bankman-Fried’s youth was spent enmeshed in an upper-middle class academic milieu where he was, from a very early age, given the respect of an adult. Many Sundays, Barbara and Joe hosted salons of fellow scholars and researchers, where Sam was privy to deep discussions of ethics, civic duty, and politics. Even family dinners with Joe, Barbara, Sam, and Gabe were mini-salons, focused above all on utilitarianism.

The home’s intellectual framework was of a very particular sort - materialist, demystified, and remote - that seems to have been transferred into Sam as cleanly as lines of code copied onto a disk drive. Though ethnically Jewish, Joe and Barbara were atheists, and atheism became a seemingly unquestioned part of Sam’s worldview. The family dismissed ritual and sentiment: they celebrated Hanukkah without enthusiasm until, they told Michael Lewis, they “simply forgot” the holiday one year, and soon after “stopped celebrating anything.”

Most intriguing is a claim that Sam may have mythologized somewhat. As Lewis writes, the Bankman-Fried household “didn’t do birthdays, either.” As Sam told Lewis, “’My parents were like, I dunno, is there something you want? Alright, bring it up. And you can have it. Even in February. Doesn’t have to be in December. If you want it, let’s have an open and honest conversation about it instead of us trying to guess.’ Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else would want.”

In this tiny aside we have a peephole into Bankman-Fried’s impoverished view of reality, and foreshortened understanding of human life itself. Gift-giving is a practice of empathy – trying to guess what the other person wants is the entire point. Further, the idea that one should simply articulate one’s wants or needs implies a mentally crystalline homo economicus who knows exactly what they want, dismissing the idea that another person, even a parent, might know your own desires better.

The radical rejection of gift-giving, then, betrays a reduction of human life and relationships to mere exchanges of value. It defies the ritual function of gift-giving in human society, as Marcel Mauss and other sociologists have argued, as an act whose excess and even waste are core to cementing interpersonal and community bonds. The role of the gift in human society is also a clear example of how utilitarian concepts of “effectiveness” cannot capture the lived reality of “value” with the reductive metrics of finance.

Other versions of this story suggest that Sam himself proposed binning birthday gift-giving, not Joe and Barbara. What matters, though, is his eagerness to present his family life as so radically unsentimental - and Lewis’ eagerness to valorize the family’s “indifference to convention,” which “came naturally and unselfconsciously.”

God Is Not Real, and Other Things Sam Knew For Sure

That indifference to convention could be broadly characterized as a disinterest in mysteries: the mystery of the other, the mystery of the self, and the mystery of the universe. In its place Joe, and above all Barbara, instilled in their children an understanding of the world not only as purely material, but as predictably mechanistic. This encompassed the contents of the human mind and decision-making, which Barbara presented, both at home and in her professional life, in terms of what she described as “hard core” determinism.

The depth of these convictions, the naive credulity with which Sam absorbed them, and their usefulness for spreading the techno-rationalist ideology, are spelled out in another pivotal anecdote. At around ten years old, Bankman-Fried made the shocking discovery that some people did genuinely believe in the existence of God, a power beyond the merely material. He found this disturbing, and asked his parents’ circle of scholarly friends if they believed in God.

“They’d equivocate,” as Sam later described it. “Like, say something about a Being that started the Clock of the Universe. And I’d think, Quit fucking around: it’s a binary question. Just yes or no.” From this, “Sam drew a conclusion: it was possible for almost everyone to be self-evidently wrong about something … he simply came to terms with the fact that the world could be completely wrong about something, and he could be completely right.” (Lewis 26)

This is one of the moments when it’s nearly impossible to take Michael Lewis’ prose at face value. Is there not a wry twist here, an ironic double-meaning? Sam’s confidence surely fits the broader effort to valorize his intellect. But a fixed and unwavering belief that nothing that could be called “God” exists isn’t a sign of intelligence - it’s a sign of profound incuriosity, the pat acceptance of what his parents told him, never to be examined again.

Read More: Harry Potter and the Mantras of Authority: Pop Bayesianism and the Rationality of Power

Contrast Sam’s position with that of what should have been one of his intellectual idols, Blaise Pascal, who helped the Chevalier de Mere develop the foundations of probability through a study of gambling. Later, Pascal would become so intensely religious that he gave up mathematics - but he didn’t entirely give up gambling, and may even be best known for a bet he made on God, a formulation now known as “Pascal’s wager.”