(I don’t have strong confidence, what follows is my impression based on what I read)
It’s my impression that a good portion of Tether’s reserves is loans to various companies in the crypto space. Those loans in turn are essentially the reason why Tether is the central stablecoin in a bunch of exchanges.
I would expect that the way Tether speculates with the reserve money is similar to how Alameda speculated with the customer funds.
USDT is not the only stablecoin that’s pegged to the dollar. If someone doesn’t want to expose themselves to BTC’s price fluctuations, I would expect them to want to hold different stablecoins than USDT.
There are already plenty of ways that people can make money online via websites like Fiverr and Upwork. There’s no need to do anything like creating fake porn to make money on the internet.
Early in the war, there was a story that using drones to drop grenades is happening.
You could answer “Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” “No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.”. But you could also mean with “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” that you don’t mean “function” as an ontological entity.
Barry Smith created Basic Formal Ontology which is the central framework for ontology used in bioinformatics. Basic Formal Ontology does take the stance that functions are ontologically meaningful entities. It does take the stance that they are part of the ontological entities that make up reality.
Other big biological ontologies like FMA also have immaterial anatomical entities.
Part of why the work of Judea Pearl didn’t happen earlier is that materialism and reductionism are frameworks that held back science from studying non-materialistic ontological entities. There’s a lot of progress that happened in the last twenty years that was about moving beyond those frameworks and how they stifled science.
I have been born and live in West-Berlin, so let me speak from my own on-the-ground experience.
It makes sense to first deconstruct the question. What do you mean by West? It could be that you mean Anglo-American and just label it as West in your mind. Germany has a long intellectual tradition on its own even if the allies suppressed it to the point that we don’t build the old German toilets that Zizek was speaking about anymore.
Years ago I wrote Beware of identifying with schools of thought to express some memes that feel more German and less Anglo to me.
I don’t feel like there’s anything in our meme space where I could point to it being clearly Eastern while it feels easy to point to Anglo-American influences.
FTX had $1 billion yearly revenue in 2021 which is a 1000% year-over-year improvement. 20 billion market cap for FTX is a 20x revenue multiple. 20x revenue multiples for startups aren’t uncommon and 1000% year-over-year improvement means startup.
I think that revenue is mostly trading fees which are a reasonable service. The speculative profits seem to be made by Alameda.
You can argue with all startups about whether or not they are overpriced but it’s qualitatively different than Madoff hair which has zero market value.
FTX was working on new financial products like prediction markets as well, so even in a crypto downturn, they could expand to new markets.
EA is not an entity that knows or doesn’t know. Individual players in the field know or don’t know and make decisions based on what they know. If you want to critique it makes sense to think about which players should have made different decisions.
The FTT token was freely traded and held by plenty of people who aren’t co-conspirators and it used to be valued at a price where it would have enough collateral for the debt. On the other hand, nobody holds Madoff hair who wouldn’t be a co-conspirator.
There’s no realistic future world where you could expect any money to made by selling his hair, but the same isn’t true for the FTT tokens. You can easily sell a small portion with them at the price. It’s just that you can’t sell billions worth of them at once.
Or, “should EA have noticed Sam’s lack of ethics and reacted to that?”
How would such a reaction have looked like?
How, complex was it to fork the forum? Is the software now at a stage where it’s easy to set up new forums with the same structure?
Bernie Madoff reported data to the public that was clearly fake.
If there wouldn’t have been a run on FTX and they could have slowly sold their FTT tokens to turn them into money, their balance sheet would have again been fine. Something similar was never an option with Bernie Madoff.
The revelation that he spent maybe 10x as much on villas for his girlfriends as EA cause areas
Link?
In the interview, he explains what he means by saying ethics is fake by essentially saying “win + clean” is just as good as “win + shady”.
The difference between clean and shady is one of normal ethics not of EA ethics.
winning as in making money
Money is worth the thing that you are intending to buy with it. It seems like he wanted to spend his largely to fund EA causes and nothing in the recent episode suggests he changed his mind on that.
To me your description sounds like on the one hand I would enjoy having a sexual relationship with you and on the other hand, he doesn’t want to damage his relationship with your dad.
To what extent he would let desires overrule his principles of what he thinks respecting your dad is important to him, depends a lot on parts of his personality that you haven’t written about.
I am 99% sure that if I were to lean against him or something while sitting beside him, he would physically draw away from me.
Having done a few calibration exercises, 99% is really a lot and unless you actually tried it, I would not expect it to be reasonable to assess that probability.
One rationality technique would be to actually attach probabilities to the various uncertainties that you have, and see whether you can test some of them without cost like what happens when you lean against him.
There seem to be basically two questions:
If you could just start a friend-with-benefits relationship with him, would you?
If you would try, how likely would it be to work out?
You probably want to answer those two separately.
Part of what utilitarianism is about is that you are not supposed to make decisions because you feel sad when others feel sad but instead of following emotions make rational calculations.
If your point is “most humans who are utilitarianism don’t really follow through on rational calculation but let emotions drive them, so there’s no problem”, it would make sense to make it more explicit.
There’s no difference between applying the principles of utilitarianism to the book and being a sociopath in your definition.
Let’s say you have the scenario: ‘There’s on person who’s alive and suffering, you can either help them or help 1 trillion future people and you don’t feel any emotional empathy toward those 1 trillion future people’. Who should you help? Normal people decide to help the one person who’s alive and suffering because they have empathy for them. The longtermist pitch, on the other hand, suggests that this is wrong and future people should be valued just as much as present people and people should not lead themselves to get blinded by that empathy.
We already have an EA movement where the leading organization has no problem editing out elements of a picture it publishes on its website because of possible PR risks. While you can argue that it’s not literally lying it comes very close and suggests the kind of environment that does not have the strong norms that would be desirable
I don’t think FTX/Almeda doing this in secret strongly damaged general norms against lying, corruption, and fraud.
Them blowing up like this actually is a chance for moving toward those norms. It’s a chance to actually look into ethics in a different way to make it more clear that being honest and transparent is good.
Saying “poor messaging on our part” which resulted in “actions were negative in expectation in a purely utilitarian perspective” is a way to avoid having the actual conversation about the ethical norms that might produce change toward stronger norms for truth.
You are however only counting one side here. SBF appearing successful was a motivating example for others to start projects that would have made them Mega donors.
Governments are now 10% less likely to cooperate with EAs on AI safety
I don’t think that’s likely to be the case.
The next 2 EA mega-donors decide to pass on EA
There’s an unclearness here about what “pass on EA means”. Zvi wrote about Survival and Flourishing Fund not being an EA fund.
How to model all the related factors is complicated. Saying that you easily know the right answer to whether the effects are negative or positive in expectation without running any numbers seems to me unjustified.
The solution is likely “talk to people”. That could involve going to trade events or writing cold LinkedIn messages to ask people to eat lunch together.
You might also do something like an internship where you are not paid but on the other hand, will also own the code that you are writing during that internship.