Folding Ideas has a great video on NFTs called "line goes up" where he says that NFTs are not revolutionary, it's the 1% trying to get as rich as .01% are
Agree completely. Even in line goes up he is a little overly conspiratorial and a little too eager to see basic human failings and greed as the machinations of his supposed political enemies.
But despite all that it is a great outline out of the basic fundemental flasws with the crypto world, and particularly with "smart contracts" which were always one of the things that most drove me up the wall when people were exicted about them.
I think the most surprising thing for me was that “In line with most tech companies” is a great euphemism for “yes, everyone was on stimulants”. And just how matter of fact the article is about software engineering being fundamentally incompatible with the human mind.
And like… I can’t focus very well at my software engineering job, to the degree that I basically relate to all the discussions of people with ADHD now (it wasn’t an issue before college). And I don’t really have particular problems with anything else (chores, writing, massive amounts of DMing). Just my job.
I know a few friends on Adderall, but I thought they were the minority. I don’t know how to feel if it’s really that common. I’m honestly still skeptical of the claim, just because I don’t want to believe it.
I'm probably exaggerating a bit here, and I've added a clarification to that effect to the post. I really don't know the real number. Maybe a job for an ACX survey.
ACX readership is _definitely_ not a representative sample of... anything really, but in particular of strange medication use.
When I try to think of examples in the tech people around myself, the people who come to mind were influenced in some degree by knowing me. (And I'm actually pretty conservative - never even tried recreational drugs above weed)
I'm very dubious. I know tons of programmers, and none of them seem to be taking stimmies, other than a morning coffee and an afternoon espresso, with is pretty mild stuff.
I've been a software engineer for about 18 years, and I did not take stimulants for 16 of those years. I started taking them about 2 years ago, but only because of depression which I suspect was induced by the COVID pandemic, rather than because of my profession.
I think the trend is in the same direction. Three years ago I'm confident none of my close tech friends were taking stims. Now at least two of them are. Anecdata only but consistent with the idea that this is becoming more common.
Not sure about stimulants, but on multiple occasions, my husband and I have been surrounded by a big group of colleagues and learned that we were the only ones not on some sort of prescribed psychoactive medication, mostly antidepressants and anti anxiety meds. It was honestly a little alarming to have a room full of people start comparing notes on that.
Same. It may be higher than the general population, but it's not everyone, or even >50% from my anecdata. One thing to consider is the average tech age and the supposed recent huge increase of stimulant use in college. Considering the graduated in the last 10yrs population, use may be around average.
I guess I'm one of the lucky few. I have been a programmer at big companies since 1982, delaying retirement because I enjoy it so much. I haven't taken more than coffee, and I'm not aware of any peers taking stimulants.
Sure, I guess. But most of them, for the past 20 years? It's not like I've been their boss, and some of them have been pretty good friends. I'm sure there's some fraction of the people I know in general that have weird hidden personal problems. I'm just dubious that it's most or nearly everybody.
Maybe it's more common in a start-up culture environment? I also know may programmers, and none admit to taking stimulants, but none of them work at start-ups.
I knew a few, but only among the ones I was close enough to that we discussed our various medical problems. No one was leaving bottles on their desk or casually talking about it in the hallways.
I used Adderall (generic) myself, for a bit, back when my incipient PTSD was misdiagnosed as my previously-sub-clinical ADHD getting worse. It was useful, but I didn't like it. I noticed an increasing inability to switch from lower-priority tasks to higher-priority tasks, as if whatever I happened to be focused on at the moment was much more important than it actually was.
That's my main problem with stimulants in general and amphetamine in particular as well. It works great — if I can start doing what I need to be doing. But mostly I just keep doing whatever I was doing when it kicked in.
Yes, this has resulted in four-hour masturbation sessions; and brother, let me tell you: you don't know shame until you finish after four hours of doing the most useless and — heh — masturbatory activity possible, having accomplished nothing *and* not even really enjoyed it after about minute 15, and that post-orgasm clarity hits you...
Maybe it's more common in the SF Bay area, or in start-ups, or among the pseudo-nerds who read Wired magazine and are desperate to be part of the Next Big Thing.
On the flip side, I know a ton of hackers who are very definitely all taking some sort of prescription stimulant. I am sure I could name ten without working too hard at it, and could potentially hit as many as two dozen if I really strained at it.
It may well be that the people who have ADD don't talk about it with people who *don't* have ADD or ADHD, which is why it seems to be this significant divide in the comments on the topic.
Would you tell us what city are you in, what age these hackers are, or what market sector they work in? I expect there are difference along those lines.
Well, it's not a localized phenomenon, so city is sort of useless, though I'll say this is people all over the world, from Dubai to Czech to Germany to Holland to the US.
Age group would be like, 30 to 60. Market sector is generally infosec or something related; insofar as it is possible for one to professionally be a "cypherpunk", a lot of these people are doing that. There's often a lot of strangely coincidental overlap in groups of people I know, so I hesitate to declare absolutely that it was 100% of these people, but it was probably pretty close, that all of these people will be folks I know because I was going to events like Defcon. (At the Alexis Park, putting me firmly in the *middle* of that age group above... ;) ) So, crypto, cryptocurrencies, computer and network security, penetration testing, sysadmins. That sort of thing.
> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering.
That’s why the evolutionary response is autism and why it is particularly prevalent in the Bay Area… That said, I find it hard to believe people who make their living from their brains will gamble with their moneymaker. The only stimulant I take is theobromine, a.k.a. chocolate.
The invention of software engineering is too recent for an evolutionary response to have happened.
I think to steelman what you're saying, we probably have autism for "other reasons", and coincidentally, high functioning autism happens to be pretty good for software engineering.
I think you probably mean "that's why people with autism can be more successful in the By Area," rather than implying that there is natural selection for more autism.
I don't think there's any reason to believe caffeine or amphetamine is a gamble of that fashion. See, e.g., Erdõs, if the giant avalanche of studies confirming this hasn't convinced you for some reason.
To give you another reference point, I'm a mediocre programmer, and I feel like true focus is something I experience a few times a day when I'm trying hard and things come together. It's not the norm for me. There's a boot up process of loading things into my working memory and getting my my motivational framework aligned that can be interrupted, or might never come together if the conditions aren't right. (Or if I'm being lazy. Or if I'm doing things I know throw me off like checking Twitter.)
I am a programmer as well. I do take prescribed stims, and even with them I would say true focus is something I experience about once a week. I would love to do it a few times a day.
I've been in software for more than twenty years, and have never worked at a place where taking stimulants was common. I can only recall one anecdote about a place where doing so was standard practice. If Scott actually thinks speed is common in tech companies, I suspect the influence is from some other circles he travels in, not tech specifically.
Anecdotally, I work at a FAANG and know for a fact all of my coworkers just (~2 yrs) out of college use stimulants, at least periodically. I only know this because they told me. I think you might be surprised how hard it is to tell, but also I'm sure it's much more common in this recent generation.
Where are you located? That probably matters. Probably less common in some countries and also less common at conventional business software places.
Modafinil is incredily effective for me. You do have to make sure you drink a lot of water. But the impact is much more intense and much more useful than caffeine.
Maybe some kinds of tech either don't attract people who benefit heavily from something like Modafinil? I can do good work if I get in the zone without Modafinil but Modafinil helps get you in the zone and zeroes out lots of distractions.
I'm in Canada, working for what I guess I'll call a FAANG-aspiring company. I was at an actual FAANG in Canada for three years and in Silicon Valley for eight years back in the 00s.
What about all the people grinding leetcode and CS knowledge for months just to pass programming interviews, are the vast majority of them doing it "naturally" - no stimulants except the odd cup of coffee?
Don't know about "all". Some version of your description fits tens of my friends and acquaintances and, at times, fitted me to some extent. I'm aware of a single person on this list taking stimulants. They were taking them for perfectly non-job-related reasons, way before entering the CS/ data/... world. Scott's description is completely unrecognizable to me - I've been in tech for decades now, including Valley start-ups, and have seen essentially zero use of stimulants. Slightly more in academia (including the occasional Aderall before tests), but still almost zero, and almost entirely in undergraduates. I suspect either Scott or I (and so many other commenters!) live in a bubble. I further suspect it's Scott.
To be clear, I have zero knowledge about the world at large using Adderall. If your links have anything to do specifically with the use of stimulants in tech, I missed it. The word "tech" is absent from both links. All I'm saying is that Scott's characterization of tech as one big stim-party (and that being common knowledge!) is entirely alien to my experiences.
Also, it's a bit strange to put both links together - and then to imply (or at least so I read you - otherwise, what *is* the point you're making? That some people somewhere are using Adderall more? Or at least more relative to supply - numbers are entirely absent from both links?) that the shortage is mostly due to a surge in demand. The second link talks of the supply-side woes and of quotas being reduced.
I think the point I was looking for is, it seems to be a very popular PED. (I have unfortunately mislaid my links about similar tenure track drug abuse.) Why not in tech?
A. The claims I was responding to were that it happens in tech *above and beyond the baseline*. You can write "in tech, many people drink water/ have two ears" and be technically correct - but it would be a weird choice. So "why not in tech" is the wrong question. "Why in tech more than in many other areas" would've been better but we don't know that it's at all true.
B. "Why not in tech" may still have pretty reasonable answers. If there's a surge in Adderall demand, it must be relatively recent, hence "surge". Then tech would be selecting for people who achieved much/ worked hard/ studied well/ formed habits/ etc. before said surge. I would also expect risk aversion and conscientiousness to be mildly anti-correlated with stimulant usage and to be strongly present in tech. Perhaps Scott/ John/ you are talking about subcultures such as crypto/ fintech - not much I can say here.
And I'm reporting my own experience - those are friends, people I worked and studied with (including leetcode), not "I heard of them vaguely once". Is my experience consistent with "vast majority" of substance abusers or whatever? Yes, but it's much more consistent with low prevalence, at least for my generation.
Could there be a tech drug epidemic incoming? Sure, that's possible. Particularly if popular Substack writers and their commenters make it seem like everybody's taking stimulants all the time ;)
C. Tenure track - I'd be happy to see that link. Again - I've been exposed to the academic world all my life. Are there stress, tragic cases, highly salient examples of drug abuse? Yes. Are they more prevalent in academia than in other walks of life? I'd like to see the numbers.
I want to note how pejoratively stimulants are discussed, both in the second article you linked and to some degree in this conversation.
E.g.
“Adderall is prescribed for ADHD, which was once diagnosed only in the prepubescent. Now adults are discovering they have ADHD. Or occasional ADHD. Or work-at-home ADHD.”
Imagine saying the same things about antidepressants. “Now people are finding they have work-from-home depression.”
It seems pretty wild to me to suggest that a spike in prescriptions for a psychiatric drug around December 2020 was due to… avarice and a need for performance enhancement?
The much more obvious explanation would be that a lot of borderline-ADHD people were able to make it in a relatively free and open society, and then when their lives were massively disrupted they weren’t able to get by anymore.
That’s when I got diagnosed. My wife and I both have full time jobs and a then-four-year-old son. When the pandemic hit, schools shut down, childcare of any kind was illegal, and our jobs expected us to work remotely. It was the most attentionally-demanding, work-laden period of my life by far. And when time gets short and workloads get high, your other coping mechanisms often stop working.
Obviously my experience is not general, but I’d love to see some consideration that Adderall prescriptions are not all attempts to get a competitive advantage.
In my experience, ADHD isn't a thing that keeps me from focusing; in fact, it MAKES me focus. Just not always on what I should be focusing on.
It prevents me from rationally controlling my task-switching--or, arguably, it makes it rational to task-switch in a way that makes it hard to work with people who task-switch easily.
I think my ADHD is a memory problem, not a focus problem or a boredom problem.
1. It imposes a heavy overhead on task-switching. Whenever I task switch, I'll forget forever any ideas I had related to what I was doing unless I write them down; it will take me a long time to load up my memory again with what it needs to resume the task; and I might never remember to resume the task.
2. It imposes a heavy cost on NOT task-switching when I discover something new that needs doing--if I don't drop what I'm doing, and do the other thing right away, I might never do it.
3. I don't have an internal alarm clock. Other people tell their minds, "Remember to go to the meeting at 2pm," and at 1:50, an internal alarm clock raises "go to meeting" into their consciousness. I have to either think about the meeting constantly until the time of the meeting; or set an external alarm. If my alarm goes off at 1:50, and then I notice a program has crashed which I need to run during the meeting so I can get the results that day, and I take 30 seconds to restart it, I might not to remember the meeting. The fact that I remembered the meeting at 1:50 will not make me remember it at 1:51 if I did something else in the minute between.
When I'm coding, I'm usually hyper-focused on it for many hours.
I don't think being bored with something is a result of ADHD. Being bored is more-likely a result of being too smart or not smart enough to find a thing interesting. But then, ADHD may not be a single disease, but a syndrome.
My extremely crude and incorrect way of thinking about this is that my brain is wired more toward “explore” than “exploit”, ie there’s a much higher threshold of engagement necessary to get my brain to think “I should keep doing this” rather than “I should go do something else”. And it seems like dopamine is a core part of shifting toward “exploit”.
But as you say there are many different presentations / parts of the brain that can cause similar symptoms!
I think there are two theories getting conflated here for why stimulant use might be common in the tech world, and I want to add a third that I’m surprised no one else has offered.
1. Particular places may have a culture of stimulant use. Maybe this is common in startups to handle a high workload (and the high stress position that your company might fail if you don’t work harder), but I’ve been in the tech industry for 15 years (mostly at a FAANG) and never encountered it. But I doubt anyone would question that some places undoubtedly do have such a culture, like the subject of the article, where there was clearly no attempt made to hide the selegeline or adrafinil.
2. Scott’s idea that boring jobs require stimulants, programming and accounting are unusually boring jobs, thus people in these jobs are more likely to seek and benefit from stimulants. I don’t find this argument convincing. Programming is one of the most fun and engaging jobs a person can have. When people talk about flow states they often mention coding, and every programmer I’ve discussed it with knows and enjoys this state as well. Contrast with, say, working in a lab, where you have to do the same things over and over and record the result. When you’re programming you’re invariably solving a new problem.
This brings me to my suggested explanation:
3. People with poor attention are drawn to computers and programming. In my experience there are two life stories of programmers: either you chose it in college as a well-rounded career (excellent choice!) or it chose you when you were young and wanted to play video games and make your own video games and network two computers to play video games with friends and draw fractals and host a website and so on.
Programming is great for people with poor attention spans because it gives immediate feedback. Make a change, run it, make a change, run it, ad infinitem. As someone with poor attentional control myself, I ended up in this industry precisely because it was the work I could get lost in and enjoy.
It was only when I had kids and advanced in my job to the point where I was no longer coding that I realized I needed help. I’m doing double shifts of design / coordination at work, plus childcare at home. Stimulants have helped me feel less bored and frustrated as I do all the less-intrinsically-engaging tasks I have to take on now.
>Programming is one of the most fun and engaging jobs a person can have
I think this is a statement that has a lot to do with it. I'd say there are two kinds of programmers - ones for whom this statement holds true, and others, like myself, for whom it does not. The thing is the distribution of people who have the mindset and skills to become competent programmers is split pretty evenly over these subgroups.
People who enjoy the job and derive satisfaction from it can focus pretty well and do good work. Others feel like the job is pulling teeth, but keep at it because the pay/status is good comparatively. I think that second group is a lot more likely to use stimulants to combat the drag of going to work because switching jobs to something more tolerable is such a pay cut.
That certainly makes sense. It would be really interesting to get some data distinguishing software engineers on two axes:
Takes / does not take stimulants
Thinks coding is / is not a relatively fun job activity
Then we could see whether it’s the people who enjoy coding who are more likely to take stimulants (which would point to ADHD as a driver of both) or the people who don’t enjoy coding (which would point to boredom / job dissatisfaction).
Of course, my theory probably has an unfair advantage - which is that if two people go to two psychiatrists and one says “I’ve had trouble paying attention all my life, it’s why I’m a programmer” and the other says “I have trouble paying attention when programming, I don’t find it engaging” the former is much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and given stimulants while the latter is less so. AIUI there’s some expectation that ADHD develops early and affects at least two major areas of life (work, school, home).
Funny. I'm a programmer and my experience is mostly the opposite. I have trouble with chores, errands, writing, reading, paperwork, etc, but a clearly defined coding problem is easy for me to focus on.
It doesn't match my experience either. Maybe its a FAANG thing?
If it is, it is seriously making me second guess working there if I had the chance. The idea of a workplace where the majority of workers are required to be on stimulants is nightmare inducing. (Exceptions made for genuine shift work which requires inhuman circadian schedules.)
One of my colleagues once told me a story about working in a place where speed use was common. She said workers on speed did indeed work very quickly, but the speed really shot their judgement all to hell, so they could produce pages and pages of work without realizing it was complete nonsense.
I have this crazy idea that it might be best to have mixed pods of maybe four workers on speed and one supervisor who is clearheaded and can get the speeders back on track when they go off on a tangent.
Like that bit in Herodotus where he's talking about how the ancient Persians made decisions: if they come up with an idea when drunk, they wait until they're sober and see if it still makes sense then. And crucially, if they come up with an idea when sober, they then get drunk to see if it still makes sense when blitzed out of their gourds.
I work at a FAANG and at large companies the culture can vary widely the further you travel in the org chart, so my experience may not be representative. But there’s definitely not a strong pressure to maintain strong work output; in fact, there’s a major focus on ensuring that people have a good life balance and are going at a sustainable pace.
Does this mean people aren’t on speed? Of course not. But it’s not part of the culture or necessitated by high expectations.
I work for a big tech company, and if the people around me are on Adderall they're not telling me about it. I'm not, haven't asked, and don't seem to be falling behind anyone else.
Though there was a weird poster by the cafeteria a few months ago that was some sort of advertisement for a charity that was against black-market pills that were laced with all sorts of things. The odd part was that it treated pill addiction as perfectly normal ('$DEAD_KID was normal, sometimes took Adderall to work hard, or took Xanax to chill...') and didn't seem to have any awareness that maybe dosing kids up with black-market pills might be a bad idea. Like..."don't get prescription medicine anywhere but the pharmacy" seemed to me to be a pretty basic bit of common sense, but I guess not.
I didn't add a note saying "Why not just give your kids speed and opium directly?", but I was briefly tempted.
There IS a big difference between using drugs to achieve life goals vs when they become the life goal themselves. The former is drug instrumentalization, the latter is addiction.
It’s weird that people are so broadly unaware that there are different possible relationships with drugs (I myself only discovered this term a few years ago) despite the fact that like 80% of the population has a relationship to caffeine that is obviously not addiction (and I would characterize as drug instrumentalization).
E.g. this journal article starts with:
Most people who are regular consumers of psychoactive drugs are not drug addicts, nor will they ever become addicts. In neurobiological theories, non-addictive drug consumption is acknowledged only as a "necessary" prerequisite for addiction, but not as a stable and widespread behavior in its own right. This target article proposes a new neurobiological framework theory for non-addictive psychoactive drug consumption, introducing the concept of "drug instrumentalization." Psychoactive drugs are consumed for their effects on mental states. Humans are able to learn that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors. We discuss specific "instrumentalization goals" and outline neurobiological mechanisms of how major classes of psychoactive drugs change mental states and serve non-drug-related behaviors.
Except coffee, it's the greatest drug in the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTVE5iPMKLg) and if you learn about the distinctions, you can seem very cultured to your friends!
DISCLAIMER: The fact that I come from a traditional coffee-exporter country has no bearing at all in my coffee recommendation
Were there any mainstream media stories critical of their use of performance enhancing drugs (which SBF and others seem to have been quite open about on Twitter) before the crash? It seems that would be a red flag worth looking into when reporting on SBF and FTX - but probably didn't fit the narrative of the boy wonder next Warren Buffet story journalists wanted to tell.
I've been working in tech for a long time. I've never (in my life) taken anything like adderall. At most, I have some caffeine (but I don't even like coffee.)
After reading this: I'm curious about how this type of thing would affect me. Can anyone describe the difference? (How much of it do we think is placebo effect?)
Edit: To clarify my "placebo" comment. I don't think the stimulants have _no_ effect. But I'm wondering if _some_ (maybe more than half) might be due to knowing you took a pill that supposed to help you concentrate.
Stimulants are not placebos. Caffeine has such bad side effects at such low doses that you really can't just do doses of caffeine that are comparable to therapeutic doses of amphetamines and then compare the mental effects. Your review of this experience will mostly be "when I used that much caffeine I was jittery and my stomach hurt and later all my muscles were sore."
Only if you take enough to make you very jittery and have noticeable muscle tension. Not if you're just having your daily coffee that you hardly even notice doing anything anymore.
It’s often said that daily coffee just staves off withdrawal, but it’s not quite true - you develop tolerance to its effects at the A2a receptor, but not it’s effects at the A1 receptor. Even in tolerant individuals caffeine retains a wakefulness-promoting effect.
I've tried modafinil and the effect is definitely not a placebo. Usually I struggle a lot with distractions/procrastination/low energy, on moda I end up working so intensely I often forget to eat. Problem solving is also easier, because you mind feels clearer/more powerful. I suspect I'm already low on the distribution for conscientiousness/focus/executive function, in school (assuming that's roughly representative of the general population) I'd say I worked about as hard as the average student, maybe less, but in more selective environments, uni/jobs etc., I definitely felt below average, so probably I get more benefits from stimulants than most people would. Even so I think they can easily double some people's work output, with improved quality.
You order them from India (unpatented generics, and it avoids some regulation or another). Check r/Nootropics for the best websites to buy from that delivers to your country.
Also check the laws in your own country! I think in lots of places it's legal to import for personal use even though you can't buy it without a prescription, but check very carefully that that's true for your own jurisdiction
Have you ever had enough caffeine to notice an effect from it? The stimulant effect is certainly real, and caffeine is just the legally and socially accepted milder end of the spectrum.
I take 100 mg caffeine pills 3x/week (plus l-theanine, a very well-known & highly recommended nootropic combination that balances caffeine's energy & alertness with calm focus), and I have also had a prescription for 10 mg Adderall. For me, with my level of tolerance and sensitivity to both substances, the Adderall felt roughly like taking two of the caffeine pills: nothing crazy, no unpleasant side effects, but very definitely a significant boost in mood, energy, and executive function.
If you're curious, the safe and easy way to explore is to buy caffeine + l-theanine capsules on Amazon, probably the lowest dose you can find (probably 100 mg caffeine), and take one. If you don't notice an effect, take two the next day or the day after that. Take them first thing in the morning or your sleep may suffer.
I have experimented with it, and I definitely do not have ADHD, so I can tell you the effect it has on someone taking it for investigational or recreational purposes. You know how once in a while a dull task like cleaning your kitchen just turns out to be really satisfying, and you keep going and do extra things, like taking things out of cupboards and throwing away the out-of-date stuff and wiping down the cupboard shelves? OK, well if you take adderall before you do a routine kitchen cleaning, you're way more likely to get on a roll like that. And if you sit down to write an email or a blog post or whatever, the same sort of thing will happen. You will find it easier to focus, and more enjoyable to do. Your ideas will flow more freely and there will be fewer of the kind of moments where have that feeling of, "I can't think of what to say next. I wish I didn't have to do this." For me, anyhow, adderall did not induce a feeling of jitteriness or being hyper. It just felt like having a really good, productive day. So I enjoy it a lot, but am careful not to do it very often.
Sure seems like an awful lot of things de facto require stimulants for success now. Compulsory education (for boys anyway), coding, professional gaming and sports, financial trading...or even in mundane occupations and daily routines, who doesn't get started with a caffeinated beverage? (Much more fun when also mixed with amphetamines, too. Espresso + dexadrine led to some...memorably long uptimes. Glad to have kicked that habit.) Perhaps there's a more systemic price to be paid for the general overclocking of humanity, beyond potential acute failures like this one.
(Can't resist 8: Based on your expertise and years of training, Dr. Alexander, do you agree that __injecting__ bleach would on net be more harmful than drinking it?)
For what it's worth, I don't have autism, I avoid caffeine during my work week (take it in the afternoon on Fridays to shift back to my natural nocturnal rhythm to be able to keep my mood from crashing from too many diurnal days), don't take any other stimulants, and I still work fine as a software engineer. I have somehow gotten hired by Google; like many people there think about themselves, I too think maybe Google made a mistake in hiring me, but this is the end of year two and they're not even considering it yet, so apparently one can land and hold a high-paying job in IT without being on stimmies.
To be fair, I have done mighty little coding so far, but that's an accident of the things I've been working at at Google, my previous jobs were very coding heavy, and I still code a lot in my spare time. Going by experience, if I *were* coding, I'd be focussing quite naturally, it's an easy activity to get lost in for me, but I'd describe it as an aesthetic experience more than a problem-solving experience, i.e. I take a lot of enjoyment out of how good code reads and looks.
That said, I also *do* seem to have some kind of weird reward function in my brain! For example, I love fixing bugs, refactoring things and writing documentation, whereas my understanding is that most of my colleagues prefer not doing those things and instead writing new features, which honestly sounds dreadful to me for complicated reasons (but flippantly and self-deprecatingly summarised boil down to that I don't want to make decisions in a void; this is an over-simplification, but I didn't want to leave anyone reading this comment hanging *completely* as to the underlying mechanism).
I too dislike writing code for new features and 'making decisions in a void' seems like a fairly apt description of (at least one reason) why it's aversive to me too. Interestingly, I have no basically no problem with new features for my own personal projects or things like 'code challenges'. I think a lot of the aversion is because of the ambiguity and uncertainty regarding what exactly satisfies an MVP for a feature or how correctness versus speed/pragmatism is _expected_ or desired by my superiors/supervisors. Fixing bugs, refactoring, and writing (internal or technical) documentation are all things where the 'reward function' is MUCH easier (for me) to discern.
Heh, I feel the same way about bugs and refactoring. Also performance improvements.
New features are OK if there's rapid prototyping and a constant feedback loop. What I don't like are the times where all the planning happens up front (even if I'm involved), and then implementation happens later on a detailed schedule, with a final rollout. In my experience, there's always stuff that's harder to do than anyone planned for. And that sort of advance planning never seems to be thorough enough, and misses things that should be covered and covers things that are unnecessary. I hate the position of being halfway through coding something and having to tell people that this is going to take longer than expected, and ought to have some more things added, and some of their pet details are superfluous and ought to wait until an update.
Yes, low-latency feedback and feedback _loops_ are ideal. I haven't been dealing with lots of advance planning (unless it's my own) but I very much dislike 'murky models' of other systems with which I'm integrating or, even worse, one's internal to the very system I'm working on/in/with. Even bugs can be awful to fix when 'correctness' is murky enough!
Ugh, yeah. I hate those situations where there's no clearly optimal solution, and all the potential solutions involve balancing lots of factors that everyone assigns different priorities to, and there's always a majority against any specific solution, but no majority for anything at all.
I don’t drink caffeine unless I really need it(a couple times a year). Maybe I have natural high levels of these traits people want, but I also kind of suspect constant reliance on substances degrades their natural functionality.
Something this makes me wonder is if Jane Street or other non-exploded trading firms have far more capable and systematic psychiatrists on staff to manage the drug cocktails their teams are on
My experience in a small corner of industry was that the systematic trading firm did not actually manage what drugs their staff were on. This was probably a mistake, since some people obviously had untreated ADHD and contributed less or less consistently as a result.
>But if you’re already a cryptocurrency trader, maybe it only takes a tiny amount of risk-curve-shifting to turn you into a cryptocurrency trader who makes riskier trades.
Can we stop pretending that risky trades were SBF's main fault instead of committing fraud?
>Please don’t rush out to abuse drugs just because you read about them in an article on how they contributed to a $10 billion bankruptcy.
Yeah, that's what the annual nootropic survey is for.
"Can we stop pretending that risky trades were SBF's main fault instead of committing fraud?"
I don't think I'm pretending anything. I'm writing an article about how psychopharmacology contributed to the crash. He was on a medication that purportedly causes risk seeking, not a medication that causes fraud. Obviously then there is a causal chain from "lost lots of money" -> "fraud to conceal that".
The fraud may not need to stem from losing the money to stem from the psychopharmacology. Presumably at least part of the reason people don't commit fraud is that "it's a bad idea," either because they don't want to get caught or because risk-averseness also applies to the risks of violating social norms/moral intuitions.
That comes from an introspective intuition that if I were more risk-averse I'd engage in less immoral behaviour, and vice versa.
Hm. I feel like "pathological gambling" and "hypersexuality" are more specific and common dopaminergic side effects than "become a bad person", but I can't really explain why that should be. I bet I would understand this if I knew more neuroeconomics.
If the accusation was he just took the money for himself I’d agree. But it’s more like, he tried to get everything back by gambling with other peoples money. Legally that doesn’t sound very different, but “problem gambler” seems like a more important factor in the later explanation.
I think you would be more technical and careful in how you describe it - some of them worsen temper, some can make you addicted and then you do bad things.
I don't think there's any medication whose effect is as close to the common-sense concept of "bad person" as eg antisocial personality disorder is.
Would something like Acetaminophen's reduction of empathy of others' pain[1] count?
Presumably having less empathy would mean you'd take more risks that affects others, although I guess it's still not strictly evil, and is more like recklessness.
Thinking about it, considering how something like MDMA/metta meditation makes you much more empathetic/sympathetic; loving; generous; etc, surely there must be a drug that does the opposite?
Well, you could say that engaging in fraud is just a variety of risk-taking . The risk is getting caught, and/or suffering from a guilty conscience. If you don't have a very powerful conscience, then the risk is just getting caught. So IF SBF didn't have a very active conscience, it actually does seem to me that committing fraud would be in pretty much the same category as making risky trades -- maybe there will be a good outcome, maybe a bad -- and an upper on board might shift the needle a bit on how you evaluate the chances of different outcomes.
But that model only works if suffering from a guilty conscience isn't a danger for the person. Was it, for SBF? I know very little about him, but here's some demographic reasoning based on my life experience: Young males who graduate from high-prestige schools, then become traders, then set out to become the best in the world at something (in this case, the world's most effective altruist) are not usually very high on compassion and conventionality, & those are the things that underlie attacks of conscience.
This seems a bizarre response given you general positions on things. People who commit fraud are not “bad people” in some categorical way different from the various other behavior spectrums you subscribe to.
Disinhibition should not interfere with honesty, I would expect. I don't know how much of honesty and lying is understood neuroscientifically. The case has been made that deception and countering it created the evolutionary pressure to develop a human brain. Drugs that induce paranoia or delusion may be understood as promoting self-deception, deceiving others still is something different.
Do the drugs also cause dishonesty in addition to risk taking? Why not talk more about the culture of FTX and the role it played? Most businesses don't encourage drug use.
FWIW, I'm sufficiently isolated from news that I didn't actually know there was fraud involved. And Scott didn't actually mention it anywhere in the article. I'm not trying to say you should write like a newspaper with big explanations of the context at the top for people like me who apparently live under rocks, but I feel like it's fair to not find the link to fraud <i>obvious</i> when you don't mention it.
I'd guess that people are wary of libel accusations. Given that crypto is famously under-regulated, FTX may have technically not broken any laws, but if what they freely admitted to having done happened in normal finance instead, it would be fraud ten times over, so that's a pretty fair characterisation.
IIUC, he is definitely under suspicion of committing fraud, and various other financial crimes. That it was done via crypto-currency isn't really significant. Whether he is actually guilty is, of course, another question.
And, again, IIUC, the regulations would probably only be for the purposes of allowing regulators to inspect the books even when a crime is not suspected. Think of them as trip-wires rather than additional crimes. (Though, of course, blocking access by the regulators would be an additional crime.)
Yeah, IMHO most of the blame here lies not so much at the feet of the bunch of amateurs that the FTX gang seems to be, but at the banking regulators failing to do their jobs, and the sophisticated investors failing to do due diligence.
There's a lot of allegations flying around and on first glance it sure *looks* like fraud, but it's hard to say until the investigation is done and any criminal charges are pressed. The fraud *appears* to be "took clients' funds and threw them into the gaping money pit in an attempt to make the money back, cover their losses, and then repay the clients" but don't quote me on that. What started it was a run on FTX when people wanted to cash in and FTX seems not to have had the liquidity to cover that.
In general it's a complicated mess of "how much was the Wild West approach to crypto trading and how much was breaking an actual law we can point at?"
I too have been confused about the 'fraud' but I _think_ it's pointing at (the alleged) instances of FTX transferring user deposits to Alameda to cover the latter's losses. That seems like a fairly 'non-central example' of fraud, but it makes sense (to me, now).
Easy to miss the fraud part even if you read the news. NYT and Washington Post stories on FTX were strangely positive with very little mention of the crimes and a lot about over ambition.
I don't think it's as simple as him donating lots of money to the Democrats so he gets favorable coverage but comparing how FTX has been treated with other tech companies has been strange.
"A kid from a good family" seems to be the likeliest explanation for the general kid-gloves approach, but actively promoting correct politics certainly helps too, which has become uncommon in big tech lately.
That's the only problem only if you're pretty amoral to begin with. I wouldn't commit fraud even if it was zero risk. Because it's wrong. So you can shift my risk-taking curve as much as you like, and I might very well try to beat the BMW bike to the top of the hill when there really isn't room and die in a fiery crash, but I sure as heck wouldn't be found screwing people out of their life's savings.
Obviously neither of us really knows what went on in SBFs and other people's head at the time. Is it not conceivable that they started out by thinking dipping into customer funds is no big deal, it's a victimless crime if it had worked out? Maybe they even did it in the past and it worked. Reading the stories about other famous blow ups it sort of comes in dribs and drabs, a little lie here, a little unethical behavior there, not some conscious "let's all commit fraud" decision. The rationalizations probably come easy, especially if chemically assisted.
Sure. Like I said, they had to be pretty amoral to begin with. I wouldn't do the rationalization at Step 1 on account of the shade of my mother would immediately rise out of the floor in a towering rage and beat the snot out of me. Lying to people is wrong even if they never find out.
It seems to be a common failure mode though, when people are entrusted with pots of money by others, and they are either in the business of trading/gambling on stocks or get into it privately. They make quick money at the start due to beginner's luck, think they've found the secret of easy money, plunge, lose their shirts, and try to dam the leak by 'borrowing' some of that money lying idle in their charge. Just borrow it, for this sure thing that will pay out big, and I can put it back with nobody noticing and no harm done once I make my losses back.
Of course they lose it, so they need even more urgently to find some way of getting funds fast in order to cover what they 'borrowed' and that leads to more 'borrowing' and more speculating until it all blows up.
It does seem to be the lure of "since I have to manage this money, eventually I come to think of it as 'my' money in a sense, and it seems very silly to let it lie there idle when I could be using it to make a profit for all of us".
I think a lot of people who have never been in a certain kind of situation don't understand how little "morality" has to do with it. It seems hard to test that theory though.
You can't exactly put the people claiming "I would never!" in a relevant situation.
I agree. Every workplace I have been in has some kind of bad behavior that is sanctioned. Usually it has to do with not really sticking to the standards that are mandated by law. And the places I have worked have mostly been psychiatric settings, so sloppiness about patient care and confidentiality had real, direct effects on vulnerable people. And yet the people being sloppy were not bad people. Mostly they were smart and caring. But they were also tired and busy. So they did what most people do: They followed, not the rules in the book, but the unwritten rules that everyone else did.
None whatsoever. But I think the question is per se a disputatious gotcha with little applicability to the real world. I don't need to stand exactly in Sam Bankman-Fried's shoes to have a reasonable theory about what I would do if I were he, the same way we don't need to stand exactly in Heinrich Himmler's shoes to have a reasonable theory about whether we'd send all the Jews to Treblinka.
In general, to understand these situations we extrapolate from what we *do* know about ourselves, and we back that up by comparing our other behavior and choices with those of the person in question, to see how similar we are in general, and finally we check to see whether the relatively few other people who *have* stood in similar shoes all did the same bad thing to get an idea of the population-averaged probability of being bad. So far as I can tell this all yields pretty good results -- at least, I have rarely been surprised these past few decades in how I (or people I know well) will react (ethically) to novel situations. I am obviously not saying I *don't* have ethical weaknesses -- I'm only saying I know pretty well by now what they are, and aren't.
So first I know from long experience how much I generally value money vis-a-vis my ability to sleep at night with a clear conscience, and the answer is: not much. I could certainly have more money at various points in my life if I cut some ethical corners. Not a billion dollars, but not $100 either. I haven't done it. Would I do it if the reward were $1 billion? I doubt it. I don't really have that much interest in $1 billion in wealth, indeed it seeems to me it would be tedious and unpleasant, saddling me with all kinds of responsibilities and attracting the nastiest sorts of parasites. There's a lot I could so with it, a la Elon Musk, but I don't have his drive and ambition, I'm OK with where I am. I'd be much more impelled to consider the chance of $1 million, which would let me retire a little earlier and do a few other things. But I already know I wouldn't trade my satisfaction in my character for the modest extra bump in convenience and comfort that would mean. Maybe it's only because I'm old enough that I can no longer fool myself into thinking I'll live forever, and being happy with who I am is much more important than having a nicer car. My car is nice enough already anyway.
Secondly can compare my general nature and general actions with these folks, and when I do, the mismatch is grotesque. The more I learn of their lifestyle, the weirder it seems to me. There's a whole collection of stuff there that I would never even start doing -- the publicity show, the Manichaen urge to Change The World right now and comfort with cutting corners in the interest of speed, the drugs, the funky personal lifestyle -- and to be brutally frank a lof ot this kind of reeks to me of a real self-esteem problem. I can imagine that someone who has a big self-esteem problem, and is very smart, might indeed want to pull the mobiest financial hack ever, because maybe it will finally sate that internal hunger. But I already know I'm not that kind of person. For better or worse[1], I don't have self-esteem problems.
And, thirdly, there are certainly a number of people who *have* had the opportunity to pull billion-dollar frauds and we find that -- hardly any of them do. When one of them does, it's a shocker. So that tells me that the a priori probability that I'd act dishonestly is low, because most people don't. Combine that with what I additionally know empirically about myself from the above, and I conclude the probability is extra low.
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[1] I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I *should* ha ha, but I don't care about them.
"So far as I can tell this all yields pretty good results -- at least, I have rarely been surprised these past few decades in how I (or people I know well) will react (ethically) to novel situations. I am obviously not saying I *don't* have ethical weaknesses -- I'm only saying I know pretty well by now what they are, and aren't."
I feel similarly to you, so I'm going to complicate things a bit.
Part of The Lord's Prayer (used a lot by Catholics ... maybe by others as well) goes like this: "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
Because, I think, avoiding having the choice/option to do the wrong thing is a huge help. Much like an alcoholic NOT keeping liquor at home.
To illustrate, I will present Temar Boggs. When he was 15 years old, he noticed a 5 year old being kidnapped and took off on his bicycle to stop the kidnapping. After quite a car chase on the bicycles the kidnapper gave up trying to elude him (and a friend) and let the child go free. Temar (and his friend) were heroes [and I don't think this was staged though I can't rule out the possibility].
Three years later Temar went to prison for armed robbery.
I wonder if the folks who knew Temar when he was 15 would have been surprised at his behavior three years later. Maybe?
But its basically the same kid an I feel that with a different set of friends the older Temar might well have grown up as a law abiding member of his community.
I wonder how often that holds for lots of folks who screw up big time. It is simple to just conclude that they are bad/immoral/amoral/whatever. And some of them might be. But I think for a bunch if the opportunity for crime hadn't be there (or the opportunity had required much more effort) they'd have lived their lives never knowing that they might have gone the wrong way.
I think lots of people have a high opinion of their moral character when it's not particularly tested.
That's not to say that you would do crime if you were in SBFs shoes -- I think many people wouldn't -- but I do think that it's hard to say for sure unless you've been in at least remotely similar places.
Maybe. But so far I'm not convinced that the "places" these people were in were very "remote." It all reads like market-timing, check kiting, embezzlement, gambling the shopping money, and then doubling down by gambling the mortgage money when you lose, and having a lot of team pep-talks and popping uppers to boost your spirits when the squalid reality peeps through every now and then. Pretty ordinary types of human decadence and moral failure.
I mean, the numbers are much bigger. If I try a little market timing, I do it with $5000 instead of $5 billion. If I kite a check it's for $150 and not $150 million. But I'm not persuaded that's a difference that is sufficiently important to completely change the situation, make it utterly incomprehensible to anyone not in the very same shoes[1].
If a man is willing to commit murder, I don't think we're completely at sea with the question of whether he's willing to commit a million of them. If he's willing to steal a bike, I don't think we are completely in the dark about whether he would steal a luxury car.
Indeed, my experience is that people who have character and self-discipline exhibit that in small and great matters pretty equally, without regard for the number of zeros in what's at stake, because its the nature of the person that matters -- what he values, how he sees himself -- much more than the size of the table stakes.
A person who won't lie to his wife about where he's been, even when it's embarassing, also won't cheat on his income taxes or sell nuclear secrets to the Russians. Conversely, people who do lie and cheat and steal and cut ethical corners in great big ways seem to do it in small things as well.
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[1] Actually, saying "you don't know what it's like to be me! You might do the same!" sounds more like weaseling denial and egoistical self-justification, which alas fits impression I'm getting that there was no small amount of "as Supermen it would be silly and wasteful to consider ourselves bound by the mundane inflexible moral strictures imposed on mere mortals."
In defence of the defence attorney, even lawyers have their own ethical rules. If his client says she didn't drink the bleach, he's not allowed to make up his own, better case.
You also should consider doing expert testimony again; you had basically the definitive expert witness experience of being cross-examined on something with a counter-intuitive answer that you don't have to hand. Taking an honest crack at it is the best you can do in the circumstances, so well done!
It's also worth bearing in mind that judges have all heard the same thing hundreds of times, so are aware it's mostly a parlour trick.
Scott wrote previously that getting institutionalized in the US is very disadvantageous because you get the bill for it. If the person doesn't have the right insurance, it will be very devastating and will make his life more complicated. It is no wonder why the patient wanted to argue in the court against the order.
Maybe it wasn't in the US but in Ireland where people generally don't have to suffer from lack of insurance. Then it doesn't apply. In any case, he shouldn't feel bad about what happened in the court. He told honestly what he thought about the situation and the judge considered it. Sometimes things go as you expect them to and sometimes not. It is not up to you. No one is going to think that you are a bad doctor based on lawyer's words.
I don't know about "primarily". It's certainly a popular use.
About ten years ago, lots of people thought that modafinil had some sort of high-tech magic bullet effect on orexins, sleep related chemicals that would help with narcolepsy. More recently, people have figured out that it's probably just a stimulant, albeit one that has relatively few side effects and lasts longer than usual. It still works fine for narcolepsy, because lots of stimulants do, but I think it's getting more commonly used in generic stimulant roles.
Some people say that relative to eg Adderall, modafinil is better at keeping you awake and Adderall at keeping you focused. I don't know if that's true or just a side effect of the way the drug was originally marketed.
As a narcoleptic and a “focus worker”, having been prescribed each at various times, I would say that both have fairly similar wakefulness effects, especially if taking extended release Adderall, but the difference in increased focus under Adderall was noticeable; however, Adderall seems to taper off in efficacy over time where Modafinil/Armodafinil remain relatively consistent in effect over time.
For me Modafinil has an anti-addictive effect if anything. Not sure how I'd feel about more conventional ADHD drugs. Like I do not at all feel a desire to be on it all the time, it is an entirely instrumental desire. "I'm about to do a pretty high pain type of programming better take Modafinil".
Even when I used it to play EVE, doing 100 characters of maxed out Planetary Interaction specifically, it wasn't something I looked forward to or needed.
I understand that Adderall is supposed to be much more addictive.
I would also note that not one neurologist I’ve worked with nor any literature I’ve read prior to your comment has suggested that Modafinil would have any impact on the orexin/hypocretin issue and only that it was another type of stimulant to use in attempt to address the symptoms.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine who's definitely not me reported that even low doses of modafinil were very reliably taking away almost all of the euphoria from GHB taken at the same time, while no other common dopaminergic substances (including, IIRC, Adderall, Ritalin and cocaine) did anything of the sort, which sort of hints at some significant differences in the mechanism of action. But, again, totally anecdotal.
It is a rather different type of stimulant. On the other hand, I don't know why one should use any stimulant while under the effects of GHB. At least for narcolepsy, one is for daytime and one is for nighttime.
GHB is frequently used recreationally, in which case its sleep-inducing effects are a hindrance rather than a benefit. Stimulants take care of that problem.
I feel like there's kind of obviously a class of people who wear opposite-sex clothes for reasons other than identifying with the opposite sex, and "transvestite" is a perfectly-fine word for this class of people.
To the extent it's considered an "offensive" term now, the reason AFAIK is literally just "transvestism's existence is very mildly inconvenient for the SJ narrative, so SJ has decided to cancel everyone who acknowledges it". Certainly this isn't a case of "we came up with a new word, if you aren't with the current fashion you're bad" - there is no new SJ-approved word for transvestism, *all* of them (crossdresser, trap, etc.) are now "slurs", it's just been cut out of the accepted language as an expressible concept in the exact mold of Newspeak.
(I stress again, the existence of transvestism isn't even *that* inconvenient for the SJ narrative! You can totally believe transvestism is a thing and also transgenderism is a thing! It just slightly complicates the explanation!)
In the US, there are lots of them. My source is my dad is super incredibly gay and loves to hang out with big groups of gay men many of whom wear women's clothing and all of whom love going to in-person shows that are mostly about men wearing women's clothing.
Elsewhere, some places have different cultural ideas around this stuff that apparently cause people to be crossdressers at much higher rates and transgender at much lower rates.
Lots of gay men dress up in drag for fun -- it has nothing to do with wanting to be women.. Then there are males who truly feel they are female in some important way, and dress as women to manifest femaleness. And there are also straight men who dress in women's clothes because it's a turn-on. Lots of variety out there.
I've never met/heard of any that identify themselves that way in recent years, no.
There are certainly people who cross-dress recreationally for dag shows and the like, and people who cross-dress as a fashion statement or w/e, but I don't think those things carry the sort of pathological/compulsive context that was the essence of our past understanding of 'transvestism'.
And there's definitely a lot of fetish porn around sissy/forced feminization kinks that involve men wearing/being forced to wear women's clothes. But it's not clear how much of that is weird confusion around humiliation/submission kinks getting filtered through toxic masculinity, or how much of it is actual unacknowledged transgenderism being sublimated through the not-shameful-because-it's-supposed-to-be-shameful avenue of porn consumption.
So maybe there are some people in that kink scene that conform more to our past understanding of the context for 'transvestism', but only the most shameful/sexual version of that context.
AFAIK, people like Eddie Izzard who openly identified as transvestites and cross-dressed consistently in daily life, were all absorbed into either trans or non-binary.
"But it's not clear how much of that is weird confusion around humiliation/submission kinks getting filtered through toxic masculinity, or how much of it is actual unacknowledged transgenderism being sublimated through the not-shameful-because-it's-supposed-to-be-shameful avenue of porn consumption."
Aren't you somewhat glossing over Blanchard's hypothesis? I know it's not politically correct to acknowledge it, and my own experiences suggest it's not 100% correct, but it can't be dismissed as 100% incorrect, either.
I'm sure there's some truth to this, but it's not true that "all" of them are now slurs. Haven't seen any discourse against drag, for one, and for a new coinage, there's "gender-non-conforming"/"gnc".
The second is not specific to transvestites; it's lumping them in with genderqueer, so it doesn't acknowledge that transvestism is a thing on its own not necessarily related to genderqueer.
Drag, possibly. My exposure to SJ has dropped a lot the past few years, so I can't speak for certain about that one; "drag queen" is still definitely a thing, but I think calling one "a man in drag" (even if accurate) might draw the Eye of Sauron.
Outside of SJ circles there are some women who are miffed at men putting on "womanface" and portraying rather regressive stereotypes of female behaviour.
I don't know where you got the idea that "crossdresser" is a slur, but it isn't. It's the preferred word for people who dress in clothes associated with the opposite gender for non-identity, non-performance, non-fashion/expression reasons.
(Performance is drag, identity is trans, and fashion/expression is usually butch or fem/femboy or maybe "crossdressing" as a verb.)
'Transvestite' comes across as a bit old fashioned to me, but not weird in a 1970s-psych-textbook kind of way the way 'transvestism' does. Idk who'd be offended at 'crossdresser' or 'drag', though 'trap' is firmly in the slur category for a lot of people.
I guess the most commonly used modern term is 'femboy'? :P
I would have thought "transvestism" and "transvestite" had basically the same connotations since they're the same Latin root construction and merely a different grammatical suffix to specify person vs. phenomenon - like "racist" vs. "racism".
Your analogy's bad. "Transvestite" and "transvestism" aren't different words for the same thing using different-but-related constructions; they're words for different-but-related things derived from the same construction.
Synonyms have a lot of room to acquire separate nuances; because they can be substituted, the choice of which synonym to use tends to acquire signalling value (the different nuance of "Jewish person" vs. "Jew" essentially boils down to signalling "I am all-in on the Blue Tribe's Whorfian language games" vs. "I am not"). But you can't substitute "transvestism" for "transvestite"; one means the phenomenon and the other a person displaying said phenomenon.
>I guess the most commonly used modern term is 'femboy'? :P
The general term for this whole category is "gender non-conforming", usually shortened to GNC. Which itself is a sort of superset of "non-binary" which includes people that don't explicitly use that label.
Femboys/bois are definitely GNC and often NB, as are drag queens/kings.
Calling all drag queens/kings "definitely GNC" would be controversial, since that set includes (1) trans drag performers who are traditionally feminine/masculine in their identified gender, (2) performers who are traditionally-masculine/feminine in their private lives and wear drag only as a costume for performances and professional events, and arguably (3) bio queens/kings whose only gender-nonconformity is their participation in an art form associated with the opposite sex.
You could make an argument that they all transgress gender roles in some way, but so did Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Rudy Giuliani, all the women who've played Peter Pan, all the men who played women in premodern stage performances, and anyone who's ever dressed up as an opposite-sex character for Halloween. In all those cases we don't generally treat gender-role-transgression as a characteristic that the person has; its just a thing that they've done.
I think I can handwave away (2) as unambiguously being an *act* of GNC'ity, even if they aren't GNC all the time, but the degree to which they consider it a pillar of their life/identity is relevant to that. For (1), IME even most binary trans people are *somewhat* GNC and play around with gender, but fair. The mere existence of (3) is contradictory enough to how most people define drag that I can't comment on it.
I can think of at least four Robin Williams movies off the top of my head that directly touch on GNC'ity, so henceforth I will be thinking of Robin Williams as a GNC icon.
FWIW I was taught that transvestism is a thing and also transgenderism is a thing and they are different things both worthy of respect and tolerance in high school health class in 1990. The distinction isn't even new.
The thing is we don't have words for other types of people who wear specific types of clothes. There's no medical-sounding terms for 'denimites' or 'sundression' or w/e.
'Transvestism' is historically a medical-ish diagnosis and referred to mental condition that went well beyond just liking to wear a type of clothing sometimes. And to the extent that it had those deeper connotations, they mainly came from transgender people who *were* expressing a deeper issue with how society viewed them, and we now understand our pt understanding of transvestism was innacurate to those people.
Basically, take the misunderstand of transgender people out of our historical understanding of transvestism, and there's nothing of much substance left to the word that would justify keeping it around. Something like 'cross-dressing' or 'drag' or other non-medical-context-and-weird-history words are much more appropriate for the people who just like to sometimes wear those clothes for whatever reason.
Fascinating/awesome write up! This whole debacle feels like a crossover episode of silicon valley and 30 Rock with Chris Parnell aka Dr Spaceman (spe-ch-men) being in three episodes as the company psychiatrist/performance coach
Thank you for the gift of that YouTube Dr. Spaceman binge! I can't believe how much more likeable Chris Parnell is here, compared to Archer or Rick and Morty. Come to think of it, he's like an IRL Krieger in 30 Rock.
I think it got subsumed into expected utility calculation and the reality of life under capitalism.
Like, I have an ADHD diagnosis, and a bottle of prescribed amphetamines. I don't need them to function normally, and only take them when I need to crunch on a project at work, maybe 1-3 pills a week. They definitely have negative short-term side effects when I take them, and may have negative long-term side effects for all I know.
A very long employment history confirms that when I do this, I can hold down a high-paying and satisfying job, and perform well enough that I am not constantly worried about my performance and if I am about to lose my job. When I do not do this, my performance suffers, I am constantly worried about losing my job to a degree that interferes with enjoying the rest of my life, and I do actual lose those high-paying and very intense, demanding jobs at the rate of about 1 every 1-2 years.
So what is 'do no harm' here? Certainly if I wasn't trying to hold these high-paying jobs, my life would be better with no medication. Certainly my life is better with medication and being comfortable in a high-paying satisfying job than it would be if I were constantly losing high-paying jobs or working a boring low-paying job.
How should a doctor calculate 'harm' in that situation?
And more importantly, what happens when the guy who wants my job realizes he can't compete with me when I'm on speed and he's not, and he goes to his doctor saying *his* life would be better off with meds so he could take my job? What happens when a significant portion of the people in high-paying jobs are each individually telling that to different doctors? What are the doctors supposed to do?
I wasn't responding to the types of clinical concerns which you are raising and comes up for patients and their physicians daily. It was more related to the boundary circumstances outlined in the FTX article in the Times. The clinical issue is the one Scott raises and you raise - if one has an ADHD diagnosis its easier from a standard of care standpoint. That said our diagnostic criteria and predictive criteria are not so precise.
> this is a violation of the Goldwater Rule that psychiatrists aren’t supposed to publicly assess famous figures
Would this article fall under that rule? You're not giving a psych evaluation of him, but would speculating about how his medication might have affected his risk tolerance, count as "publicly assessing" him?
I'm not sure, it doesn't really have clear boundaries and wasn't written with pharmacology in mind. I would like to think this article continues to stand if we replace him with some random other person who took these same medications, and that that matters.
From the perspective of a layman reading it, I feel like this article is fine. It isn't about SBF, it's about stimulants and SBF is merely a reason people currently want to read about the effects of stimulants
What a wonderful S.A. (i.e. "an essay as outstanding as a post by S.A.S."). I am grateful to live in this time. No cocaine for my brain, no emsam and no jhanna, just this. I am high on ACX.
Good to know it was just good old regular idiocy then. And not drug induced idiocy which caused this.
But seriously, anytime someone is labelled "the next Warren Buffett" they are usually the complete opposite. It is amazing how reliable this seems to be.
Of course. Following the path of Jack Bogle is boring. Far easier to invent magic beans. That goes for Bitcoin, too. Its only genuine use case is ordering illegal drugs.
I think people miss the point of Warren Buffett. Sure, he's made a lot of investments and does a good job managing them, but his real insight is to play the long game. He's like a billion years old and built his fortune through slow prudent investing. Nobody in their 20s can be "the next Warren Buffett" by making flashy trades and getting rich quickly - that's the opposite of what he does!
It also requires quite a lot of capital. There's a huge difference in buying a few shares of an undervalued company and buying a large chunk of an undervalued company and then being able to unlock that value.
Yeah to become as rich as Buffett you need outside capital. But if you start with $50k of savings and save up $15k per year if you have a well paying job, and invest it at 15% per year by finding undervalued stocks, you could have $10m after 30 years. I think that could be considered rich.
If you are as good as Buffett and get a 25% annual return, you would have $100m by the time you are in your 60's (if you start young).
Few people end up doing it though, because it takes discipline and patience. And a well paying job of course.
I think that's buying into the myth that Buffet is selling. He does this work full-time, has likely a lot more access to the corporations and he also can influence the corporations he buys, something a small shareholder can not do. The regular person with a day job is probably far better of with an index fund.
You can read all his letters to the partners in his hedge fund as well as to the Berkshire shareholders, it's pretty interesting reading.
"Here's the paradox: You recognize that as an individual trader you probably are not gonna be able to make good enough stock picks, consistently, to outperform an index. But you're also greedy, and can't accept the meager 8% annualized return of the S&P." ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgisRHEQ2FM&t=252s
That would also make for quite the boring story. The business press loves it when someone under 30 strikes it rich by selling shares in an unprofitable company, building a profitable company with sustainable growth from the ground up doesn't sound that exciting.
One data point: I have a relative with Parkinson's. All of a sudden out of nowhere, he lost tens of thousands of dollars gambling. His doctor took him off his medicine (I don't know which one it was), and he stopped gambling--he had never gambled before. He wrote the drug company, and they paid for his losses.
I'd be very interested in reading about any details of your relative's experience. What did it _feel_ like for them to decide to both start and continue gambling?
I like _betting_ (for very small stakes and almost always about interpersonal disputes regarding 'trivia') but 'gambling' just doesn't make any sense (given the negative expected value). I can't imagine any drug changing that but I'm very curious if your relative has any insight about how that might work.
Some describe it as a compulsion that can't be ignored, like seeing food after a 4 day fast, and others as a desire that makes no sense to ignore, because it would be fun and good.
Here's a thought that crossed my mind which I'm not sure how seriously to take:
If you think, on utilitarian grounds, that you ought to be a lot less risk averse than seems intuitive, then you'll probably find that your instinctive risk averse responses in many situations are getting in the way of acting quickly how you would want, on reflection, to act. So if there are drugs that make one's instinctive responses less risk averse, one might consider taking those as a kind of moral enhancement.
SBF et al. famously did think that they ought to be much less risk averse than is intuitive. I wonder, then, if it's possible that risk curve shifting was not an unintended side effect of the stimulants, but rather part of the point of taking them.
(Of course, this only makes sense if you think the drugs shift your risk curve in a way that is predictable and doesn't overshoot or otherwise make one act irrationally, and I don't know if it's plausible SBF et al. would have thought that.)
🤯🤯🤯🤯 this is making me want to stop taking Ritalin.
I definitely went through a period where I was weirdly addicted to online furniture and fixture/hardware shopping while I was doing a reno and it struck me as very odd. Nothing before or after that reno triggered compulsive behavior in the same way. I also totally overshot my furniture budget. 🤦♀️ Never thought it was the adhd meds...
Wonder what else it’s doing to me that I don’t realize.
Also, Hamilton Morris has discussed combining adderall and Ayahuasca (an maoi) and he did not die.
Ayahuasca is a combination of two drugs, DMT and an MAOI. The MAOI prevents the body from breaking down the DMT in the gut, which is why it also makes you sensitive to foods with tyramine. There's been some imprecision on this point in the press, especially after Aaron Rodgers went to Peru and realized that wide receivers are just a projection of his will and he deserves 20% of the Packers' salary cap.
Lol. Yes. I mean that Ayahuasca contains an MAOI, so people tell you not to mix it with stimulants, but if you do accidentally, you probably won’t die.
That's funny. I don't have much experience with stimulants, just a short period of time. But what I do have matches your experience with shopping. I've never done anything dangerous on stimulants, never gambled, nothing that odd. But holy heck have I gone on strange purchasing rat holes that I was absolutely sure were logical decisions at the time. And later had me laughing, wtf was going on in my head.
The annoying thing is that being aware of this effort doesn't inoculate you from it. Somehow you think, "But this time is different, I'm *aware* of the bias from the stimulants and I'm adjusting for it..." Repeat up the levels of the stack the next time, you are aware that even being aware didn't work, but that means *this* time...
However I also do smaller weird shopping rat holes without stimulants, it's not a created behavior. Rather seemed like a huge multiplier on it. It pushed me over some threshold and started some feedback loops.
Fascinating. Also, love the term “rat hole.” Haha. It’s so true about knowing but continuing. During my furniture rat hole, I’d look at 1,000s different bed frames and think—I’m bat shit crazy. And then I’d like at 200 more frames...
Never did I think it might be related to Ritalin. 🤦♀️
I find the idea of being on stimulants to do your job both fascinating and terrifying. I don't really touch drugs so my experience is far more about caffeine than anything harder, but my every experience with stimulants is that you're not really gaining anything. Sure, you're more focused, more active and more productive now... but there's always a later and generally the work I get done during a caffeine rush is matched by all the work I don't get done when dealing with the post-crash brain fog.
Maybe people are more willing to mortgage their downtime in exchange for their productive hours than I am. It still feels like a real faustian bargain to me, though.
I don't know about your job, but mine (software eng) benefits more from an hour of peak concentration than eight hours of barely being able to think about things. During the brain fog you can just chill, which you should probably do anyway.
I had to lay off the caffeine temporarily for health reasons, and my focus is dogshit. I might end up getting that Ritalin prescription after all.
Modafinil is almost as good if you can't get an ADHD med prescription. Probably much healthier than caffeine, too. Also it works better IMO and is probably cheaper unless you use pills for your caffeine.
I find it’s not really trivial to find out where to acquire it? I mean sure, if you’re in Provincetown or Manhattan or SF, seems easier, but what if you’re not?
So far I didn't even consider modafinil because I have enough problems keeping my circadian clock remotely sane. Perhaps I shouldn't? FWIW, I had no problems sleeping after a bit of Ritalin in the morning.
Very interesting recent paper challenging the role of MAO-B inhibitors in the metabolism of dopamine. Disclaimer, I haven't read it closely, but the journal is fairly reputable and the topic is relevant here. It is making some controversial claims so I have some skepticism, but again I have yet to read closely.
Also interesting to note, I believe MAO-A is responsible for the metabolism of tyramine and therefore selegiline (as a selective MAO-B inhibitor at lower doses) is generally not considered to be a risk for noradrenergic hypertensive crises. I also believe that with lower amounts of tyramine in modern foods (among other reasons) has led to the risk of such crises in general being much rarer than was previously expected. This seems to be backed up by user reports on such drugs, but of course there is a selection bias in that these reports cannot be made by people who died from strokes related to an explosion of blood pressure.
Interested in hearing peoples opinions on both points.
EDIT: Oh, I just noticed you posted this in the footnotes. Apologies, but still interested in any discussion!
Can stimulants get you in a loop where after taking them, reloading with another dose sounds like a great idea? Basically the Gandhi murder pill thought experiment but with real pills and less murder?
As for risk curves... I have a friend who's bipolar, though one of the lucky (?) ones who spends ~80% time in various degrees of mania. His favorite quote is a piece of philosophy he accidentally received from a third world waiter struggling with English: "Everything is highly recommended".
This sounds unlikely because they don't last that long (the patch in this article lasts most of a day and this is longer than almost everything else) and because using more than the normal amount will begin to be disruptive to your work (assuming you are mainly interested in taking them for work, not for days-long sex parties)
Yes, dopaminergic stimulants can very much produce wanting more, even in the absence of actually liking the experience. I've observed this when cocaine became available in my friend group: one person kept saying she didn't notice any effect so LET'S DO MORE. After a few times, our supplier recognized this as a dangerous pattern and wisely cut her off.
>Can stimulants get you in a loop where after taking them, reloading with another dose sounds like a great idea? Basically the Gandhi murder pill thought experiment but with real pills and less murder?
This is one of the reasons people think longer time release forms have less danger for abuse.
Not sure if this is unique to stimulants though. I'm much more likely to decide drinking more alcohol is a good idea, after I've had some amount of alcohol. Psychedelics supposedly run counter to this trend, but no personal experience myself.
Yeah, psychedelics are pretty overwhelming and you just get tired of them for a while (the good kind of tired, like coming back from a mindblowing backpacking trip). They also usually give you some kind of rapid onset tolerance, you can't really prolong your trip by taking more in the middle.
Re: Footnote 8: Three words: dose-response curve. Too much: bad. Not enough: not a problem. "Dose-response curve" is a much more expert-sounding answer than "I don't know", even though it means the same thing.
Except: is "dose-response curve" three words or two? I don't know!
This post also makes me feel less bad about not being able to manipulate tiny numbers all day. I’ve been beating myself up about this perceived failure, but you’ve normalized it. Thank you for this. 🙏
It's worth noting that what got me my ongoing ADHD diagnosis wasn't my inability to crunch tiny numbers (which honestly, even unmedicated I was frequently able to do).
It was actually my inability to feed myself (plan meals, buy the right food, organise enough to make meals before the food goes bad, notice that I'm hungry before all the shops close), do laundry before I have literally no underwear, keep appointments, and remember where I left my things or parked my car.
Scott decides to run challenge mode where he will be pruning out comments, and the same week this all happens. I'm wondering if he still has time to do the challenge pruning, or have events overtaken him?
As to the psychiatrist, I'm going to venture that someone who is being described as a pill-pusher whose job was to get all the FTX and Alameda traders hyped up on stimulants is not going to admit in an NYT interview "Oh yeah, they were all frothing at the mouth crazy, I just wrote the scripts as they asked for them" especially in light of all the allegations of fraud and embezzlement and swindling, but rather rush to give an account about "Why yes I was there but only as a kind of life coach and goodness gracious me I had NO IDEA that kind of malarkey was going on!" as a way of trying to keep out of the mud.
As to bleach, I have no idea how much you'd need to drink for a suicide attempt. A mouthful is bad but probably will only make you sick; half a bottle will likely do damage:
As to the drug use, here is where we slap ALLEGED ALLEGED ALLEGED all over any comments we might make, but again - "judicious" is not what comes to mind in this context of over-ambition, over-confidence, and over-reaching themselves, especially in Bankman-Fried's case.
From what I know of the facts, FTX had nothing resembling a system of internal financial controls or compliance. These things are vital to the safe operation of any financial business, but they are hard to do and not necessarily intuitive. Furthermore the incentive structure of the business always motivates sales and trading personnel to shortcut or ignore them. Financial regulators are constantly sanctioning and fining well known major entities for violations.
I doubt that anyone in the crypto arena knows or cares very much about controls and compliance. The FTX disaster noes not require drugs to explain it, just ignorance and a lack of regulation.
Life's too short to be an expert witness on anything but as a former attorney, I can say you did a great job. The point of the defense attorney's questions was to ruin your credibility no matter what you said. He'd paint the answer "You can drink a little bleach and live" to mean "I am recommending drinking bleach" and the answer "If you drink a little bleach you'll die" to be absolute proof that no bleach was drunk.
"Probably you can drink some bleach and not die but I can't be sure and that's not really the point of my testimony" was 100% the correct answer.
I’ll echo this. The whole point of XXN is to give the opposing side the chance to attack your credibility. Of course he’s going to bluster and bullshit and twist what you said and try to make you contradict yourself. You did very well.
One of my lawyer friends makes a lot of money by threatening litigation with absolutely no intention to follow through. A lawsuit is expensive and risky, but sending a threatening letter is cheap and quite often collects a payout. As he wryly observed to me, in other circumstances it could be described as extortion.
I feel like being a good lawyer requires a certain level of sociopathy.
Generally the resort of the litigious, the crank, and the would-be extortioner to threaten sending a person or business or other entity a solicitor's letter in order to get them to cough up cash. Does work well at times.
The matching pair of the set is the lawyer in question, again often someone who is an ambulance-chaser or makes a career out of taking cases to court. Not to name any names but we've one example of such a firm in my town; when I worked in local government they were notorious for being willing to represent (and indeed encouraging) the disgruntled to take the council to court. One spectacular result was when they managed to have a judgment for €10,000 issued against the housing department, awarded so that the plaintiff could "afford private rent".
The cynical view on our part was that the majority of this award was going to go into the lawyer's clutches as "legal fees" and what remained for the plaintiff would go to his drug-dealer, and not on paying rent to enable him to get a place to live, which was the ostensible reason for the court case. I should probably add that yes, Mr. "I won money off yiz for rent because ye wouldn't give me a house" was back applying for social housing due to homelessness quite shortly after this case.
If true, deprenyl actually works by inhibiting the synthesis of astrocytic GABA (which is done by MAOB), increasing dopaminergic tone by releasing the inhibition exerted by GABAergic interneurons.
Also though, inhibiting MAOB most definitely increases Beta-phenylethylamine and other trace amines, some of which are basically endogenous forms of amphetamine
Morgan Housel's insight seems worth considering with Lord Acton's preceding as a more direct explanation of events.
LA: "Power corrupts"
@morganhousel, 3:03 PM · Nov 12, 2022
"Re-watched the Enron documentary with @bethanymac12 a few weeks ago and a thing that sticks out is how much you can get away with when you tell investors what they want to hear. Very few people asks questions when the numbers are going up."
"If you pretend to make other people rich those people become 10x more gullible than they assumed they were."
"It’s why so many frauds are shockingly unsophisticated."
Recovering stim-addict Hunter Biden made his first public appearance yesterday, in a Twitter spaces about the FTX scandal, but didn’t comment on it directly.
So, FTX deserves some credit for making a crisis so big, it serves as an opportunity for others.
Others who have begun the process of rehabilitating their image by implicitly comparing themselves to SBF include the people behind the crypto blowups that precipitated the FTX collapse: Do Kwan of Terra/Luna, Su Zhu of 3 Arrows Capital; and also Martin Shkreli, the guy who went to jail for hiking the prices of old drugs, among other things.
From the outside, it did look like that Sam had a penchant for stims. If you see him in TV/youtube interviews, his body physically shakes.
Now, how commonly do stims get used as performance enhancing drugs in tech? Impossible to exactly measure, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In the hiphop world, to be “geeked” or “geeking” means to be high on uppers.
> If you want real sound crypto, you have some good buying opportunities here. Mid 2024 we will go through the ups again. Ignore all the morons saying this time is the end. I've heard that every crash since 2010.
This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a prediction market!
Since we know SBF is a subscriber here, I’m wondering if he read this article and is now second guessing his decision to mix the drugs.
We can also assume Matt Levine is a subscriber, since he quoted a subscribers-only post the other day. I wonder if any of this will make it into his newsletter if this angle on the FTX story comes up.
"The best I can say for him is that he’ll probably get away with it, because the only injured party is Sam Bankman-Fried, and I assume Sam’s lawyers are busy right now."
Don't psychiatrists have a professional association or trade organization with a mandate to investigate stuff like that regardless of what the victim might want, and dole out serious punishment up to and including the removal of the ability to legally practice?
FWIW, n=1. Many years ago I was for a good long while on an ordinary therapeutic dose of venlafaxine (Effexor) for depression. It worked well for that. But I ended up going through the unexpectedly difficult process of getting the hell off venlafaxine because I came to believe that it was causing me to take unwise risks and also to be callously unconcerned about other people (both of those things being, I think, symptoms of a more general “don’t dwell on negative consequences: just do the thing” effect). I don't think either of those effects would have been easily measurable, and it was only the cumulative experience of many months on the drug and some sustained self-examination that teased it out for me. I continue to wonder to what extent small effects like these, multiplied by the many people now on drugs like these, may have prudence- and consideration-eroding effects at the societal scale.
When I was briefly on Prozac (or similar, not actually sure what) as a child, I stopped almost immediately and started selling it instead. I had nearly crashed my grandfather's car during my first couple weeks on it and found I didn't give a shit.
Seemed like the drugs were a bad idea if that was how my brain worked on them.
> He claims this is okay, because he was just a “performance coach” for the company, who happened to, additionally, be a psychiatrist who was treating many of the company’s employees.
>neuroscientists investigate how modafinil shifts some technical parameter in a risk curve; usually these don’t replicate
Additional anecdotal data: during use of prescription modafinil, I actually had minor reduced risk taking as I had more energy to actually address known risks. I imagine same or opposite effect could be seen in folks that had risk-averse or risk-taking activities/tasks that they already wanted to do but simply didn’t have enough energy to participate in/complete. I would not be surprised at all if this explained the outliers/non-reproducible cases. (Naturally, a crypto-trader may also fall under the umbrella of “wanted to do more risky crypto-trading the whole time and now has the time and energy to do so”.)
>Because ADHD is so poorly defined that the official standards basically boil down to “it’s hard for them to do their job without Adderall”, there is a giant loophole where bosses can just make jobs that are hard to do without Adderall, and then psychiatrists can prescribe the Adderall.
While this is a very serious loophole, please please avoid generalizing it, as there are many software jobs that appeal to people with a “number brain” (mode of thinking that is related to ADHD-adjacent and autism-adjacent traits in complicated ways but also allows rapid flexibility & high engagement when Poking Those Tiny Numbers All Day), and thus software jobs will attract many employees that suffer from attention problems in all aspects of life and regardless of what job they are working.
Oftentimes, the attention problems even follow specific patterns of “I can focus extremely well on the work itself but put me in an under-stimulating meeting that for some reason is required five times a week of software engineers, and I will be completely useless”. (My source for this is observation of colleagues in multiple software jobs and in software club work. Almost nothing got done in any meetings unless a non-engineer was directing the meeting. Hence, regardless of medication level, I recommend converting these meetings into other formats that are easier for the engineer to digest rather than assuming it’s their problem for not listening well. It’s simply more effective.)
It's also reasonably common for such people to have a problem of the form "I can focus reasonably well on the job and survive the meetings, but my personal life is a disaster because I forget/procrastinate/avoid anything that doesn't involve manipulating tiny numbers."
I just read this excerpt which is part of a great chapter about attention aside from malady or pharm treatment:
"Occasionally we find people who have been gifted with one-pointed minds and have not had to undergo the strenuous sensory training necessary for most of us. Excellent – it saves a lot of effort – but there can be one potential drawback. Such a person’s mind may fix itself so passionately on the subject of his interest that he cannot leave it even when necessary. [author proceeds to give examples]"
While I agree we should never consider any skills outside of our reach, I feel like this framing is ignoring the difference in “strenuous sensory training necessary” to reach a specific skill level which has a lot of variance based on pedagogy methods, which are still very deficient for non-average learners.
As an anecdote for this, it’s been more than 10 years since I started specifically scheduling time to work on conversation skills (at first, was as much as 3 hours a day), and I still have to focus intently at work to correctly time when to speak without interrupting others. If I’m not focused, such as around friends, then I miss the timing and will either speak up before someone has finished a thought or after another person has already responded. Meanwhile, the majority of folks I know can maintain this skill automatically all day long (until a good four to eight beers in.)
Hey John. Honestly, I had only read the one preceding comment until just now. The condition you have sounds challenging.
The contribution I was attempting to make is that even a gifted neuro-typical can be undercut by an undisciplined, untrained natural ability. For someone with diagnosed condition, therapy and meds should be consider of course but I'd say used as sparingly as possible in favor of mind and/or mind-body exercises. Similar to physical therapy only strengthening parts of the mind for the first time.
Thanks for the clarification; looking at your comment in only the context of the preceding one, it is clear "aside from malady or treatment" was an exception rather than the inverse. Given that, I wholeheartedly agree that attention and other mental skills shouldn't be neglected by anyone, and in cases where medication is needed, meds should be considered supplemental to therapy, accommodations, skill-building, and general goal-oriented life choices (though not one-over-the-other). I also realize now looking at the quote that I was recently recommended Easwaran's Conquest of Mind; I'll definitely have to look into him.
There have been a lot of challenges, but I study a lot because I enjoy it, and I overall am incredibly fortunate, no worries at all. (My studies are how my fiancé and I got together!) Was merely a good contextual example for strenuous mental training.
> I quit my job and tried to contribute what little I could to the ongoing campaign of all reasonable people to destroy the New York Times. This was the correct, ethical thing to do!
I pray that one day you will be able to forgive a newspaper rather than let this grievance define your entire politics.
Why? The paper certainly has its share of sins (along with merits). If you cannot be petty and vindictive against people/institutions who have seriously harmed you what is even the point of life?
Also it it not remotely clear to me the NYT is a net force for good in the world. In my direct experiences with reporters, they are generally a pretty stupid and credulous group of people often harming society who instead think they are saints crossed with Sherlock Holmes and doing god's work.
One guy I know (play board games with) is the leading "education" reporter in my state, which sounds impressive. In practice it means that he is tremendous at getting the University admin's position printed as though it is fact and not really challenging it with any questions while dismissing/minimizing critics.
> If you cannot be petty and vindictive against people/institutions who have seriously harmed you what is even the point of life?
You need to find God dude.
In my direct experiences with SFBA Rationalists, they are generally a pretty stupid and credulous group of people often harming society who instead think they are saints crossed with Sherlock Holmes and doing god's work.
I'm not ashamed to reflexively point out spiritual corruption when I see it. You find humor when you are faced with sincere injunction to live a purer, less petty and vindictive life? Your nihilism leaks through and I find _that_ humorous.
"Ha, I hit a nerve by inducing a moral correction to be applied to myself; truly I am the superior intellect" I seem to hear you say! Sorry, but I don't LARP as an emotionless logical automaton the way you SFBA Rationalists seem to admire.
Sorry that I mention this as a joke on occasion when it's extremely relevant, like when the discussion is already revolving around psychiatrists, confidentiality, and NYT articles.
And yet I remember you pulling the same "I'm just joking it's just a joke" excuse in other places when you were being held to account for "So when you swore up, down and sideways that definitely within two weeks Trump would be in jail, and it's been longer than two weeks and he's not in jail, do you admit you were wrong?"
Your point of view meanders so much, it's hard to keep up with. It's a general mish-mash of swinging between median Democratic Party supporter talking points, liberal, progressive, and your very own special sauce.
You're very fond of calling everyone fascists and what-not, and that's as much of a coherent view as you demonstrate: whatever straw is in your hair this week, anyone not on board with your take on it is a fascist.
In a post-ironic world, all expression is genuine. Your grievance with a newspaper that has performed the function, as a mirror, of the newspaper; this grievance with the machine is no different from an anarkiddy fighting with the police to prove a point. The state is just a big bear and you poked it. The state has good mirrors.
That your politics is reactionary is thus trivial. A persecution complex which leaks out.
You've never had the courage to admit that Trumpism amounted to an authoritarian power grab by theocrats, but now I'm not sure you have the brainpower to understand that this is so. That's the degree to which your woke moral panic has divorced you from mainstream political contexts.
You can cry on your personal island of misfits that you are mistreated, just like the cult leader himself, all alone against an imagined AI monster while the normal human monsters emerge around you as phantasms which you think are merely, what? Histrionic illusions of the left?
There are such a thing as basic tests of political intelligence, and: understanding the speech Trump gave on 1/6 as a summoned mob arriving for violence is one of those tests.
There is such a thing as a basic test of human social intelligence, and: can you recognize that the form of a cult has emerged around a leader who wrote some self help texts on his blog? is one of those tests.
If your community develops a reputation for tripping over its own arguments, that is a consequence. If your community develops a reputation for hosting the nazi disco dance party, that is a consequence. My disdain and contempt for you comes out when I tell you: the reason you should drop your grudge against the NYT is because you're the one who wrote that story, they're just the ones who published it. You're the one who spread a neophyte blogger's packaging of Fox News viewpoints developed by Limbaugh in the 90s (god that 'Republicans should use more class based rhetoric' was severely underinformed), and who is on the record consciously reflecting on this desire to grow your audience in the reactionary direction.
You did these things, and now you are here, on substack.
I hope you can learn the lesson of those you follow, that the sycophancy required of the inner circle of a cult creates such interesting exchange of ideas alone on their island.
Impassionata, I am going to be serious for once. Have you really got nothing better to do than whine about Scott? How is he so important to you? How is he so important in the wide world? You did it over on SSC, The Motte, Drama, and now you've pitched up here, sounding like a bitter ex who insists that "you'll never get anyone as good as me again, you'll never be happy without me!"
You went a bit bonkers with the marshmallow site, but you really don't seem to have moved on at all. You're stuck in the rut of "I was right all the time, those alt-right fascist nazi reactionaries over at that place, and that place, and that place, and the other place, couldn't handle me telling The Truth and bullied and drove me off".
Right now, you are reminding me of a family member who is rewriting events in their mind and fitting them in with imagined past events and fabulations into a narrative of victimhood where everyone has always been against them and done them down, and is going around telling people stories about things that literally were impossible to have happened in the past as yet more 'evidence' of how they have been abused and mistreated all their life. That person is not mentally well and has two suicide attempts under their belt.
This is not a good exemplar to sound like. I think you'd be a lot happier if you could just let go of whatever grudges or slights you are holding, and find something else to think and write about. Anything else.
And no, this is not because "Ha ha, am I piercing your shell of ignorance?" on my part. Seeing you confabulate what really happened on various sites with what really happened is funny but there comes a time when seeing someone pissing themselves in public loses all humour value.
Right now, you are rewriting events in your mind and fitting them in with imagined past events and fabulations into a narrative around me, Impassionata, and you are going around telling people stories as yet more 'evidence' of how right you are and how pathological psychologically 'bad' I am.
> Have you really got nothing better to do than whine about Scott? How is he so important to you? How is he so important in the wide world?
Turning a figure onto a truer path would be a meaningful accomplishment I must admit.
> I think you'd be a lot happier if you could just let go of whatever grudges or slights you are holding, and find something else to think and write about.
You hold a grudge against me for not granting your viewpoint any particular legitimacy. I suggest you let go of it, and me.
> there comes a time when seeing someone pissing themselves in public loses all humour value.
Telling people stories about things... You can of course tell the story of BothAfternoon and Impassionata in any way you wish, but you're the one with the family history of self-serving narrative! lmao.
Fwiw I have been on Ritalin for coming up to 2.5 years now (well, 3 years interrupted by about 3 months when I ran out and couldn't get more due to pandemic and relocating). I have negative interest in regularly drinking coffee because it often makes me physically ill. Previous to being medicated it had a pleasant mental alertness effect, now that effect is negligible compared to the ritalin and it's primarily just laxative now (gross, I know). But it still tastes nice, so I have it in moderation and it doesn't make me too sick.
Also occasionally coffee will (paradoxically) cause me to become extremely sleepy. This is both pre and post medication, and some anecdotal (people I know IRL as well as online) suggests that the caffeine sometimes does that if you have ADHD.
This could almost have qualified for a "Sam Bankman Fried's Drug Habits: More Than You Wanted to Know" title, but hey, I read the whole thing, so I guess it wasn't more than I wanted to know.
I must say, also, that this post has inspired me to make the following vow: if I'm ever the CEO of a medical supply company, I will not name random product offerings after my progeny. I can't imagine there aren't better ways to publicly demonstrate love and devotion to one's offspring than to name a particular MOAI Delivery device after them, especially since the life cycle of the product is probably limited to the patent length, anyway, and in the meantime, shady, pseudo-intellectual finance bros are abusing it to scratch out a few extra basis points in their ponzi crypto schemes. I have to think a son of mine would be almost as equally unexalted to be informed one future day that a new enema kit had been branded the Gordon Tremeshko Jr. Buttflush 3000 in his honor.
On the other hand, think of all the terrible diseases that have been named after their physician discover/characterizer as an intent to honor. Should Alois Alzheimer and Douglas Reye have felt endlessly humiliated?
And then there's the even more interesting case of barbituric acid...although if the stories are true at least Baeyer was discreet.
Nah, I think that's entirely different. If you're a doctor, describing some new malady that the rest of your profession can tackle studying causes and treatments for is big stuff. Like an astronomer finding a new super black hole or something: it advances the whole profession and enhances one's personal prestige within it. On the contrary, being a kid whose name is permanently attached to a not-particularly-noteworthy product whose creation you had nothing to do with is kind of a double whammy, because now your name is pointlessly attached to this product for good or ill, plus it means your dad's kind of a dork.
The better shame analogy would be the somewhat uncommon practice of naming diseases after patients. Say, for example, that I contracted some weird kind of genital warts, and the doctor was like "I don't know if I've seen this kind of thing before; this looks brand new to me," and then some more patients showed up at the clinic with the same warts and the doctor started referring to them Tremeshko's Genital Warts, then the media started running alarmist stories about this terrible new menace afflicting the community called TGW or "Tremeshko's Genital Warts," and a new wikipedia page was created explaining that this was because the first patient to present with these disgusting sores all over his junk from doing God knows what was some sadsack named Gordon Tremeshko, I....I imagine I might feel a tad distressed by that, and be tempted to lobby for some sort of name change.
I thought Scott's comment that selegiline's trade name is the cutest psychopharmacology fact he knows was pretty funny. It's not as though there are lots of cute psychopharm facts to compete with "Emsam." Cuteness is pretty thin on the ground is psychopharm land.
> Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency you should hold. Maybe ETH.
This is a little extreme, there are other useful projects. BTC Maxis are behind the times. I do agree exchange tokens and probably 95% of other coins are pointless scams, but there are legitimate projects with ecosystems worth participating in.
Anecdote regarding footnote 5): I have diagnosed ADHD and something that happened to me was that when changing from methylphenidate (Concerta) to Lisdexamfetamine (Elvanse) some social triggers + heightened ability to "withstand social risks" + heightened (bodily) anxiety cracked my transgender egg in an extremely quick way (few weeks of discussions with some peers led me to 10% confidence hypothesis, then I reduced and later stopped the stimulant usage, thoughts / changed beliefs stayed, now I Have some 80% confidence of being in some way non-cisgender). (There were minor "signs" in earlier decades of my life, and I don't doubt it would have come up at some point, but it might have taken many more years otherwise.)
A surprising number of botanical supplements are MAOI's. I just discovered I have occasionally mixed a MAOI and a dopaminergic stimulant. I'm glad I did not die.
I stopped in the middle of reading just to add this
"A significant fraction of the finance industry is on Adderall - I know because they keep trying to make me prescribe it to them. This hasn’t degraded performance so much that managers have noticed or made rules against it. And for all I know, maybe the medicated mental risk curves are better for trading than the unmedicated ones."
Kind of off topic but I confirmed with a big market making firm that making money as a market maker in 2021 was crazy easy. The claims that Alameda became unprofitable at that then don’t pass the smell test. “Not especially competent at running a trading firm” doesn’t match many of the facts and is an overly convenient explanation. There was obviously fraud and some massively bad decisions but losing their edge wasn’t the reason for the losses.
I did notice an increased tendency to take risks (i.e. quitting a miserable corporate law job to do a software bootcamp) as well as a tendency to be more direct and honest in social situations. After conferring with friends on this, especially if I was becoming mean/insensitive, the consensus was that I was, in fact, doing more stuff without overanalysis. But also that relative to the norm, for me "doing more stuff without overanalysis" still meant overanalyzing considerably.
The main thought I had reading this excellent writeup (Thank you. Scott Alexander) is the mistaken notion that FTX would somehow not have occurred if <insert X drug(s)> were not being used.
This is thoroughly invalid, IMO.
Whatever you think about cryptocurrency - the reality is that the entire space has been a veritable Tortuga of scammers and grifters as well as your more typical one-trick pony, one and done trader.
And to be more clear: the one-trick pony, one and done trader is that guy who goes all in on exactly the most foamiest trade during an up cycle of risk, but literally has no trading skills whatsoever. Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, SOMEBODY is going to make the perfect trade at any given time, even if it is just by coincidence/luck.
Combine a modest amount of criminogenic accounting savvy with $1b of venture capital, a soupcon of utter shamelessness, a dollop of woke virtue signaling and a totally unregulated sector - and an FTX was inevitable.
The nootropic dude's comment was the funniest: clearly another one-trick pony trader failing to recognize the fundamental sea change represented by short to medium term risk-off due to escalating interest rates - doubly ironic because the brilliant coders and masterminds behind literally every big name Silicon Valley startup in the past decade have yielded nothing more than minimum wage circumventing, washing each other's laundry, fundamentally financial garbage "unicorns".
Hm, this does not seem like gambling behavior to me. It looks like this was one single decision by SBF to bail out Alameda by committing fraud. I guess one could see it as taking a risk and gambling that he would not get found out, and the pharmaceuticals he was on could have influenced his decision. But something tells me he would have made this decision no matter what drugs he was on in order to save Alameda, since most of his wealth was tied in it.
If lack of sleep is the main mechanism by which stimulants cause psychosis, then modafinil and amphetamines should cause psychosis at similar rates. If anything modafinil should be worse, since it seems to more effective in specifically suppressing the urge to sleep. So why is it that amphetamines have a much worse reputation?
Does anyone else find it strange that we have an economy that rewards people so disparately depending on their abilities? There's so much talk about "hard work", "deservedness" and "talent". But if there are pills that can make you work crazy hard, doesn't that prove it's all just brain chemistry? And "talent" is also just a bunch of heritable things like IQ.
It really seems like your lot-in-life is entirely rng dependent on what genes you're born with, where your dopamine baseline gets set, intelligence etc. Reading stuff like this makes me feel very Rawlsian.
So, one possible approach: go to (or make) spaces where your usual distractions/leisure activities are infeasible, and then do work-like things there to build up the association.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't work *perfectly* - many work-like things require the internet these days, for one, and that is inherently a source of distraction (see: this comment, posted during work hours) - but n=1 it's better than nothing.
* surround yourself with people who are more productive/disciplined than you are.
* spend some resources on various other mechanisms of support (productivity/accountability app, coach, therapist, buddy system).
* seriously prioritize vigorous exercise every day, eating well, and getting enough sleep.
* think about mortality more (by this I mean take frequent mental steps back to look at your life from the imagined end of it and keep reminding yourself what really matters to you; stay close to the awareness that life is fleeing). There's a kind of fun app called WeCroak that will help you do this.
We have an economy that rewards people for what they produce that other people find valuable, full stop. That's why you can get rich by simply being born beautiful, or with a beautiful voice, which has zero to do with your character or your effort, it just drops out of the sky onto you. But it doesn't matter, because as long as other people value it, you get paid for it.
Conversely, if other people don't value it, we don't pay you shit. Cf. Cassandra, and any number of prophets before their time. Indeed, if you tell us truths we don't want to hear, we may not only not pay you, we may run you out of town on a rail.
We do this because Christ has not yet returned to tell us exactly how to judge the merit of individual souls, so we just have this half-assed quasi-popularity-contest system, much like electing Homecoming Queen, except at least in this case people have to fork out their own money to place a vote, so they take it more seriously.
I'm tempted to link this to a recent famous story about someone telling people to drink bleach, but I don't really want to end up in yet another slapfight about motivated stopping.
Nobody, but thanks to the power of motivated stopping it's possible to believe anything bad about the other team by just refusing to think about claims received.
My personal experience with Prozac is that it makes me a better card counter and a worse trader. Card counting is just executing an algorithm robotically, and prozac gives me the audacity to go do that in a casino. But trading requires more judgment calls and the medication seems to shift the risk curve.
A decade ago when I suggested taking an herbal MAOI (rhodiola) together with the 10mg prozac I was already taking, my psychiatrist was immediately like "ok, fine, no problem, I've done this before with several patients and nobody ever got serotonin syndrome"
Yeah, I have heard lots of stories like these that make me think there's some sense in which rhodiola isn't a MAOI in the sense where you have to worry about it, but I don't know the actual science - maybe it does reversible inhibition?
FTX shrink says executives were ‘undersexed,’ denies rampant amphetamine use By Thomas Barrabi November 16, 2022
The in-house performance coach at FTX claimed Tuesday the doomed crypto firm’s headquarters in the Bahamas was a “pretty tame place” — despite rampant speculation about its executives’ sex lives and alleged substance use.
Online gossip alleging the group lived in a “polycule” — or network of polyamorous relationships — surged after CoinDesk reported the executives “are, or used to be, paired up in romantic relationships with each other.”
Dr. George K. Lerner, a psychiatrist, reportedly served as a therapist to disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and an adviser to many of the firm’s employees. Bankman-Fried and his ex-lover Caroline Ellison were reportedly part of a 10-person group that ran FTX and its sister cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research from a “luxury penthouse” in the Bahamas.
“It’s a pretty tame place,” Lerner told the New York Times. “The higher-ups, they mostly played chess and board games. There was no partying. They were undersexed, if anything.”
“They were working way too much,” he added. “It would have been healthier if they did have more healthy dating relationships.”
The personal habits of Bankman-Fried and other executives are under the microscope following reports that at least $1 billion in FTX client funds is still missing. FTX, Alameda Research and more than 100 affiliates filed for bankruptcy last week.
Lerner also addressed viral rumors about the alleged use of stimulants by FTX executives. Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, admitted to “regular amphetamine use” in an April 2021 tweet, while Bankman-Fried has openly discussed his experimentation with Adderall and other stimulants.
Lerner told the Times that while some FTX employees may have had prescriptions for ADHD medications, the “rate of ADHD in the company was in line with most tech companies.”
He was such a different person while on the medicine. I don't think he really has access now to who that person was.
My reading is this: Gambling is exciting. I think that anyone who is exposed to gambling has to exert will power to stop. Maybe not much willpower, but some. Before the medicine, he never lacked for willpower. What changed with the medicine was that the excitement was able to override the willpower.
Absolutely hilarious in your last footnote about testifying, as a colleague, yep, I HATE the court, they make physicians who are testifying for the sake of patient care and the safety of the community out to be the villains, even the lawyers who are there to be supporting you do a shit job in doing so.
Forensic psychiatry can be boiled down to one comment: make sure you get paid first!
Oh, taking selegiline meant he couldn't eat tyramine? There's the problem! Without tyramine, his rudimentary telepathic complex stopped working, leading to worse performance and then failure.
Wait, is transvestite now considered to just be an old and offensive term for transgender? I thought they were different things. I can certainly imagine a universe where "people who identify as a gender separate from their sex" and "people who like to wear clothes that don't conform to their gender" both exist.
> I want to back off from saying it’s omnipresent, because commenters are telling me it’s not, but I’d be interested in finding firm numbers
I believe it's omnipresent in highly competitive industries, like Big Tech A.K.A FAANG, probably finance etc. I can comment about Google - while I worked there I was under the impression half of people were on Adderall or other medication.
Knowing SBF came from Jane Street, Addie was probably very popular there.
I really hope people start openly talking about Adderall abuse - it's like doping in white collar industries. And the problem is that most folks on Addie force this crazy workstyle on the rest of us.
Did anyone put a gun to SBF's head and force him to take drugs? No? Then I don't care in the slightest if he did what he did because of drugs or because he was a bad person. We are all responsible for our actions, both on and off drugs. I don't get away with murder just because I was drunk while committing the crime. Abusers of illegal drugs are even less deserving of leniency.
There was a young man here (California) recently who crashed his car while drunk and killed the young mother of a child. Thing was, though, he had a few DUIs already. So the DA charged him with second-degree murder, on the grounds that he knew damn well what could happen if he got drunk and drove, and he chose to do it anyway -- thus, he had demonstrated in some sense an "intent" to kill. The theory is pretty out there -- I believe it's long been possible to be convicted of manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk, but that's different because there's no intent to kill in manslaughter -- but the judge allowed it and the jury convicted. Kid went away to Quentin for 20 years.
Might have been the judge and jury both feeling "You had several chances to stop fucking around drinking and driving, you went ahead and drove drunk, you killed a young mother, so here is what happens when you insist on being an asshole".
May not be great law, and even this idiot may not deserve twenty years in the slammer, but I can see why they'd do it. Will he serve the full twenty years or is there a chance of parole/time off etc.?
I think murder is going too far, for the same reason that I think manslaughter is a fair charge: if he had been driving equally recklessly while sober and killed someone, he'd be guilty of homicide by negligence, aka manslaughter. Not murder.
Murder probably is going far for what the actual crime is, but by the same token if he had a record of reckless driving while sober, then reckless driving that killed someone would be viewed much more seriously than if this was a first-time offence.
And that's before 'he imbibed a substance which affected his ability to react, his judgement, his co-ordination and his capacity to deal with sudden unexpected conditions'. Deliberately getting yourself into a state where you are impaired, and doing this several times before you finally do kill someone, is not going to make people look favourably on "Oh don't throw the book at him".
Dr. Lerner has some really problematic and questionable reviews, that further the case for potential malpractice. Reported to the CA Board, making a proposition towards a client, etc. See this tweet for more: https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1592659580081016833
Hm, you could say they're random internet reviews, but some of the reviewers are not done by anonymous screennames but clients who disclose their identity. Additionally, there's a pattern of enmeshing clients into his own personal baggage. Combine it with his dubious choices as a Coach/Psychiatrist for FTX, and it makes the claim that he propositioned a client credible
Poor sleep hygiene is a glaring dangerous side effect of stimulant use.
Impaired judgement living on 5 hours of sleep mixed with any stimulant
I worked the majority of my life in Canada and Japan where most prescriptions are written by a gp and very few have access to a psychiatrist.
Canada and Japan culturally accept weak corporate governance and dismal enforcement records.
At the height of Japan 1990s when I was in Japan shareholder meetings were held on the same day and Police showed up 10000 strong Companies used to coordinate to hold their shareholders meetings on the same day to reduce the risk of “sokaiya” corporate racketeers from showing up.
Canada doesn't even have a National Market Regulator to regulate their market and it is very whistleblower unfriendly.
I know you've already summed up your thoughts on what dopaminergic medications do to risk assessment (negligible if used appropriately), but because I work in a notably high consequence industry (consequences round the neighbourhood of Exxon Valdez or Piper Alpha) where doing risk assessments is a pretty big part of the job, I'm going to ask anyway:
Is this risk of compromising risk-based decision making big enough that I should bring it up with my own doctor? Should I just be aware that it's possible (particularly on sleep deprived days), adjust my behaviour, and move on?
I might be in the minority, but I'd like to gently suggest that you reconsider using footnotes. I found that they broke the flow of the narrative, and clicking on them was quite unwieldy on my phone. Or perhaps it might be possible to have them appear in a sidebar?
I wonder if he was trying stimulants for weight loss? The guy is pudgy (and before anyone steps in to accuse me of fat-shaming, I'm no sylph myself. Just as it's okay for rappers to use the n-word, so can People Of Amplitude talk about "lookin' a bit porky there, mate").
What brings this type of consideration to mind is this interview, or rather Twitter conversation, that Kelsey Piper has up at Vox with him:
The depressing part is that he does not accept any responsibility at all in a meaningful way. He talks about "I fucked up" but then he goes into what is plainly going to become the story he will tell himself from now on, in denial of the facts - he could have fixed it all, but he was led astray by bad advice from the people who told him to declare bankruptcy. If he hadn't done that, he could have (magically, miraculously, somehow) raised the funding to make it all okay and pay everyone back in a month or so.
Typical behaviour of someone in denial of reality and spinning a story around their own victimhood: it wasn't me, it's all the fault of other people. It's the fault of the people who told me to file for bankruptcy, it's Gary's fault, it's Nishad's fault for not standing by me:
"SBF: I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup?
KP: Oh?
SBF: The one thing *everyone* told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t.
KP: I’m trying to guess but I have no idea.
SBP: Chapter 11.
KP: Like, should’ve just rode it out and kept trying to make the $8 billion back?
SBF: If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.
KP: I’d take the under on that.
SBF: Basically we get there if both:
a) EITHER Gary OR Nishad comes back
b) we can win a jurisdictional battle vs Delaware
KP: Gary and Nishad are gone?
SBF: Yeah, scared. Or Gary is scared, Nishad is ashamed and guilty.
KP: Ashamed and guilty because all the customer deposits are gone?
SBF: Yeah.
KP: People I’ve talked to have said Nishad was much more into the ethics/not being sketchy stuff than you were.
SBF: Yeah. It hit him hard. I mean it hit all of us hard. But it hit him HARD.
KP: It seems like you have more of a sense of yourself to fall back on, more of a sense that you are only wrong if you lose and he was more like “wow we stole money from people who trusted us”.
SBF: The world is never so black and white."
As to Delaware, good luck with that one. FTX is incorporated in the Bahamas, so I don't know if he means FTX.US, or if he's trying to shift incorporation from the Bahamas to Delaware. Either way, given that he kept moving headquarters to get out from under regulatory bodies, I don't think Delaware courts will be too lenient about alleged fraud.
This conversation also explains something that puzzled me, the sponsorship of sports teams and buying stadium naming rights. I couldn't figure out why FTX was doing that, given all the noise Bankman-Fried was making in interviews about doing good and donating to worthy causes. Publicity, sure, but why sports?
But this report clears it up for me. He was never about ethics/ethical altruism, he was always about *popularity*. Saying the right things is a way of getting people to like you, and when they like you, you win. And it's all about winning.
So sports is a way of getting popularity. Part of it might have been "what do other billionaires invest in, oh I see a lot of them have sports teams and sponsor stadia", but let's face it: he was probably a chubby nerd in high school and in college, and who are (allegedly) the popular ones in high school and college? The jocks. Colleges have sports teams and invest a lot in them. That explains to me why he went for buying the naming rights for UC-Berkeley sports arena (rather than getting a building named after him or endowing a chair as the usual way for STEM/business types). This was a way to get in on that mass appeal popularity and be the cool guy that he never could be as a chubby nerd:
"KP: So the ethics stuff – mostly a front? People will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that’s how it all really works?
SBF: Yeah. I mean that’s not *all* of it but it’s a lot. The worst quadrant s “sketchy + lose”, the best is “win + ???”, “clean + lose" is bad but not terrible”.
KP: You were really good at talking about ethics, for somoene who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers.
SBF: Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it. By this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us."
So he learned off the jargon that was current in a particular circle he moved in, and he's still spouting it ("woke Westerners" etc. is the right thing to say about 'we white liberals have all this privilege' when trying to shift the context from 'you stole money from your clients' personal guilt to 'the guilt of Western society fall upon us all' collective and nebulous blame - like systemic racism, what can you, single white person, really be held accountable for if it's all in the water and all are to blame?)
There's other stuff that I don't believe, because if it's true then this lot shouldn't have been in charge of a lemonade stand let alone a trading firm and exchange. If a disgruntled and lower-level ex-employee can hack your systems for millions of dollars that mysteriously went missing after all this shit hit the fan, then what the hell were you doing? What justifies you being in charge?
It's a mess all around and sadly it looks, so far, as if Bankman-Fried has settled into his comfortable little groove of denial: sure he messed up, but his intentions were good, and he could have fixed it all were it not for bad advisors and cowardly colleagues.
Looks like the grown-ups are finally in the building, and I now understand the remarks Bankman-Fried made in that Vox article about "if we can win a jurisdictional battle vs Delaware".
FTX (or the new CEO acting to try and salvage it, John J. Ray III) have filed for bankruptcy in Delaware, and the filing is here and boy, he does not put a tooth in it about the absolute amateur-hour mess of how FTX/Alameda were run (for all intents and purposes, these were not two separate entities as they should have been):
It is going to be one heck of a mess to sort out which was what, but right now it's looking like Bankman-Fried owned pretty much everything, or at least controlled it all. So it's going to be very hard for him to wiggle off the hook of "I had no idea what was going on, it wasn't me, I didn't have anything to do with that":
"4. I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.
5. Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
6. These Chapter 11 Cases have five core objectives:
(a) Implementation of Controls: the implementation of accounting, audit, cash management, cybersecurity, human resources, risk management, data protection and other systems that did not exist, or did not exist to an appropriate degree, prior to my appointment;
(b) Asset Protection & Recovery: the location and security of property of the estate, a substantial portion of which may be missing or stolen;
(c) Transparency and Investigation: the pending, comprehensive, transparent and deliberate investigation into claims against Mr. Samuel Bankman-Fried, the other co-founders of the Debtors and third parties, in coordination with regulatory stakeholders in the United States and around the world;
(d) Efficiency and Coordination: cooperation and coordination with insolvency proceedings of subsidiary companies in other jurisdictions; and
e) Maximization of Value: the maximization of value for all stakeholders through the eventual reorganization or sale of the Debtors’ complex array of businesses, investments and digital and physical property. These proceedings in the District of Delaware are the appropriate means to accomplish each of these objectives.
I. THE PREPETITION DEBTORS
A. Corporate Organization and Identification of Four Silos
9. For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include:
(a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses;
(b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”);
(c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”);
and (d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.”
10. Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo."
Seriously though, the next time anyone complains about government waste or featherbedding, we in publicly funded organisations and local government and civil/public service *do* have to have stringent financial controls in place and engage in audits and account for where the money goes. I've just had to pack up our financial year's worth of accounts and supporting documentation for our auditors to do their annual report on, which will then be disseminated to various bodies including the Charity Regulators once we get it back. Nobody is throwing billions at *us* without examining where the money is going, and the big question after "what the hell happened?" is going to be "where the hell were the accountants/auditors in all this mess" and "why the hell didn't the people sinking billions of investment into this have a good look at the balance sheet?"
He stayed up to literally confess everything in writing (via Twitter DMs) to a journalist.
Then when the journalist reached out a different way the next day to make sure it was really him and she hadn't gotten catfished, he instantly replied to affirm the whole conversation.
As a thousand Twitter commenters have asked, doesn't this guy have a lawyer? Has he ever _talked_ to a lawyer??
And the answer turns out to be that _both_ of his parents are law professors. His mother was in private practice and then clerked for a federal court before becoming an academic. His father in addition to being a career legal academic is a clinical psychologist who "teaches mental health law and writes on the intersection of law and psychology."
He has plenty of lawyers, he's just not listening to any of them. From the Chapter 11 filing:
"Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School."
He still thinks he's the smart guy who was brought down by the lesser, cowardly, ashamed bunch who wanted to take the safe option of bankruptcy when he, genius risk-manipulator, could have saved the entire kit and kaboodle if only he had held out to hang tough.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP quit a few days ago, according to Reuters. That firm's star partner, Martin Flumenbaum, is already "defending Christian Larsen, the founder and chair of crypto payment and exchange company Ripple Labs Inc, in a high-profile lawsuit filed by the SEC." Flumenbaum is well known in the financial sector having been the defense attorney for Michael Milken. Flumenbaum told Reuters that “We informed Mr. Bankman-Fried several days ago after the filing of the FTX bankruptcy that conflicts have arisen that precluded us from representing him."
More from Reuters: "Bankman-Fried, who did not respond to questions about his legal team this week, has hired Gregory Joseph, a criminal defense lawyer at law firm Joseph Hage Aaronson in New York, and Stanford University law professor David Mills as members of his legal team, according to a report from Semafor. Both of Bankman-Fried's parents are on the faculty of Stanford Law School.
Joseph is a former president of the American College of Trial Lawyers who has written about racketeering law and rules of evidence. Mills specializes in criminal law and white-collar crime."
Bravo, great comment. I logged on to see if anyone else was posting the bankruptcy filing -- you did it better than I would have.
And your concluding paragraph...!!! As a longtime manager of NGOs I am absolutely boggled at what is gotten away with or excused in the allegedly-better-run sector. Literally inconceivable in my professional world.
Yeah, doing bits'n'bobs in different jobs in different public sector areas, and having the Auditors Came Down From Dublin to look at the books, and being asked to account for a 50 cent difference in quotation versus invoice - it's astounding to me how the private industry, which is allegedly so much more efficient, gets away with stuff. Every time a 'business-friendly' government comes into power in my country and wants to "make the public sector run like a business" or "get people in from the private sector and business to reform how things are run", I laugh into my mug of tea because if they ever did it, it would be an entirely different kettle of fish.
"Where's that five grand? Oh I can't recall, just round it off to an accounting error, yeah?"
I mean, the amount of reporting to stakeholders that we have to do! Apart from the annual report including set of certified accounts from the auditors for the Charity Regulators, I have to do quarterly returns on expenditure versus income against the funding we get for service provision to one public body, another set of reports and spreadsheets to the government body for which we provide Section 39 agency services, monthly returns to Revenue Commissioners, and whenever she asks for them reports on income, wages,expenditure, etc. etc. etc. to the overall manager when she is reporting to the monthly board meeting. Also price comparisons for goods and services that we get and can we get a better price elsewhere or discounts/reductions on contract? And I don't even have to handle (thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother) the sixty dozen different funding schemes operated by the government's various services which we qualify for, or operate, or get funding from (some other poor divil has to do that, I flatly refuse because it is Lovecraftian-level sanity-sapping).
We're a small potatoes organisation that only handles about €1 to €2 million or in turnover, but we have to keep track of and account for *everything*. Meanwhile, the new CEO can't even find out how many people actually worked or were employed by FTX because nobody kept count.
"Yeah, doing bits'n'bobs in different jobs in different public sector areas, and having the Auditors Came Down From Dublin to look at the books, and being asked to account for a 50 cent difference in quotation versus invoice - it's astounding to me how the private industry, which is allegedly so much more efficient, gets away with stuff."
Maybe private industry is more efficient because it doesn't bother with useless stuff like accounting for a 50 cent difference. Accounting for that difference is not a good use of anyone's time. It doesn't add value to the company or help its customers in any way.
Well, accurate bookkeeping is for untermenschen. They had a planet to save! You wouldn't expect Superman and Thor to save their receipts and file expense reports, would you?
I absolutely would expect it from Superman, because his parents raised him right and he is a reporter, I doubt the "Daily Planet" accounts department lets him just claim stuff with nothing to back it up.
As for Thor, I imagine since the days of Dr. Donald Blake as his alter-ego are gone, it's rather different for a prince of Asgard, but even there *somebody* is in charge of the royal purse!
Damn skippy! Also, Superman and Thor are good guys, with a sense of honor. Neither would do sketchy s#!t on purpose. It wouldn’t even be hard for Clark to do the right thing: he’s super-fast, right? 😄
"Please don’t rush out to abuse drugs just because you read about them in an article on how they contributed to a $10 billion bankruptcy."
According to a friend who works on Wall Street, the Alameda Research trading strategy could be summed up as "frontrunning, performed using FTX customer money".
*IF* that is accurate, how clueful can these people be, if they went bankrupt because they screwed up a game rigged in their favor? It's like losing all your money playing poker, when you are the only one at the table who secretly knows what the next turn of cards is going to be and you also can gamble using the other players' money.
The answer seems to be because they started to think they are geniuses who are better than everyone taking directional bets, not just the basic low risk market making activity with unfair advantage. Turns out it was just a bull market and they got blown up like many others, and they plugged the hole with FTX customers' money
This is totally anecdotal, but I've actually been on Emsam. I have treatment resistant depression and after many SSRIs and SNRIs I wanted to try an MAOI. But I was worried about the side effects, so I heard the patch would work better for that. Luckily I had good insurance at the time that actually covered it, so instead of over a thousand dollars a month it was $30.
I also started transcranial magnetic stimulation around the same time, so it's hard to distinguish the effects of the two.
I struggle with impulse control, but I didn't notice it any worse with the Emsam. I worked up to the highest dose as well. I did notice that I couldn't sleep. I was absolutely wired, I was seriously sleep deprived and unable to sleep. I was taking two months off between jobs because my poor impulse control had me hating myself so much for my performance at my last job. So it wasn't a huge deal. But it was very uncomfortable. My doctor eventually gave me temazepam, but I was worried about that and didn't want to use it much. So after a couple of months I went off the Emsam.
Oh, I did have an adverse food reaction once. It was rather scary, I broke out in a cold sweat, shakes, had to lie down on the floor and was debating if I should crawl over to the door and call out for our receptionist to call 911. It eventually passed. This was shortly after I started at the lowest dose, and I had had some trail mix and didn't realize that things like raisins and walnuts were on the naughty list.
I still think the sleeplessness was due to the Emsam and not the TMS. I was on TMS for a while after stopping the Emsam and it wasn't as bad. Although I'm trying maintenance now and struggling with sleep, but it's been a while and that could be due to many other reasons.
TMS was one of the few things that worked, but it wore off fairly quickly after some major life events kicked me in the ass.
RE: FTX and "where were the auditors in all this?", the Chapter 11 filing is highly entertaining reading (if you're not personally affected by 'this bastard took my money', 'this bastard has blackened the name of crypto' or 'this bastard has blackened the name of EA' or 'this bastard was a friend of a friend and now everyone thinks I'm dodgy too'):
"The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”
Even Zuckerberg is getting dragged into this disaster! 🤣
Somehow I imagine Mr. Ray the Third, after the first couple of days wading through the burst sewerage pipe that is this train crash, sitting down with a bottle of whiskey which he's glugging straight from the bottle and writing up this declaration because "Fuck it, I don't care any more, what are they gonna do - fire me as CEO of this dumpster fire? I wish!"
Why take Adrafanil over Modafinil? Doesn't that just get you extra kidney strain and side effects? Does the Prodrug-> Drug-conversion even work consistently? Is there some kind of galaxy-brain reasoning, that says that Adrafanil + Selegiline, is easier for your body to regulate than straight Modafinil + Selegiline? I've never heard of anyone preferring Adrafanil, when real Modafinil (or Armodafinil for that matter) is an easy option.
Yeah, it's silly. I think adrafinil may be easier to obtain - apparently you used to be able to get it at nootropics Depot (this is longer true). It's not as highly regulated (modafinil is schedule IV -- the same category as benzos which is kinda ridiculous).
Given the longer duration of effects, I'm pretty sure he wasn't sleeping well. Modafinil increases orexin which is very important for Circadian rhythm. You can adjust to the effects of modafinil somewhat but I doubt perfectly and it masks the effects of sleep deprivation on more subtle aspects of cognition (ie you aren't consciously aware of them / feel fine).
> But a lot of Wall Street is on stimulants of one sort or another, and most of them don’t act like FTX did
Actually, from what I am reading about financial history, a real lot of them act or try to act like FTX/SBF did. Only traditional finance has levels of circuit breakers - including the Fed and the Congress ready to deploy literally trillions of dollars - to dispel situations like that from affecting the system, and frequently to bail out the participants from the consequences of their insane risk taking. At least that's what I gathered from reading a bunch of books on last 50 years of financial history and the litany of financial crises that happened. Just in crypto, it's ok to let the FTX explode. If it were a bank, there would probably be a recapitalization/takeover deal brokered by financial regulators, and we'd never hear about it unless we dig up technical reports and can parse fedspeak they are written in. If you peer into the lawcraftian depth of financial system, you'd find entities much more scary than SBF - but nobody but highly trained professionals armed with infinite money supply do it anymore. Crypto is small, so we can see all the tempest in the teapot and imagine it is scary. Truly scary, trillion-size things aren't for us to see.
If you are not at all involved with EA (my sympathies, lads and lasses), rationality (ditto), crypto, or put any of your money into what he was doing (ouch), then the FTX/Bankman-Fried saga continues to be primetime entertainment.
Forbes magazine is plainly mad as hell and out for blood, because like everyone else they thought the sun shone out of his backside and were putting him and his friends onto their "Thirty Under 30" lists and writing hagiographic articles about them.
Well, no more! Recent Forbes articles have been more full of salt than a Silesian mine, and they've done one now on Caroline Ellison (who seems to have enough brains to keep her mouth shut, say nothing to anyone, and refuse to be contacted). Along the way, they take a swipe at another online article:
"Prominent FTX backer Sequoia Capital was also caught in the gravitational pull, publishing a now-deleted 14,000 word paean to Bankman-Fried that likened him to fictional protagonist Jay Gatsby. (“Is crypto the new jazz?” the author wondered, apparently not considering that the titular Gatsby earned his fortune through crime.) This week, Sequoia wrote down its $213 million FTX investment to $0."
Now-deleted? Not if Forbes have any say about it! And so they helpfully provide a link to the Wayback Machine storage of the piece, and boy is it a doozy in the genre of "had I but known" tales. Published in September of this year, but that might have been aeons and empires ago:
You really should read this. If you're EA-adjacent, you'll probably wince at the heavy-weight names being dropped all through the piece, but holy hannah does it repay reading. Here's the ending, to whet your appetite:
"After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.
But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.
…The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better."
Let's hope that Mr. Fisher did *not* make Bankman-Fried his banker after all.
Right now, I think the Forbes piece on Ellison is more interesting, given that we've had copious analysis of Bankman-Fried to date but little to nothing about the others involved. Forbes cannot resist kicking the guy even in this piece, but it still does tell us something:
"Behind both Alameda and FTX was Bankman-Fried, a bloviating then-billionaire founder, who had founded the FTX two years after Alameda to build what he considered a modern cryptocurrency exchange. When Bankman-Fried decided to step away from Alameda to focus full-time on the fast-growing FTX, Ellison, a quiet and quirky child of MIT economics professors, took over as co-CEO.
...In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. They think Ellison was set up to be the fall person, and claim that former co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who they derisively call “Sam Tabasco," is behind Alameda’s implosion. Trabucco didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I definitely think she’s innocent,” one said. “I think Caroline can be saved.”
I have *no* idea if the Yarvin Connection is true or not, but this entire rabbit hole just goes deeper and deeper. I expect a healthy selection of conspiracy theories to be dragged in at some time by somebody as the next development.
As I said, if you're not directly or even tangentially involved with this, it is brilliantly funny. Forbes is *so* bitter about having fallen for this guy and his gang, their recent articles on this is Forbes at home in the fluffy dressing gown with a pint of ice cream and a bottle of prosecco, drunk-texting all their friends about how Bankman-Fried was a total loser and Forbes is SO over him and by the way, did they tell you about this other shitty thing he did? 😁
As for the Sequoia article, I'm not surprised they tried to memory-hole it. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that "Adam Fisher has changed his name and fled to Bolivia" after it.
The utilitarian angle gets pushed *hard* and right now I'm #NeverSoGladToBeDeontologist:
"SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number. One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.
....MacAskill couldn’t have hoped for a better recruit. Not only was SBF raised in the Bay Area as a utilitarian, but he’d already been inspired by Peter Singer to take moral action. During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming. As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life. And MacAskill—Singer’s philosophical heir—had the answer: The best way for him to maximize good in the world would be to maximize his wealth.
SBF listened, nodding, as MacAskill made his pitch. The earn-to-give logic was airtight. It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism. Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, “Yep. That makes sense.” But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake. All the rest was merely execution risk.
...Still, when SBF analyzed the bright future that lay before him, something wasn’t right. He was, he realized, too secure. SBF’s mind had been trained almost from birth to calculate. As a schoolboy the hedonic calculous of utilitarianism had him trying to maximize the utility function (measured in “utils,” of course) for abortion. During his teenage gaming years, his mathematical abilities allowed him to sharpen his tactics—and win. And, of course, every trade SBF ever made at Jane was the subject of a risk/reward calculation. All of it boiled down to expected value. The formula is fairly simple. If the amount won multiplied by the probability of winning a bet is greater than the amount lost multiplied by the probability of losing a bet, then you go for it—irrespective of units. Utils, euros, dollars were all subject to the same reckoning.
...To be clear, SBF is not talking about maximizing the total value of FTX—he’s talking about maximizing the total value of the universe. And his units are not dollars: In a kind of GDP for the universe, his units are the units of a utilitarian. He’s maximizing utils, units of happiness. And not just for every living soul, but also every soul—human and animal—that will ever live in the future. Maximizing the total happiness of the future—that’s SBF’s ultimate goal. FTX is just a means to that end.
...There’s no question that SBF was nerd sniped as a young man at MIT. Indeed, just before he got sniped, SBF had a personal blog where he wrote about his search for life’s meaning. In the blog, he declares his allegiance to utilitarianism over and over, carefully outlining his reasoning before concluding, “And so I am a total utilitarian.” Later writings refine that statement, making it clear that he’s a utilitarian in its purest—Benthamite—form, and that there will be no saving himself from the implications of the Benthamite Way. Every action since then has been a principled puzzling-through of the implications of that philosophy. Even now, even when directly challenged, SBF maintains that he brooks no limit in following the philosophical implications to their logical end: “If I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.”
So when, that next summer, MacAskill sat with SBF in Harvard Square and carefully explained, in the way only an Oxford-educated philosopher can, that the practice of effective altruism boils down to “applied utilitarianism,” Snipe’s arrow hit SBF hard. He’d found his path. He would become a maximization engine. As he wrote in his blog, “If you’ve decided that some of your time—or money—can be better spent on others than on yourself, well, then, why not more of it? Why not all of it?”
This is the same Will MacAskill who, in another thread, was quoted as not wanting kids because they'd interfere with his work. So instead of a legacy of a family, Will, this (for the moment at least) is going to be your legacy: you pushed Bankman-Fried along the path he took to defraud and lose billions. Maybe a couple of messy toddlers are looking better right now?
Hi Scott, thanks for this piece, which I read with interest. You have done an admirable job (as far as I can tell) summarizing what we (don't) know about how dopaminergic medications might shift your risk curve and so contribute to altered risk management. But what most of these discussions seem to leave out is the fact (as I understand it) that a certain percentage of folks who get put on stimulants will become manic, which generally involves gross distortions of risk curves, grandiosity, and overt, visible, poor judgment. And when I say "most of these discussions" I am thinking in particular of the frequent discussions about the wisdom of putting so many school children on stimulants. As a fellow psychiatrist, I will also try to shy away from public opinions on diagnosis. This week we've seen what many laypeople might join me in thinking is a combination of grandiosity and manifestly poor judgment at Twitter, and I have no reason to suspect that mania has anything to do with it. On the other hand, reading SBF's Vox interview a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that there is more going on there than insufficient risk aversion. So I am curious about your opinion on the possibility that mania of some form might be a piece of this picture. PS I appreciate your clarity on how, uh, problematic the DSM categorical approach to ADHD diagnosis is. PPS If you think I am overstepping the Goldwater rule--which I generally support--please tell me and I will try to edit accordingly.
It always amuses me when people insist that every cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are scams and ponzi schemes.
It never occurs to them that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are obvious Ponzi schemes, designed with FOMO in mind.
If you assume that literally everything in crypto is a scam of some kind, you'll have a much better understanding of the market.
FTX imploding isn't surprising to me because it is, like all of these things, a scam based on things that aren't actually worth anything and whose price is entirely a construct of fraud. Tether is fraudulent, and 95% of the run up to bitcoin's ATH was due to fraudulent non-economic trading.
All the money in these markets is fake except the fraction that real people put in, and the fraudsters take out.
I believe Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum were designed from the start to serve legitimate, non-scammy use cases. Naively optimistic technolibertarian fantasy use cases, perhaps, but not Ponzi schemes. And to the extent that "FOMO" was part of the plan, I believe that was mostly to bootstrap early adoption of the new currencies to build quasi-respectability.
Just about everything after, seems to me to be a mix of scams, practical jokes, and *extreme* wishful thinking. They are all extremely handicapped in serving any non-scam use case by the head start BTC and ETH have in exploiting network effects.
Since there are people who have legitimate-ish use cases for cryptocurrencies, I expect BTC and ETH will survive this debacle in some form. I wouldn't want to be invested in even those two right now.
RE the expert witness story: Before I went to jury selection, I did not anticipate the level of social pressure that you (or at least I) experience when being questioned in front of 100 people. My plan beforehand was to give my honest opinion that, by a plain reading of the law, juries on criminal cases are legally obligated to always vote Not Guilty because the epistemics of a court are never good enough to overcome the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard, and therefore I would vote Not Guilty no matter what, and this answer would disqualify me. But when actually questioned, I felt really silly about saying this and was afraid it would attract a lot of probing follow-up questions, so I said something boring instead, and ended up getting selected, so I had to endure 5 days of jury duty because I didn't want to look weird for a few minutes.
Pretty lame. Effective altruism turns out to be mostly effective at allowing sociopathic nerds to commit crime on a massive scale. Write something about that, or stop writing at all.
Scott, you shouldn't be afraid of or hesitant to give expert testimony. I read this entire post carefully. It was informative. I felt the most emotion while reading your footnote 9 at the very end. I felt empathy for your situation with the bleach drinker. You are much wiser and more knowledgeable now though!
(MAOIs are contraindicated when taken with almost everything, or so it seems to me from reading drug inserts. I am a statistician not an M.D. so I will believe what you say. I try to stay far away from them myself though.)
Cryptocurrency also makes ordering illegal drugs via the mail much easier... uh oh.
Well, one way in which it has changed the world is making ransomware easier and more profitable.
Folding Ideas has a great video on NFTs called "line goes up" where he says that NFTs are not revolutionary, it's the 1% trying to get as rich as .01% are
Agree completely. Even in line goes up he is a little overly conspiratorial and a little too eager to see basic human failings and greed as the machinations of his supposed political enemies.
But despite all that it is a great outline out of the basic fundemental flasws with the crypto world, and particularly with "smart contracts" which were always one of the things that most drove me up the wall when people were exicted about them.
The ballad of MurderGhandi.
I think the most surprising thing for me was that “In line with most tech companies” is a great euphemism for “yes, everyone was on stimulants”. And just how matter of fact the article is about software engineering being fundamentally incompatible with the human mind.
And like… I can’t focus very well at my software engineering job, to the degree that I basically relate to all the discussions of people with ADHD now (it wasn’t an issue before college). And I don’t really have particular problems with anything else (chores, writing, massive amounts of DMing). Just my job.
I know a few friends on Adderall, but I thought they were the minority. I don’t know how to feel if it’s really that common. I’m honestly still skeptical of the claim, just because I don’t want to believe it.
I'm probably exaggerating a bit here, and I've added a clarification to that effect to the post. I really don't know the real number. Maybe a job for an ACX survey.
ACX readership is _definitely_ not a representative sample of... anything really, but in particular of strange medication use.
When I try to think of examples in the tech people around myself, the people who come to mind were influenced in some degree by knowing me. (And I'm actually pretty conservative - never even tried recreational drugs above weed)
I'm very dubious. I know tons of programmers, and none of them seem to be taking stimmies, other than a morning coffee and an afternoon espresso, with is pretty mild stuff.
I've been a software engineer for about 18 years, and I did not take stimulants for 16 of those years. I started taking them about 2 years ago, but only because of depression which I suspect was induced by the COVID pandemic, rather than because of my profession.
I think the trend is in the same direction. Three years ago I'm confident none of my close tech friends were taking stims. Now at least two of them are. Anecdata only but consistent with the idea that this is becoming more common.
Not sure about stimulants, but on multiple occasions, my husband and I have been surrounded by a big group of colleagues and learned that we were the only ones not on some sort of prescribed psychoactive medication, mostly antidepressants and anti anxiety meds. It was honestly a little alarming to have a room full of people start comparing notes on that.
Same. It may be higher than the general population, but it's not everyone, or even >50% from my anecdata. One thing to consider is the average tech age and the supposed recent huge increase of stimulant use in college. Considering the graduated in the last 10yrs population, use may be around average.
I guess I'm one of the lucky few. I have been a programmer at big companies since 1982, delaying retirement because I enjoy it so much. I haven't taken more than coffee, and I'm not aware of any peers taking stimulants.
But would you know? People can hide these things.
Sure, I guess. But most of them, for the past 20 years? It's not like I've been their boss, and some of them have been pretty good friends. I'm sure there's some fraction of the people I know in general that have weird hidden personal problems. I'm just dubious that it's most or nearly everybody.
I am with you here. Coffees sure.
Maybe it's more common in a start-up culture environment? I also know may programmers, and none admit to taking stimulants, but none of them work at start-ups.
I have the same experience, but I assume most people would NOT tell their coworkers about this, so it seems pretty unknowable.
I knew a few, but only among the ones I was close enough to that we discussed our various medical problems. No one was leaving bottles on their desk or casually talking about it in the hallways.
I used Adderall (generic) myself, for a bit, back when my incipient PTSD was misdiagnosed as my previously-sub-clinical ADHD getting worse. It was useful, but I didn't like it. I noticed an increasing inability to switch from lower-priority tasks to higher-priority tasks, as if whatever I happened to be focused on at the moment was much more important than it actually was.
That's my main problem with stimulants in general and amphetamine in particular as well. It works great — if I can start doing what I need to be doing. But mostly I just keep doing whatever I was doing when it kicked in.
Yes, this has resulted in four-hour masturbation sessions; and brother, let me tell you: you don't know shame until you finish after four hours of doing the most useless and — heh — masturbatory activity possible, having accomplished nothing *and* not even really enjoyed it after about minute 15, and that post-orgasm clarity hits you...
Maybe it's more common in the SF Bay area, or in start-ups, or among the pseudo-nerds who read Wired magazine and are desperate to be part of the Next Big Thing.
On the flip side, I know a ton of hackers who are very definitely all taking some sort of prescription stimulant. I am sure I could name ten without working too hard at it, and could potentially hit as many as two dozen if I really strained at it.
It may well be that the people who have ADD don't talk about it with people who *don't* have ADD or ADHD, which is why it seems to be this significant divide in the comments on the topic.
Would you tell us what city are you in, what age these hackers are, or what market sector they work in? I expect there are difference along those lines.
Well, it's not a localized phenomenon, so city is sort of useless, though I'll say this is people all over the world, from Dubai to Czech to Germany to Holland to the US.
Age group would be like, 30 to 60. Market sector is generally infosec or something related; insofar as it is possible for one to professionally be a "cypherpunk", a lot of these people are doing that. There's often a lot of strangely coincidental overlap in groups of people I know, so I hesitate to declare absolutely that it was 100% of these people, but it was probably pretty close, that all of these people will be folks I know because I was going to events like Defcon. (At the Alexis Park, putting me firmly in the *middle* of that age group above... ;) ) So, crypto, cryptocurrencies, computer and network security, penetration testing, sysadmins. That sort of thing.
> The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering.
That’s why the evolutionary response is autism and why it is particularly prevalent in the Bay Area… That said, I find it hard to believe people who make their living from their brains will gamble with their moneymaker. The only stimulant I take is theobromine, a.k.a. chocolate.
The invention of software engineering is too recent for an evolutionary response to have happened.
I think to steelman what you're saying, we probably have autism for "other reasons", and coincidentally, high functioning autism happens to be pretty good for software engineering.
I think you probably mean "that's why people with autism can be more successful in the By Area," rather than implying that there is natural selection for more autism.
I don't think there's any reason to believe caffeine or amphetamine is a gamble of that fashion. See, e.g., Erdõs, if the giant avalanche of studies confirming this hasn't convinced you for some reason.
To give you another reference point, I'm a mediocre programmer, and I feel like true focus is something I experience a few times a day when I'm trying hard and things come together. It's not the norm for me. There's a boot up process of loading things into my working memory and getting my my motivational framework aligned that can be interrupted, or might never come together if the conditions aren't right. (Or if I'm being lazy. Or if I'm doing things I know throw me off like checking Twitter.)
Is this the kind of thing you're talking about?
I am a programmer as well. I do take prescribed stims, and even with them I would say true focus is something I experience about once a week. I would love to do it a few times a day.
I know how I would feel: mad that the government is gatekeeping such a useful tool from everybody.
Wait she finds out about psychedelics.
I've been in software for more than twenty years, and have never worked at a place where taking stimulants was common. I can only recall one anecdote about a place where doing so was standard practice. If Scott actually thinks speed is common in tech companies, I suspect the influence is from some other circles he travels in, not tech specifically.
Anecdotally, I work at a FAANG and know for a fact all of my coworkers just (~2 yrs) out of college use stimulants, at least periodically. I only know this because they told me. I think you might be surprised how hard it is to tell, but also I'm sure it's much more common in this recent generation.
To be clear, by "stimulants" you mean things stronger than coffee or tea, right?
Yes I mean things like Adderall.
To add to this. I worked at a non-FAANG company before this and if anyone was taking stimulants there they weren't telling me about it.
He did mention that he might have a bit of selection bias. My guess would be that his selection bias is higher than he thinks.
Where are you located? That probably matters. Probably less common in some countries and also less common at conventional business software places.
Modafinil is incredily effective for me. You do have to make sure you drink a lot of water. But the impact is much more intense and much more useful than caffeine.
Maybe some kinds of tech either don't attract people who benefit heavily from something like Modafinil? I can do good work if I get in the zone without Modafinil but Modafinil helps get you in the zone and zeroes out lots of distractions.
I'm in Canada, working for what I guess I'll call a FAANG-aspiring company. I was at an actual FAANG in Canada for three years and in Silicon Valley for eight years back in the 00s.
What about all the people grinding leetcode and CS knowledge for months just to pass programming interviews, are the vast majority of them doing it "naturally" - no stimulants except the odd cup of coffee?
Don't know about "all". Some version of your description fits tens of my friends and acquaintances and, at times, fitted me to some extent. I'm aware of a single person on this list taking stimulants. They were taking them for perfectly non-job-related reasons, way before entering the CS/ data/... world. Scott's description is completely unrecognizable to me - I've been in tech for decades now, including Valley start-ups, and have seen essentially zero use of stimulants. Slightly more in academia (including the occasional Aderall before tests), but still almost zero, and almost entirely in undergraduates. I suspect either Scott or I (and so many other commenters!) live in a bubble. I further suspect it's Scott.
For what it's worth
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-announces-shortage-adderall
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/adderall-has-become-l-a-s-not-so-secret-weapon/
To be clear, I have zero knowledge about the world at large using Adderall. If your links have anything to do specifically with the use of stimulants in tech, I missed it. The word "tech" is absent from both links. All I'm saying is that Scott's characterization of tech as one big stim-party (and that being common knowledge!) is entirely alien to my experiences.
Also, it's a bit strange to put both links together - and then to imply (or at least so I read you - otherwise, what *is* the point you're making? That some people somewhere are using Adderall more? Or at least more relative to supply - numbers are entirely absent from both links?) that the shortage is mostly due to a surge in demand. The second link talks of the supply-side woes and of quotas being reduced.
I think the point I was looking for is, it seems to be a very popular PED. (I have unfortunately mislaid my links about similar tenure track drug abuse.) Why not in tech?
A. The claims I was responding to were that it happens in tech *above and beyond the baseline*. You can write "in tech, many people drink water/ have two ears" and be technically correct - but it would be a weird choice. So "why not in tech" is the wrong question. "Why in tech more than in many other areas" would've been better but we don't know that it's at all true.
B. "Why not in tech" may still have pretty reasonable answers. If there's a surge in Adderall demand, it must be relatively recent, hence "surge". Then tech would be selecting for people who achieved much/ worked hard/ studied well/ formed habits/ etc. before said surge. I would also expect risk aversion and conscientiousness to be mildly anti-correlated with stimulant usage and to be strongly present in tech. Perhaps Scott/ John/ you are talking about subcultures such as crypto/ fintech - not much I can say here.
And I'm reporting my own experience - those are friends, people I worked and studied with (including leetcode), not "I heard of them vaguely once". Is my experience consistent with "vast majority" of substance abusers or whatever? Yes, but it's much more consistent with low prevalence, at least for my generation.
Could there be a tech drug epidemic incoming? Sure, that's possible. Particularly if popular Substack writers and their commenters make it seem like everybody's taking stimulants all the time ;)
C. Tenure track - I'd be happy to see that link. Again - I've been exposed to the academic world all my life. Are there stress, tragic cases, highly salient examples of drug abuse? Yes. Are they more prevalent in academia than in other walks of life? I'd like to see the numbers.
I want to note how pejoratively stimulants are discussed, both in the second article you linked and to some degree in this conversation.
E.g.
“Adderall is prescribed for ADHD, which was once diagnosed only in the prepubescent. Now adults are discovering they have ADHD. Or occasional ADHD. Or work-at-home ADHD.”
Imagine saying the same things about antidepressants. “Now people are finding they have work-from-home depression.”
It seems pretty wild to me to suggest that a spike in prescriptions for a psychiatric drug around December 2020 was due to… avarice and a need for performance enhancement?
The much more obvious explanation would be that a lot of borderline-ADHD people were able to make it in a relatively free and open society, and then when their lives were massively disrupted they weren’t able to get by anymore.
That’s when I got diagnosed. My wife and I both have full time jobs and a then-four-year-old son. When the pandemic hit, schools shut down, childcare of any kind was illegal, and our jobs expected us to work remotely. It was the most attentionally-demanding, work-laden period of my life by far. And when time gets short and workloads get high, your other coping mechanisms often stop working.
Obviously my experience is not general, but I’d love to see some consideration that Adderall prescriptions are not all attempts to get a competitive advantage.
In my experience, ADHD isn't a thing that keeps me from focusing; in fact, it MAKES me focus. Just not always on what I should be focusing on.
It prevents me from rationally controlling my task-switching--or, arguably, it makes it rational to task-switch in a way that makes it hard to work with people who task-switch easily.
I think my ADHD is a memory problem, not a focus problem or a boredom problem.
1. It imposes a heavy overhead on task-switching. Whenever I task switch, I'll forget forever any ideas I had related to what I was doing unless I write them down; it will take me a long time to load up my memory again with what it needs to resume the task; and I might never remember to resume the task.
2. It imposes a heavy cost on NOT task-switching when I discover something new that needs doing--if I don't drop what I'm doing, and do the other thing right away, I might never do it.
3. I don't have an internal alarm clock. Other people tell their minds, "Remember to go to the meeting at 2pm," and at 1:50, an internal alarm clock raises "go to meeting" into their consciousness. I have to either think about the meeting constantly until the time of the meeting; or set an external alarm. If my alarm goes off at 1:50, and then I notice a program has crashed which I need to run during the meeting so I can get the results that day, and I take 30 seconds to restart it, I might not to remember the meeting. The fact that I remembered the meeting at 1:50 will not make me remember it at 1:51 if I did something else in the minute between.
When I'm coding, I'm usually hyper-focused on it for many hours.
I don't think being bored with something is a result of ADHD. Being bored is more-likely a result of being too smart or not smart enough to find a thing interesting. But then, ADHD may not be a single disease, but a syndrome.
Constant boredom has been perhaps the most salient symptom for me. And it looks like there’s a correlation in the literature: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-engaged-mind/202104/boredom-could-help-you-understand-what-its-have-adhd
My extremely crude and incorrect way of thinking about this is that my brain is wired more toward “explore” than “exploit”, ie there’s a much higher threshold of engagement necessary to get my brain to think “I should keep doing this” rather than “I should go do something else”. And it seems like dopamine is a core part of shifting toward “exploit”.
But as you say there are many different presentations / parts of the brain that can cause similar symptoms!
I think there are two theories getting conflated here for why stimulant use might be common in the tech world, and I want to add a third that I’m surprised no one else has offered.
1. Particular places may have a culture of stimulant use. Maybe this is common in startups to handle a high workload (and the high stress position that your company might fail if you don’t work harder), but I’ve been in the tech industry for 15 years (mostly at a FAANG) and never encountered it. But I doubt anyone would question that some places undoubtedly do have such a culture, like the subject of the article, where there was clearly no attempt made to hide the selegeline or adrafinil.
2. Scott’s idea that boring jobs require stimulants, programming and accounting are unusually boring jobs, thus people in these jobs are more likely to seek and benefit from stimulants. I don’t find this argument convincing. Programming is one of the most fun and engaging jobs a person can have. When people talk about flow states they often mention coding, and every programmer I’ve discussed it with knows and enjoys this state as well. Contrast with, say, working in a lab, where you have to do the same things over and over and record the result. When you’re programming you’re invariably solving a new problem.
This brings me to my suggested explanation:
3. People with poor attention are drawn to computers and programming. In my experience there are two life stories of programmers: either you chose it in college as a well-rounded career (excellent choice!) or it chose you when you were young and wanted to play video games and make your own video games and network two computers to play video games with friends and draw fractals and host a website and so on.
Programming is great for people with poor attention spans because it gives immediate feedback. Make a change, run it, make a change, run it, ad infinitem. As someone with poor attentional control myself, I ended up in this industry precisely because it was the work I could get lost in and enjoy.
It was only when I had kids and advanced in my job to the point where I was no longer coding that I realized I needed help. I’m doing double shifts of design / coordination at work, plus childcare at home. Stimulants have helped me feel less bored and frustrated as I do all the less-intrinsically-engaging tasks I have to take on now.
>Programming is one of the most fun and engaging jobs a person can have
I think this is a statement that has a lot to do with it. I'd say there are two kinds of programmers - ones for whom this statement holds true, and others, like myself, for whom it does not. The thing is the distribution of people who have the mindset and skills to become competent programmers is split pretty evenly over these subgroups.
People who enjoy the job and derive satisfaction from it can focus pretty well and do good work. Others feel like the job is pulling teeth, but keep at it because the pay/status is good comparatively. I think that second group is a lot more likely to use stimulants to combat the drag of going to work because switching jobs to something more tolerable is such a pay cut.
That certainly makes sense. It would be really interesting to get some data distinguishing software engineers on two axes:
Takes / does not take stimulants
Thinks coding is / is not a relatively fun job activity
Then we could see whether it’s the people who enjoy coding who are more likely to take stimulants (which would point to ADHD as a driver of both) or the people who don’t enjoy coding (which would point to boredom / job dissatisfaction).
Of course, my theory probably has an unfair advantage - which is that if two people go to two psychiatrists and one says “I’ve had trouble paying attention all my life, it’s why I’m a programmer” and the other says “I have trouble paying attention when programming, I don’t find it engaging” the former is much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and given stimulants while the latter is less so. AIUI there’s some expectation that ADHD develops early and affects at least two major areas of life (work, school, home).
Funny. I'm a programmer and my experience is mostly the opposite. I have trouble with chores, errands, writing, reading, paperwork, etc, but a clearly defined coding problem is easy for me to focus on.
Was this part of what led you to become a programmer? That was my experience :)
Probably, but I got into programming when I was young so I don't rightly remember. It's definitely part of why I stick with it.
It doesn't match my experience either. Maybe its a FAANG thing?
If it is, it is seriously making me second guess working there if I had the chance. The idea of a workplace where the majority of workers are required to be on stimulants is nightmare inducing. (Exceptions made for genuine shift work which requires inhuman circadian schedules.)
One of my colleagues once told me a story about working in a place where speed use was common. She said workers on speed did indeed work very quickly, but the speed really shot their judgement all to hell, so they could produce pages and pages of work without realizing it was complete nonsense.
I have this crazy idea that it might be best to have mixed pods of maybe four workers on speed and one supervisor who is clearheaded and can get the speeders back on track when they go off on a tangent.
But holy hell it would be dehumanizing.
Like that bit in Herodotus where he's talking about how the ancient Persians made decisions: if they come up with an idea when drunk, they wait until they're sober and see if it still makes sense then. And crucially, if they come up with an idea when sober, they then get drunk to see if it still makes sense when blitzed out of their gourds.
Something something system 1 vs. system 2...
I work at a FAANG and at large companies the culture can vary widely the further you travel in the org chart, so my experience may not be representative. But there’s definitely not a strong pressure to maintain strong work output; in fact, there’s a major focus on ensuring that people have a good life balance and are going at a sustainable pace.
Does this mean people aren’t on speed? Of course not. But it’s not part of the culture or necessitated by high expectations.
I work for a big tech company, and if the people around me are on Adderall they're not telling me about it. I'm not, haven't asked, and don't seem to be falling behind anyone else.
Though there was a weird poster by the cafeteria a few months ago that was some sort of advertisement for a charity that was against black-market pills that were laced with all sorts of things. The odd part was that it treated pill addiction as perfectly normal ('$DEAD_KID was normal, sometimes took Adderall to work hard, or took Xanax to chill...') and didn't seem to have any awareness that maybe dosing kids up with black-market pills might be a bad idea. Like..."don't get prescription medicine anywhere but the pharmacy" seemed to me to be a pretty basic bit of common sense, but I guess not.
I didn't add a note saying "Why not just give your kids speed and opium directly?", but I was briefly tempted.
There IS a big difference between using drugs to achieve life goals vs when they become the life goal themselves. The former is drug instrumentalization, the latter is addiction.
It’s weird that people are so broadly unaware that there are different possible relationships with drugs (I myself only discovered this term a few years ago) despite the fact that like 80% of the population has a relationship to caffeine that is obviously not addiction (and I would characterize as drug instrumentalization).
E.g. this journal article starts with:
Most people who are regular consumers of psychoactive drugs are not drug addicts, nor will they ever become addicts. In neurobiological theories, non-addictive drug consumption is acknowledged only as a "necessary" prerequisite for addiction, but not as a stable and widespread behavior in its own right. This target article proposes a new neurobiological framework theory for non-addictive psychoactive drug consumption, introducing the concept of "drug instrumentalization." Psychoactive drugs are consumed for their effects on mental states. Humans are able to learn that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors. We discuss specific "instrumentalization goals" and outline neurobiological mechanisms of how major classes of psychoactive drugs change mental states and serve non-drug-related behaviors.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22074962/
Please don't begin abusing drugs.
Except coffee, it's the greatest drug in the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTVE5iPMKLg) and if you learn about the distinctions, you can seem very cultured to your friends!
DISCLAIMER: The fact that I come from a traditional coffee-exporter country has no bearing at all in my coffee recommendation
Were there any mainstream media stories critical of their use of performance enhancing drugs (which SBF and others seem to have been quite open about on Twitter) before the crash? It seems that would be a red flag worth looking into when reporting on SBF and FTX - but probably didn't fit the narrative of the boy wonder next Warren Buffet story journalists wanted to tell.
I've been working in tech for a long time. I've never (in my life) taken anything like adderall. At most, I have some caffeine (but I don't even like coffee.)
After reading this: I'm curious about how this type of thing would affect me. Can anyone describe the difference? (How much of it do we think is placebo effect?)
Edit: To clarify my "placebo" comment. I don't think the stimulants have _no_ effect. But I'm wondering if _some_ (maybe more than half) might be due to knowing you took a pill that supposed to help you concentrate.
Stimulants are not placebos. Caffeine has such bad side effects at such low doses that you really can't just do doses of caffeine that are comparable to therapeutic doses of amphetamines and then compare the mental effects. Your review of this experience will mostly be "when I used that much caffeine I was jittery and my stomach hurt and later all my muscles were sore."
Wait caffeine makes your muscles sore? I really should try quitting coffee
Only if you take enough to make you very jittery and have noticeable muscle tension. Not if you're just having your daily coffee that you hardly even notice doing anything anymore.
I think that, if you take the same amount of coffee every day, all it does is prevent withdrawal symptoms.
You would have to take a dose larger than your usual to become jittery.
It’s often said that daily coffee just staves off withdrawal, but it’s not quite true - you develop tolerance to its effects at the A2a receptor, but not it’s effects at the A1 receptor. Even in tolerant individuals caffeine retains a wakefulness-promoting effect.
https://examine.com/articles/science-behind-caffeine/
I've tried modafinil and the effect is definitely not a placebo. Usually I struggle a lot with distractions/procrastination/low energy, on moda I end up working so intensely I often forget to eat. Problem solving is also easier, because you mind feels clearer/more powerful. I suspect I'm already low on the distribution for conscientiousness/focus/executive function, in school (assuming that's roughly representative of the general population) I'd say I worked about as hard as the average student, maybe less, but in more selective environments, uni/jobs etc., I definitely felt below average, so probably I get more benefits from stimulants than most people would. Even so I think they can easily double some people's work output, with improved quality.
Interesting. Is there something OTC that I can take to try? Or is this prescription-only?
It's prescription only, but pretty easy to buy online.
It's OTC in many countries.
You order them from India (unpatented generics, and it avoids some regulation or another). Check r/Nootropics for the best websites to buy from that delivers to your country.
Also check the laws in your own country! I think in lots of places it's legal to import for personal use even though you can't buy it without a prescription, but check very carefully that that's true for your own jurisdiction
As Scott mentions, Adrafinil is a slower way to take Modafinil, and last I checked (a few years ago) it was available in regular US online stores.
And is unscheduled (legal to possess without a prescription) in the US, unlike Modafinil which was schedule IV (last I checked, a few years ago)
Have you ever had enough caffeine to notice an effect from it? The stimulant effect is certainly real, and caffeine is just the legally and socially accepted milder end of the spectrum.
I take 100 mg caffeine pills 3x/week (plus l-theanine, a very well-known & highly recommended nootropic combination that balances caffeine's energy & alertness with calm focus), and I have also had a prescription for 10 mg Adderall. For me, with my level of tolerance and sensitivity to both substances, the Adderall felt roughly like taking two of the caffeine pills: nothing crazy, no unpleasant side effects, but very definitely a significant boost in mood, energy, and executive function.
If you're curious, the safe and easy way to explore is to buy caffeine + l-theanine capsules on Amazon, probably the lowest dose you can find (probably 100 mg caffeine), and take one. If you don't notice an effect, take two the next day or the day after that. Take them first thing in the morning or your sleep may suffer.
I have experimented with it, and I definitely do not have ADHD, so I can tell you the effect it has on someone taking it for investigational or recreational purposes. You know how once in a while a dull task like cleaning your kitchen just turns out to be really satisfying, and you keep going and do extra things, like taking things out of cupboards and throwing away the out-of-date stuff and wiping down the cupboard shelves? OK, well if you take adderall before you do a routine kitchen cleaning, you're way more likely to get on a roll like that. And if you sit down to write an email or a blog post or whatever, the same sort of thing will happen. You will find it easier to focus, and more enjoyable to do. Your ideas will flow more freely and there will be fewer of the kind of moments where have that feeling of, "I can't think of what to say next. I wish I didn't have to do this." For me, anyhow, adderall did not induce a feeling of jitteriness or being hyper. It just felt like having a really good, productive day. So I enjoy it a lot, but am careful not to do it very often.
Sure seems like an awful lot of things de facto require stimulants for success now. Compulsory education (for boys anyway), coding, professional gaming and sports, financial trading...or even in mundane occupations and daily routines, who doesn't get started with a caffeinated beverage? (Much more fun when also mixed with amphetamines, too. Espresso + dexadrine led to some...memorably long uptimes. Glad to have kicked that habit.) Perhaps there's a more systemic price to be paid for the general overclocking of humanity, beyond potential acute failures like this one.
(Can't resist 8: Based on your expertise and years of training, Dr. Alexander, do you agree that __injecting__ bleach would on net be more harmful than drinking it?)
For what it's worth, I don't have autism, I avoid caffeine during my work week (take it in the afternoon on Fridays to shift back to my natural nocturnal rhythm to be able to keep my mood from crashing from too many diurnal days), don't take any other stimulants, and I still work fine as a software engineer. I have somehow gotten hired by Google; like many people there think about themselves, I too think maybe Google made a mistake in hiring me, but this is the end of year two and they're not even considering it yet, so apparently one can land and hold a high-paying job in IT without being on stimmies.
To be fair, I have done mighty little coding so far, but that's an accident of the things I've been working at at Google, my previous jobs were very coding heavy, and I still code a lot in my spare time. Going by experience, if I *were* coding, I'd be focussing quite naturally, it's an easy activity to get lost in for me, but I'd describe it as an aesthetic experience more than a problem-solving experience, i.e. I take a lot of enjoyment out of how good code reads and looks.
That said, I also *do* seem to have some kind of weird reward function in my brain! For example, I love fixing bugs, refactoring things and writing documentation, whereas my understanding is that most of my colleagues prefer not doing those things and instead writing new features, which honestly sounds dreadful to me for complicated reasons (but flippantly and self-deprecatingly summarised boil down to that I don't want to make decisions in a void; this is an over-simplification, but I didn't want to leave anyone reading this comment hanging *completely* as to the underlying mechanism).
I too dislike writing code for new features and 'making decisions in a void' seems like a fairly apt description of (at least one reason) why it's aversive to me too. Interestingly, I have no basically no problem with new features for my own personal projects or things like 'code challenges'. I think a lot of the aversion is because of the ambiguity and uncertainty regarding what exactly satisfies an MVP for a feature or how correctness versus speed/pragmatism is _expected_ or desired by my superiors/supervisors. Fixing bugs, refactoring, and writing (internal or technical) documentation are all things where the 'reward function' is MUCH easier (for me) to discern.
Heh, I feel the same way about bugs and refactoring. Also performance improvements.
New features are OK if there's rapid prototyping and a constant feedback loop. What I don't like are the times where all the planning happens up front (even if I'm involved), and then implementation happens later on a detailed schedule, with a final rollout. In my experience, there's always stuff that's harder to do than anyone planned for. And that sort of advance planning never seems to be thorough enough, and misses things that should be covered and covers things that are unnecessary. I hate the position of being halfway through coding something and having to tell people that this is going to take longer than expected, and ought to have some more things added, and some of their pet details are superfluous and ought to wait until an update.
Yes, low-latency feedback and feedback _loops_ are ideal. I haven't been dealing with lots of advance planning (unless it's my own) but I very much dislike 'murky models' of other systems with which I'm integrating or, even worse, one's internal to the very system I'm working on/in/with. Even bugs can be awful to fix when 'correctness' is murky enough!
Ugh, yeah. I hate those situations where there's no clearly optimal solution, and all the potential solutions involve balancing lots of factors that everyone assigns different priorities to, and there's always a majority against any specific solution, but no majority for anything at all.
I don’t drink caffeine unless I really need it(a couple times a year). Maybe I have natural high levels of these traits people want, but I also kind of suspect constant reliance on substances degrades their natural functionality.
I am not qualified to talk about the pharmacological aspects of the article, but I did simplify the financial aspect of FTXs fall:
https://jorgevelez.substack.com/p/ftx
I found this article extremely helpful. Thanks for writing it!
Excellent write up, thank you. So this was basically a bank run on a brokerage that decided to act like a bank.
Something this makes me wonder is if Jane Street or other non-exploded trading firms have far more capable and systematic psychiatrists on staff to manage the drug cocktails their teams are on
My experience in a small corner of industry was that the systematic trading firm did not actually manage what drugs their staff were on. This was probably a mistake, since some people obviously had untreated ADHD and contributed less or less consistently as a result.
They have better risk management which is a fancy way of saying they’re more intentional about access control and monitoring exposure.
>But if you’re already a cryptocurrency trader, maybe it only takes a tiny amount of risk-curve-shifting to turn you into a cryptocurrency trader who makes riskier trades.
Can we stop pretending that risky trades were SBF's main fault instead of committing fraud?
>Please don’t rush out to abuse drugs just because you read about them in an article on how they contributed to a $10 billion bankruptcy.
Yeah, that's what the annual nootropic survey is for.
"Can we stop pretending that risky trades were SBF's main fault instead of committing fraud?"
I don't think I'm pretending anything. I'm writing an article about how psychopharmacology contributed to the crash. He was on a medication that purportedly causes risk seeking, not a medication that causes fraud. Obviously then there is a causal chain from "lost lots of money" -> "fraud to conceal that".
Also, trivial warning (1% of a ban) for tone.
The fraud may not need to stem from losing the money to stem from the psychopharmacology. Presumably at least part of the reason people don't commit fraud is that "it's a bad idea," either because they don't want to get caught or because risk-averseness also applies to the risks of violating social norms/moral intuitions.
That comes from an introspective intuition that if I were more risk-averse I'd engage in less immoral behaviour, and vice versa.
Hm. I feel like "pathological gambling" and "hypersexuality" are more specific and common dopaminergic side effects than "become a bad person", but I can't really explain why that should be. I bet I would understand this if I knew more neuroeconomics.
If the accusation was he just took the money for himself I’d agree. But it’s more like, he tried to get everything back by gambling with other peoples money. Legally that doesn’t sound very different, but “problem gambler” seems like a more important factor in the later explanation.
Is "becoming a bad person" an acknowledged side effect of any medication?
I think you would be more technical and careful in how you describe it - some of them worsen temper, some can make you addicted and then you do bad things.
I don't think there's any medication whose effect is as close to the common-sense concept of "bad person" as eg antisocial personality disorder is.
Would something like Acetaminophen's reduction of empathy of others' pain[1] count?
Presumably having less empathy would mean you'd take more risks that affects others, although I guess it's still not strictly evil, and is more like recklessness.
Thinking about it, considering how something like MDMA/metta meditation makes you much more empathetic/sympathetic; loving; generous; etc, surely there must be a drug that does the opposite?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5015806/
Well, you could say that engaging in fraud is just a variety of risk-taking . The risk is getting caught, and/or suffering from a guilty conscience. If you don't have a very powerful conscience, then the risk is just getting caught. So IF SBF didn't have a very active conscience, it actually does seem to me that committing fraud would be in pretty much the same category as making risky trades -- maybe there will be a good outcome, maybe a bad -- and an upper on board might shift the needle a bit on how you evaluate the chances of different outcomes.
But that model only works if suffering from a guilty conscience isn't a danger for the person. Was it, for SBF? I know very little about him, but here's some demographic reasoning based on my life experience: Young males who graduate from high-prestige schools, then become traders, then set out to become the best in the world at something (in this case, the world's most effective altruist) are not usually very high on compassion and conventionality, & those are the things that underlie attacks of conscience.
This seems a bizarre response given you general positions on things. People who commit fraud are not “bad people” in some categorical way different from the various other behavior spectrums you subscribe to.
Disinhibition should not interfere with honesty, I would expect. I don't know how much of honesty and lying is understood neuroscientifically. The case has been made that deception and countering it created the evolutionary pressure to develop a human brain. Drugs that induce paranoia or delusion may be understood as promoting self-deception, deceiving others still is something different.
.
Do the drugs also cause dishonesty in addition to risk taking? Why not talk more about the culture of FTX and the role it played? Most businesses don't encourage drug use.
Scott is quite deliberately only focusing on the psychopharmacology angle here, as that's where he feels he has relevant new points to make.
It's only illegal if you get caught, and stimulants make it seem like something that happens to other people.
FWIW, I'm sufficiently isolated from news that I didn't actually know there was fraud involved. And Scott didn't actually mention it anywhere in the article. I'm not trying to say you should write like a newspaper with big explanations of the context at the top for people like me who apparently live under rocks, but I feel like it's fair to not find the link to fraud <i>obvious</i> when you don't mention it.
I'd guess that people are wary of libel accusations. Given that crypto is famously under-regulated, FTX may have technically not broken any laws, but if what they freely admitted to having done happened in normal finance instead, it would be fraud ten times over, so that's a pretty fair characterisation.
IIUC, he is definitely under suspicion of committing fraud, and various other financial crimes. That it was done via crypto-currency isn't really significant. Whether he is actually guilty is, of course, another question.
And, again, IIUC, the regulations would probably only be for the purposes of allowing regulators to inspect the books even when a crime is not suspected. Think of them as trip-wires rather than additional crimes. (Though, of course, blocking access by the regulators would be an additional crime.)
Yeah, IMHO most of the blame here lies not so much at the feet of the bunch of amateurs that the FTX gang seems to be, but at the banking regulators failing to do their jobs, and the sophisticated investors failing to do due diligence.
There's a lot of allegations flying around and on first glance it sure *looks* like fraud, but it's hard to say until the investigation is done and any criminal charges are pressed. The fraud *appears* to be "took clients' funds and threw them into the gaping money pit in an attempt to make the money back, cover their losses, and then repay the clients" but don't quote me on that. What started it was a run on FTX when people wanted to cash in and FTX seems not to have had the liquidity to cover that.
In general it's a complicated mess of "how much was the Wild West approach to crypto trading and how much was breaking an actual law we can point at?"
I too have been confused about the 'fraud' but I _think_ it's pointing at (the alleged) instances of FTX transferring user deposits to Alameda to cover the latter's losses. That seems like a fairly 'non-central example' of fraud, but it makes sense (to me, now).
Easy to miss the fraud part even if you read the news. NYT and Washington Post stories on FTX were strangely positive with very little mention of the crimes and a lot about over ambition.
I don't think it's as simple as him donating lots of money to the Democrats so he gets favorable coverage but comparing how FTX has been treated with other tech companies has been strange.
"A kid from a good family" seems to be the likeliest explanation for the general kid-gloves approach, but actively promoting correct politics certainly helps too, which has become uncommon in big tech lately.
Committing fraud seems a pretty good example of taking an extreme risk to me.
That's the only problem only if you're pretty amoral to begin with. I wouldn't commit fraud even if it was zero risk. Because it's wrong. So you can shift my risk-taking curve as much as you like, and I might very well try to beat the BMW bike to the top of the hill when there really isn't room and die in a fiery crash, but I sure as heck wouldn't be found screwing people out of their life's savings.
Obviously neither of us really knows what went on in SBFs and other people's head at the time. Is it not conceivable that they started out by thinking dipping into customer funds is no big deal, it's a victimless crime if it had worked out? Maybe they even did it in the past and it worked. Reading the stories about other famous blow ups it sort of comes in dribs and drabs, a little lie here, a little unethical behavior there, not some conscious "let's all commit fraud" decision. The rationalizations probably come easy, especially if chemically assisted.
Sure. Like I said, they had to be pretty amoral to begin with. I wouldn't do the rationalization at Step 1 on account of the shade of my mother would immediately rise out of the floor in a towering rage and beat the snot out of me. Lying to people is wrong even if they never find out.
It seems to be a common failure mode though, when people are entrusted with pots of money by others, and they are either in the business of trading/gambling on stocks or get into it privately. They make quick money at the start due to beginner's luck, think they've found the secret of easy money, plunge, lose their shirts, and try to dam the leak by 'borrowing' some of that money lying idle in their charge. Just borrow it, for this sure thing that will pay out big, and I can put it back with nobody noticing and no harm done once I make my losses back.
Of course they lose it, so they need even more urgently to find some way of getting funds fast in order to cover what they 'borrowed' and that leads to more 'borrowing' and more speculating until it all blows up.
It does seem to be the lure of "since I have to manage this money, eventually I come to think of it as 'my' money in a sense, and it seems very silly to let it lie there idle when I could be using it to make a profit for all of us".
I think a lot of people who have never been in a certain kind of situation don't understand how little "morality" has to do with it. It seems hard to test that theory though.
You can't exactly put the people claiming "I would never!" in a relevant situation.
I agree. Every workplace I have been in has some kind of bad behavior that is sanctioned. Usually it has to do with not really sticking to the standards that are mandated by law. And the places I have worked have mostly been psychiatric settings, so sloppiness about patient care and confidentiality had real, direct effects on vulnerable people. And yet the people being sloppy were not bad people. Mostly they were smart and caring. But they were also tired and busy. So they did what most people do: They followed, not the rules in the book, but the unwritten rules that everyone else did.
How many opportunities to commit fraud with a billion-dollar payout and zero risk have you actually been presented with?
None whatsoever. But I think the question is per se a disputatious gotcha with little applicability to the real world. I don't need to stand exactly in Sam Bankman-Fried's shoes to have a reasonable theory about what I would do if I were he, the same way we don't need to stand exactly in Heinrich Himmler's shoes to have a reasonable theory about whether we'd send all the Jews to Treblinka.
In general, to understand these situations we extrapolate from what we *do* know about ourselves, and we back that up by comparing our other behavior and choices with those of the person in question, to see how similar we are in general, and finally we check to see whether the relatively few other people who *have* stood in similar shoes all did the same bad thing to get an idea of the population-averaged probability of being bad. So far as I can tell this all yields pretty good results -- at least, I have rarely been surprised these past few decades in how I (or people I know well) will react (ethically) to novel situations. I am obviously not saying I *don't* have ethical weaknesses -- I'm only saying I know pretty well by now what they are, and aren't.
So first I know from long experience how much I generally value money vis-a-vis my ability to sleep at night with a clear conscience, and the answer is: not much. I could certainly have more money at various points in my life if I cut some ethical corners. Not a billion dollars, but not $100 either. I haven't done it. Would I do it if the reward were $1 billion? I doubt it. I don't really have that much interest in $1 billion in wealth, indeed it seeems to me it would be tedious and unpleasant, saddling me with all kinds of responsibilities and attracting the nastiest sorts of parasites. There's a lot I could so with it, a la Elon Musk, but I don't have his drive and ambition, I'm OK with where I am. I'd be much more impelled to consider the chance of $1 million, which would let me retire a little earlier and do a few other things. But I already know I wouldn't trade my satisfaction in my character for the modest extra bump in convenience and comfort that would mean. Maybe it's only because I'm old enough that I can no longer fool myself into thinking I'll live forever, and being happy with who I am is much more important than having a nicer car. My car is nice enough already anyway.
Secondly can compare my general nature and general actions with these folks, and when I do, the mismatch is grotesque. The more I learn of their lifestyle, the weirder it seems to me. There's a whole collection of stuff there that I would never even start doing -- the publicity show, the Manichaen urge to Change The World right now and comfort with cutting corners in the interest of speed, the drugs, the funky personal lifestyle -- and to be brutally frank a lof ot this kind of reeks to me of a real self-esteem problem. I can imagine that someone who has a big self-esteem problem, and is very smart, might indeed want to pull the mobiest financial hack ever, because maybe it will finally sate that internal hunger. But I already know I'm not that kind of person. For better or worse[1], I don't have self-esteem problems.
And, thirdly, there are certainly a number of people who *have* had the opportunity to pull billion-dollar frauds and we find that -- hardly any of them do. When one of them does, it's a shocker. So that tells me that the a priori probability that I'd act dishonestly is low, because most people don't. Combine that with what I additionally know empirically about myself from the above, and I conclude the probability is extra low.
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[1] I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I *should* ha ha, but I don't care about them.
"So far as I can tell this all yields pretty good results -- at least, I have rarely been surprised these past few decades in how I (or people I know well) will react (ethically) to novel situations. I am obviously not saying I *don't* have ethical weaknesses -- I'm only saying I know pretty well by now what they are, and aren't."
I feel similarly to you, so I'm going to complicate things a bit.
Part of The Lord's Prayer (used a lot by Catholics ... maybe by others as well) goes like this: "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
Because, I think, avoiding having the choice/option to do the wrong thing is a huge help. Much like an alcoholic NOT keeping liquor at home.
To illustrate, I will present Temar Boggs. When he was 15 years old, he noticed a 5 year old being kidnapped and took off on his bicycle to stop the kidnapping. After quite a car chase on the bicycles the kidnapper gave up trying to elude him (and a friend) and let the child go free. Temar (and his friend) were heroes [and I don't think this was staged though I can't rule out the possibility].
Three years later Temar went to prison for armed robbery.
I wonder if the folks who knew Temar when he was 15 would have been surprised at his behavior three years later. Maybe?
But its basically the same kid an I feel that with a different set of friends the older Temar might well have grown up as a law abiding member of his community.
I wonder how often that holds for lots of folks who screw up big time. It is simple to just conclude that they are bad/immoral/amoral/whatever. And some of them might be. But I think for a bunch if the opportunity for crime hadn't be there (or the opportunity had required much more effort) they'd have lived their lives never knowing that they might have gone the wrong way.
I think lots of people have a high opinion of their moral character when it's not particularly tested.
That's not to say that you would do crime if you were in SBFs shoes -- I think many people wouldn't -- but I do think that it's hard to say for sure unless you've been in at least remotely similar places.
Maybe. But so far I'm not convinced that the "places" these people were in were very "remote." It all reads like market-timing, check kiting, embezzlement, gambling the shopping money, and then doubling down by gambling the mortgage money when you lose, and having a lot of team pep-talks and popping uppers to boost your spirits when the squalid reality peeps through every now and then. Pretty ordinary types of human decadence and moral failure.
I mean, the numbers are much bigger. If I try a little market timing, I do it with $5000 instead of $5 billion. If I kite a check it's for $150 and not $150 million. But I'm not persuaded that's a difference that is sufficiently important to completely change the situation, make it utterly incomprehensible to anyone not in the very same shoes[1].
If a man is willing to commit murder, I don't think we're completely at sea with the question of whether he's willing to commit a million of them. If he's willing to steal a bike, I don't think we are completely in the dark about whether he would steal a luxury car.
Indeed, my experience is that people who have character and self-discipline exhibit that in small and great matters pretty equally, without regard for the number of zeros in what's at stake, because its the nature of the person that matters -- what he values, how he sees himself -- much more than the size of the table stakes.
A person who won't lie to his wife about where he's been, even when it's embarassing, also won't cheat on his income taxes or sell nuclear secrets to the Russians. Conversely, people who do lie and cheat and steal and cut ethical corners in great big ways seem to do it in small things as well.
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[1] Actually, saying "you don't know what it's like to be me! You might do the same!" sounds more like weaseling denial and egoistical self-justification, which alas fits impression I'm getting that there was no small amount of "as Supermen it would be silly and wasteful to consider ourselves bound by the mundane inflexible moral strictures imposed on mere mortals."
In defence of the defence attorney, even lawyers have their own ethical rules. If his client says she didn't drink the bleach, he's not allowed to make up his own, better case.
You also should consider doing expert testimony again; you had basically the definitive expert witness experience of being cross-examined on something with a counter-intuitive answer that you don't have to hand. Taking an honest crack at it is the best you can do in the circumstances, so well done!
It's also worth bearing in mind that judges have all heard the same thing hundreds of times, so are aware it's mostly a parlour trick.
Scott wrote previously that getting institutionalized in the US is very disadvantageous because you get the bill for it. If the person doesn't have the right insurance, it will be very devastating and will make his life more complicated. It is no wonder why the patient wanted to argue in the court against the order.
Maybe it wasn't in the US but in Ireland where people generally don't have to suffer from lack of insurance. Then it doesn't apply. In any case, he shouldn't feel bad about what happened in the court. He told honestly what he thought about the situation and the judge considered it. Sometimes things go as you expect them to and sometimes not. It is not up to you. No one is going to think that you are a bad doctor based on lawyer's words.
I thought modafinil was primarily used for narcolepsy
I don't know about "primarily". It's certainly a popular use.
About ten years ago, lots of people thought that modafinil had some sort of high-tech magic bullet effect on orexins, sleep related chemicals that would help with narcolepsy. More recently, people have figured out that it's probably just a stimulant, albeit one that has relatively few side effects and lasts longer than usual. It still works fine for narcolepsy, because lots of stimulants do, but I think it's getting more commonly used in generic stimulant roles.
Some people say that relative to eg Adderall, modafinil is better at keeping you awake and Adderall at keeping you focused. I don't know if that's true or just a side effect of the way the drug was originally marketed.
As a narcoleptic and a “focus worker”, having been prescribed each at various times, I would say that both have fairly similar wakefulness effects, especially if taking extended release Adderall, but the difference in increased focus under Adderall was noticeable; however, Adderall seems to taper off in efficacy over time where Modafinil/Armodafinil remain relatively consistent in effect over time.
For me Modafinil has an anti-addictive effect if anything. Not sure how I'd feel about more conventional ADHD drugs. Like I do not at all feel a desire to be on it all the time, it is an entirely instrumental desire. "I'm about to do a pretty high pain type of programming better take Modafinil".
Even when I used it to play EVE, doing 100 characters of maxed out Planetary Interaction specifically, it wasn't something I looked forward to or needed.
I understand that Adderall is supposed to be much more addictive.
I would also note that not one neurologist I’ve worked with nor any literature I’ve read prior to your comment has suggested that Modafinil would have any impact on the orexin/hypocretin issue and only that it was another type of stimulant to use in attempt to address the symptoms.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine who's definitely not me reported that even low doses of modafinil were very reliably taking away almost all of the euphoria from GHB taken at the same time, while no other common dopaminergic substances (including, IIRC, Adderall, Ritalin and cocaine) did anything of the sort, which sort of hints at some significant differences in the mechanism of action. But, again, totally anecdotal.
It is a rather different type of stimulant. On the other hand, I don't know why one should use any stimulant while under the effects of GHB. At least for narcolepsy, one is for daytime and one is for nighttime.
GHB is frequently used recreationally, in which case its sleep-inducing effects are a hindrance rather than a benefit. Stimulants take care of that problem.
I think Adderall also has a strong nominative determinism effect for tech.
Adder All.
Concerta or Vyvanse sound like something music/art students take to practice.
"Don't worry, I have a cunning plan!"
Now the theme song is stuck in my head.
It is, at least, an accurate description of my experiences with modafinil and methylphenidate.
Scott, I just have to say, I love how you write disclaimers. They're great.
Re: footnote #5
I feel like there's kind of obviously a class of people who wear opposite-sex clothes for reasons other than identifying with the opposite sex, and "transvestite" is a perfectly-fine word for this class of people.
To the extent it's considered an "offensive" term now, the reason AFAIK is literally just "transvestism's existence is very mildly inconvenient for the SJ narrative, so SJ has decided to cancel everyone who acknowledges it". Certainly this isn't a case of "we came up with a new word, if you aren't with the current fashion you're bad" - there is no new SJ-approved word for transvestism, *all* of them (crossdresser, trap, etc.) are now "slurs", it's just been cut out of the accepted language as an expressible concept in the exact mold of Newspeak.
(I stress again, the existence of transvestism isn't even *that* inconvenient for the SJ narrative! You can totally believe transvestism is a thing and also transgenderism is a thing! It just slightly complicates the explanation!)
Are there still a lot of transvestites, or did they get absorbed into general transgender?
Ordinary gay drag certainly still exists.
In the US, there are lots of them. My source is my dad is super incredibly gay and loves to hang out with big groups of gay men many of whom wear women's clothing and all of whom love going to in-person shows that are mostly about men wearing women's clothing.
Elsewhere, some places have different cultural ideas around this stuff that apparently cause people to be crossdressers at much higher rates and transgender at much lower rates.
But they presumably don't think the are women or would expect people to seriously consider them to be female when they wear women's clothing?
Lots of gay men dress up in drag for fun -- it has nothing to do with wanting to be women.. Then there are males who truly feel they are female in some important way, and dress as women to manifest femaleness. And there are also straight men who dress in women's clothes because it's a turn-on. Lots of variety out there.
Your dad's gay? My mom was a lesbian. Gives you a different perspective, right?
Eddie Izzard has shifted from calling herself transvestite to trans, and has requested she/her pronouns.
I've never met/heard of any that identify themselves that way in recent years, no.
There are certainly people who cross-dress recreationally for dag shows and the like, and people who cross-dress as a fashion statement or w/e, but I don't think those things carry the sort of pathological/compulsive context that was the essence of our past understanding of 'transvestism'.
And there's definitely a lot of fetish porn around sissy/forced feminization kinks that involve men wearing/being forced to wear women's clothes. But it's not clear how much of that is weird confusion around humiliation/submission kinks getting filtered through toxic masculinity, or how much of it is actual unacknowledged transgenderism being sublimated through the not-shameful-because-it's-supposed-to-be-shameful avenue of porn consumption.
So maybe there are some people in that kink scene that conform more to our past understanding of the context for 'transvestism', but only the most shameful/sexual version of that context.
AFAIK, people like Eddie Izzard who openly identified as transvestites and cross-dressed consistently in daily life, were all absorbed into either trans or non-binary.
"But it's not clear how much of that is weird confusion around humiliation/submission kinks getting filtered through toxic masculinity, or how much of it is actual unacknowledged transgenderism being sublimated through the not-shameful-because-it's-supposed-to-be-shameful avenue of porn consumption."
Aren't you somewhat glossing over Blanchard's hypothesis? I know it's not politically correct to acknowledge it, and my own experiences suggest it's not 100% correct, but it can't be dismissed as 100% incorrect, either.
I'm sure there's some truth to this, but it's not true that "all" of them are now slurs. Haven't seen any discourse against drag, for one, and for a new coinage, there's "gender-non-conforming"/"gnc".
The second is not specific to transvestites; it's lumping them in with genderqueer, so it doesn't acknowledge that transvestism is a thing on its own not necessarily related to genderqueer.
Drag, possibly. My exposure to SJ has dropped a lot the past few years, so I can't speak for certain about that one; "drag queen" is still definitely a thing, but I think calling one "a man in drag" (even if accurate) might draw the Eye of Sauron.
Outside of SJ circles there are some women who are miffed at men putting on "womanface" and portraying rather regressive stereotypes of female behaviour.
I don't know where you got the idea that "crossdresser" is a slur, but it isn't. It's the preferred word for people who dress in clothes associated with the opposite gender for non-identity, non-performance, non-fashion/expression reasons.
(Performance is drag, identity is trans, and fashion/expression is usually butch or fem/femboy or maybe "crossdressing" as a verb.)
'Transvestite' comes across as a bit old fashioned to me, but not weird in a 1970s-psych-textbook kind of way the way 'transvestism' does. Idk who'd be offended at 'crossdresser' or 'drag', though 'trap' is firmly in the slur category for a lot of people.
I guess the most commonly used modern term is 'femboy'? :P
I would have thought "transvestism" and "transvestite" had basically the same connotations since they're the same Latin root construction and merely a different grammatical suffix to specify person vs. phenomenon - like "racist" vs. "racism".
yeah I'm not saying it makes any etymological sense, it's just the vibes I get from the training data I've seen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is common though - think of how different “Democrat Party” and “Democratic Party” sound, or “Jew” versus “Jewish person”.
Your analogy's bad. "Transvestite" and "transvestism" aren't different words for the same thing using different-but-related constructions; they're words for different-but-related things derived from the same construction.
Synonyms have a lot of room to acquire separate nuances; because they can be substituted, the choice of which synonym to use tends to acquire signalling value (the different nuance of "Jewish person" vs. "Jew" essentially boils down to signalling "I am all-in on the Blue Tribe's Whorfian language games" vs. "I am not"). But you can't substitute "transvestism" for "transvestite"; one means the phenomenon and the other a person displaying said phenomenon.
>I guess the most commonly used modern term is 'femboy'? :P
The general term for this whole category is "gender non-conforming", usually shortened to GNC. Which itself is a sort of superset of "non-binary" which includes people that don't explicitly use that label.
Femboys/bois are definitely GNC and often NB, as are drag queens/kings.
Calling all drag queens/kings "definitely GNC" would be controversial, since that set includes (1) trans drag performers who are traditionally feminine/masculine in their identified gender, (2) performers who are traditionally-masculine/feminine in their private lives and wear drag only as a costume for performances and professional events, and arguably (3) bio queens/kings whose only gender-nonconformity is their participation in an art form associated with the opposite sex.
You could make an argument that they all transgress gender roles in some way, but so did Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Rudy Giuliani, all the women who've played Peter Pan, all the men who played women in premodern stage performances, and anyone who's ever dressed up as an opposite-sex character for Halloween. In all those cases we don't generally treat gender-role-transgression as a characteristic that the person has; its just a thing that they've done.
I think I can handwave away (2) as unambiguously being an *act* of GNC'ity, even if they aren't GNC all the time, but the degree to which they consider it a pillar of their life/identity is relevant to that. For (1), IME even most binary trans people are *somewhat* GNC and play around with gender, but fair. The mere existence of (3) is contradictory enough to how most people define drag that I can't comment on it.
I can think of at least four Robin Williams movies off the top of my head that directly touch on GNC'ity, so henceforth I will be thinking of Robin Williams as a GNC icon.
FWIW I was taught that transvestism is a thing and also transgenderism is a thing and they are different things both worthy of respect and tolerance in high school health class in 1990. The distinction isn't even new.
>there's kind of obviously a class of people who wear opposite-sex clothes for reasons other than identifying with the opposite sex
See also Aella's "Everyone Has Autogynephilia"
https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
The thing is we don't have words for other types of people who wear specific types of clothes. There's no medical-sounding terms for 'denimites' or 'sundression' or w/e.
'Transvestism' is historically a medical-ish diagnosis and referred to mental condition that went well beyond just liking to wear a type of clothing sometimes. And to the extent that it had those deeper connotations, they mainly came from transgender people who *were* expressing a deeper issue with how society viewed them, and we now understand our pt understanding of transvestism was innacurate to those people.
Basically, take the misunderstand of transgender people out of our historical understanding of transvestism, and there's nothing of much substance left to the word that would justify keeping it around. Something like 'cross-dressing' or 'drag' or other non-medical-context-and-weird-history words are much more appropriate for the people who just like to sometimes wear those clothes for whatever reason.
'sans-cullotisme' ;-)
Fascinating/awesome write up! This whole debacle feels like a crossover episode of silicon valley and 30 Rock with Chris Parnell aka Dr Spaceman (spe-ch-men) being in three episodes as the company psychiatrist/performance coach
😂😂😂😂
Thank you for the gift of that YouTube Dr. Spaceman binge! I can't believe how much more likeable Chris Parnell is here, compared to Archer or Rick and Morty. Come to think of it, he's like an IRL Krieger in 30 Rock.
"And to think, we used to solve questions of paternity by dunking a woman's head under water, until she admitted she made it all up."
This is 👀. Somewhere along the line the concept of primum non nocere got lost.
I think it got subsumed into expected utility calculation and the reality of life under capitalism.
Like, I have an ADHD diagnosis, and a bottle of prescribed amphetamines. I don't need them to function normally, and only take them when I need to crunch on a project at work, maybe 1-3 pills a week. They definitely have negative short-term side effects when I take them, and may have negative long-term side effects for all I know.
A very long employment history confirms that when I do this, I can hold down a high-paying and satisfying job, and perform well enough that I am not constantly worried about my performance and if I am about to lose my job. When I do not do this, my performance suffers, I am constantly worried about losing my job to a degree that interferes with enjoying the rest of my life, and I do actual lose those high-paying and very intense, demanding jobs at the rate of about 1 every 1-2 years.
So what is 'do no harm' here? Certainly if I wasn't trying to hold these high-paying jobs, my life would be better with no medication. Certainly my life is better with medication and being comfortable in a high-paying satisfying job than it would be if I were constantly losing high-paying jobs or working a boring low-paying job.
How should a doctor calculate 'harm' in that situation?
And more importantly, what happens when the guy who wants my job realizes he can't compete with me when I'm on speed and he's not, and he goes to his doctor saying *his* life would be better off with meds so he could take my job? What happens when a significant portion of the people in high-paying jobs are each individually telling that to different doctors? What are the doctors supposed to do?
I wasn't responding to the types of clinical concerns which you are raising and comes up for patients and their physicians daily. It was more related to the boundary circumstances outlined in the FTX article in the Times. The clinical issue is the one Scott raises and you raise - if one has an ADHD diagnosis its easier from a standard of care standpoint. That said our diagnostic criteria and predictive criteria are not so precise.
The office was only on Adderall because of cowards who know Desoxyn is the best treatment for ADHD and refuse to prescribe it.
Is it also the best for low impact ADHD? (Just use a smaller dose?)
> this is a violation of the Goldwater Rule that psychiatrists aren’t supposed to publicly assess famous figures
Would this article fall under that rule? You're not giving a psych evaluation of him, but would speculating about how his medication might have affected his risk tolerance, count as "publicly assessing" him?
I'm not sure, it doesn't really have clear boundaries and wasn't written with pharmacology in mind. I would like to think this article continues to stand if we replace him with some random other person who took these same medications, and that that matters.
From the perspective of a layman reading it, I feel like this article is fine. It isn't about SBF, it's about stimulants and SBF is merely a reason people currently want to read about the effects of stimulants
What a wonderful S.A. (i.e. "an essay as outstanding as a post by S.A.S."). I am grateful to live in this time. No cocaine for my brain, no emsam and no jhanna, just this. I am high on ACX.
Good to know it was just good old regular idiocy then. And not drug induced idiocy which caused this.
But seriously, anytime someone is labelled "the next Warren Buffett" they are usually the complete opposite. It is amazing how reliable this seems to be.
Of course. Following the path of Jack Bogle is boring. Far easier to invent magic beans. That goes for Bitcoin, too. Its only genuine use case is ordering illegal drugs.
I think people miss the point of Warren Buffett. Sure, he's made a lot of investments and does a good job managing them, but his real insight is to play the long game. He's like a billion years old and built his fortune through slow prudent investing. Nobody in their 20s can be "the next Warren Buffett" by making flashy trades and getting rich quickly - that's the opposite of what he does!
Yeah that is exactly it. When asked why not more people were doing what he was doing he replied "Nobody wants to get rich slowly".
It also requires quite a lot of capital. There's a huge difference in buying a few shares of an undervalued company and buying a large chunk of an undervalued company and then being able to unlock that value.
Yeah to become as rich as Buffett you need outside capital. But if you start with $50k of savings and save up $15k per year if you have a well paying job, and invest it at 15% per year by finding undervalued stocks, you could have $10m after 30 years. I think that could be considered rich.
If you are as good as Buffett and get a 25% annual return, you would have $100m by the time you are in your 60's (if you start young).
Few people end up doing it though, because it takes discipline and patience. And a well paying job of course.
I think that's buying into the myth that Buffet is selling. He does this work full-time, has likely a lot more access to the corporations and he also can influence the corporations he buys, something a small shareholder can not do. The regular person with a day job is probably far better of with an index fund.
You can read all his letters to the partners in his hedge fund as well as to the Berkshire shareholders, it's pretty interesting reading.
"Here's the paradox: You recognize that as an individual trader you probably are not gonna be able to make good enough stock picks, consistently, to outperform an index. But you're also greedy, and can't accept the meager 8% annualized return of the S&P." ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgisRHEQ2FM&t=252s
That would also make for quite the boring story. The business press loves it when someone under 30 strikes it rich by selling shares in an unprofitable company, building a profitable company with sustainable growth from the ground up doesn't sound that exciting.
"Which came first, the idiocy or the drugs?" seems like something that is going to be debated for a long time.
One data point: I have a relative with Parkinson's. All of a sudden out of nowhere, he lost tens of thousands of dollars gambling. His doctor took him off his medicine (I don't know which one it was), and he stopped gambling--he had never gambled before. He wrote the drug company, and they paid for his losses.
I'd be very interested in reading about any details of your relative's experience. What did it _feel_ like for them to decide to both start and continue gambling?
I like _betting_ (for very small stakes and almost always about interpersonal disputes regarding 'trivia') but 'gambling' just doesn't make any sense (given the negative expected value). I can't imagine any drug changing that but I'm very curious if your relative has any insight about how that might work.
I posted this elsewhere, but this longform article had a lot of personal accounts of exactly this effect: https://theamericanscholar.org/the-degradation-drug/
Some describe it as a compulsion that can't be ignored, like seeing food after a 4 day fast, and others as a desire that makes no sense to ignore, because it would be fun and good.
Thanks! What is describes is pretty terrifying!
Here's a thought that crossed my mind which I'm not sure how seriously to take:
If you think, on utilitarian grounds, that you ought to be a lot less risk averse than seems intuitive, then you'll probably find that your instinctive risk averse responses in many situations are getting in the way of acting quickly how you would want, on reflection, to act. So if there are drugs that make one's instinctive responses less risk averse, one might consider taking those as a kind of moral enhancement.
SBF et al. famously did think that they ought to be much less risk averse than is intuitive. I wonder, then, if it's possible that risk curve shifting was not an unintended side effect of the stimulants, but rather part of the point of taking them.
(Of course, this only makes sense if you think the drugs shift your risk curve in a way that is predictable and doesn't overshoot or otherwise make one act irrationally, and I don't know if it's plausible SBF et al. would have thought that.)
🤯🤯🤯🤯 this is making me want to stop taking Ritalin.
I definitely went through a period where I was weirdly addicted to online furniture and fixture/hardware shopping while I was doing a reno and it struck me as very odd. Nothing before or after that reno triggered compulsive behavior in the same way. I also totally overshot my furniture budget. 🤦♀️ Never thought it was the adhd meds...
Wonder what else it’s doing to me that I don’t realize.
Also, Hamilton Morris has discussed combining adderall and Ayahuasca (an maoi) and he did not die.
Ayahuasca is a combination of two drugs, DMT and an MAOI. The MAOI prevents the body from breaking down the DMT in the gut, which is why it also makes you sensitive to foods with tyramine. There's been some imprecision on this point in the press, especially after Aaron Rodgers went to Peru and realized that wide receivers are just a projection of his will and he deserves 20% of the Packers' salary cap.
Lol. Yes. I mean that Ayahuasca contains an MAOI, so people tell you not to mix it with stimulants, but if you do accidentally, you probably won’t die.
That's funny. I don't have much experience with stimulants, just a short period of time. But what I do have matches your experience with shopping. I've never done anything dangerous on stimulants, never gambled, nothing that odd. But holy heck have I gone on strange purchasing rat holes that I was absolutely sure were logical decisions at the time. And later had me laughing, wtf was going on in my head.
The annoying thing is that being aware of this effort doesn't inoculate you from it. Somehow you think, "But this time is different, I'm *aware* of the bias from the stimulants and I'm adjusting for it..." Repeat up the levels of the stack the next time, you are aware that even being aware didn't work, but that means *this* time...
However I also do smaller weird shopping rat holes without stimulants, it's not a created behavior. Rather seemed like a huge multiplier on it. It pushed me over some threshold and started some feedback loops.
Fascinating. Also, love the term “rat hole.” Haha. It’s so true about knowing but continuing. During my furniture rat hole, I’d look at 1,000s different bed frames and think—I’m bat shit crazy. And then I’d like at 200 more frames...
Never did I think it might be related to Ritalin. 🤦♀️
"I also totally overshot my furniture budget."
So, like that tweet:
"Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Candles $3,600
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying" 😁
I find the idea of being on stimulants to do your job both fascinating and terrifying. I don't really touch drugs so my experience is far more about caffeine than anything harder, but my every experience with stimulants is that you're not really gaining anything. Sure, you're more focused, more active and more productive now... but there's always a later and generally the work I get done during a caffeine rush is matched by all the work I don't get done when dealing with the post-crash brain fog.
Maybe people are more willing to mortgage their downtime in exchange for their productive hours than I am. It still feels like a real faustian bargain to me, though.
I don't know about your job, but mine (software eng) benefits more from an hour of peak concentration than eight hours of barely being able to think about things. During the brain fog you can just chill, which you should probably do anyway.
I had to lay off the caffeine temporarily for health reasons, and my focus is dogshit. I might end up getting that Ritalin prescription after all.
Do it, it'll change your life.
Modafinil is almost as good if you can't get an ADHD med prescription. Probably much healthier than caffeine, too. Also it works better IMO and is probably cheaper unless you use pills for your caffeine.
I find it’s not really trivial to find out where to acquire it? I mean sure, if you’re in Provincetown or Manhattan or SF, seems easier, but what if you’re not?
ModUp is back yeah? Just get it shipped from India. Customs doesn't care.
Where exactly would a curious consumer find ModUp, given that a Google search seems to only pull up sources talking about their closure back in 2020?
Hmm, coulda sworn I got an email from them but can't find it. Might have been from another modafinil site.
In that case I'd probably just ask Gwern on his blog or something what the go to site is these days.
So far I didn't even consider modafinil because I have enough problems keeping my circadian clock remotely sane. Perhaps I shouldn't? FWIW, I had no problems sleeping after a bit of Ritalin in the morning.
Thanks, that's a valuable data point.
Can't wait for the inevitable Much More Than You Needed To Know About The Safety of Drinking Bleach when Scott retires.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s12276-021-00646-3
Very interesting recent paper challenging the role of MAO-B inhibitors in the metabolism of dopamine. Disclaimer, I haven't read it closely, but the journal is fairly reputable and the topic is relevant here. It is making some controversial claims so I have some skepticism, but again I have yet to read closely.
Also interesting to note, I believe MAO-A is responsible for the metabolism of tyramine and therefore selegiline (as a selective MAO-B inhibitor at lower doses) is generally not considered to be a risk for noradrenergic hypertensive crises. I also believe that with lower amounts of tyramine in modern foods (among other reasons) has led to the risk of such crises in general being much rarer than was previously expected. This seems to be backed up by user reports on such drugs, but of course there is a selection bias in that these reports cannot be made by people who died from strokes related to an explosion of blood pressure.
Interested in hearing peoples opinions on both points.
EDIT: Oh, I just noticed you posted this in the footnotes. Apologies, but still interested in any discussion!
So modafinil breaks birth control and causes hypersexuality. Why is no one else pointing to this as the cause of increased ADHD diagnoses?
90% joking
Oh no. The transhuman master race is already here.
Also, I thought Adhd meds were supposed to cause a reduction in libido??? Not hypersexuality. Very confusing.
My experience is that they do.
Can stimulants get you in a loop where after taking them, reloading with another dose sounds like a great idea? Basically the Gandhi murder pill thought experiment but with real pills and less murder?
As for risk curves... I have a friend who's bipolar, though one of the lucky (?) ones who spends ~80% time in various degrees of mania. His favorite quote is a piece of philosophy he accidentally received from a third world waiter struggling with English: "Everything is highly recommended".
“Everything is highly recommend.” Is going to be my new fav quote. Thank you. 👏
This sounds unlikely because they don't last that long (the patch in this article lasts most of a day and this is longer than almost everything else) and because using more than the normal amount will begin to be disruptive to your work (assuming you are mainly interested in taking them for work, not for days-long sex parties)
That sounds like a description of a meth addiction.
Yes, dopaminergic stimulants can very much produce wanting more, even in the absence of actually liking the experience. I've observed this when cocaine became available in my friend group: one person kept saying she didn't notice any effect so LET'S DO MORE. After a few times, our supplier recognized this as a dangerous pattern and wisely cut her off.
>Can stimulants get you in a loop where after taking them, reloading with another dose sounds like a great idea? Basically the Gandhi murder pill thought experiment but with real pills and less murder?
This is one of the reasons people think longer time release forms have less danger for abuse.
Not sure if this is unique to stimulants though. I'm much more likely to decide drinking more alcohol is a good idea, after I've had some amount of alcohol. Psychedelics supposedly run counter to this trend, but no personal experience myself.
Yeah, psychedelics are pretty overwhelming and you just get tired of them for a while (the good kind of tired, like coming back from a mindblowing backpacking trip). They also usually give you some kind of rapid onset tolerance, you can't really prolong your trip by taking more in the middle.
Re: Footnote 8: Three words: dose-response curve. Too much: bad. Not enough: not a problem. "Dose-response curve" is a much more expert-sounding answer than "I don't know", even though it means the same thing.
Except: is "dose-response curve" three words or two? I don't know!
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-most-common-pain-relief-drug-in-the-world-induces-risky-behavior-study-shows
Acetaminophen might increase risk-taking.
This post also makes me feel less bad about not being able to manipulate tiny numbers all day. I’ve been beating myself up about this perceived failure, but you’ve normalized it. Thank you for this. 🙏
It's worth noting that what got me my ongoing ADHD diagnosis wasn't my inability to crunch tiny numbers (which honestly, even unmedicated I was frequently able to do).
It was actually my inability to feed myself (plan meals, buy the right food, organise enough to make meals before the food goes bad, notice that I'm hungry before all the shops close), do laundry before I have literally no underwear, keep appointments, and remember where I left my things or parked my car.
Agree with all of this, but the "regular" in Caroline's comment quite obviously means "consistent" rather than "standard".
Scott decides to run challenge mode where he will be pruning out comments, and the same week this all happens. I'm wondering if he still has time to do the challenge pruning, or have events overtaken him?
As to the psychiatrist, I'm going to venture that someone who is being described as a pill-pusher whose job was to get all the FTX and Alameda traders hyped up on stimulants is not going to admit in an NYT interview "Oh yeah, they were all frothing at the mouth crazy, I just wrote the scripts as they asked for them" especially in light of all the allegations of fraud and embezzlement and swindling, but rather rush to give an account about "Why yes I was there but only as a kind of life coach and goodness gracious me I had NO IDEA that kind of malarkey was going on!" as a way of trying to keep out of the mud.
As to bleach, I have no idea how much you'd need to drink for a suicide attempt. A mouthful is bad but probably will only make you sick; half a bottle will likely do damage:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/the-fda-warns-not-to-drink-bleach-in-case-you-needed-that-reminder/
As to the drug use, here is where we slap ALLEGED ALLEGED ALLEGED all over any comments we might make, but again - "judicious" is not what comes to mind in this context of over-ambition, over-confidence, and over-reaching themselves, especially in Bankman-Fried's case.
The dopamine I felt when I saw was posted was off the charts
Just here to say, great use of "marit ayin."
From what I know of the facts, FTX had nothing resembling a system of internal financial controls or compliance. These things are vital to the safe operation of any financial business, but they are hard to do and not necessarily intuitive. Furthermore the incentive structure of the business always motivates sales and trading personnel to shortcut or ignore them. Financial regulators are constantly sanctioning and fining well known major entities for violations.
I doubt that anyone in the crypto arena knows or cares very much about controls and compliance. The FTX disaster noes not require drugs to explain it, just ignorance and a lack of regulation.
Bernie Madoff didn't use drugs.
Wanted to comment briefly on the testimony thing:
Life's too short to be an expert witness on anything but as a former attorney, I can say you did a great job. The point of the defense attorney's questions was to ruin your credibility no matter what you said. He'd paint the answer "You can drink a little bleach and live" to mean "I am recommending drinking bleach" and the answer "If you drink a little bleach you'll die" to be absolute proof that no bleach was drunk.
"Probably you can drink some bleach and not die but I can't be sure and that's not really the point of my testimony" was 100% the correct answer.
I’ll echo this. The whole point of XXN is to give the opposing side the chance to attack your credibility. Of course he’s going to bluster and bullshit and twist what you said and try to make you contradict yourself. You did very well.
One of my lawyer friends makes a lot of money by threatening litigation with absolutely no intention to follow through. A lawsuit is expensive and risky, but sending a threatening letter is cheap and quite often collects a payout. As he wryly observed to me, in other circumstances it could be described as extortion.
I feel like being a good lawyer requires a certain level of sociopathy.
Round these parts, we call that a "solicitor's letter":
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100517123
Generally the resort of the litigious, the crank, and the would-be extortioner to threaten sending a person or business or other entity a solicitor's letter in order to get them to cough up cash. Does work well at times.
The matching pair of the set is the lawyer in question, again often someone who is an ambulance-chaser or makes a career out of taking cases to court. Not to name any names but we've one example of such a firm in my town; when I worked in local government they were notorious for being willing to represent (and indeed encouraging) the disgruntled to take the council to court. One spectacular result was when they managed to have a judgment for €10,000 issued against the housing department, awarded so that the plaintiff could "afford private rent".
The cynical view on our part was that the majority of this award was going to go into the lawyer's clutches as "legal fees" and what remained for the plaintiff would go to his drug-dealer, and not on paying rent to enable him to get a place to live, which was the ostensible reason for the court case. I should probably add that yes, Mr. "I won money off yiz for rent because ye wouldn't give me a house" was back applying for social housing due to homelessness quite shortly after this case.
There's some evidence that MAOB does not play a large role in the degradation of dopamine in vivo.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34244591/
If true, deprenyl actually works by inhibiting the synthesis of astrocytic GABA (which is done by MAOB), increasing dopaminergic tone by releasing the inhibition exerted by GABAergic interneurons.
Also though, inhibiting MAOB most definitely increases Beta-phenylethylamine and other trace amines, some of which are basically endogenous forms of amphetamine
Morgan Housel's insight seems worth considering with Lord Acton's preceding as a more direct explanation of events.
LA: "Power corrupts"
@morganhousel, 3:03 PM · Nov 12, 2022
"Re-watched the Enron documentary with @bethanymac12 a few weeks ago and a thing that sticks out is how much you can get away with when you tell investors what they want to hear. Very few people asks questions when the numbers are going up."
"If you pretend to make other people rich those people become 10x more gullible than they assumed they were."
"It’s why so many frauds are shockingly unsophisticated."
Recovering stim-addict Hunter Biden made his first public appearance yesterday, in a Twitter spaces about the FTX scandal, but didn’t comment on it directly.
So, FTX deserves some credit for making a crisis so big, it serves as an opportunity for others.
Others who have begun the process of rehabilitating their image by implicitly comparing themselves to SBF include the people behind the crypto blowups that precipitated the FTX collapse: Do Kwan of Terra/Luna, Su Zhu of 3 Arrows Capital; and also Martin Shkreli, the guy who went to jail for hiking the prices of old drugs, among other things.
From the outside, it did look like that Sam had a penchant for stims. If you see him in TV/youtube interviews, his body physically shakes.
Now, how commonly do stims get used as performance enhancing drugs in tech? Impossible to exactly measure, but stereotypes exist for a reason. In the hiphop world, to be “geeked” or “geeking” means to be high on uppers.
> If you want real sound crypto, you have some good buying opportunities here. Mid 2024 we will go through the ups again. Ignore all the morons saying this time is the end. I've heard that every crash since 2010.
This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a prediction market!
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-umisteryouaresodumbs-predictio
I think when the thing you're predicting is 'will this asset appreciate (relative to some other asset)?' that's just a futures market
Since we know SBF is a subscriber here, I’m wondering if he read this article and is now second guessing his decision to mix the drugs.
We can also assume Matt Levine is a subscriber, since he quoted a subscribers-only post the other day. I wonder if any of this will make it into his newsletter if this angle on the FTX story comes up.
The referenced Matt Levine post: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-10-31/elon-musk-is-busy-with-twitter
I had assumed that the various Muskapades were because he was "high on Twitter"... but what if he was just high too ?
"The best I can say for him is that he’ll probably get away with it, because the only injured party is Sam Bankman-Fried, and I assume Sam’s lawyers are busy right now."
Don't psychiatrists have a professional association or trade organization with a mandate to investigate stuff like that regardless of what the victim might want, and dole out serious punishment up to and including the removal of the ability to legally practice?
FWIW, n=1. Many years ago I was for a good long while on an ordinary therapeutic dose of venlafaxine (Effexor) for depression. It worked well for that. But I ended up going through the unexpectedly difficult process of getting the hell off venlafaxine because I came to believe that it was causing me to take unwise risks and also to be callously unconcerned about other people (both of those things being, I think, symptoms of a more general “don’t dwell on negative consequences: just do the thing” effect). I don't think either of those effects would have been easily measurable, and it was only the cumulative experience of many months on the drug and some sustained self-examination that teased it out for me. I continue to wonder to what extent small effects like these, multiplied by the many people now on drugs like these, may have prudence- and consideration-eroding effects at the societal scale.
When I was briefly on Prozac (or similar, not actually sure what) as a child, I stopped almost immediately and started selling it instead. I had nearly crashed my grandfather's car during my first couple weeks on it and found I didn't give a shit.
Seemed like the drugs were a bad idea if that was how my brain worked on them.
> He claims this is okay, because he was just a “performance coach” for the company, who happened to, additionally, be a psychiatrist who was treating many of the company’s employees.
"I'm not a therapist; I'm a therapy *horse*!"
(line from Bojack Horseman)
>neuroscientists investigate how modafinil shifts some technical parameter in a risk curve; usually these don’t replicate
Additional anecdotal data: during use of prescription modafinil, I actually had minor reduced risk taking as I had more energy to actually address known risks. I imagine same or opposite effect could be seen in folks that had risk-averse or risk-taking activities/tasks that they already wanted to do but simply didn’t have enough energy to participate in/complete. I would not be surprised at all if this explained the outliers/non-reproducible cases. (Naturally, a crypto-trader may also fall under the umbrella of “wanted to do more risky crypto-trading the whole time and now has the time and energy to do so”.)
>Because ADHD is so poorly defined that the official standards basically boil down to “it’s hard for them to do their job without Adderall”, there is a giant loophole where bosses can just make jobs that are hard to do without Adderall, and then psychiatrists can prescribe the Adderall.
While this is a very serious loophole, please please avoid generalizing it, as there are many software jobs that appeal to people with a “number brain” (mode of thinking that is related to ADHD-adjacent and autism-adjacent traits in complicated ways but also allows rapid flexibility & high engagement when Poking Those Tiny Numbers All Day), and thus software jobs will attract many employees that suffer from attention problems in all aspects of life and regardless of what job they are working.
Oftentimes, the attention problems even follow specific patterns of “I can focus extremely well on the work itself but put me in an under-stimulating meeting that for some reason is required five times a week of software engineers, and I will be completely useless”. (My source for this is observation of colleagues in multiple software jobs and in software club work. Almost nothing got done in any meetings unless a non-engineer was directing the meeting. Hence, regardless of medication level, I recommend converting these meetings into other formats that are easier for the engineer to digest rather than assuming it’s their problem for not listening well. It’s simply more effective.)
It's also reasonably common for such people to have a problem of the form "I can focus reasonably well on the job and survive the meetings, but my personal life is a disaster because I forget/procrastinate/avoid anything that doesn't involve manipulating tiny numbers."
I just read this excerpt which is part of a great chapter about attention aside from malady or pharm treatment:
"Occasionally we find people who have been gifted with one-pointed minds and have not had to undergo the strenuous sensory training necessary for most of us. Excellent – it saves a lot of effort – but there can be one potential drawback. Such a person’s mind may fix itself so passionately on the subject of his interest that he cannot leave it even when necessary. [author proceeds to give examples]"
----Eknath Easwaran, 'Passage Meditation', 78, 91, 2008
While I agree we should never consider any skills outside of our reach, I feel like this framing is ignoring the difference in “strenuous sensory training necessary” to reach a specific skill level which has a lot of variance based on pedagogy methods, which are still very deficient for non-average learners.
As an anecdote for this, it’s been more than 10 years since I started specifically scheduling time to work on conversation skills (at first, was as much as 3 hours a day), and I still have to focus intently at work to correctly time when to speak without interrupting others. If I’m not focused, such as around friends, then I miss the timing and will either speak up before someone has finished a thought or after another person has already responded. Meanwhile, the majority of folks I know can maintain this skill automatically all day long (until a good four to eight beers in.)
Hey John. Honestly, I had only read the one preceding comment until just now. The condition you have sounds challenging.
The contribution I was attempting to make is that even a gifted neuro-typical can be undercut by an undisciplined, untrained natural ability. For someone with diagnosed condition, therapy and meds should be consider of course but I'd say used as sparingly as possible in favor of mind and/or mind-body exercises. Similar to physical therapy only strengthening parts of the mind for the first time.
Thanks for the clarification; looking at your comment in only the context of the preceding one, it is clear "aside from malady or treatment" was an exception rather than the inverse. Given that, I wholeheartedly agree that attention and other mental skills shouldn't be neglected by anyone, and in cases where medication is needed, meds should be considered supplemental to therapy, accommodations, skill-building, and general goal-oriented life choices (though not one-over-the-other). I also realize now looking at the quote that I was recently recommended Easwaran's Conquest of Mind; I'll definitely have to look into him.
There have been a lot of challenges, but I study a lot because I enjoy it, and I overall am incredibly fortunate, no worries at all. (My studies are how my fiancé and I got together!) Was merely a good contextual example for strenuous mental training.
"Easwaran's Conquest of Mind"
Hadn't known about this one - will have to pick it up.
Anyway, glad you're doing well.
> I quit my job and tried to contribute what little I could to the ongoing campaign of all reasonable people to destroy the New York Times. This was the correct, ethical thing to do!
I pray that one day you will be able to forgive a newspaper rather than let this grievance define your entire politics.
620 Eighth Avenue Delenda Est!
Why? The paper certainly has its share of sins (along with merits). If you cannot be petty and vindictive against people/institutions who have seriously harmed you what is even the point of life?
Also it it not remotely clear to me the NYT is a net force for good in the world. In my direct experiences with reporters, they are generally a pretty stupid and credulous group of people often harming society who instead think they are saints crossed with Sherlock Holmes and doing god's work.
One guy I know (play board games with) is the leading "education" reporter in my state, which sounds impressive. In practice it means that he is tremendous at getting the University admin's position printed as though it is fact and not really challenging it with any questions while dismissing/minimizing critics.
> If you cannot be petty and vindictive against people/institutions who have seriously harmed you what is even the point of life?
You need to find God dude.
In my direct experiences with SFBA Rationalists, they are generally a pretty stupid and credulous group of people often harming society who instead think they are saints crossed with Sherlock Holmes and doing god's work.
That is funny, but I am not a rationalist in the sense you mean. But clearly I hit a nerve.
I'm not ashamed to reflexively point out spiritual corruption when I see it. You find humor when you are faced with sincere injunction to live a purer, less petty and vindictive life? Your nihilism leaks through and I find _that_ humorous.
"Ha, I hit a nerve by inducing a moral correction to be applied to myself; truly I am the superior intellect" I seem to hear you say! Sorry, but I don't LARP as an emotionless logical automaton the way you SFBA Rationalists seem to admire.
Sorry that I mention this as a joke on occasion when it's extremely relevant, like when the discussion is already revolving around psychiatrists, confidentiality, and NYT articles.
Like I said, you needed better writing instruction. "I'm just joking it's just a joke brah" is not responsibility or good sense.
And yet I remember you pulling the same "I'm just joking it's just a joke" excuse in other places when you were being held to account for "So when you swore up, down and sideways that definitely within two weeks Trump would be in jail, and it's been longer than two weeks and he's not in jail, do you admit you were wrong?"
Frankly I don't trust you to read me accurately. You have never understood my point of view and never bothered to study why.
Your point of view meanders so much, it's hard to keep up with. It's a general mish-mash of swinging between median Democratic Party supporter talking points, liberal, progressive, and your very own special sauce.
You're very fond of calling everyone fascists and what-not, and that's as much of a coherent view as you demonstrate: whatever straw is in your hair this week, anyone not on board with your take on it is a fascist.
Are you actually sorry or is your kindness a disingenuous affectation.
The second one.
In a post-ironic world, all expression is genuine. Your grievance with a newspaper that has performed the function, as a mirror, of the newspaper; this grievance with the machine is no different from an anarkiddy fighting with the police to prove a point. The state is just a big bear and you poked it. The state has good mirrors.
That your politics is reactionary is thus trivial. A persecution complex which leaks out.
You've never had the courage to admit that Trumpism amounted to an authoritarian power grab by theocrats, but now I'm not sure you have the brainpower to understand that this is so. That's the degree to which your woke moral panic has divorced you from mainstream political contexts.
You can cry on your personal island of misfits that you are mistreated, just like the cult leader himself, all alone against an imagined AI monster while the normal human monsters emerge around you as phantasms which you think are merely, what? Histrionic illusions of the left?
There are such a thing as basic tests of political intelligence, and: understanding the speech Trump gave on 1/6 as a summoned mob arriving for violence is one of those tests.
There is such a thing as a basic test of human social intelligence, and: can you recognize that the form of a cult has emerged around a leader who wrote some self help texts on his blog? is one of those tests.
If your community develops a reputation for tripping over its own arguments, that is a consequence. If your community develops a reputation for hosting the nazi disco dance party, that is a consequence. My disdain and contempt for you comes out when I tell you: the reason you should drop your grudge against the NYT is because you're the one who wrote that story, they're just the ones who published it. You're the one who spread a neophyte blogger's packaging of Fox News viewpoints developed by Limbaugh in the 90s (god that 'Republicans should use more class based rhetoric' was severely underinformed), and who is on the record consciously reflecting on this desire to grow your audience in the reactionary direction.
You did these things, and now you are here, on substack.
I hope you can learn the lesson of those you follow, that the sycophancy required of the inner circle of a cult creates such interesting exchange of ideas alone on their island.
Impassionata, I am going to be serious for once. Have you really got nothing better to do than whine about Scott? How is he so important to you? How is he so important in the wide world? You did it over on SSC, The Motte, Drama, and now you've pitched up here, sounding like a bitter ex who insists that "you'll never get anyone as good as me again, you'll never be happy without me!"
You went a bit bonkers with the marshmallow site, but you really don't seem to have moved on at all. You're stuck in the rut of "I was right all the time, those alt-right fascist nazi reactionaries over at that place, and that place, and that place, and the other place, couldn't handle me telling The Truth and bullied and drove me off".
Right now, you are reminding me of a family member who is rewriting events in their mind and fitting them in with imagined past events and fabulations into a narrative of victimhood where everyone has always been against them and done them down, and is going around telling people stories about things that literally were impossible to have happened in the past as yet more 'evidence' of how they have been abused and mistreated all their life. That person is not mentally well and has two suicide attempts under their belt.
This is not a good exemplar to sound like. I think you'd be a lot happier if you could just let go of whatever grudges or slights you are holding, and find something else to think and write about. Anything else.
And no, this is not because "Ha ha, am I piercing your shell of ignorance?" on my part. Seeing you confabulate what really happened on various sites with what really happened is funny but there comes a time when seeing someone pissing themselves in public loses all humour value.
Right now, you are rewriting events in your mind and fitting them in with imagined past events and fabulations into a narrative around me, Impassionata, and you are going around telling people stories as yet more 'evidence' of how right you are and how pathological psychologically 'bad' I am.
> Have you really got nothing better to do than whine about Scott? How is he so important to you? How is he so important in the wide world?
Turning a figure onto a truer path would be a meaningful accomplishment I must admit.
> I think you'd be a lot happier if you could just let go of whatever grudges or slights you are holding, and find something else to think and write about.
You hold a grudge against me for not granting your viewpoint any particular legitimacy. I suggest you let go of it, and me.
> there comes a time when seeing someone pissing themselves in public loses all humour value.
Telling people stories about things... You can of course tell the story of BothAfternoon and Impassionata in any way you wish, but you're the one with the family history of self-serving narrative! lmao.
I've recently started taking Biphentin (canadian methylphenidate) and I was wondeing about the interaction with 1/ coffe and 2/ weed.
I couldn't find anything interesting online and was wondering if you could point in the right direction.
Fwiw I have been on Ritalin for coming up to 2.5 years now (well, 3 years interrupted by about 3 months when I ran out and couldn't get more due to pandemic and relocating). I have negative interest in regularly drinking coffee because it often makes me physically ill. Previous to being medicated it had a pleasant mental alertness effect, now that effect is negligible compared to the ritalin and it's primarily just laxative now (gross, I know). But it still tastes nice, so I have it in moderation and it doesn't make me too sick.
Also occasionally coffee will (paradoxically) cause me to become extremely sleepy. This is both pre and post medication, and some anecdotal (people I know IRL as well as online) suggests that the caffeine sometimes does that if you have ADHD.
Maybe the problem was not the use of drugs.
OR not the root problem.
One thing I find not true: " if a good doctor carefully chooses the right drug and dose, you’ll mostly get what you want."
Would say the evidence suggests "might"rather than usually
This could almost have qualified for a "Sam Bankman Fried's Drug Habits: More Than You Wanted to Know" title, but hey, I read the whole thing, so I guess it wasn't more than I wanted to know.
I must say, also, that this post has inspired me to make the following vow: if I'm ever the CEO of a medical supply company, I will not name random product offerings after my progeny. I can't imagine there aren't better ways to publicly demonstrate love and devotion to one's offspring than to name a particular MOAI Delivery device after them, especially since the life cycle of the product is probably limited to the patent length, anyway, and in the meantime, shady, pseudo-intellectual finance bros are abusing it to scratch out a few extra basis points in their ponzi crypto schemes. I have to think a son of mine would be almost as equally unexalted to be informed one future day that a new enema kit had been branded the Gordon Tremeshko Jr. Buttflush 3000 in his honor.
On the other hand, think of all the terrible diseases that have been named after their physician discover/characterizer as an intent to honor. Should Alois Alzheimer and Douglas Reye have felt endlessly humiliated?
And then there's the even more interesting case of barbituric acid...although if the stories are true at least Baeyer was discreet.
Nah, I think that's entirely different. If you're a doctor, describing some new malady that the rest of your profession can tackle studying causes and treatments for is big stuff. Like an astronomer finding a new super black hole or something: it advances the whole profession and enhances one's personal prestige within it. On the contrary, being a kid whose name is permanently attached to a not-particularly-noteworthy product whose creation you had nothing to do with is kind of a double whammy, because now your name is pointlessly attached to this product for good or ill, plus it means your dad's kind of a dork.
The better shame analogy would be the somewhat uncommon practice of naming diseases after patients. Say, for example, that I contracted some weird kind of genital warts, and the doctor was like "I don't know if I've seen this kind of thing before; this looks brand new to me," and then some more patients showed up at the clinic with the same warts and the doctor started referring to them Tremeshko's Genital Warts, then the media started running alarmist stories about this terrible new menace afflicting the community called TGW or "Tremeshko's Genital Warts," and a new wikipedia page was created explaining that this was because the first patient to present with these disgusting sores all over his junk from doing God knows what was some sadsack named Gordon Tremeshko, I....I imagine I might feel a tad distressed by that, and be tempted to lobby for some sort of name change.
What about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_named_after_famous_people_(born_1950%E2%80%93present)
I thought Scott's comment that selegiline's trade name is the cutest psychopharmacology fact he knows was pretty funny. It's not as though there are lots of cute psychopharm facts to compete with "Emsam." Cuteness is pretty thin on the ground is psychopharm land.
> Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency you should hold. Maybe ETH.
This is a little extreme, there are other useful projects. BTC Maxis are behind the times. I do agree exchange tokens and probably 95% of other coins are pointless scams, but there are legitimate projects with ecosystems worth participating in.
Anecdote regarding footnote 5): I have diagnosed ADHD and something that happened to me was that when changing from methylphenidate (Concerta) to Lisdexamfetamine (Elvanse) some social triggers + heightened ability to "withstand social risks" + heightened (bodily) anxiety cracked my transgender egg in an extremely quick way (few weeks of discussions with some peers led me to 10% confidence hypothesis, then I reduced and later stopped the stimulant usage, thoughts / changed beliefs stayed, now I Have some 80% confidence of being in some way non-cisgender). (There were minor "signs" in earlier decades of my life, and I don't doubt it would have come up at some point, but it might have taken many more years otherwise.)
Thank you for writing about this.
A surprising number of botanical supplements are MAOI's. I just discovered I have occasionally mixed a MAOI and a dopaminergic stimulant. I'm glad I did not die.
List of common examples in the table of this article. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9268457/
I stopped in the middle of reading just to add this
"A significant fraction of the finance industry is on Adderall - I know because they keep trying to make me prescribe it to them. This hasn’t degraded performance so much that managers have noticed or made rules against it. And for all I know, maybe the medicated mental risk curves are better for trading than the unmedicated ones."
LOL
Kind of off topic but I confirmed with a big market making firm that making money as a market maker in 2021 was crazy easy. The claims that Alameda became unprofitable at that then don’t pass the smell test. “Not especially competent at running a trading firm” doesn’t match many of the facts and is an overly convenient explanation. There was obviously fraud and some massively bad decisions but losing their edge wasn’t the reason for the losses.
On stimulants and risk-taking:
I did notice an increased tendency to take risks (i.e. quitting a miserable corporate law job to do a software bootcamp) as well as a tendency to be more direct and honest in social situations. After conferring with friends on this, especially if I was becoming mean/insensitive, the consensus was that I was, in fact, doing more stuff without overanalysis. But also that relative to the norm, for me "doing more stuff without overanalysis" still meant overanalyzing considerably.
The main thought I had reading this excellent writeup (Thank you. Scott Alexander) is the mistaken notion that FTX would somehow not have occurred if <insert X drug(s)> were not being used.
This is thoroughly invalid, IMO.
Whatever you think about cryptocurrency - the reality is that the entire space has been a veritable Tortuga of scammers and grifters as well as your more typical one-trick pony, one and done trader.
And to be more clear: the one-trick pony, one and done trader is that guy who goes all in on exactly the most foamiest trade during an up cycle of risk, but literally has no trading skills whatsoever. Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, SOMEBODY is going to make the perfect trade at any given time, even if it is just by coincidence/luck.
Combine a modest amount of criminogenic accounting savvy with $1b of venture capital, a soupcon of utter shamelessness, a dollop of woke virtue signaling and a totally unregulated sector - and an FTX was inevitable.
The nootropic dude's comment was the funniest: clearly another one-trick pony trader failing to recognize the fundamental sea change represented by short to medium term risk-off due to escalating interest rates - doubly ironic because the brilliant coders and masterminds behind literally every big name Silicon Valley startup in the past decade have yielded nothing more than minimum wage circumventing, washing each other's laundry, fundamentally financial garbage "unicorns".
Hm, this does not seem like gambling behavior to me. It looks like this was one single decision by SBF to bail out Alameda by committing fraud. I guess one could see it as taking a risk and gambling that he would not get found out, and the pharmaceuticals he was on could have influenced his decision. But something tells me he would have made this decision no matter what drugs he was on in order to save Alameda, since most of his wealth was tied in it.
If lack of sleep is the main mechanism by which stimulants cause psychosis, then modafinil and amphetamines should cause psychosis at similar rates. If anything modafinil should be worse, since it seems to more effective in specifically suppressing the urge to sleep. So why is it that amphetamines have a much worse reputation?
Add me to the list of bay area software engineers who have never taken Adderall or anything like it. Heck, I don't even drink coffee!
Does anyone else find it strange that we have an economy that rewards people so disparately depending on their abilities? There's so much talk about "hard work", "deservedness" and "talent". But if there are pills that can make you work crazy hard, doesn't that prove it's all just brain chemistry? And "talent" is also just a bunch of heritable things like IQ.
It really seems like your lot-in-life is entirely rng dependent on what genes you're born with, where your dopamine baseline gets set, intelligence etc. Reading stuff like this makes me feel very Rawlsian.
The pills aren't actually a very good substitute for normal-internal-ability-to-work-hard for most people.
Is there a good way to compensate for a poor normal-internal-ability-to-work-hard? Asking for a friend.
Seek government employment.
Sorry, I had to, people.
So, one possible approach: go to (or make) spaces where your usual distractions/leisure activities are infeasible, and then do work-like things there to build up the association.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't work *perfectly* - many work-like things require the internet these days, for one, and that is inherently a source of distraction (see: this comment, posted during work hours) - but n=1 it's better than nothing.
I agree. Also:
* surround yourself with people who are more productive/disciplined than you are.
* spend some resources on various other mechanisms of support (productivity/accountability app, coach, therapist, buddy system).
* seriously prioritize vigorous exercise every day, eating well, and getting enough sleep.
* think about mortality more (by this I mean take frequent mental steps back to look at your life from the imagined end of it and keep reminding yourself what really matters to you; stay close to the awareness that life is fleeing). There's a kind of fun app called WeCroak that will help you do this.
Learn how to live on much less money so that you can afford to work less.
We have an economy that rewards people for what they produce that other people find valuable, full stop. That's why you can get rich by simply being born beautiful, or with a beautiful voice, which has zero to do with your character or your effort, it just drops out of the sky onto you. But it doesn't matter, because as long as other people value it, you get paid for it.
Conversely, if other people don't value it, we don't pay you shit. Cf. Cassandra, and any number of prophets before their time. Indeed, if you tell us truths we don't want to hear, we may not only not pay you, we may run you out of town on a rail.
We do this because Christ has not yet returned to tell us exactly how to judge the merit of individual souls, so we just have this half-assed quasi-popularity-contest system, much like electing Homecoming Queen, except at least in this case people have to fork out their own money to place a vote, so they take it more seriously.
I'm tempted to link this to a recent famous story about someone telling people to drink bleach, but I don't really want to end up in yet another slapfight about motivated stopping.
Nobody, but thanks to the power of motivated stopping it's possible to believe anything bad about the other team by just refusing to think about claims received.
My personal experience with Prozac is that it makes me a better card counter and a worse trader. Card counting is just executing an algorithm robotically, and prozac gives me the audacity to go do that in a casino. But trading requires more judgment calls and the medication seems to shift the risk curve.
A decade ago when I suggested taking an herbal MAOI (rhodiola) together with the 10mg prozac I was already taking, my psychiatrist was immediately like "ok, fine, no problem, I've done this before with several patients and nobody ever got serotonin syndrome"
Yeah, I have heard lots of stories like these that make me think there's some sense in which rhodiola isn't a MAOI in the sense where you have to worry about it, but I don't know the actual science - maybe it does reversible inhibition?
https://nypost.com/2022/11/16/ftx-shrink-says-execs-were-undersexed-denies-substance-abuse/
FTX shrink says executives were ‘undersexed,’ denies rampant amphetamine use By Thomas Barrabi November 16, 2022
The in-house performance coach at FTX claimed Tuesday the doomed crypto firm’s headquarters in the Bahamas was a “pretty tame place” — despite rampant speculation about its executives’ sex lives and alleged substance use.
Online gossip alleging the group lived in a “polycule” — or network of polyamorous relationships — surged after CoinDesk reported the executives “are, or used to be, paired up in romantic relationships with each other.”
Dr. George K. Lerner, a psychiatrist, reportedly served as a therapist to disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and an adviser to many of the firm’s employees. Bankman-Fried and his ex-lover Caroline Ellison were reportedly part of a 10-person group that ran FTX and its sister cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research from a “luxury penthouse” in the Bahamas.
“It’s a pretty tame place,” Lerner told the New York Times. “The higher-ups, they mostly played chess and board games. There was no partying. They were undersexed, if anything.”
“They were working way too much,” he added. “It would have been healthier if they did have more healthy dating relationships.”
The personal habits of Bankman-Fried and other executives are under the microscope following reports that at least $1 billion in FTX client funds is still missing. FTX, Alameda Research and more than 100 affiliates filed for bankruptcy last week.
Lerner also addressed viral rumors about the alleged use of stimulants by FTX executives. Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, admitted to “regular amphetamine use” in an April 2021 tweet, while Bankman-Fried has openly discussed his experimentation with Adderall and other stimulants.
Lerner told the Times that while some FTX employees may have had prescriptions for ADHD medications, the “rate of ADHD in the company was in line with most tech companies.”
He was such a different person while on the medicine. I don't think he really has access now to who that person was.
My reading is this: Gambling is exciting. I think that anyone who is exposed to gambling has to exert will power to stop. Maybe not much willpower, but some. Before the medicine, he never lacked for willpower. What changed with the medicine was that the excitement was able to override the willpower.
Who are you talking about? The trader on cocaine I quoted in the article?
No. I was replying to a comment by Kenny on a comment I made referring to a relative of mine. Don't know why this showed up where it did.
Because Substack email replies to comments don't work.
I read an interesting long form article about dopamine agonists causing compulsive and risk taking behavior that people may find illuminating: https://theamericanscholar.org/the-degradation-drug/
Absolutely hilarious in your last footnote about testifying, as a colleague, yep, I HATE the court, they make physicians who are testifying for the sake of patient care and the safety of the community out to be the villains, even the lawyers who are there to be supporting you do a shit job in doing so.
Forensic psychiatry can be boiled down to one comment: make sure you get paid first!
And if not paid, get the F out of having to go!!!
*tongue in cheek*
Oh, taking selegiline meant he couldn't eat tyramine? There's the problem! Without tyramine, his rudimentary telepathic complex stopped working, leading to worse performance and then failure.
I Cee what you did there.
Does this mean SBF is going to wind up fleeing to an all-male monastic retreat to hide from his pursuers?
Having read this, I have reached the conclusion that the tech/crypto/EA nexus is completely out of control and needs a jolly good talking to.
I would say so too. They need to hear that they're not Messiahs, they're very naughty boys.
Wait, is transvestite now considered to just be an old and offensive term for transgender? I thought they were different things. I can certainly imagine a universe where "people who identify as a gender separate from their sex" and "people who like to wear clothes that don't conform to their gender" both exist.
> I want to back off from saying it’s omnipresent, because commenters are telling me it’s not, but I’d be interested in finding firm numbers
I believe it's omnipresent in highly competitive industries, like Big Tech A.K.A FAANG, probably finance etc. I can comment about Google - while I worked there I was under the impression half of people were on Adderall or other medication.
Knowing SBF came from Jane Street, Addie was probably very popular there.
I really hope people start openly talking about Adderall abuse - it's like doping in white collar industries. And the problem is that most folks on Addie force this crazy workstyle on the rest of us.
An equally fun Psychopharmacology fact: the discoverer of Barbiturates named them after his girlfriend - Barbara.
Did anyone put a gun to SBF's head and force him to take drugs? No? Then I don't care in the slightest if he did what he did because of drugs or because he was a bad person. We are all responsible for our actions, both on and off drugs. I don't get away with murder just because I was drunk while committing the crime. Abusers of illegal drugs are even less deserving of leniency.
There was a young man here (California) recently who crashed his car while drunk and killed the young mother of a child. Thing was, though, he had a few DUIs already. So the DA charged him with second-degree murder, on the grounds that he knew damn well what could happen if he got drunk and drove, and he chose to do it anyway -- thus, he had demonstrated in some sense an "intent" to kill. The theory is pretty out there -- I believe it's long been possible to be convicted of manslaughter for killing someone while driving drunk, but that's different because there's no intent to kill in manslaughter -- but the judge allowed it and the jury convicted. Kid went away to Quentin for 20 years.
Might have been the judge and jury both feeling "You had several chances to stop fucking around drinking and driving, you went ahead and drove drunk, you killed a young mother, so here is what happens when you insist on being an asshole".
May not be great law, and even this idiot may not deserve twenty years in the slammer, but I can see why they'd do it. Will he serve the full twenty years or is there a chance of parole/time off etc.?
I think murder is going too far, for the same reason that I think manslaughter is a fair charge: if he had been driving equally recklessly while sober and killed someone, he'd be guilty of homicide by negligence, aka manslaughter. Not murder.
Murder probably is going far for what the actual crime is, but by the same token if he had a record of reckless driving while sober, then reckless driving that killed someone would be viewed much more seriously than if this was a first-time offence.
And that's before 'he imbibed a substance which affected his ability to react, his judgement, his co-ordination and his capacity to deal with sudden unexpected conditions'. Deliberately getting yourself into a state where you are impaired, and doing this several times before you finally do kill someone, is not going to make people look favourably on "Oh don't throw the book at him".
Dr. Lerner has some really problematic and questionable reviews, that further the case for potential malpractice. Reported to the CA Board, making a proposition towards a client, etc. See this tweet for more: https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1592659580081016833
Hmn. Just random internet reviews, but I can't help but think of Lerner's 'They were undersexed, if anything." comment now.
Hm, you could say they're random internet reviews, but some of the reviewers are not done by anonymous screennames but clients who disclose their identity. Additionally, there's a pattern of enmeshing clients into his own personal baggage. Combine it with his dubious choices as a Coach/Psychiatrist for FTX, and it makes the claim that he propositioned a client credible
24 7 trading hours in
Poor sleep hygiene is a glaring dangerous side effect of stimulant use.
Impaired judgement living on 5 hours of sleep mixed with any stimulant
I worked the majority of my life in Canada and Japan where most prescriptions are written by a gp and very few have access to a psychiatrist.
Canada and Japan culturally accept weak corporate governance and dismal enforcement records.
At the height of Japan 1990s when I was in Japan shareholder meetings were held on the same day and Police showed up 10000 strong Companies used to coordinate to hold their shareholders meetings on the same day to reduce the risk of “sokaiya” corporate racketeers from showing up.
Canada doesn't even have a National Market Regulator to regulate their market and it is very whistleblower unfriendly.
Can you write an article about the possibility of asperger syndrome and the inner circle of FTX story ;
I know you've already summed up your thoughts on what dopaminergic medications do to risk assessment (negligible if used appropriately), but because I work in a notably high consequence industry (consequences round the neighbourhood of Exxon Valdez or Piper Alpha) where doing risk assessments is a pretty big part of the job, I'm going to ask anyway:
Is this risk of compromising risk-based decision making big enough that I should bring it up with my own doctor? Should I just be aware that it's possible (particularly on sleep deprived days), adjust my behaviour, and move on?
I might be in the minority, but I'd like to gently suggest that you reconsider using footnotes. I found that they broke the flow of the narrative, and clicking on them was quite unwieldy on my phone. Or perhaps it might be possible to have them appear in a sidebar?
I wonder if he was trying stimulants for weight loss? The guy is pudgy (and before anyone steps in to accuse me of fat-shaming, I'm no sylph myself. Just as it's okay for rappers to use the n-word, so can People Of Amplitude talk about "lookin' a bit porky there, mate").
What brings this type of consideration to mind is this interview, or rather Twitter conversation, that Kelsey Piper has up at Vox with him:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
The depressing part is that he does not accept any responsibility at all in a meaningful way. He talks about "I fucked up" but then he goes into what is plainly going to become the story he will tell himself from now on, in denial of the facts - he could have fixed it all, but he was led astray by bad advice from the people who told him to declare bankruptcy. If he hadn't done that, he could have (magically, miraculously, somehow) raised the funding to make it all okay and pay everyone back in a month or so.
Typical behaviour of someone in denial of reality and spinning a story around their own victimhood: it wasn't me, it's all the fault of other people. It's the fault of the people who told me to file for bankruptcy, it's Gary's fault, it's Nishad's fault for not standing by me:
"SBF: I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup?
KP: Oh?
SBF: The one thing *everyone* told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t.
KP: I’m trying to guess but I have no idea.
SBP: Chapter 11.
KP: Like, should’ve just rode it out and kept trying to make the $8 billion back?
SBF: If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.
KP: I’d take the under on that.
SBF: Basically we get there if both:
a) EITHER Gary OR Nishad comes back
b) we can win a jurisdictional battle vs Delaware
KP: Gary and Nishad are gone?
SBF: Yeah, scared. Or Gary is scared, Nishad is ashamed and guilty.
KP: Ashamed and guilty because all the customer deposits are gone?
SBF: Yeah.
KP: People I’ve talked to have said Nishad was much more into the ethics/not being sketchy stuff than you were.
SBF: Yeah. It hit him hard. I mean it hit all of us hard. But it hit him HARD.
KP: It seems like you have more of a sense of yourself to fall back on, more of a sense that you are only wrong if you lose and he was more like “wow we stole money from people who trusted us”.
SBF: The world is never so black and white."
As to Delaware, good luck with that one. FTX is incorporated in the Bahamas, so I don't know if he means FTX.US, or if he's trying to shift incorporation from the Bahamas to Delaware. Either way, given that he kept moving headquarters to get out from under regulatory bodies, I don't think Delaware courts will be too lenient about alleged fraud.
This conversation also explains something that puzzled me, the sponsorship of sports teams and buying stadium naming rights. I couldn't figure out why FTX was doing that, given all the noise Bankman-Fried was making in interviews about doing good and donating to worthy causes. Publicity, sure, but why sports?
But this report clears it up for me. He was never about ethics/ethical altruism, he was always about *popularity*. Saying the right things is a way of getting people to like you, and when they like you, you win. And it's all about winning.
So sports is a way of getting popularity. Part of it might have been "what do other billionaires invest in, oh I see a lot of them have sports teams and sponsor stadia", but let's face it: he was probably a chubby nerd in high school and in college, and who are (allegedly) the popular ones in high school and college? The jocks. Colleges have sports teams and invest a lot in them. That explains to me why he went for buying the naming rights for UC-Berkeley sports arena (rather than getting a building named after him or endowing a chair as the usual way for STEM/business types). This was a way to get in on that mass appeal popularity and be the cool guy that he never could be as a chubby nerd:
"KP: So the ethics stuff – mostly a front? People will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that’s how it all really works?
SBF: Yeah. I mean that’s not *all* of it but it’s a lot. The worst quadrant s “sketchy + lose”, the best is “win + ???”, “clean + lose" is bad but not terrible”.
KP: You were really good at talking about ethics, for somoene who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers.
SBF: Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it. By this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us."
So he learned off the jargon that was current in a particular circle he moved in, and he's still spouting it ("woke Westerners" etc. is the right thing to say about 'we white liberals have all this privilege' when trying to shift the context from 'you stole money from your clients' personal guilt to 'the guilt of Western society fall upon us all' collective and nebulous blame - like systemic racism, what can you, single white person, really be held accountable for if it's all in the water and all are to blame?)
There's other stuff that I don't believe, because if it's true then this lot shouldn't have been in charge of a lemonade stand let alone a trading firm and exchange. If a disgruntled and lower-level ex-employee can hack your systems for millions of dollars that mysteriously went missing after all this shit hit the fan, then what the hell were you doing? What justifies you being in charge?
It's a mess all around and sadly it looks, so far, as if Bankman-Fried has settled into his comfortable little groove of denial: sure he messed up, but his intentions were good, and he could have fixed it all were it not for bad advisors and cowardly colleagues.
The real issue:
Never seen ‘such a complete failure’ of corporate controls, says new FTX CEO who also oversaw Enron bankruptcy
Published Thu, Nov 17 2022
Rohan Goswami@moleskinemaniac
Newly appointed FTX CEO John Ray III scorched Sam Bankman-Fried for a total absence of trustworthy data and lack of financial safeguards.
Ray, who led the restructuring of Enron, said that FTX lacked adequate human resources, cybersecurity, accounting and auditing teams.
Ray disclosed that he had no confidence in the balance sheet statements of Alameda, FTX, or their subsidiaries.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/ftx-ceo-shreds-bankman-fried-never-seen-such-a-failure-of-controls-.html
Looks like the grown-ups are finally in the building, and I now understand the remarks Bankman-Fried made in that Vox article about "if we can win a jurisdictional battle vs Delaware".
FTX (or the new CEO acting to try and salvage it, John J. Ray III) have filed for bankruptcy in Delaware, and the filing is here and boy, he does not put a tooth in it about the absolute amateur-hour mess of how FTX/Alameda were run (for all intents and purposes, these were not two separate entities as they should have been):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23310507-ftx-bankruptcy-filing-john-j-ray-iii
It is going to be one heck of a mess to sort out which was what, but right now it's looking like Bankman-Fried owned pretty much everything, or at least controlled it all. So it's going to be very hard for him to wiggle off the hook of "I had no idea what was going on, it wasn't me, I didn't have anything to do with that":
"4. I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.
5. Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
6. These Chapter 11 Cases have five core objectives:
(a) Implementation of Controls: the implementation of accounting, audit, cash management, cybersecurity, human resources, risk management, data protection and other systems that did not exist, or did not exist to an appropriate degree, prior to my appointment;
(b) Asset Protection & Recovery: the location and security of property of the estate, a substantial portion of which may be missing or stolen;
(c) Transparency and Investigation: the pending, comprehensive, transparent and deliberate investigation into claims against Mr. Samuel Bankman-Fried, the other co-founders of the Debtors and third parties, in coordination with regulatory stakeholders in the United States and around the world;
(d) Efficiency and Coordination: cooperation and coordination with insolvency proceedings of subsidiary companies in other jurisdictions; and
e) Maximization of Value: the maximization of value for all stakeholders through the eventual reorganization or sale of the Debtors’ complex array of businesses, investments and digital and physical property. These proceedings in the District of Delaware are the appropriate means to accomplish each of these objectives.
I. THE PREPETITION DEBTORS
A. Corporate Organization and Identification of Four Silos
9. For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include:
(a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses;
(b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”);
(c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”);
and (d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.”
10. Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo."
Seriously though, the next time anyone complains about government waste or featherbedding, we in publicly funded organisations and local government and civil/public service *do* have to have stringent financial controls in place and engage in audits and account for where the money goes. I've just had to pack up our financial year's worth of accounts and supporting documentation for our auditors to do their annual report on, which will then be disseminated to various bodies including the Charity Regulators once we get it back. Nobody is throwing billions at *us* without examining where the money is going, and the big question after "what the hell happened?" is going to be "where the hell were the accountants/auditors in all this mess" and "why the hell didn't the people sinking billions of investment into this have a good look at the balance sheet?"
And the guy won't shut up.
"Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself The fallen crypto CEO on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way. "
By Kelsey Piper | Nov 16, 2022
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
He stayed up to literally confess everything in writing (via Twitter DMs) to a journalist.
Then when the journalist reached out a different way the next day to make sure it was really him and she hadn't gotten catfished, he instantly replied to affirm the whole conversation.
As a thousand Twitter commenters have asked, doesn't this guy have a lawyer? Has he ever _talked_ to a lawyer??
And the answer turns out to be that _both_ of his parents are law professors. His mother was in private practice and then clerked for a federal court before becoming an academic. His father in addition to being a career legal academic is a clinical psychologist who "teaches mental health law and writes on the intersection of law and psychology."
He has plenty of lawyers, he's just not listening to any of them. From the Chapter 11 filing:
"Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School."
He still thinks he's the smart guy who was brought down by the lesser, cowardly, ashamed bunch who wanted to take the safe option of bankruptcy when he, genius risk-manipulator, could have saved the entire kit and kaboodle if only he had held out to hang tough.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP quit a few days ago, according to Reuters. That firm's star partner, Martin Flumenbaum, is already "defending Christian Larsen, the founder and chair of crypto payment and exchange company Ripple Labs Inc, in a high-profile lawsuit filed by the SEC." Flumenbaum is well known in the financial sector having been the defense attorney for Michael Milken. Flumenbaum told Reuters that “We informed Mr. Bankman-Fried several days ago after the filing of the FTX bankruptcy that conflicts have arisen that precluded us from representing him."
More from Reuters: "Bankman-Fried, who did not respond to questions about his legal team this week, has hired Gregory Joseph, a criminal defense lawyer at law firm Joseph Hage Aaronson in New York, and Stanford University law professor David Mills as members of his legal team, according to a report from Semafor. Both of Bankman-Fried's parents are on the faculty of Stanford Law School.
Joseph is a former president of the American College of Trial Lawyers who has written about racketeering law and rules of evidence. Mills specializes in criminal law and white-collar crime."
In short, he's narcissistic.
Bravo, great comment. I logged on to see if anyone else was posting the bankruptcy filing -- you did it better than I would have.
And your concluding paragraph...!!! As a longtime manager of NGOs I am absolutely boggled at what is gotten away with or excused in the allegedly-better-run sector. Literally inconceivable in my professional world.
Yeah, doing bits'n'bobs in different jobs in different public sector areas, and having the Auditors Came Down From Dublin to look at the books, and being asked to account for a 50 cent difference in quotation versus invoice - it's astounding to me how the private industry, which is allegedly so much more efficient, gets away with stuff. Every time a 'business-friendly' government comes into power in my country and wants to "make the public sector run like a business" or "get people in from the private sector and business to reform how things are run", I laugh into my mug of tea because if they ever did it, it would be an entirely different kettle of fish.
"Where's that five grand? Oh I can't recall, just round it off to an accounting error, yeah?"
I mean, the amount of reporting to stakeholders that we have to do! Apart from the annual report including set of certified accounts from the auditors for the Charity Regulators, I have to do quarterly returns on expenditure versus income against the funding we get for service provision to one public body, another set of reports and spreadsheets to the government body for which we provide Section 39 agency services, monthly returns to Revenue Commissioners, and whenever she asks for them reports on income, wages,expenditure, etc. etc. etc. to the overall manager when she is reporting to the monthly board meeting. Also price comparisons for goods and services that we get and can we get a better price elsewhere or discounts/reductions on contract? And I don't even have to handle (thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother) the sixty dozen different funding schemes operated by the government's various services which we qualify for, or operate, or get funding from (some other poor divil has to do that, I flatly refuse because it is Lovecraftian-level sanity-sapping).
We're a small potatoes organisation that only handles about €1 to €2 million or in turnover, but we have to keep track of and account for *everything*. Meanwhile, the new CEO can't even find out how many people actually worked or were employed by FTX because nobody kept count.
"Yeah, doing bits'n'bobs in different jobs in different public sector areas, and having the Auditors Came Down From Dublin to look at the books, and being asked to account for a 50 cent difference in quotation versus invoice - it's astounding to me how the private industry, which is allegedly so much more efficient, gets away with stuff."
Maybe private industry is more efficient because it doesn't bother with useless stuff like accounting for a 50 cent difference. Accounting for that difference is not a good use of anyone's time. It doesn't add value to the company or help its customers in any way.
Well, accurate bookkeeping is for untermenschen. They had a planet to save! You wouldn't expect Superman and Thor to save their receipts and file expense reports, would you?
I absolutely would expect it from Superman, because his parents raised him right and he is a reporter, I doubt the "Daily Planet" accounts department lets him just claim stuff with nothing to back it up.
As for Thor, I imagine since the days of Dr. Donald Blake as his alter-ego are gone, it's rather different for a prince of Asgard, but even there *somebody* is in charge of the royal purse!
Damn skippy! Also, Superman and Thor are good guys, with a sense of honor. Neither would do sketchy s#!t on purpose. It wouldn’t even be hard for Clark to do the right thing: he’s super-fast, right? 😄
"Please don’t rush out to abuse drugs just because you read about them in an article on how they contributed to a $10 billion bankruptcy."
According to a friend who works on Wall Street, the Alameda Research trading strategy could be summed up as "frontrunning, performed using FTX customer money".
*IF* that is accurate, how clueful can these people be, if they went bankrupt because they screwed up a game rigged in their favor? It's like losing all your money playing poker, when you are the only one at the table who secretly knows what the next turn of cards is going to be and you also can gamble using the other players' money.
The answer seems to be because they started to think they are geniuses who are better than everyone taking directional bets, not just the basic low risk market making activity with unfair advantage. Turns out it was just a bull market and they got blown up like many others, and they plugged the hole with FTX customers' money
Thinking about it, the difference between crypto trading and my poker analogy is that poker is more or less a zero-sum game, while crypto is not.
This is totally anecdotal, but I've actually been on Emsam. I have treatment resistant depression and after many SSRIs and SNRIs I wanted to try an MAOI. But I was worried about the side effects, so I heard the patch would work better for that. Luckily I had good insurance at the time that actually covered it, so instead of over a thousand dollars a month it was $30.
I also started transcranial magnetic stimulation around the same time, so it's hard to distinguish the effects of the two.
I struggle with impulse control, but I didn't notice it any worse with the Emsam. I worked up to the highest dose as well. I did notice that I couldn't sleep. I was absolutely wired, I was seriously sleep deprived and unable to sleep. I was taking two months off between jobs because my poor impulse control had me hating myself so much for my performance at my last job. So it wasn't a huge deal. But it was very uncomfortable. My doctor eventually gave me temazepam, but I was worried about that and didn't want to use it much. So after a couple of months I went off the Emsam.
Oh, I did have an adverse food reaction once. It was rather scary, I broke out in a cold sweat, shakes, had to lie down on the floor and was debating if I should crawl over to the door and call out for our receptionist to call 911. It eventually passed. This was shortly after I started at the lowest dose, and I had had some trail mix and didn't realize that things like raisins and walnuts were on the naughty list.
I still think the sleeplessness was due to the Emsam and not the TMS. I was on TMS for a while after stopping the Emsam and it wasn't as bad. Although I'm trying maintenance now and struggling with sleep, but it's been a while and that could be due to many other reasons.
TMS was one of the few things that worked, but it wore off fairly quickly after some major life events kicked me in the ass.
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RE: FTX and "where were the auditors in all this?", the Chapter 11 filing is highly entertaining reading (if you're not personally affected by 'this bastard took my money', 'this bastard has blackened the name of crypto' or 'this bastard has blackened the name of EA' or 'this bastard was a friend of a friend and now everyone thinks I'm dodgy too'):
"The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”
Even Zuckerberg is getting dragged into this disaster! 🤣
Somehow I imagine Mr. Ray the Third, after the first couple of days wading through the burst sewerage pipe that is this train crash, sitting down with a bottle of whiskey which he's glugging straight from the bottle and writing up this declaration because "Fuck it, I don't care any more, what are they gonna do - fire me as CEO of this dumpster fire? I wish!"
Why take Adrafanil over Modafinil? Doesn't that just get you extra kidney strain and side effects? Does the Prodrug-> Drug-conversion even work consistently? Is there some kind of galaxy-brain reasoning, that says that Adrafanil + Selegiline, is easier for your body to regulate than straight Modafinil + Selegiline? I've never heard of anyone preferring Adrafanil, when real Modafinil (or Armodafinil for that matter) is an easy option.
Yeah, it's silly. I think adrafinil may be easier to obtain - apparently you used to be able to get it at nootropics Depot (this is longer true). It's not as highly regulated (modafinil is schedule IV -- the same category as benzos which is kinda ridiculous).
Given the longer duration of effects, I'm pretty sure he wasn't sleeping well. Modafinil increases orexin which is very important for Circadian rhythm. You can adjust to the effects of modafinil somewhat but I doubt perfectly and it masks the effects of sleep deprivation on more subtle aspects of cognition (ie you aren't consciously aware of them / feel fine).
I feel like you've missed the best part:
"I am Sam. I EMSAM. Sam I am."
:D
> Otherwise, choose 2d4 random side effects from the appropriate side of the table.
"2d4"? Optimist. I'm pretty sure there's at least one 12 sider in there.
> I’m sorry to use the old offensive terminology, but I do so deliberately here.
For whatever reason, I dislike the use of "sorry" not to mean regret but... acknowledgement (?)
> But a lot of Wall Street is on stimulants of one sort or another, and most of them don’t act like FTX did
Actually, from what I am reading about financial history, a real lot of them act or try to act like FTX/SBF did. Only traditional finance has levels of circuit breakers - including the Fed and the Congress ready to deploy literally trillions of dollars - to dispel situations like that from affecting the system, and frequently to bail out the participants from the consequences of their insane risk taking. At least that's what I gathered from reading a bunch of books on last 50 years of financial history and the litany of financial crises that happened. Just in crypto, it's ok to let the FTX explode. If it were a bank, there would probably be a recapitalization/takeover deal brokered by financial regulators, and we'd never hear about it unless we dig up technical reports and can parse fedspeak they are written in. If you peer into the lawcraftian depth of financial system, you'd find entities much more scary than SBF - but nobody but highly trained professionals armed with infinite money supply do it anymore. Crypto is small, so we can see all the tempest in the teapot and imagine it is scary. Truly scary, trillion-size things aren't for us to see.
If you are not at all involved with EA (my sympathies, lads and lasses), rationality (ditto), crypto, or put any of your money into what he was doing (ouch), then the FTX/Bankman-Fried saga continues to be primetime entertainment.
Forbes magazine is plainly mad as hell and out for blood, because like everyone else they thought the sun shone out of his backside and were putting him and his friends onto their "Thirty Under 30" lists and writing hagiographic articles about them.
Well, no more! Recent Forbes articles have been more full of salt than a Silesian mine, and they've done one now on Caroline Ellison (who seems to have enough brains to keep her mouth shut, say nothing to anyone, and refuse to be contacted). Along the way, they take a swipe at another online article:
"Prominent FTX backer Sequoia Capital was also caught in the gravitational pull, publishing a now-deleted 14,000 word paean to Bankman-Fried that likened him to fictional protagonist Jay Gatsby. (“Is crypto the new jazz?” the author wondered, apparently not considering that the titular Gatsby earned his fortune through crime.) This week, Sequoia wrote down its $213 million FTX investment to $0."
Now-deleted? Not if Forbes have any say about it! And so they helpfully provide a link to the Wayback Machine storage of the piece, and boy is it a doozy in the genre of "had I but known" tales. Published in September of this year, but that might have been aeons and empires ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/
You really should read this. If you're EA-adjacent, you'll probably wince at the heavy-weight names being dropped all through the piece, but holy hannah does it repay reading. Here's the ending, to whet your appetite:
"After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.
But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.
…The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better."
Let's hope that Mr. Fisher did *not* make Bankman-Fried his banker after all.
Right now, I think the Forbes piece on Ellison is more interesting, given that we've had copious analysis of Bankman-Fried to date but little to nothing about the others involved. Forbes cannot resist kicking the guy even in this piece, but it still does tell us something:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/11/18/queen-caroline-the-risk-loving-29-year-old-embroiled-in-the-ftx-collapse/?sh=31a6ecc2791f&utm_source=ForbesMainTwitter
"Behind both Alameda and FTX was Bankman-Fried, a bloviating then-billionaire founder, who had founded the FTX two years after Alameda to build what he considered a modern cryptocurrency exchange. When Bankman-Fried decided to step away from Alameda to focus full-time on the fast-growing FTX, Ellison, a quiet and quirky child of MIT economics professors, took over as co-CEO.
...In recent days, Ellison has faced a barrage of particularly nasty criticism from crypto boosters who blame her for overseeing the downfall of Alameda. But amid the vitriol she has found some defenders in an unlikely group of people who have celebrated the musings about race science and imperialism on a blog she allegedly wrote in college. Some of her defenders, who call her “Queen Caroline,” are followers of Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary political theorist and far right darling. Many of the people who have flocked to Ellison’s defense gather on Urbit, a peer-to-peer platform created by Yarvin, one of her online supporters told Forbes. They think Ellison was set up to be the fall person, and claim that former co-CEO Sam Trabucco, who they derisively call “Sam Tabasco," is behind Alameda’s implosion. Trabucco didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I definitely think she’s innocent,” one said. “I think Caroline can be saved.”
I have *no* idea if the Yarvin Connection is true or not, but this entire rabbit hole just goes deeper and deeper. I expect a healthy selection of conspiracy theories to be dragged in at some time by somebody as the next development.
Thank you for sharing, I am decidedly entertained
As I said, if you're not directly or even tangentially involved with this, it is brilliantly funny. Forbes is *so* bitter about having fallen for this guy and his gang, their recent articles on this is Forbes at home in the fluffy dressing gown with a pint of ice cream and a bottle of prosecco, drunk-texting all their friends about how Bankman-Fried was a total loser and Forbes is SO over him and by the way, did they tell you about this other shitty thing he did? 😁
As for the Sequoia article, I'm not surprised they tried to memory-hole it. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that "Adam Fisher has changed his name and fled to Bolivia" after it.
The utilitarian angle gets pushed *hard* and right now I'm #NeverSoGladToBeDeontologist:
"SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number. One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.
....MacAskill couldn’t have hoped for a better recruit. Not only was SBF raised in the Bay Area as a utilitarian, but he’d already been inspired by Peter Singer to take moral action. During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming. As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life. And MacAskill—Singer’s philosophical heir—had the answer: The best way for him to maximize good in the world would be to maximize his wealth.
SBF listened, nodding, as MacAskill made his pitch. The earn-to-give logic was airtight. It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism. Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, “Yep. That makes sense.” But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake. All the rest was merely execution risk.
...Still, when SBF analyzed the bright future that lay before him, something wasn’t right. He was, he realized, too secure. SBF’s mind had been trained almost from birth to calculate. As a schoolboy the hedonic calculous of utilitarianism had him trying to maximize the utility function (measured in “utils,” of course) for abortion. During his teenage gaming years, his mathematical abilities allowed him to sharpen his tactics—and win. And, of course, every trade SBF ever made at Jane was the subject of a risk/reward calculation. All of it boiled down to expected value. The formula is fairly simple. If the amount won multiplied by the probability of winning a bet is greater than the amount lost multiplied by the probability of losing a bet, then you go for it—irrespective of units. Utils, euros, dollars were all subject to the same reckoning.
...To be clear, SBF is not talking about maximizing the total value of FTX—he’s talking about maximizing the total value of the universe. And his units are not dollars: In a kind of GDP for the universe, his units are the units of a utilitarian. He’s maximizing utils, units of happiness. And not just for every living soul, but also every soul—human and animal—that will ever live in the future. Maximizing the total happiness of the future—that’s SBF’s ultimate goal. FTX is just a means to that end.
...There’s no question that SBF was nerd sniped as a young man at MIT. Indeed, just before he got sniped, SBF had a personal blog where he wrote about his search for life’s meaning. In the blog, he declares his allegiance to utilitarianism over and over, carefully outlining his reasoning before concluding, “And so I am a total utilitarian.” Later writings refine that statement, making it clear that he’s a utilitarian in its purest—Benthamite—form, and that there will be no saving himself from the implications of the Benthamite Way. Every action since then has been a principled puzzling-through of the implications of that philosophy. Even now, even when directly challenged, SBF maintains that he brooks no limit in following the philosophical implications to their logical end: “If I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.”
So when, that next summer, MacAskill sat with SBF in Harvard Square and carefully explained, in the way only an Oxford-educated philosopher can, that the practice of effective altruism boils down to “applied utilitarianism,” Snipe’s arrow hit SBF hard. He’d found his path. He would become a maximization engine. As he wrote in his blog, “If you’ve decided that some of your time—or money—can be better spent on others than on yourself, well, then, why not more of it? Why not all of it?”
This is the same Will MacAskill who, in another thread, was quoted as not wanting kids because they'd interfere with his work. So instead of a legacy of a family, Will, this (for the moment at least) is going to be your legacy: you pushed Bankman-Fried along the path he took to defraud and lose billions. Maybe a couple of messy toddlers are looking better right now?
Hi Scott, thanks for this piece, which I read with interest. You have done an admirable job (as far as I can tell) summarizing what we (don't) know about how dopaminergic medications might shift your risk curve and so contribute to altered risk management. But what most of these discussions seem to leave out is the fact (as I understand it) that a certain percentage of folks who get put on stimulants will become manic, which generally involves gross distortions of risk curves, grandiosity, and overt, visible, poor judgment. And when I say "most of these discussions" I am thinking in particular of the frequent discussions about the wisdom of putting so many school children on stimulants. As a fellow psychiatrist, I will also try to shy away from public opinions on diagnosis. This week we've seen what many laypeople might join me in thinking is a combination of grandiosity and manifestly poor judgment at Twitter, and I have no reason to suspect that mania has anything to do with it. On the other hand, reading SBF's Vox interview a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that there is more going on there than insufficient risk aversion. So I am curious about your opinion on the possibility that mania of some form might be a piece of this picture. PS I appreciate your clarity on how, uh, problematic the DSM categorical approach to ADHD diagnosis is. PPS If you think I am overstepping the Goldwater rule--which I generally support--please tell me and I will try to edit accordingly.
It always amuses me when people insist that every cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are scams and ponzi schemes.
It never occurs to them that both Bitcoin and Ethereum are obvious Ponzi schemes, designed with FOMO in mind.
If you assume that literally everything in crypto is a scam of some kind, you'll have a much better understanding of the market.
FTX imploding isn't surprising to me because it is, like all of these things, a scam based on things that aren't actually worth anything and whose price is entirely a construct of fraud. Tether is fraudulent, and 95% of the run up to bitcoin's ATH was due to fraudulent non-economic trading.
All the money in these markets is fake except the fraction that real people put in, and the fraudsters take out.
I believe Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum were designed from the start to serve legitimate, non-scammy use cases. Naively optimistic technolibertarian fantasy use cases, perhaps, but not Ponzi schemes. And to the extent that "FOMO" was part of the plan, I believe that was mostly to bootstrap early adoption of the new currencies to build quasi-respectability.
Just about everything after, seems to me to be a mix of scams, practical jokes, and *extreme* wishful thinking. They are all extremely handicapped in serving any non-scam use case by the head start BTC and ETH have in exploiting network effects.
Since there are people who have legitimate-ish use cases for cryptocurrencies, I expect BTC and ETH will survive this debacle in some form. I wouldn't want to be invested in even those two right now.
Wow. I honestly was unaware of all of this. Thanks for sharing!
The moral of this story is that people shouldn't do drugs.
RE the expert witness story: Before I went to jury selection, I did not anticipate the level of social pressure that you (or at least I) experience when being questioned in front of 100 people. My plan beforehand was to give my honest opinion that, by a plain reading of the law, juries on criminal cases are legally obligated to always vote Not Guilty because the epistemics of a court are never good enough to overcome the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard, and therefore I would vote Not Guilty no matter what, and this answer would disqualify me. But when actually questioned, I felt really silly about saying this and was afraid it would attract a lot of probing follow-up questions, so I said something boring instead, and ended up getting selected, so I had to endure 5 days of jury duty because I didn't want to look weird for a few minutes.
Pretty lame. Effective altruism turns out to be mostly effective at allowing sociopathic nerds to commit crime on a massive scale. Write something about that, or stop writing at all.
Scott, you shouldn't be afraid of or hesitant to give expert testimony. I read this entire post carefully. It was informative. I felt the most emotion while reading your footnote 9 at the very end. I felt empathy for your situation with the bleach drinker. You are much wiser and more knowledgeable now though!
(MAOIs are contraindicated when taken with almost everything, or so it seems to me from reading drug inserts. I am a statistician not an M.D. so I will believe what you say. I try to stay far away from them myself though.)
I hate being the Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers. It's very stressful.
Some more info has come to light about Dr. Lerner. See: https://twitter.com/daniiicloud/status/1602852140552159232
Does that change any of your opinions?