Welcome to the making sense podcast. This is Sam Harris.
Okay, well, I want to say something about the sandbank manfried Fiasco. As many of, you know, I spoke to Sam once on the podcast. We also put that conversation on the waking up app we've since removed it from the app because it really no longer belongs there. Given what happened but it's still on the podcast, it's episode 271 so you can find it there if you're interested.
I'm not going to give a full account of what bank manfried did to destroy his reputation and his wealth and the wealth of many investors and customers. It seems in record time. Many details are still coming in and this is all being very well covered by the Press with schadenfreude and cynicism to spare. And that's the point. I will return to
But briefly Venkman freed had made tens of billions of dollars trading cryptocurrency. And he had built one of the world's largest crypto exchanges FTX along, with his own investment, entity called Alameda research, and the connection between ft x and Alameda was always unclear and the seems to have been in retrospect. Something that investors and the business press
s should have been more interested in, but my interest in banquet freed was entirely due to his stated commitment to effective. Altruism, he appeared to be the world's greatest example of what has been called learning to give in the EA Community, which is setting out to make a lot of money for the express purpose of giving most or all of it away. And at the time, I interviewed him, everything suggested that he was doing this.
In any case, what seems to have happened? Last week, is that concerns over the Financial Health of FTX and it's links to Alameda research, triggered essentially a run on the bank FDX. Customers tried to withdraw their assets on mass and this revealed an underlying problem at FTX. Unfortunately, Bank been freed appears to have used customer assets. That should have been safely stored there to fund risky Investments.
Through Alameda in a way that seems objectively shady and unethical whether or not. It was also illegal. I don't think we know all this happened outside of us jurisdiction as a majority of crypto trading. In fact, does
So, whatever the legality or illegality bagman free seems guilty of enormous Financial malfeasance.
He appears to have lost something like sixteen billion dollars in customer assets. And then there were clearly moments where his public comments about the state of the business amounted to lies. These were lies, that seemed calculated to reassure investors and customers that everything was fine when everything was really falling apart. Now I have no idea when all the Shady and unethical and probably illegal Behavior started, was he Bernie Madoff from
The beginning, or does he just panic in a financial emergency thinking that he could use customer funds? Just this one time and then everything would be okay? Again, the truth is, I don't even know whether Bernie Madoff was Bernie Madoff from the beginning, I don't know whether he was a legitimate investor, who is making his clients a lot of money and then got underwater and then went Ponzi in an attempt to get back to dry land and then found that he never could or that wouldn't be good obviously but it's a very different picture.
Then of a man who was an evil liar from the very beginning, you're just a pure sociopath who knew that he would be bankrupt in vulnerable people. Every step along the way, perhaps we know was true about Madoff. I just haven't read very deeply about his case. But the point is, I have no idea who's Sam Bank manfried was, or is really, and this morning, I went back and listened to the interview I did with him. And,
Even with the benefit of hindsight, I don't detect anything about him, that strikes me as insincere. I don't have any retrospective spidey sense that makes that conversation appear suddenly in a new light.
Now, maybe I'm just a bad judge of character. That is totally possible. I've had people much closer to me than Sam Bank manfried. I've never met an only spoken to twice once being on that podcast. I've had people much closer to me. People have worked with, and people who are actual friends behave in, very strange ways that have totally surprised me.
And some of these people have large public platforms and have done things in recent years that I consider quite harmful. I've commented about some of them and I've held my tongue about others. And frankly, I'm still uncertain about the ethics here. What sort of loyalty does 10 a friend or a former friend when that person is creating great harm out in the world especially when you yourself have a public platform from which to comment on that.
Harm and are even being asked to comment. Is it appropriate to treat them differently than one would treat a stranger? Who is creating the same sort of harm? I don't know. You can probably guess some of the names here. But covid alone has caused several of my friends and former friends to say and do some spectacularly stupid things. And I haven't known what to do about that.
However, my point is that I've been very surprised by much of this Behavior. So, perhaps, I am a bad judge of character. However, in the case of Sam bank manfried, I had no prior exposure to him, that podcast conversation was the first time I ever spoke to him. He was simply someone who had been ripped from the pages of Forbes Magazine, and promoted by the most prominent people in the effect of altruistic community. And I had no reason to suspect that he was doing anything shady.
Behind closed doors. And it appears that many of the executives at FTX, didn't know what he was doing. And the Venture capitalists like, Sequoia and light speed and SoftBank, and tiger, Global and BlackRock who gave him two billion dollars, clearly didn't know what he was doing. And again, when I listen to my interview with him, now, I don't detect anything. They should have been a red flag to me.
Of course, none of this diminishes the harm that bank manfried has caused. As far as I can tell, the accounting is still pretty murky. So it's not clear where the money actually went. But as I said, he appears to have lost something like sixteen billion dollars of customer funds, that's a lot of money and it's quite possible that some people who listen to my podcast with him could have been so impressed by him and his story that they invested in or through FTX
I was certainly beyond happy to learn that that had happened and I would deeply regret, any role that my podcast played there. But again I just listened to the conversation this morning and I still don't hear anything that should have caused me to worry that sandbag manfried or FTX was not what they seemed now. Beyond the immediate financial harm, he caused Bank when freed has done great harm to the reputation of effective altruism
The Revelation that the biggest donor in the EA Universe was not what he seemed has produced bomb. Bursts of cynicism throughout Tech and journalism. All of them quite understandable but also quite unwarranted first. Let me be clear about my own relationship to effective altruism. I've said this before, but I've UEA as very much a work in progress and I have never been identified.
I'd with the movement or the community and of only interacted with a few people in it, mostly by having them on my podcast. And as I said to will mccaskill, the movement has always seemed somewhat cultic. And to online for me to fully endorse, some of his precepts seem a little dogmatic to me. What I've taken from effective altruism has really been quite simple and can be distilled, 22 points.
The first is that some ways of helping to reduce suffering are far more effective than others and we should care about those differences. For instance, it's quite possible. They trying to solve a problem by one method will be 10 or even 100 times more effective than trying to solve it by another. And in fact, some ways of trying to solve a problem will only make the problem worse.
Now, this is such an obvious point that it seems insane that you would need a movement to get people to understand it. But prior to EA most philanthropy seem to be basically blind to any rational metrics of success. In fact, many Charities are governed by perverse incentives, they can't afford to solve the problem. There ostensibly committed to solving because then they would go out of business.
effective altruism at least in principle represents a clear-eyed view of what it takes to do good in the world and to prioritize the most effective ways of doing that good, the second principle, which more or less follows directly from the first, is that, there is a difference between causes that make us feel good that are sexy and subjectively rewarding to support and those that reduce suffering and death, most effectively,
As I've discussed many times on the podcast, we are easily moved by a compelling story, particularly one with a single sympathetic protagonist, and we tend not to be moved At All by statistics. So, if you tell me, the one, little girl fell down a well, and I can do something to save her right now. Well, I'm going to do more or less, whatever it takes, especially if that girl lives just a few blocks away from my home.
But if you tell me that 10,000, little girls, fall down Wells every year, and most of them live in Tanzania. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but it's not going to sweep aside, all my other priorities for the day. I might just go get some frozen yogurt in an hour. And if you do convince me to support a charity, that is working in Tanzania to save these little girls. However, big a check, I write the act of writing it is not going to be a subjectively rewarding.
As my helping, my neighbors, save one little girl. It might be 10,000 times more effective but will be 10,000 times less rewarding
Okay. This is a bug, not a feature of our moral psychology. We are just not built to emotionally respond to data. And yet the data really do indicate the relative magnitude of human suffering. So in this point effective, altruism has convinced me to give in a way that is unsentimental. In that it can be divorced from the good feelings. I want to get from supporting causes. I'm emotionally connected to its cause
To commit in advance to give a certain amount of money away every year, in my case, a minimum of 10% of my pre-tax income. And in the case of waking up a minimum of ten percent of our profits and to give this money to the most effective Charities we can find, as I've said before, I even said this in the intro to the episode was Sam Bank manfried committing in advance, to give it a certain percentage of weight of the most effective Charities and then giving whatever I want to less effective causes to, which I might be more.
Emotionally attached. This has really transformed my ethical life for the better because I know experience, giving money to a children's hospital or to some persons GoFundMe page more or less like a guilty pleasure. It's like I'm splurging on myself. That money could be going to the most effective Charities but selfish bastard that I am. I'm just helping a single individual who may have been the victim of an acid attack in Pakistan.
It's hard to capture the psychology of this until you experience it, but it has transformed my thinking about many things, but wealth, and charity and compassion and exactly. None of this is put in Jeopardy by the discovery that Sam Bank manfried was guilty of some terrible investment fraud. Again, I'm still not sure what happened with him, whether he was exactly what he seemed, but then freaked out in the midst of an emergency.
Emergency and started lying and stealing an attempt to get out of it or whether he's a pure con, man. But neither of these possibilities has any implication for what I've taken from effective altruism, and the same would be true if there were unhappy Revelations. You have to come from other prominent people in the EA Community. This would be very depressing, but it would have no effect on how my thinking about, ethics, has changed for the better.
Here's an analogy that might make this a little clearer. Imagine a very prominent scientist or group of scientists is found to have faked their data this happens from time to time. Imagine that the scientist in question has been so influential and the fraud was sustained for so long that a Nobel Prize now has to be rescinded and an entire department at Harvard shuddered.
With this, say anything about the legitimacy of science itself, of course not. However, I'm now seeing a lot of people respond to the bank man freed debacle as though it reveals that the very idea of effective altruism was always a sham because if people are concluding that no one is ever sincere in their attempts to help others or that, there are no better and worse ways of doing good in the world, certainly not, where charity is concerned.
It's all just virtue, signaling and reputation laundering and sanctimony and lies there appear to be many. Very selfish. People who didn't much like hearing about someone giving most or all of his wealth away who now feel totally Vindicated in their selfishness. They seem to be thinking all those effective altruists, we're just pretending to be better than me and they're not, they're actually worse, right? Because they can't be honest about.
their selfishness and hypocrisy over here in the real world we're just all in it for ourselves and that's fine because as all this possible
Anyway this is all just morbid and obtuse just as you can know that science is a legitimate Enterprise because you can actually do science, you can know that effective altruism is legitimate because you can actually do it for the right reasons.
As damaging as fraud can be in both domains no case of fraud can put either domain in question. We fraud has no logical relationship to either Enterprise. Scientific frauds are not science, they're frauds. And the corrective to them is real science. Ethical frauds are not ethics, they're frauds.
The corrective to them is real ethical Behavior.
The other crazy thing I'm seeing is that people are linking bank man. Freeze Behavior to the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism. As though belief in this philosophy was bound to produce such behavior. And everything I've heard said or seen written about this is pretty confused. I'm sure we'll talk more about this in future podcasts because it's important to get straight. But the short point I'll make here is that in my view, the claim that utilitarianism
Or more properly, consequentialism is bad amounts to a claim that it has bad consequences of some sort. But, of course, if these consequences are worth caring about, they can be included in any Fuller picture of consequentialism. My point, I made this at length in my book, the moral landscape which Remains the most misunderstood book I've ever written. My point is that everyone really is some form of consequentialist even if they think they're not.
You just have to listen to them talk long enough. And they start telling you about the consequences, they really care about deontology. For instance, a version like kant's categorical imperative or a virtue ethics, right? I think these positions and tail covert claims about the consequences of certain ways of thinking or acting or being in the world.
Anyway, I'll speak more about that at some point, but suffice it to say that if Sam Bank manfried stole his customers money and gambled, it away, whatever rationale he may have had in his head, it would have been very easy to argue that this was wrong from the point of view of consequentialism. Just look at the consequences, their disastrous, their disastrous for him and for his investors and customers.
And for anyone in his life, who cares about him. I mean, just think about the consequences for his parents. His parents are both Stanford law professors now assuming that neither had any idea what he was up to. And so they're not at all culpable, for what happened and who knows? They might actually have been involved. I know nothing about them but I suspect not imagine how their lives changed last week.
They have spent the last decade being congratulated. I suspect endlessly for having produced such a marvelous and marvelously successful, son. We can you imagine he got a degree in physics from MIT and then went on to make Thirty billion dollars for the purpose of giving it all away to charity and then expanded his influence into politics and among celebrities so that he could do even more good.
Ultimately he's hanging with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Tom, Brady and Gisele. But rather than being just a starfucker or an ordinary rich guy, he is laser focused on making money to solve the world's most pressing problems. Can you imagine how proud his parents were and now their son is the next Elizabeth Holmes or worse? I M have to consider the lives of these two people, and this is a fucking Greek.
UT.
But of course, the harm has spread much further than that.
Anyway, those are my thoughts at the moment. I will definitely speak more about these issues on future podcasts, and I'd be happy to hear suggestions for anyone who I might speak with. Who could take the conversation in New
Directions. Thanks for listening.
