Myself, I feel like every two weeks or so we see this kind of post with similar style to Eliezer's so it feels repetitive... but I may be wrong though, just my reaction after seeing that post.
I'm kind of against it. There's a line and I draw it there, it's just too much power waiting to fall in a bad actor's hand...
May you possibly be underestimating how hard it is to build a startup?
hilarious
Hey, I think you should also consider how the out-of-nowhere narrative-breaking nature of COVID. Which also happened after you wrote this. It's not necessarily a proof that the narrative can "break," but it sure is an example.
And, while I think I read the sequences way longer than 4 years ago, if I remember something it gave me is a sense of "everything can change very, very fast."
Thank you for being a temporary asshole, that is a great comment. Does it occur to you how it can be done?
the first prediction market about this was in 8 november on polymarket and surprisingly it was 94 percent probability on them not halting withdrawals
Magic not needed... someone sees that SBF offers 3 billion to buy a piece of twitter, gets spooked and aggregates it on the prediction market -> this raises the probability that it's doing something shady (then any other assessment will be aggregated) now when FTX offers EA some money, we know the probability of them doing something shady... have some info to make a better decision (I noticed Scott Alexander writing about this)
I don't think it's quite a mystery as you think... if you do the same overleveraged high stakes bet and you come out winning ten out of ten times, it's likely you will continue doing it (this is the nature of a ponzi scheme.) I think they could have easily find investors if they could have sustained the bank run and prevent the balance sheet leak.
The latter, I think, is the real mystery.
SBF probably knew at all times the dollar value size of a bank-run he could sustain until having to forcedly lock withdrawals, plus which whales could dump FTT at any given time (one of this being the CEO of Binance.)
While most people are thinking that Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao made a huge move dumping all of FTT, I think it's terrible for him -- it highlights the fragility of the entire enterprise and shifts all eyes on the remaining centralized exchanges (I imagine SBF's line of thinking going something like this, he didn't think that Zhao would martyr himself, but he did and thus we're here)
hehe Inadequate Equilibria is one of my favorite books ever, so I'm really glad that this study came up. It proves not only the SAD-specific section of the book, but the overall point.
The last few weeks I felt the opposite of this. I kind of go back and forth on thinking they are plateauing and then I get surprised with the new Sonnet version or o1-preview. I also experiment with my own prompting a lot.