On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

But not everybody is playing the same game. People have different incentives, and they may be following their incentives rationally, but it nevertheless creates profitable opportunities for DFT, which just wants to make money. Maybe conscientious contrarianism

You could tell that the Manifest conference was a rationalist rather than an EA event because of the presence of people who were either considered unwoke (like Hanson, who told me he’d basically been canceled from EA events since a 2018 blog post in which he wrote sympathetically about the idea of redistributing sex to incels),

This would have been a good bargain, and not just in hindsight; a Manifold market at the time presciently assigned SBF a 71 percent chance

She once threw a party where everyone had to be naked except for a mask, hoping it might loosen up the rationalists a bit. “But instead, they all just sat around the circle and behaved exactly the way they normally do and started debating like global trade,” she told me. (Aella’s efforts weren’t entirely fruitless; Scott Alexander met his future wi

worth literally trillions, which he claimed he could put toward EA-related causes. Who knows what the limits were; he’d even told Ellison there was a 5 percent chance he could become president of the United States. His utility function was “closer to linear,” he explained; the trillionth dollar really was almost as good as the first. Technically sp

in practice both EAs and rationalists have a catholic appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of controversies. Effective altruism

someone with an informed, original opinion about what the betting line should be, usually formulated through painstaking statistical modeling.

But although SBF might or might not have underestimated how bad a crash would look, he probably did underestimate how likely one was.

of being sentenced to at least twenty years in prison. And yet he hesitated. “I’d have to think about exactly what that meant,” he said after a long pause.