2022-06-12

Patrick Collison in conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried

• Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaSSTEHB0Y
• Patrick Collison
• Sam Bankman-Fried
• Bitcoin vs. gold
  • Inflation is not up this year, just measures of inflation
• Is crypto good or bad for the dollar?
  • It's complicated
  • All digital assets provide ways for fiat "rails" to be cleaner and more efficient than they are today
  • Hopefully digit assets will put pressure on poorly built fiat systems and support well built ones
• Building a busy has a lot of messy parts
  • You need to be able to effectively manage the messy parts
  • The world is messy everywhere; nothing works the way it says it does
• Sam guesses annonymous cryptocurrencies will likely be seen as problamatic in the coming years
  • eg. Monero, ZCash
  • KYC
  • Selective privacy solutions might be preferable
• Smaller, more nible countires can more easily adopt pro-crypto legislation
• Blockchain applications
  • Interoperability between platforms --> bullish case
  • Bad for platforms, consumers, and society,
    • Breaking into the industry becomes non-practical
• In general, people are too risk averse
  • Specifically when it comes to things that are altruistic
• FTX has fewer than 30 software engineers
  • Companies should only grow their engineering team if they know what to do with them and how to integrate them
• Predictors of success for FTX employees (unique or important to FTX):
  • Being able to handle messy worlds well
    • How much do you care about beautiful code?
      • f you refuse to work in messy code you won't cut it
      • Sometimes you have to improve, do the best you can, and iterate
    • Make reasonable tradeoffs given the messiness
  • Working well with colleagues
    • You can't hire assholes, even if they are brilliant --> ends up bad
    • Intelligence is an important predictor but not overwhelmingly so
      • ~20-30% of what matters
      • Not as important as their willingness to work hard, their ability to be good a colleague, or being aligned with the company
• Utilitarianism
  • Expected utility ethics
  • You should do the actions that maximize the utility of the world
• Effective Altruism
  • Biggest blindspot
    • EAs were originally too concerned with problems that were clean stories
      • Things they were able to measure directly
    • Haven't been solving big messy problems