Astral Codex Ten

SBF

12 min read

SBF

Article

SBF is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 12 times across 12 issues between November 18, 2021 and December 10, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “SBF writes :”; “SBF writes : You’re not taking all successful people at random”; “SBF is a semi-mythical figure”. It most often appears alongside FTX, effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 12
  • Issue count: 12
  • First seen: November 18, 2021
  • Last seen: December 10, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
...the research community combined would have in a century. Darwin has many paragraphs in his writings that are worth a Nobel prize by themselves. A role model for us all! SBF writes : You're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just hav...
...the research community combined would have in a century. Darwin has many paragraphs in his writings that are worth a Nobel prize by themselves. A role model for us all! SBF writes : You're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheri...
Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
Still, I’m reluctant to center the St. Petersburg narrative here. Hundreds of other crypto projects have proven fraudulent and gone bust without us needed to appeal to exotic branches of philosophy. SBF is a semi-mythical figure. It would feel appropriate if his downfall was for properly mythical reasons, like a deep commitment to literal St. Petersburg. But I think in the end it will probably have at least as much to do with the normal human vices that we all have to struggle against.
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
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.
OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"
March 01, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Your Book Review: Lying for Money
May 26, 2023 · Original source
If Davies were working on a new updated version of the book, what would he add? I think the answer is fairly obvious: 2022 saw the collapse of one of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges (FTX) after it was discovered that they had improperly been using customer deposits. FTX is currently going through bankruptcy, where filings seem to indicate that they owe at least $3.1 billion to roughly 1 million creditors, many of whom may not get their money back. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is facing an eight-count federal indictment including multiple counts of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, among other charges.
Inline links: at least $3.1 billion to roughly 1 million creditors
Sam Bankman-Fried's origin story begins in a similar manner: his foray into cryptocurrency began with the Alameda Research trading firm, whose first mission was focused on an arbitrage opportunity that they discovered: the story, as SBF tells it, is that there was enough of a price differential between the price of cryptocurrency on US and Japanese exchanges that, if you were set up to trade in both markets, you could exploit the difference and make "free money."
What lessons would Davies hope for us to learn from the example of SBF? Partly, the saga of Sam Bankman-Fried seems like a parable about laundering reputation and credibility: if it's possible for people to buy respectability, then it's important to realize that crooks often control assets that they can use to buy respectability (even if the assets aren't theirs, strictly speaking). And at a certain point, the extra layers of respectability aren't really "earned" or even "bought" so much as picked up through sheer inertia.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
The founders of Anthropic included several EAs (I can’t tell if CEO Dario Amodei is an EA or not). The original investors included Dustin Moskowitz, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jaan Tallinn, and various EA organizations. Its Wikipedia article says that “Journalists often connect Anthropic with the effective altruism movement”. Anthropic is controlled by a board of trustees, most of whose members are effective altruists.
Inline links: board of trustees
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Open Thread 305
December 04, 2023 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The Early Christian Strategy
November 14, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
5: Nick Maggiulli: "My favorite story about Sam Bankman-Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital where he built a system to get the 2016 US Presidential election results [a few minutes] before any mainstream media outlets...however, despite learning of a pending Trump victory before anyone else, Jane Street still managed to lose money on their trade because they [incorrectly thought a Trump win would be bad for] US markets."
Inline links: Nick Maggiulli
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on