With 10% for The Big Guy.

(Gosh, who could possibly have foreseen that….??)

A few things that strike me reading up is this but from Pete Singer on Wiki. Singer’s one of my old bugaboos, so that is one issue. But there is also this excerpt from Wiki (and sure, it is Wiki…).

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away …The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society.

A few things that stand out:

Firstly: Even if we presume that it makes no moral difference whether we help a Bengali we never know or a neighbor’s child (which is itself fraught with assumptions), we are in a much better position to research our neighbor’s kid and evaluate the effectiveness and desirability of aid to them..

Simply put, if we don’t even know the name of the Bengali, we also probably won’t know if some middle management asshole stole the funds em route.

As well as the moral good of actually helping one or the other. What if the Bengali is an Islamist nut case? Or conversely, if our neighbor’s kid is a literal psycho?

This ties in to the diffusion of information mentioned by many others like the Chicago School, and how it is important to limit one’s actions to their knowledge.

Secondly: What if one assumes that their own society is a moral good and that propagating its interests is important?

Thirdly: One thing that stood out is that the essay’s context speaks of the 1971 crisis in East Bengal, but never mentioned the fact that it was overwhelmingly caused by Pakistani Militarists genociding Bengali culture. Would it not be safe to conclude that one very effective case of altruism would be using military force to break the Pakistanis, as the Indians did?

Ellison additionally testified that Bankman-Fried believed in utilitarianism and thought rules against lying or stealing inhibited his ability to maximize the greatest benefit for the most people.

This stands out to me. While at least Theoretically I can understand the logic as something of a Machiavellian, it is still a rare case that is utterly manipulative. It also ignores that it will in most cases not inhibit that ability to maximize benefit.

And it also runs afoul of their moral and legal rights as well as the fact that you are not God and thus cannot know everything, meaning you can’t assume you intuitively know how to better maximize the good for those people or others than they will, because again information is diffused.

It really does seem like so much of it is a Central Planner’s wet dream and reminds me of the old CS Lewis quote on the tyranny of moral busybodies.

I believe you are correct, and that the others got plea deals in order for the prosecution to focus on him and to use their testimony against him. The prosecution had nothing to gain from making a deal with him. However, had he pled guilty and acted contrite, he still might have gotten less of a sentence than he will now get.

Cornhead:

I’m not so sure, but it will be an interesting test for calibrating one’s cynicism about Democrats and America.

And SBFs primary beneficiary was politicians and political causes.

The absence of this line of inquiry about the trial leaves me flummoxed: I believe that SBF believed his political donations would protect him from the danger of prosecution.

If not, then the obvious lack of adult accounting by his companies enabled this fiduciary abuse, which would have resulted in his colleagues seeing a variety of red flag warnings.

I am yet to see these two duelling narratives developed in SBF news coverage.