★★★☆☆ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis
A smart jerk out of his depth
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Michael Lewis
A smart jerk out of his depth
I am an admirer of Michael Lewis. He tells stories about numbers people that manage to be both accurate and broadly comprehensible. Although I was not really interested in Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF hereafter), I picked up Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon on the strength of my admiration for Lewis. Going Infinite is a biography of SBF -- necessarily incomplete, since at the time of publication SBF was only 31 years old. Presumably he has a lot of story left, although at present it looks as if he'll be seeing the next decade or two from prison.
The problem, and in this regard my instincts were correct, is that SBF is just not that interesting a person. He's a smart guy, but you've probably met smarter -- I'm sure I have. Indeed, he recognized this himself. This is what he told Lewis about the people he met at High School math camp
“For the first time I wasn’t one of the smartest,” said Sam. “Each of the campers was more interesting than the most interesting person in high school. They were smarter in every way. They were also more quantitative. But they had more distance from standard culture and felt less pressure or less ability to conform.”
SBF was, however, very good at one thing: trading in financial markets (which means finding and exploiting market inefficiencies, a recurring theme in Lewis's books). He was a world-class trader, but probably far from the world's best. He recognized that cryptocurrencies were a new opportunity where his trading skill could yield huge returns. And so they did, and he rapidly became one of the world's richest people. He also was eccentric and looked it. A lot of people who should know better are inclined to think that eccentrics are geniuses. (Here's the thing: some geniuses are indeed eccentric, but the vast majority of eccentrics are not geniuses.) This got him a lot of exploitable attention.
Lewis emits a lot of ink concerning the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, since it was a big part of SBF's life and thinking. My take on EA is that it is just one of a long, long line of smart ideas that smart people have used throughout history to fool themselves into thinking they were special.
Because he was a slob and a colossal jerk and not particularly concerned with conventional ethics SBF's empire came crashing down and a lot of people who trusted him lost their shirts.
As it happens, just before Going Infinite I read Nate Silver's On the Edge, which contains a chapter on SBF and also spends time on EA and its problems. I felt that I got more understanding of SBF from Silver than I did from Lewis, because Silver saw through SBF from the beginning. He writes
...his intellect didn’t bowl me over. We poker players inherently treat smartest-kid-in-the-room types with suspicion. We know that some of them talk a big game and can’t back it up. We know that some of them just got lucky.
I will not say that Going Infinite disappointed me, because I went into it with low expectations. I had hoped that Lewis, with his special magic, could pull a win out, but alas, that did not happen.