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by UncleMeat 629 days ago
SBF has been widely presented as a person who was constantly running these probabilistic computations and comparing expected values, but this strikes me as total horseshit that is a group invention of SBF himself and journalists who have a much more interesting story when he is a wunderkind.

I'll totally buy that he thinks about risk differently than other people, but not in some more mathematical sense.

2 comments

Well for a start to run an even passable market making operation and to get into the jobs Sam did you have to be atleast fairly good at the mathematics behind probability. He's definitely more able to reason about probabilities than the average person. But sure, "I'm gonna go steal all these guys deposits to go gambling" wasn't an aggressive but understandable bet, it was the act of a degenerate gambler.
There were two things going on: A) Betting more aggressively than the Kelly Criterion, which indicates a bad understanding of how to reason about risk and EV[1], and, separately B) taking unnecessary, negative EV risks that have no justification beyond laziness.

B) include things like "having such sloppy accounting that you simply forget about major accounts[2] and are unintelligible to potential buyers" and "storing critical private keys in a text file that lots of people have poorly logged access to".

[1] lay explanation: https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/why-infinite-coin-fli...

[2] the infamous "hidden, poorly labeled fiat account" for example