Sam Bankman-Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…How was that game different? And how does it relate to how you think about what you do in your business? I think that there are some overlaps. I was at Jane Street before I jumped into crypto, and a lot of the interviews there look like game-type questions or are framed as games. I think a lot of the reason is that a nice property of games is, you’re just put in front of a messy situation, and in the end, your directions are “Do the best you can. ” The directions are “Here’s how it works. Now just start playing it.” You can do whatever thinking you want, whatever you think is helpful to get you to make the right moves, but in the end, what matters is making the best moves that you can, given whatever uncertainty that you have. You’re constantly, implicitly making probabilistic decisions, but in a world where you know you can’t calculate everything out. You need to make sure to include the important factors, and not to spend all of your time worrying about factors that don’t matter, and balancing those reasonably. I think that’s one piece of this. Another thing that I would say was really important for trading is really, really grinding until you do a good job. Thinking of it in terms of my goal in the end here is to do a good job. My goal isn’t “Check this box.” My goal isn’t “Send this email to this person, telling them to do this thing.” My goal is, I need to make the money from having done the trade, whatever that takes, and do everything that it takes to get there. When you think about some of the trades — especially in crypto — that we did, half of it was operational, and half of it was really annoying. You had to jump through some really bizarre, Byzantine hoops in order to get where you needed to go. That meant that you had to fight through bureaucracies. You could never let them get the best of you. You had to keep being creative and pushing for more and more solutions until you could get there. That’s tenacity. An ability to think of potential solutions to problems and try them out is another really important piece of it. If you’re 14 years old, and you’re arguing with your mother about the repugnant conclusion and trolley problems — and she, as you know, is a famous consequentialist, right?…

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