Sam Bankman-Fried: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] Honestly, that’s an interesting question that I would be interested in talking with them about. But you do see this, and with some teams, I do have a sense of what the answer is. You see some sports team outperform year after year after year. The Patriots are probably the most notable example of that, and I think everyone knows it’s about Belichick and the staff that he’s built and the culture that he’s built, centered around outthinking some other coaches. But also, a big thing there is doing the right thing. What’s he known for? Being gruff, but in the end, he’ll make the right play. He’ll come up with wacky new formations that will be good, and he doesn’t care that much what’s popular. He doesn’t care that much about how things are done. He cares about, “What’s the play that will optimize our chances of winning, and how do we do that?” You can see that in a lot of areas. Look at the running backs that New England has employed over the years. It’s this random, motley crew of people who everyone would have said are randos and unlikely to be that good or important, and then they lead the league in rushing. Then those running backs go get some payday somewhere else, and they have some new running back no one’s ever heard of, and again, they lead the league in yards per carry at least, or some tandem of them. There’s a lot of things going on there. I think that that’s an important piece of this, and frankly, I think for sports teams in general, a lot of the fruit is low hanging. It’s consistently picking the low-hanging fruit, doing a good job, thinking carefully about what the right thing to do is, not getting too sidetracked by what the convention is for what to do somewhere. I think that gets you a lot of the way. Let me ask you a few questions about effective altruism, a movement where you’ve been a leader and major supporter. Thanks to people like you and also Open Philanthropy, effective altruism seems to be moving away from being funding-constrained to now being talent-constrained or people- or organization-constrained. (A) Is that true, and (B) if it’s true, what does that mean for strategy?…

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