Sam Bankman-Fried: preference

Transcript context

…So what do you do? Yeah, so what do you do? Well, I query whether I’m the one you want to take advice from, but I think I know a decent amount about it by now. I’ve had a lot of experience thinking about this and acknowledging that it’s messy and that nothing is perfect here. What I think about now is, basically the most important thing — and embarrassingly, I think a lot of people forget to do well — is, first of all, try to get the right object-level answer. Before you get into management disputes and things like that, understand what the truth is. That is legitimately, I think, the biggest weakness of a lot of managers. They jump straight into how to manage without first thinking, “Well, what’s the right answer in terms of the object-level problem we’re trying to solve? What coding practices should we use? Should we run this advertisement?” Whatever the question is, first of all, find the right answer. Do whatever research you need to do to find that answer. Then a thing that is really important — at least in how we function — is having a company culture that that is what matters, and making it clear that in the end, that’s what we care about. That’s what we’re going to push on, and we’re going to be pretty ruthless on that. Caring about making the right ultimate decision, and no other argument is going to win over that one when push comes to shove, and everyone has to be aligned on that fact. But then put that aside for a second. Okay, you’ve done that. Now, what do you do to actually resolve disputes if there is a dispute? One thing that I didn’t realize at the beginning was that, first of all, it’s great if everyone’s aligned and if everyone thinks the same things. But in the end, there has to be some process by which everyone agrees you’re going to come to a conclusion. There’s some way to ultimately resolve these disputes. There’s some person, odd number of people, probably 1 percent, honestly, who ultimately makes that final call, and everyone knows it. If a civil war were to break out, everyone could just look at how it’s going to end, and now there’s no civil war. There are downsides to that, but I think they’re outweighed by the upsides from it. That’s one important piece of this, and that’s something that I’ve changed my thoughts on a lot over time and become a lot more cognizant of. What accounts for the Miami Heat being such a well-managed team so consistently?…

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