Review

Comment

Morality

23 November 2023

7 min read

Sam Bankman-Fried: doing the math on morality

The calculated character and philanthropy of crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried is analysed by Krish Kandiah, who finds it doesn’t to add up.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Sam Bankman-Fried at a crypto-conference, 2021.

Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is quite the compelling read.

For a start Lewis has an incredible ability to explain complex economic and business scenarios in a way that is not only accessible, but also gripping. It is no wonder his previous books have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Lewis also has a knack for finding the humanity in almost any given situation. Whether he is writing about the system for picking a world-beating baseball team, the global economic crisis or, in this case, the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency exchange, he delves deep into the characters at the heart of the stories, exposing their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and values.

The publication of Going Infinite last month also coincided with Bankman-Fried’s real time court case, ending in a guilty verdict for, in the words of US attorney Damian Williams, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

This fraud centred on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. It emerged as one of the largest in the world with billions in deposits. All helping Bankman-Fried, aged just 29, to become recognised by Forbes magazine as the 41st richest American.

For all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other.

My personal interest in the man behind the fraud was shaped by three things. Firstly, as an adoptive and foster parent of two children who are on the autistic spectrum, I was interested in what Lewis would say about the common speculation that Bankman-Fried is also on the autistic spectrum.

I was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s philosophical approach to philanthropy and how Lewis would present the problems with the movement known as Effective Altruism.

Finally, I was interested in just to what extent Bankman-Fried’s commitment to mathematical algorithms overshadowed his moral awareness, given that it may well ultimately result in a sentence of 100 years behind bars.

Autism

Lewis invites us into as much of the inner world of Bankman-Fried as he can. He writes about his loneliness in childhood and his struggles with social conventions, for example. One particularly powerful moment is when we are allowed to eavesdrop on a video call with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Bankman-Fried cannot do the call without simultaneously playing a video game. He doesn’t want to see Ms Wintour’s face while she is speaking and only looks at her when he is speaking.

While Lewis readily points to traits that are commonly associated with people on the autistic spectrum – Bankman-Fried’s struggle to comply with social norms and difficulties understanding facial expressions, for example – he avoids using the term “autism”.

It seems that Bankman-Fried himself is aware of his neurodivergent traits and is not afraid to talk about the way they impact his emotional and existential intelligence.

At one point he writes to his girlfriend:

“I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"

He went on to say:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul”

I found statements like these hard to read, but insightful. As a culture we are growing in our understanding and appreciation of a range of areas of diversity, however this has yet to be robustly applied to enable both widespread social acceptance and self-acceptance. The fact that Lewis chooses not to use the term autism may be a symptom of this.

Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a very visible member of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is a fascinating philosophical approach to philanthropy which challenges individuals to consider their lives in terms of maximising their resources for the benefit of the world. Bankman-Fried’s answer to the question “How can I do most good with my life?” was to plan to earn a very large sum of money, ideally an infinite sum of money, that could then be used to help solve huge global issues such as the threat of nuclear war or another global pandemic.

There are many criticisms of the EA movement, and, Lewis explores several of them during the course of the book. Perhaps most obviously, for all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other. In fact, there was a major falling out between the effective altruists at his first company Alameda Research where half of the employees left because of his leadership style. Charity, it seems, did not begin at home.
It is also unclear how much money Bankman-Fried actually gave away to philanthropic causes. And it is alleged that just a month after FTX collapsed, the company even began trying to claw back the charitable donations it made. According to direct messages on X with journalist Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically-driven approach was "mostly a front".

"Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known," he wrote to Piper, "and some of its most beloved people are basically shams."

The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is uncertain whether Bankman-Fried had good intentions at all or whether the lure of billions of dollars became so irresistible that whatever virtue once existed was sacrificed to vice.

There was another dark side to Bankman-Fried’s EA philosophy. He seemed to be fascinated by the question of just how far he could go in his calculations of trade-offs and risks in the supposed cause of saving the future of humanity? What was the highest risk he would take? What boundaries would he cross for financial gain? What would need to be sacrificed on the way? The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

Automatism

Sam Bankman-Fried was not afraid to be honest about his struggles to process and express empathy in socially acceptable ways. He once said:

"There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

However, what he seemed to struggle with in empathy, he apparently tried to make up for in logic. The following example is helpful.

Lewis records that Bankman-Fried saw Donald Trump as an “existential risk” to democracy and good governance and decided the best way to remove the threat was to offer to pay him not to run for president—an idea Trump was reportedly open to.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team,” Lewis writes.

I have some admiration for Bankman-Fried’s out-of-the-box thinking. He was speaking Trump’s language. He was trying to save the world. He was trying to solve a problem. Logically it was sound. But his $5,000,000,000 calculation was fundamentally flawed. It took no account of democratic values, of the consequences of feeding an ‘existential threat’ billions of dollars, or the illegality of bribery and corruption on that scale.

The same miscalculation haunts the EA movement. While earning infinite amounts of money to save the world or prevent the climate emergency sounds logical, it fails to factor in the dark side of humanity: greed, lust, pride or gluttony, or whichever vice stopped Bankman-Fried from giving away his promised sizeable sum of money and led him rather to committing one of the largest frauds in history. The tech-bro altruistic movement also doesn’t factor in the bright side of humanity: compassion, humility, generosity, sacrifice. It doesn’t account for the human things that keep us going as we pursue justice - proximity to the people we are serving, faith or beauty.

The verdict against Bankman-Fried shows us that hard logic, like lofty ideals, is not enough to protect us from the bad we might do or propel us unswervingly towards the good we should do. The equations are flawed. We are more than machines. We are not social or biological robots. Our emotions and reactions can never be completely predictable or automatic because we are human beings, each of us with our unique strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, this is what I liked about Lewis’ book – his portrayal of Sam Bankman-Fried not in terms of how much money he made, or how many years he will spend behind bars, not as Crypto-King or Lord of Frauds, but as a uniquely talented and flawed individual who wrestles with some of the biggest existential paradoxes, and who is still, by the way, only 31 years old.

Article

Comment

Grenfell disaster

Justice

Death & life

Politics

4 September 2024

7 min read

Grenfell: a tale of two towers

The Inquiry offers an opportunity to change the way we treat each other

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A wrapping around the Grenfell Tower bears a giant green heart.

The Blowup on Unsplash.

Graham Tomlin was Bishop of Kensington at the time of the Grenfell Tower fire. This is the first of a short series of articles reflecting on this milestone in our national life.

The Grenfell Inquiry report is brutal. None of the companies involved in the renovation of Grenfell Tower escape. Arconic, Kingspan, Rydon, Celotex, Exova and many others – all have a lot to answer for. Listening to the statement by Sir Martin Moore-Bick and reading the report, words such as ‘failure’, ‘dishonesty’, ‘misleading’, and ‘defective’ sounded like a tolling bell throughout his account.

This was a tragedy that was decades in the making. Reports came out, warnings were issued and routinely ignored. A government which led a campaign of de-regulation without looking at the consequences for safety, a local council that failed to plan ahead for such an event, a tenant management organisation that treated the tenants they were supposed to serve with disdain, all played their part. The construction industry fared even worse. A culture of unholy competition, ‘value engineering’ (another term for deception), cost-cutting, a scramble for market share all took precedence over the safety of the people who were going to live in the newly clad flats of Grenfell Tower.

In the past, initial reports such as those on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland and on the Hillsborough disaster, were weak affairs, failing to listen to the voices of victims, too careful to preserve the status quo, only leading to further anger, and further reports which finally began to address the key issues. This report has not pulled its punches – perhaps because they kept the human side of the tragedy in mind throughout.

In the early stages, in an inspired move, the Inquiry decided to offer an opportunity for bereaved family members to simply describe the people who died in the fire. It was intensely moving as the richness and colour of each person was described, celebrated and mourned. As a result, this Inquiry has never quite lost the human nature of this tragedy and I suspect that is why its results have been so hard-hitting.

No blame for the victims - instead he demands a radical national repentance, a re-examination of deeper social and spiritual trends, and for a radical turnaround of attitude.

Jesus and another tower

Remembering the human scale of the disaster is vital, yet in itself, it does not lead to change. At one point in his public teaching, Jesus was asked about another disaster involving a tower which led to the tragic death of a large number of people. At some point during Jesus’ time in Jerusalem, it seems a tower collapsed in a part of the city called Siloam, killing 18 people. This tragedy clearly had a significant impact across the nation, and people started asking what it meant, and what it said about the society in which they lived.

Jesus' words were harsh:

“Those who died when the tower in Siloam fell – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.’”

No blame for the victims - instead he demands a radical national repentance, a re-examination of deeper social and spiritual trends, and a profound change of mindset. If they don’t, such disasters will continue to happen. When disaster strikes, it doesn’t say anything much about those caught up in it, but it does give us an opportunity to take a good look at ourselves.

Jesus said that the two most basic commandments, the things we should set out to do every day of our lives, were to love God and to love our neighbour - who is deserving of love because they are first made and loved by God. The Grenfell story is an object lesson in what happens when those commandments get ignored. This is what happens when these commandments are superseded by other imperatives, such as to increase market share, to beat the competition or to safeguard the reputation of our own organisation.

Grenfell was the result of a culture that has become so individualistic that we have lost sight of the fact that we are our brothers’ (and sisters’) keepers, that we have a responsibility for each other, and that we find purpose and meaning in loving our neighbours as we love ourselves, whoever they happen to be. I am sure that the employees of Arconic, Rydon, Kingspan and the Tenant Management Organisation of RBKC, would have done anything they could to ensure that they and their families enjoyed a safe and secure home. They simply failed to do that for those they were meant to serve through their work. They took care of themselves and their own. They lost sight of the people their work affected. They did not take care of their neighbour.

It is the individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and to be open to change which ultimately excel.

What happens now?

Matthew Syed’s 2015 book Black Box Thinking looked at responses to catastrophic failure. He contrasted the approach of the medical profession with the aviation industry. Too often, he argued, when an error is made in the world of healthcare, the instinct is to cover up failure for fear of litigation or in order to protect reputations. As a result, he suggested, the same mistakes are often repeated, which means that thousands of people continue to die in hospitals every year due to preventable error. When a plane crashes, however, the ‘black box’ is recovered, data painstakingly analysed, and no stone is left unturned in order to determine the exact causes of the disaster to make sure that it never happens again. As a result, plane travel has become one of the safest means of transport we have.

The companies and organisations that were meant to protect the residents of Grenfell failed in that duty. Yet the moral of Syed’s story is that failure is not something to be feared — but an opportunity to change. It is the individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and to be open to change which ultimately excel. It is what the Christian church calls confession and repentance – the willingness to admit when we have got something wrong, bear the consequences, ask for forgiveness, resolve to learn from the error of our ways and to become a better person through it. Repentance is not wallowing in self-pity or hiding in a corner from the wagging finger of guilt; it is an invitation to honesty, to growth and to transformation.

Those responsible will need to face justice. Yet if we allocate blame, punish the guilty, and then carry on as before, then there is no guarantee that something like this will not happen again. We might issue new types of building regulations, or safety measures in construction, but even that would not be enough. The kind of repentance that Jesus, and indeed the Grenfell Tower fire calls for is deeper - a radical look at the way we live together in our society.

This involves all of us. As Andrew O’Hagan put it in a long article soon after the fire in the London Review of Books:

“In all the loosening of cares and controls and emergency services, it’s not just the current government but a succession of them that lie behind those deaths, and who, if not all of us, voted such vulnerability into existence? No one did well. If civic life is dead, with a 24-storey tombstone beside the Westway, it died in the times in which we too lived, and by the values we lived by. The point of a society, if we have one, is that when bad things happen, it’s everybody’s concern.”

Grenfell is such an opportunity that we dare not let pass. If we carry on as normal, with our atomised individualism, our addiction to comfort, our spiritual poverty, our disregard for our neighbours, we would miss a huge opportunity to address some of the deeper issues in our life together, not to speak of refusing to heed the call of Jesus for true repentance.

In his statement in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer pledged a “profound shift in culture and behaviour.” I hope - and pray - this is what happens. Yet it will take more than changes to building regulation and for safety. It needs spiritual and not just political change, as I’ve argued here before. It would mean each of us looking at ourselves, and the cultures of the organisations of which we are a part (yes - including the church), and responding to the call to love God – to re-orient our lives around something, someone bigger and better than us – and to love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves. What if Grenfell sparked a fundamental change back to that more connected vision of who we are and what we are here for? Grenfell - and this report - is a shock to our system. Let us not waste it.

Listen to Graham discuss Grenfell on BBC Radio 4's PM programme.

Listen from 50:56.