For thursday’s sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there’s this gem:

  1. Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough “expected value”. They point to Caroline Ellison’s testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would “be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good”. They also point to Bankman-Fried’s “own ‘calculations’” described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. “Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again,” they write.

Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.

Bonus: SBF’s lawyers’ list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:

They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that “he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement.”

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    Is he the type of guy to go ‘wait if I just explain my stance more and more they will eventually understand’?

    Did he try to Rationalist blogpost monologue his defence team because he also wanted to do that to the judge? The idea of him trying to verbose from first principles the law in his own defense sounds very funny to me. Poor lawyers

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      5 months ago

      i expect that if you listened to the water pipes in MDC Brooklyn, you could hear SBF tapping out a full explanation of his crimes in Morse code, especially why it was all Caroline’s fault