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Our friends open brokerage accounts
(awful.systems)
Is there a survey of our friends' ventures into the worlds of personal finance and investing?
- a group of EAs worked for Jane Street Capital in NYC (sounds impressive) but went on to found FTX (incompetent at business mechanics but really good at manipulating people)
- their Jane Street sponsor James McClave seems like old money since he has a family foundation
- Aella invested heavily in crypto in 2013 but was not able to turn it back into real money at a profit; she was also involved with a dating site in the Terra/Luna ecosystem
- so many other failed cryptocurrency schemes
- investment posts on LessWrong are few and unimpressive, on the level of "if I need money in a few years and emerging market stocks tend to do best, should I invest all the money in them?" The people with clues tend to disappear from the site.
- they are obsessed with prediction markets but their favourite uses their own brand of play money not hard currency https://manifold.markets/
- EA staff don't seem to understand the terms under which they hold $20m of real estate in Berkeley, and frequently misuse accounting terms
- I don't know anyone in this space who has founded a profitable business bigger than one person, and the one-person freelance businesses are scarce
- Leopold Aschenbrenner who is one step away from FTX and Anthropic just blew up his $45 billion hedge fund with too much leverage
- JueYan Zhang had a ten-year career as a hedge-fund manager but switched to redistributing donations
- many of their friends are fringe economists at George Mason University like Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson
It seems like their problem is less their quack economics and overconfidence than that learning the basics is hard, practicing them requires self-discipline and willingness to fail, and they can always talk a friend into wiring them another $100,000. So they sling the lingo but generally know less than a high-school graduate who reads books on personal finance from the library and spent a few summers running a house-painting business.
Does anyone have a favourite story?
I would be really really really surprised if, on average, LWers (et al.) performed better or worse than the average schmuck who decided to take a punt on proper investing or running a business or whathaveyou.
Beating the market is extremely hard. Riding the market is unbelievably easy, and gets easier constantly. Running a successful business is nearly impossible and gets harder all the time.
For these reasons most people don’t bother, take a job in somebody else’s company, and sometimes invest their savings in something very broad and shallow and safe like an index fund.
On the other hand, rationalism is an extremely well-funded cult, so it’s top-heavy with unbelievably bad decisions made with infinite thielbucks.
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Probably you can find a fair few good stories which are couched as “donations” because, again, rationalism is a cult, and investments in a business are framed in terms of “donations”, or tithes, to this or that cause within the movement. It may not offer a concrete return to the tither, but as with a tithe they do actually expect to get something in return.
If Scott Siskind Alexander very publicly kicks a few bucks to Max More’s cryonics scheme every now and then alongside human enhancement research to preserve a future for our white children, and makes sure he’s picked the RIGHT AI alignment protocol, he isn’t a neutral third party to the future those decisions are helping design.
The whole architecture of the group is a speculative ponzi scheme projected far off enough into the future that nobody can complain when their abstract ideas of expected return fail to come good after all.
Indeed on another level looking for good stories about bad investments is a bit of a contradiction in the sense that what you’re looking at to begin with is, for whatever else turns up in the ‘TESCREAL’ acronym, primarily a scam dreamed up by Eliezer Yudkowsky back in the early 2000s no different from scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.