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?
Some of the Zizians had parents who paid for them to bum around in the Bay Area for a few years, but AFAK no famous rationalist has parents who donated a few million to a charity which subsequently gave the child a make-work job. Their most enthusiastic patrons are New Money too.
Edit / SBF has rich and connected parents who were involved in his business ventures