Before charlatanism was an accusation, it was a job. The first charlatans were itinerant drug makers and sellers in the 17th century who advertised their medicines with magic and theatre.¹ These medicines were often concoctions with no medical relevance to the buyer's particular ailment. The business, in a trend that still holds up today, was profitable in money but unprofitable in reputation.
The charlatans attracted scorn among both the medical establishment and the elite who sneered at the common people for their obvious gullibility. As the century drew to a conclusion, the word inevitably acquired a different meaning as the garden-variety imposter we know it as today.
But although few knew it at the time, it was just as good or just as bad to ingest the charlatan's concoctions as it were to opt for standard medical treatment of the era. When confronted with an illness, any illness, the default recommendation was blood letting, a nasty practice of draining blood out of the body based on an outdated theory of disease and the human body.
King Charles II of England was helpfully drained of twenty-four ounces of blood by his royal physicians. He had merely had a mild seizure. George Washington suffered a similar fate. Until the nineteenth century, it was no exaggeration to say that the medical establishment in Europe killed more rich people than any other cause save war.
The medical practitioners of the period had seen and called the charlatans for what they were. But they had failed to see they were merely looking at their own reflection. This is the charlatan's most essential ability: to recognize and detest their nature only in others.
Elon Musk is a charlatan. There is no other respectable way to put it. There are, of course, other disrespectable ways to put it but each borrows something from the truth without paying interest. In four weeks alone, he has taken a semi functioning operation and ran it diligently into the ground. He has promised free speech while trying to police any expression of it that applies to him personally.
His actions have led to a mass exodus of corporate advertisers, who in a very funny turn of events, now have to disclaim that they stand for basic human rights. He has fired at least half of his workforce and then turned around to try to rehire some of them again.
Twitter was always unable to compete with its vastly more profitable social media peers. It is now, as far as profit is concerned, fighting for its existence. If those 44 billion dollars had been shredded a million dollars at a time, it might, it would, have taken a longer time to lose them all.
There are reasonable people whom these statements will infuriate. They will point to SpaceX's renewable rockets. They will boast of Tesla's electric revolution. They will remark, rather obviously, that he is the richest man in the world. All these things are true. Elon Musk has played an influential role in all of these things and is still a charlatan. These things do not cancel out.²
Sam Bankman Fried is a charlatan. Just last year, he was the richest self made newcomer in Forbes 400 History. In August of this year, he was being compared on Fortune Magazine to none other than Warren Buffett himself. Bankman Fried sold himself as equal parts dogooder billionaire, equal parts heterodox boy wonder. Except he wasn’t.
Bankman Fried's official networth went from 16 billion dollars to less than zero in twenty three hours. It did not even require a full day. Bankman Fried, who graduated with a mathematics degree from MIT, disregarded the Kelly Criterion, an absolutely essential but standard concept of risk and probability. ³
Bankman, a son of two well respected legal luminaries, does not appear to understand that voluntary statements are acceptable evidence for criminal liability: he keeps tweeting material that will annihilate him in a court of law by any decent legal team.⁴
Bankman Fried, a prominent effective altruist, diverted billions of dollars without permission or outsider knowledge into high-risk fraud and luxury mansions in the Bahamas, ruining the lives and finances of millions while selfishly covering this up until the end.
The effective altruist community, commonly abbreviated as EA, are charlatans. If you are unfamiliar with the EA community, they are a bunch of deeply uncool weirdos committed to maximizing the amount of good in the world.
As recently as August ( the month just keeps on giving), they flagged off a red teaming and criticism contest intended to open the community to relevant criticism from outsiders. An articulate submission, by a pseudonymous contestant, pointed out the grave irony of trying to maximize ethical behaviour while being effectively bankrolled by a fraudulent billionaire. It was downvoted in arrogance and haste:
Sven Rone
The Effective Altruism movement is not above conflicts of interest
[published Sep 1st 2022]
Summary
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is a major donator to the Effective Altruism ecosystem and has pledged to eventually donate his entire fortune to causes aligned with Effective Altruism. By relying heavily on ultra-wealthy individuals like Sam Bankman-Fried for funding, … the Effective Altruism community does not appear to recognize that this creates potential conflicts with its stated mission of doing the most good by adhering to high standards of rationality and critical thought.
In practice, Sam Bankman-Fried has enjoyed highly-favourable coverage from 80,000 Hours, an important actor in the Effective Altruism ecosystem. Given his donations to Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours is, almost by definition, in a conflict of interest.
The good apostles of reason and rationality could not entertain the possibility that they were sorely in need of both. Every winner of the contest wrote pointless pablum like how to improve the axiology of population ethics and entirely theoretical modes of decision making.
The EA community which is absolutely certain of the risks to the long-term future of humanity, even down to the total number of future humans and the specific odds of their extinction, could not see that their own funding, a major pillar behind the existence of their grants and communities, was on earthquake territory. The longtermists could not appreciate an existential risk to longtermism.
Indeed, until the events of the last week, they were busy accepting submissions on any essay ‘proving rigorously' that ‘conditional on AGI being developed by 2070, humanity will go extinct or drastically curtail its future potential due to loss of control of AGI'.
The winners would have been entitled to 1.5 million dollars in prize money. Their own odds of the event were placed at 15 percent. Where did that highly specific probability come from? Nobody knows. Where was the lucrative prize money going to come from? Sam Bankman Fried's pockets.
As usual with these people, they fell for the platonic fallacy: distinguishing between what is true and what is false is unimportant. It is the consequences of that investigation that matter.
If it turns out that 273 angels but no more can exist on the head of a pin, so what. That information has zero actionability. If it turns out that it's preferable to have a large number of theoretical humans living barely acceptable lives than to have many theoretical humans living great lives but with a fraction of them in utter suffering, an extensively well argued concern of the EA community, so what.
But if it turns out that you are being bankrolled by a fraud who has lent himself a sheen of moral respectability by association with your movement, and you will not even consider the well-argued opinion of someone who reasonably pointed that out a few months earlier, well, that matters a lot.
People excessively concerned about the odds of this world being virtual or finding civilizations in space et cetera are merely wasting their time. We are all walking with blindfolds. Those are blindfolds, which for various reasons, we will not be able to displace in the near future. The point is not to walk with no blindfolds. The point is to not walk with a blindfold on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.
The Crypto community are charlatans. In the midst of all the chaos, everyone kept ignoring the one simple solution to it all: if at any time, customers of FTX or the other exchanges to whom Bankman Fried offered FTX to had accepted FTT or any of the other worthless tokens as equivalent to actual dollars, everything would have been fine. They were all unwilling to.
The fundamental two premises of crypto are that all money is subjective value and that cryptocurrencies will be the currencies of the future. Anyone who faithfully believes in those two premises should have been perfectly fine receiving Serum tokens or FTT in exchange for the dollars and other assets they placed in FTX's custody. They were all unwilling to. Talk, as they say, is cheap.
These people are all charlatans. But then again, so are we. First off, anyone who has the time to read this is a charlatan. You are lucky enough to receive at a minumum an high school education, the fees for which were most likely paid by a parent or guardian, that is, out of someone else's pocket. You do not have dyslexia. You have no unfortunate congenital disorders. You have enough time in your day to do something - reading this essay - which has absolutely no survival value and the bulk of which will depart your memory in a couple of hours. You have access to the internet. You have a decent smartphone. You have eyes. You, dear reader, are a charlatan.
We can't admit that of course. We have to call it something else: hard work, dedication, the commitment to go through college, the skill to win decent employment. All these things are true. But they merely dilute the charlatanism. The fundamental reason we are here having a laugh and not foraging for our next meal in a Haitian shantytown is Fate. Fate gives us all a chess board but it gives some of us two queens.
I too am a charlatan. To write is a deeply arrogant thing. It is to affirm that one is worth listening to. The more I write, the more I realize that writing is democratic; good writing is not. Extreme socialists have this thing they do where they emphasize luck to the exclusion of all else. Again, that is another philosophy with no actionable value. If life is purely random, nothing is worth doing. But perhaps, we can begin to remind ourselves just a little bit more that the distances between ourselves on the ladder of life cannot be entirely explained by climbing ability.
We are all breaking promises and playing up our contributions and convincing ourselves of certain illusions. We wear the mask, Lawrence Dunbar wrote once. The characters keep changing. But the lights are still on. The theatre is in full swing. The stage is full. The masks have not come off.
¹ You have to admire our innate credulity. Someone has just demonstrated an act (magic) whose entire point is things are not as they appear and is now offering medicine on the basis that what I am offering you is actually legit this time.
² The only generous explanation for Elon's actions are that this is a hard reset. There have been countless startups that have gone on to be companies. Twitter might be the first company that is being converted back into a startup.
³ Actually, SBF understands the Kelly Criterion pretty well. He just doesn’t like it. At the end of the day, Kelly’s criterion treats the utility of the bettor as logarithmic ( there are very weak reasons why utility should be logarithmic).
Bankman probably preferred bayesian utility theory which begins with defining your own utility preferences and acting accordingly.
But none of this matters anyway because both precepts only work for you if you have an edge, that is, the probability of a positive payoff multiplied by the size of the payoff is greater than the probability of a negative payoff multiplied by its size. And there’s no edge in a crypto business. It’s purely negative sum.
⁴ It now turns out that Bankman was deleting evidence of previous tweets, probably on sound legal advice that arrived too late. Talk about right thing,wrong timing.
Removing evidence is smart: if criminals never bothered to do this, we would not need detectives and law enforcement would be vastly easier.
Removing evidence that everyone already knows about and now knows you have deleted is very stupid. It is an unforced error and an express confirmation of culpability. It’s just more ammunition for the prosecution, if of course there ever is a prosecution. Oh, well.
This post conflates rather than clarifies.