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We must leave it to the criminal courts to decide the future of Sam Bankman-Fried. He denies the various charges against him. For now, I am less concerned with his specific doings than with his worldview, which is a sort of mathematical chauvinism.
A theme in Michael Lewis’s new book about “SBF” is the subject’s mistrust of what cannot be quantified. Shakespeare’s supposed primacy in literature, for example. “What are the odds that the greatest writer was born in 1564?” SBF is quoted as asking, citing the billions of people who have been born since then, and the higher share of them who are educated. These are his “Bayesian priors”. I hope to never encounter a starker case of abstract reasoning getting in the way of practical observation.
He is, if nothing else, of his time. A year ago this weekend, Liz Truss, a maths snob who assailed colleagues with mental arithmetic questions, fell as UK premier, almost taking the economy with her. If we consider, too, the dark, Kremlin-partial end of finance bro politics, these are the most embarrassing times for maths chauvinists since Robert McNamara, who even looked geometric and dug America ever deeper into the pit of Vietnam on the back of data.
The problem isn’t maths itself. Almost all of its students and teachers avoid becoming hubristic boors. I salute the “globalism” of a subject that doesn’t require much language or insider etiquette. There isn’t a Classics or History of Art equivalent of a Cambridge don inviting a Madras clerk over on the strength of his papers, as GH Hardy did Ramanujan.
And, while it is no way of negotiating life, Cartesian purity of thought has its uses. SBF’s idea of giving Donald Trump a fee to not run for president (Lewis mentions $5bn) is the one penetrating thing I have read about politics of late. If there has been a shift in fashion towards maths, a shedding of its dweeb associations, a sense that this is now the subject of champions, it was overdue. I remember when the closest thing to a glamorous maths-relevant career was the client-facing side of investment banking, most of whose superstars weren’t mathematicians at all.
The problem is that societies overcorrect. How this happened with regard to maths is obvious enough. The most important businesses in the world used to be extractive (Shell, ExxonMobil) or industrial (Ford, Mitsubishi). Now, they are financial (BlackRock, JP Morgan) or digital (Google, Facebook). Companies that valued maths have given way to companies for whom maths permeates everything: it is the essence of their product. And so they have to hire in that image, which in turn incentivises the generation below to choose their educational path accordingly.
The result is a brilliant but narrow over-class, who allow their super-facility in one academic discipline to colour their wider worldview. The very universality of maths encourages them to range with dangerous confidence outside their domain.
“Confidence,” I said. But you needn’t have great powers of psychic penetration to sense that something nearer the opposite is at work.
At the root of maths chauvinism is a childlike craving for certainties, or at least probabilities, amid the flux of adult experience. It is a horror of life’s messiness. Arrogance is often next of kin to fear, and, for all of SBF’s intellectual swagger, and Truss’s ongoing lack of shame, each strikes me as unable to navigate the world without the guardrails of absolute belief.
Structure, order, pattern: what is ironic, or tragic, is that SBF could have got some of this from literature, whose ultimate “message” is that human nature holds across time and space. That there is some shape to the chaos of being alive. He has felt nothing — shame, love, ambition — that Shakespeare didn’t distil into eternal language.
A sense of the timelessness of things might also have disabused SBF of the notion that dressing like a giant child, or standing people up because their Expected Value wasn’t high enough, are clever ruses that somehow no one had thought of before. The ultimate lesson here is for investors. The chances that someone born in 1992 has insights that eluded the 100 billion-plus people who have lived until now are, if not zero, then small, such are the Bayesian priors.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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