Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX.FTX in 2019
Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, a Stanford law professor, once wrote an article entitled “Beyond Blame.”
Barbara Fried asked what would happen if the focus was on solving problems and not assigning blame.
Her son, Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founded FTX, which filed for bankruptcy last week.
A series of essays written by Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother have come to light following the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange he co-founded.
FTX filed for bankruptcy last week and Bankman-Fried says it is seeking to raise $8 billion to repay customers and FTX’s many creditors.
His mother is Barbara Fried, a former attorney who has taught at Stanford Law School since 1987.
She has written articles for the Boston Review, a quarterly political and literary magazine, arguing that the attribution of “personal guilt” in times of crisis has “ruined criminal justice and economic policy” and suggested it was “time the… to overcome guilt”.
“That we got so little in return for our finger-pointing at least raises the possibility that people might be receptive to a new approach,” she wrote in 2013.
“The next time something goes horribly wrong, imagine if we didn’t immediately ask who is to blame, but instead ask: How can we fix this problem?”
Fried declined to comment when contacted by Insider about this article.
In a recent Twitter DM exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried implied that his calls for crypto market regulation were a publicity stunt and that he didn’t believe his own rhetoric about the need to behave ethically.
And if asked by Vox When his colleague Nishad Singh’s alleged guilt for losing depositors’ money explains Singh’s remorse, Bankman-Fried replied: “The world is never so black and white.
In another 2013 essay for The Boston Review, entitled “The Limits of Personal Responsibility,” Fried argued that a better world is achievable “if only we could stop arguing about who is to blame for the world in which we find ourselves”.
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Defending the idea of risk in a world where personal responsibility had its limits, the scientist said: “A world where everyone is maximally risk-averse is a world none of us want to live in.”
“Rather than trying to change the public understanding of personal responsibility, we can try to change the subject to the collective benefits (in this case, economic prosperity) that could come from actually solving the problems we face ‘ wrote Fried.
Regarding emotional empathy, she suggested: “Gut feelings can play a constructive role in the political realm, especially when we feel that the tools of rational decision-making are unreliable.
“But until people learn to think more systematically and globally about the consequences of different courses of action – even the consequences for them – we will continue to invest in the wrong policies.”
Fried’s writing ties into her family’s belief in “effective altruism,” a movement that uses computation to understand how people can use their time, money, and resources to best help others, with a focus on lies in the ends of an individual’s actions, which justify the means of getting there.
Its detractors argue that effective altruism can overlook the harmful consequences of such action.
Some wonder if Bankman-Fried has somehow prioritized the expansion of FTX since he believes in the benefits of cryptocurrencies over all other considerations.
In fact, in his exchanges with Piper, Bankman-Fried viewed his downfall through the lens of a calculation that added up his efforts to bring the company down: “Every single decision seemed like a good one, and I didn’t know how big theirs was Total was to the end.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Department of Justice are understood to be investigating FTX for potential mishandling of client funds. The SEC should also investigate Bankman-Fried himself.
Prior to FTX’s collapse, the crypto exchange reportedly transferred billions of dollars worth of client funds to Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research.
FTX’s new CEO, John Ray, delivered a scathing assessment of the company under Bankman-Fried, describing “a complete failure of corporate controls” and underscoring a dissenting mindset by the former CEO that may have contributed to his downfall.
“A month ago I was one of the biggest fundraisers in the world. Now I’m a broken down wreck,” Bankman-Fried told Vox.
“But it’s one thing to be fallen — there are people who know what it’s like and want to do for someone else what no one has done for them.”
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