Parenting a Sam Bankman-Fried
Reading what Michael Lewis says about the childhood of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) gave me the shivers.
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In his description of a child who was so bored with school, I saw my son. The main differences were that (1) we intervened when he was six; (2) I decided against pursuing an academic career to ensure making professor by age 60; and (3) we prayed for wisdom. I cried a lot. O, how I cried.
Thankfully, our son appears to be a well-adjusted adult now, because his emotional development finally, in due course, caught up with his intellectual growth.
Here's an extract with the focus on the childhood/education of SBF.
“Childhood was a funny thing for Sam,” said his father. “He was never comfortable with kids, or with being a kid.”
By the time Sam was eight Barbara had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s. She remembered the instant that happened. She had been at Stanford for over a decade, a frequent contributor of difficult papers to academic journals. “I was walking him to school and he asked me what I was doing,” Barbara recalled. “I told him I was giving some paper, and he asked, ‘What’s it on?’ I gave him a bullshit answer and he pressed me on it, and by the end of the walk we were in the middle of a deep conversation about the argument. The points he was making were better than any of the reviewers’. At that moment my parenting style changed.”
“There were some things I had to teach myself to do,” he said. “One is facial expressions. Like making sure I smile when I’m supposed to smile. Smiling was the biggest thing that I most weirdly couldn’t do.” Other people would say or do things to which he was meant to respond with some emotional display. And instead of faking it, he questioned the premise. What’s the whole point of facial expressions in the first place? If you’re going to say something to me, just say it. Why do I have to grin while you do it?
Very early on Sam realised that he’d need to acquire abilities most people just took for granted. But he also knew that he could take for granted abilities that other people sweated to learn.
In kindergarten a teacher had suggested to Barbara and Joe that they enrol him in a school for gifted kids. “We thought she was bats,” Barbara said. For the next seven years they were given no reason to think they’d made a mistake. Right through middle school Sam was a good but not great student, defined mainly by his lack of interest in whatever his teacher was saying. “I was obedient in that I wouldn’t do shit I wasn’t supposed to do,” Sam said. “But I wouldn’t necessarily do shit I was supposed to do. I’d just be sitting there in a stupor.”
It was in middle school that he became conscious of the fact he was not a happy person. Depression took many forms, and his was of the low- level, simmering kind. “I think in general when people are depressed they know they are depressed,” he said. “My form of it was not out-of-control negative. My form of it was lack of positive.” He had a fault line inside him, pressure was building on it and one day, in the seventh grade, it slipped. His mother returned from work to find Sam alone, in despair. “I came home and he was crying,” Barbara recalled. “He said, ‘I’m so bored I’m going to die.’”
Barbara and Joe organised a small group of parents to beseech the school to offer an advanced math class. The school relented and brought in a special teacher. “The class met at seven,” Barbara recalled. “And for the first time Sam just jumped out of bed at 6.30. Up till then there wasn’t a real clear indicator that he was special.” It was then that Barbara and Joe decided to spend the money to send him to a fancy private high school, Crystal Springs Uplands.
Crystal Springs made no difference. “I hated it there too,” Sam said. “The whole way through. I didn’t like classes. I didn’t like my schoolmates. I was bored.” The student body was a who’s who of Silicon Valley children. (Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, was in Sam’s class.) By most standards it was a nerdy school. “It was a lot of moderately unambitious, really rich kids,” he said. “The one thing they knew is they didn’t have to worry. So there was not a lot of drive and not a lot of pressure. Everyone went to Stanford.”
He wanted to think about things other kids had no interest in — including thinking — and he had no interest in what they wanted to think about. He didn’t even bother trying to fit in. Everyone else carried a backpack; he alone showed up with a rolling bag whose wheels thump-thump-thumped over the cobblestones as he moved from class to class.
By high school Sam had decided that he just didn’t like school, which was odd for a person who would finish at the top of his class. He’d also decided that at least some of the fault lay not with him but with school. English class, for instance. His doubts about English class dated back to the sixth grade. That was when the teachers had stopped worrying about simple literacy and turned their attention to deeper questions.
“As soon as English class went from ‘can you read a book’ to writing an essay about a book, I completely lost interest,” Sam recalled. He found literary criticism bizarre: who cared what you felt or thought about a story? The story was the story, with no provably right or wrong way to read it. “If they said talk about what you like or don’t like, I would do that,” he said. That’s not what they were asking him to do, however. They were asking him to interpret the book, and then judging him on his interpretations.
That he still received good grades from his English teachers didn’t lessen his scepticism of their enterprise. Why were they giving him an A? Why were they giving any grade to anyone for what amounted to an opinion? “I convinced the teachers that I was a good student, and thus I got good grades,” he said. “It was self-fulfilling to a decent extent.”
They gave him an A because they didn’t want to explain why they didn’t give him an A. All of humanities was like this for him: dopey stuff he wanted mainly to escape but that somehow always lurked around every corner. In choosing a college to attend, Sam sought to ensure he’d never again be made to write an essay about Jane Austen.
But even MIT, where he eventually landed, had a humanities requirement —a single liberal arts class, which he satisfied by taking film history, but even that grated on him. “Whatever ceasefire existed earlier in my life was gone,” he said. “I was starting to get a little bit of a whiff of ‘I don’t have to put up with it any more’. ” The very first question on the final exam set him off. What’s the difference between art and entertainment? “It’s a bullshit distinction dreamt up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs,” Sam wrote, and handed the exam back.
By the time Sam was eight Barbara had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s. She remembered the instant that happened. She had been at Stanford for over a decade, a frequent contributor of difficult papers to academic journals. “I was walking him to school and he asked me what I was doing,” Barbara recalled. “I told him I was giving some paper, and he asked, ‘What’s it on?’ I gave him a bullshit answer and he pressed me on it, and by the end of the walk we were in the middle of a deep conversation about the argument. The points he was making were better than any of the reviewers’. At that moment my parenting style changed.”
The Bankman-Frieds weren’t big on the usual holidays. They celebrated Hanukkah but with so little enthusiasm that one year they simply forgot it, and, realising that none of them cared, stopped celebrating anything. “It was, like, ‘All right, who was bothered by this fact — the fact that we forgot Hanukkah?’ No one raised their hand,” Sam said. They didn’t do birthdays either. Sam didn’t feel the slightest bit deprived. “My parents were, like, I dunno, ‘Is there something you want? All right, bring it up. And you can have it. Even in February. Doesn’t have to be in December. If you want it, let’s have an open and honest conversation about it instead of us trying to guess.’ ” Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want. The family’s indifference to convention came naturally and unselfconsciously.
Although Sam found it easier to talk with adults than with children, the connections he made with the adults were no stronger than those he made with other kids. In some deep way, he sensed, he remained cut off from other human beings. He could read them but they couldn’t read him.
Very early on Sam realised that he’d need to acquire abilities most people just took for granted. But he also knew that he could take for granted abilities that other people sweated to learn.
In kindergarten a teacher had suggested to Barbara and Joe that they enrol him in a school for gifted kids. “We thought she was bats,” Barbara said. For the next seven years they were given no reason to think they’d made a mistake. Right through middle school Sam was a good but not great student, defined mainly by his lack of interest in whatever his teacher was saying. “I was obedient in that I wouldn’t do shit I wasn’t supposed to do,” Sam said. “But I wouldn’t necessarily do shit I was supposed to do. I’d just be sitting there in a stupor.”
It was in middle school that he became conscious of the fact he was not a happy person. Depression took many forms, and his was of the low- level, simmering kind. “I think in general when people are depressed they know they are depressed,” he said. “My form of it was not out-of-control negative. My form of it was lack of positive.” He had a fault line inside him, pressure was building on it and one day, in the seventh grade, it slipped. His mother returned from work to find Sam alone, in despair. “I came home and he was crying,” Barbara recalled. “He said, ‘I’m so bored I’m going to die.’”
Barbara and Joe organised a small group of parents to beseech the school to offer an advanced math class. The school relented and brought in a special teacher. “The class met at seven,” Barbara recalled. “And for the first time Sam just jumped out of bed at 6.30. Up till then there wasn’t a real clear indicator that he was special.” It was then that Barbara and Joe decided to spend the money to send him to a fancy private high school, Crystal Springs Uplands.
Crystal Springs made no difference. “I hated it there too,” Sam said. “The whole way through. I didn’t like classes. I didn’t like my schoolmates. I was bored.” The student body was a who’s who of Silicon Valley children. (Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, was in Sam’s class.) By most standards it was a nerdy school. “It was a lot of moderately unambitious, really rich kids,” he said. “The one thing they knew is they didn’t have to worry. So there was not a lot of drive and not a lot of pressure. Everyone went to Stanford.”
He wanted to think about things other kids had no interest in — including thinking — and he had no interest in what they wanted to think about. He didn’t even bother trying to fit in. Everyone else carried a backpack; he alone showed up with a rolling bag whose wheels thump-thump-thumped over the cobblestones as he moved from class to class.
By high school Sam had decided that he just didn’t like school, which was odd for a person who would finish at the top of his class. He’d also decided that at least some of the fault lay not with him but with school. English class, for instance. His doubts about English class dated back to the sixth grade. That was when the teachers had stopped worrying about simple literacy and turned their attention to deeper questions.
“As soon as English class went from ‘can you read a book’ to writing an essay about a book, I completely lost interest,” Sam recalled. He found literary criticism bizarre: who cared what you felt or thought about a story? The story was the story, with no provably right or wrong way to read it. “If they said talk about what you like or don’t like, I would do that,” he said. That’s not what they were asking him to do, however. They were asking him to interpret the book, and then judging him on his interpretations.
That he still received good grades from his English teachers didn’t lessen his scepticism of their enterprise. Why were they giving him an A? Why were they giving any grade to anyone for what amounted to an opinion? “I convinced the teachers that I was a good student, and thus I got good grades,” he said. “It was self-fulfilling to a decent extent.”
They gave him an A because they didn’t want to explain why they didn’t give him an A. All of humanities was like this for him: dopey stuff he wanted mainly to escape but that somehow always lurked around every corner. In choosing a college to attend, Sam sought to ensure he’d never again be made to write an essay about Jane Austen.
But even MIT, where he eventually landed, had a humanities requirement —a single liberal arts class, which he satisfied by taking film history, but even that grated on him. “Whatever ceasefire existed earlier in my life was gone,” he said. “I was starting to get a little bit of a whiff of ‘I don’t have to put up with it any more’. ” The very first question on the final exam set him off. What’s the difference between art and entertainment? “It’s a bullshit distinction dreamt up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs,” Sam wrote, and handed the exam back.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-collapse-crypto-michael-lewis-bd90l2t2s
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