I recently read Bad Blood and Original Sin. Bad Blood is about the downfall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and the fraud that she committed. Original Sin is about the uncovering of Biden's mental degradation and the lead up to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.

I liked both books quite a bit, and I learned more from them than from most things that I read. I particularly enjoyed reading them one after the other because I thought that, despite addressing in many superficial ways very disparate situations, they had a lot of interesting commonalities that seem like they say something important about human nature and epistemics (including reinforcing a bunch of lessons I feel like I learned from the experience with FTX).

A few of those commonalities:

• Both deal with the concealment of extremely valuable and in some sense difficult-to-conceal information for an extended period of time.
• Both feature very driven and intelligent people who commit profound acts of self-deception that were very damaging for them, the people around them, and to some extent the world. Both “got in too deep” such that there was probably no escape that seemed good by their lights by the end. 
• • I think this is an underrated point: the extent to which self-delusion and selfishness can bring people to take actions that are clearly incredibly destructive and irrational from their own perspective. Especially with Holmes, who must have been aware of the profound shortcomings of her technology even as she pushed forward with deploying it, it seems pretty clear that she was "walking dead" for quite a while. Towards the end, she was in a bad situation with no real chance of success, towards the end. Yet she continued to double down and dig herself deeper. 
  • • There's something especially depressing about this. Not only can smart, well resourced people be selfish and sadistic, they can do horrible, destructive things to prolong a situation that isn’t even good from their own perspective, perhaps because the short-term pain of coming clean is too aversive even if it’d reduce their long term suffering.
• Arguably, both “fly too close to the sun” and miss out on nearby worlds where they left much better legacies (if Biden had stopped at the end of his first term, if Elizabeth had settled for being a smart, driven and very charismatic person who probably could have risen to a relatively high level in a legitimate business).
• • This doesn't seem like an unfortunate accident. Both got to positions of prominence by seeking and holding on to power.
• Both additionally deal with a collection of accomplished, well-resourced people who are adjacent to the deception and have a lot to lose from it, and yet fail to act quickly and effectively to reduce the damage.

A few lessons I took from them (not new, but I thought they were particularly poignant examples): 

• Having generically smart, competent people adjacent to a situation absolutely does not guarantee that even really obvious and important things will get done with any reliability or quality. It's easy for things to fall between the cracks, For something to be aversive and get deprioritized by busy people. It's easy for something to not be anyone's job. It's easy for someone to be smart and successful in many domains, but completely miscalibrated, ignorant, or catastrophically distracted in others.
• Intimidation and harassment of potential whistleblowers is often effective for extended periods of time. Extreme insularity and litigiousness is at least a yellow flag.

From Original Sin

• A huge disanalogy between the two books is that in Original Sin, a big factor was prominent Democrats thinking that they needed to back Biden despite their misgivings to increase the chances that he beat Trump. While I think this is ethically fraught and backfired in the end, it's easy to see how they arrived at that position, and the reasoning that got them there seems potentially compelling. This isn't as much the case with Bad Blood.
• The book seems like it doesn't really want to call out prominent Democrats other than Biden's inner circle as having fucked up. But assessing the suitability of the presidential candidate really seems like one of the most important roles and responsibilities of senior party officials, so I feel pretty bad about their performance there.
• Personal connections seem like they were pretty destructive. A lot of people seemed very reluctant to damage the prospects of someone they considered a friend, even when they thought the fate of American democracy could potentially be at stake, even when they thought it could mean the difference between a competent and incompetent president.
• Biden is depicted as surrounding himself largely with sycophants who come to rely on him as their own personal sources of power and who hide poll numbers for him. And then, as a consequence, ending up with really miscalibrated takes on his probability of winning the election. I think I hadn't fully processed the degree to which one effect of surrounding yourself with people who rely on you for power might push you to take risks to retain your power that you, if you were clear-headed, might think better of. 

And from Bad Blood in particular: 

• Important companies can leverage and deceive generically smart and prestigious board members who are highly distracted and aren't subject matter experts. In Bad Blood, Holmes manages to deceive and maintain control over a board of extremely generically competent and powerful people (Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis, Rupert Murdoch), to their substantial reputational (and in some cases, financial) detriment. In a poignant episode, George Schultz sides with Holmes against his own grandson, a former Theranos employee-turned-whistleblower being harassed by the company, dividing their family. 
• • It seems like as non-SMEs in healthcare and lab testing, they were slow to notice warning signs about misconduct, and very bad at doing due diligence on what was going on. I worry a lot about non-technical board members of AI companies being similarly manipulated and low context on what their companies are doing
• It seems like aggressive lawyers kind of shoot themselves in the foot by being extremely aggressive towards high-profile investigative journalists. It seems predictable that this would trigger the journalists to double down rather than scaring them off or reassuring them that there's nothing to be concerned about. I don't know what's going on here; maybe they can't code switch / they just get stuck on a strategy of being aggressive all the time.