It’s useful to compare Lewis’s book with two other recent ones about Silicon Valley executives: John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Sarah Wynn-Williams Careless People. Both books focus on the immorality of Silicon Valley executives (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos in the first book, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan of Facebook in the second). These are tales of ambition, hubris, and utter indifference to the human suffering left in their wake. Now, you could tell a similar story about Bankman-Fried. In fact, this is what Zeke Faux did in his book Number Go Up. but that’s not the story that Lewis told. Instead, Lewis told a very different kind of story. His book is more of a character study of a person with an extremely idiosyncratic view of risk. The story Lewis told about Bankman-Fried wasn’t the story that people wanted to hear. They wanted another Bad Blood, and that’s not the book he ended up writing. As a consequencee, he told the wrong story.
Telling the wrong story is a particular risk when it comes to explaining a public large-scale incidents. We’re inclined to believe that a big incident can only happen because of a big screw-up: that somebody must have done something wrong for that incident to happen. If, on the other hand, you tell a story about how the incident happened despite nobody doing anything wrong, then you are in essence telling an unbelievable story. And, by definition, people don’t believe unbelievable stories.
From Telling the wrong story on Lorin’s excellent blog, Surfing Complexity.
