Why Sam Bankman-Fried Doesn’t Read Novels

Averroes and the STEM Case Against Literature

Sam Bankman-Fried famously boasted that he would “never read a book” and dismissed literature as worthless. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading,” he told an interviewer, “but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” He’d skim the first and last paragraphs of articles, get the gist, and move on. Fiction? A complete waste of time.

Before we dismiss this as mere philistinism, we should recognize that SBF was articulating a coherent philosophical position—one with surprisingly deep roots. The key to understanding STEM skepticism about literature lies not in Silicon Valley, but in 12th-century Córdoba, with the philosopher Averroes, a rationalist Islamic philosopher who sought to fuse his religion with the tenets of Aristotelian logic.

Averroes proposed an elegant theory about why prophets use imaginative language. Philosophical truth, he argued, exists in abstract, rational form. But most people cannot grasp pure abstractions. So prophets and religious teachers translate these truths into imaginative, metaphorical language—parables, images, stories—that appeal to the masses. The crowd mistakes these imaginative vehicles for the truth itself, taking the metaphors literally. But the enlightened philosopher knows better: the imaginative form is merely pedagogical scaffolding, dispensable once you’ve grasped the underlying rational content.