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“Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out,”
He simply came to terms with the fact that the world could be completely wrong about something, and he could be completely right.
“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.”
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.
Why were they giving any grade to anyone for what amounted to an opinion?
He was a really rare combination of hyper-rational and extremely kind.”
Matt’s father, with whom he was very close, had died of a heart attack. “Sam told me the news in person and then drove me back to his nerd frat at MIT, where we played board games and video games all night to distract me before I flew back home the next day.”
He was perfectly positioned, emotionally and intellectually, to make a religion of himself.
Yeah, of course no one likes to pay taxes, but that’s not exactly a philosophy.
utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number.
Bentham
if you can’t think your way to a belief, how can you think your way to an action?”
By math camp standards he was only mediocre at puzzles and games.
a firmly held idea that he should evaluate his actions by their utilitarian effects,
Other people felt emotions; he did not.
Australian philosopher named Peter Singer.
we needed to give what we had to others until the cost to ourselves outweighed the benefits to them.
What good can capital do if invested and returns used to fix poverty. What about forced transfers by govt. $ to govt ilo charity. Gov inefficiency
Effective altruism, the Oxford philosophers called their movement,
The agronomist Norman Borlaug (Researcher), for instance, had invented disease-resistant wheat, which had saved roughly two hundred fifty million people from starvation.
Profit motive?
save several times more lives than any one doctor.
Saving lives the end?
houses and cars and private schools
Builders auto workers teachers
doctors in Africa.
Need contraception
demographics of a physics PhD program,” he said. “The levels of autism ten times the average. Lots of people on the spectrum.”
Bill gross elon musk
the person most eager to make a bet with you is the person you should be most worried about betting against.
When people wanted to bet—or trade—with you, there was usually a reason: they knew something you did not.
The first thing you did when someone offered you a bet was to make sure you weren’t mis...
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Lots of bets looked stupid after the fact because the person on the receiving end hadn’t thought about why a bet had ...
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“The first time a New York Times piece appeared about them, there was like a nuclear meltdown,” recalled one former Jane Street employee—who,
efficient frontier
this opaque and secretive trading firm had been in possession of the results, before anyone else in the world, of maybe the most consequential presidential election in modern times, and they had lost a fortune.
they had spent too much time getting their information and not enough time thinking about how to use it.
he’s resistant to the idea that someone is going to tell him something he doesn’t know.”
in their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs.
effective altruists
adverse selection
“Am I a net positive for the company or a net negative?”
Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.”
he was himself unsure if altruism existed in human nature.
once everyone agrees on what matters, it gets repeated,” said Sam.
people and even corporations could donate effectively unlimited sums of money to political campaigns
finding as many congressional candidates as they could who would support spending on pandemic prevention and buying their elections in bulk,
at least $8 billion belonging to crypto traders, and meant to be safe and sound inside FTX, had wound up instead inside Alameda Research.
effective altruists.
$15.7 million to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, for example, for “twenty service hours, twenty social posts, one virtual lunch and fifty autographs.”
Barbara stopped arguing with Sam about what he could say to Congress, and started arguing with him about what he should wear to jail. She wanted him to put on long pants. Sam insisted on remaining in his cargo shorts.
Hedge fund managers who had shorted the stocks of US banks that banked crypto routinely spread nasty rumors about the banks’ crypto customers, like FTX, in an attempt to damage the banks.
