Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

He wasn’t braggy. He had opinions, but he didn’t seem to expect his listener to share them, and he pretended to listen to mine even when what I was saying clearly didn’t interest him. He didn’t even seem all that taken with his own fantastic story.

It was just a mess, and like everything about Sam’s appearance felt less like a decision than a decision not to make a decision.

That approach had worked during the dot-com bubble, when everyone could agree that even though Pets.com was ridiculous it was still worth $400 million, because investors were willing to buy it at that valuation.

He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations.

His whole life, as far back as he could remember, he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives. “You start by making decisions on who you are going to be with based on how they look,” he said. “Then, because of that, you make bad choices about religion and food and everything else. Then you are just rolling the dice on who you are going to be.”

you, student at an elite university, will spend roughly eighty thousand hours of your life working. If you are the sort of person who wants to “do good” in the world, what is the most effective way to spend those hours?

The agronomist Norman Borlaug (Researcher), for instance, had invented disease-resistant wheat, which had saved roughly two hundred fifty million people from starvation.

“The demographics of who this appeals to are the demographics of a physics PhD program,” he said. “The levels of autism ten times the average. Lots of people on the spectrum.”

And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own.

Crypto was like the friend you’d made only because you shared an enemy. The sort of person drawn to it, at least in the beginning, was the sort of person suspicious of big banks and governments and other forms of institutional authority.

The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system.

They were all outliers in terms of their intelligence and the way they approached the world.” Soon enough, he saw that it wasn’t a game. They were all completely and utterly sincere. They judged the morality of any action by its consequences and were living their life to maximize those consequences. George accepted their premise, as he had accepted the premises of the crypto guys who thought the government was spying on them. “It wasn’t my job to challenge them,” he said. “They were internally consistent, and if they’re internally consistent, I’m okay with it. And, you know, maybe it’s a way of actually benefiting the world, even if it is a little bit of a weird way.”

him to detect patterns in his new patients’ behavior. For example, they all professed to care about “humanity,” while at the same time often being a bit slow to love actual people.

Ian had found the same thought often crossing his mind: how shockingly just like he’d been in high school Sam still was. When the oddball in your high school class became one of the richest people in the world, you sort of assumed the oddball must have changed. Sam hadn’t changed. The world around him had.

The Asians especially were confused by the lack of an organization chart. A surprising number of people who were meant to report directly to Sam had discovered how little Sam wanted to be reported to by them.

You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn’t, not really—which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life.