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October 2 - October 4, 2023
“One hundred and fifty billion dollars,”
an island without a school
His ambition was grandiose, but he wasn’t.
Coinbase crypto exchange, where trading volume in 2017 was thirty times greater than in 2016.)
insatiable demand for young women. “Requirements are: pretty, big boobs, have done live streaming before, born in 2000 or later, good at chitchatting,” read the job ad for a salesperson
The businesses themselves didn’t always know what they were doing, or why. They were hiring lots of people because they could afford to, and big headcounts signaled their importance.
Every man Natalie Tien had ever met in crypto had been chiefly interested in money and women, and Sam was chiefly interested in neither—though
Rotterdam circa 1637, when a single tulip bulb traded for roughly triple the price of a Rembrandt.
but it wasn’t an Afro. 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.
your assets were worth only what other people were willing to pay for them.
He had more trouble with sleep than anyone she’d ever known.
“Yup” was Sam’s go-to word,
all while his knee jackhammered at four beats a second.
he needed to be playing this other game at the same time as whatever game he had going in real life.
Curiously, only when he was talking did he want to see her.
he’d been perplexed by the way people allowed physical appearance to shape their lives.
was possible for almost everyone to be self-evidently wrong about
something. “Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out,”
Smiling was the biggest thing that I most weirdly couldn’t do.”
was obedient in that I wouldn’t do shit I wasn’t supposed to do,” said Sam. “But I wouldn’t necessarily do shit I was supposed to do.
about. The thing that offended me is that it wasn’t honest with itself. It was subjectivity framed as objectivity. All the grading was arbitrary.
What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.*
“There should exist within the game a scenario where it is impossible to determine a winning strategy.”
This was a radical notion: the game was ultimately unknowable.
“They blurred the line between libertarianism as a philosophy and selfishness as a philosophy,”
to a utilitarian abortion looks a lot like birth control.
This was how Sam figured out who he was: by thinking about things for himself, without a whole lot of concern for the thoughts of others.
Magic culture that tournament rules eventually included standards of personal hygiene, after players began to weaponize their body odor.
had sort of implicitly assumed that academia was the center of morality,”
he’d experienced a boredom that had the intensity of physical pain.
he still couldn’t tell a good coder from a bad coder.
key to the game was to make quick judgments about the expected value of bizarre situations, and act on them.
“Childhood doesn’t give you a version of this that would tell you that you are good at it,”
Eventually he came to the view that we needed to give what we had to others until the cost to ourselves outweighed the benefits to them. We needed to stop thinking of charity as a thing that was nice to do but okay not to do, and begin to think of it as our duty.
knew the sort of person who’d be coming up to speak with him: the sort of person who scored an 800 on their math SAT,
Roughly three in four of the people who approached MacAskill after one of his talks were young men with a background in math or science.
All had involved social interactions.
disturbed by Sam’s indifference to other people’s feelings.
were bad at distinguishing their pet peeves from legitimate criticism.
adverse selection.
eager to make a bet with you is the person you should be most worried about betting against.
“People get so obsessed with free dollars when you frame it correctly,”
Sam’s email address was a Fibonacci sequence,
they were increasingly automated. People didn’t trade directly with people.
Speed became maybe the single most valuable attribute in a trading system.
information deforestation—an attempt to reduce to zero the amount of time it took for any piece of information to be registered in the prices of financial assets. “It’s the most complex and efficient game in the world,”
They were less socially adept than the
older traders, because they could afford to
ETFs, whose global value had grown from less than $100 billion to $2.2 trillion (on its way to more than $10 trillion in 2022).
And the real world seldom offered you coins weighted dramatically in your favor.
