I recently read “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon” by Michael Lewis. Here’s the quotes I found most interesting:
“The interactions between the cards were too complicated to fully understand—at some point Garfield realized even he could not predict what might happen in his own game, which he liked. “The game is shallow if you know when you create it what the best play is,” he said. “There should exist within the game a scenario where it is impossible to determine a winning strategy.”” (31)
“The more Sam saw of academic life, the more it felt like one long canned talk, created mainly for narrow career purposes.” (39)
“Sam said, “There was very little evidence that they were doing much of anything to change the world. Or even thinking about how to have the most impact on the world.”” (39)
“He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.” (73)
“In their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs.” (98)
“Ramnik said, “The smartest minds of our generation are either buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an add. This is the tragedy of our generation.” (122)
“Jump Trading-not a conventional venture capitalist-offered to buy a stake in FTX at a company valuation of $4 billion. “Sam said no, the fundraise is at twenty billion,” recalled Ramnik. Jump responded by saying that they’d be interested at that price if Sam could find others who were too—which told you that the value people assigned to new businesses was arbitrary.” (127)
“Selling a new business to a VC was apparently less like selling a sofa than it was like pitching a movie idea. The VCs’ eagerness to buy turned less on your hard numbers than on how excited they became about the story you told. It was as if they spent their day listening to stories and picking the ones they liked best. There was no rhyme or reason to their evaluations: English class all over again.” (127)
“In a single four-year term, a president, working with Congress, directed roughly $15 trillion in spending. And yet in 2016, the sum total of spending by all candidates on races for the presidency and Congress came to a mere $6.5 billion. “It just seems like there isn’t enough money in politics,” said Sam. “People are underdoing it. The weird thing is that Warren Buffett isn’t giving two billion dollars a year.”” (178)
“One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. 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.” (189)
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