The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
132410581X
Michael Lewis
Notes
…so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they’d been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.
(Will MacAskill) grouped these into four broad categories and offered examples of each:
- Direct Benefiter: doctor, NGO worker
- Money-maker: banker, management consultant
- Researcher: medical researcher, ethicist
- Influencer: politician, teacher
- The odds of any given Researcher or Influencer saving vast numbers of lives were vanishingly small….If you didn’t become a doctor, someone else would take your place and the doctoring would still get done. Of course, if you didn’t become a banker, someone else would take your place – but that person would spend his money on houses and cars and private schools for his kids and perhaps non-life saving donations to Yale.
How did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior. The sentence told you a lot about how Sam viewed other people, and maybe himself too. Not as fixed characters – good or bad, honest or false, brave or cowardly – but as a probability distribution around some mean. People were neither the wort nor the best thing they’d ever done. “I deeply believe and act as if people are probability distributions, not their means,” he wrote.
The truth was that grown ups bored him. All they did was slow him down.
Effective Altruism