The Six: Going (In)finite
Michael Lewis' newest book sheds a spotlight on a generational malaise.
Hello!
Today’s newsletter contains a bit of a change of pace. I’m including some recommendations upfront before linking to a longer thinkpiece I’ve written on Michael Lewis’ latest book. Let me know what you think in the comments or by emailing me.
Enjoy!
The Anxious Generation: I recently picked up a copy of this book and agree with absolutely everything in it so far. I’ll have more to say in a future installment of The Six.
Tiger Woods, Scottie Scheffler, and the New Golf Landscape: I’m a casual watcher of golf but tune in for The Masters every year. This year’s champion, Scottie Scheffler, had quite a take on what victory means to him. It’s a marked contrast to the win-at-all-costs approach of Tiger Woods, whose meek demeanor on the course is a marked contrast to his previous persona. (This is what I wrote about him a few years ago.)
Atheist Richard Dawkins is…a Christian? It’s fascinating to see one of the “four horsemen of the New Atheism” acknowledge that it is Christianity, not secularism, that has shaped him.
The Enhanced Games. Welcome to our transhumanist future. I expect to say more on this soon too.
“What if God worships me?” No comment.
See below.
The Infinitely Bankrupt Framework of Effective Altruism
Michael Lewis has a penchant for making accessible the impenetrable numbers that influence our behavior. His 2010 book The Big Short explored the rise of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s before the epic collapse of the financial system precipitated by the ubiquity of subprime mortgages. In 2015, he followed that up with Flash Boys, an exploration into high-frequency trading (HFT) firms and the massive piles of cash that they were able to acquire by shaving nanoseconds off of stock exchange prices. In a similar vein (but making for much more delightful reading for this baseball fan), Moneyball told the story of the Oakland Athletics’ pathbreaking use of sabermetrics to bring postseason semi-success to a chronically underachieving and effectively broke franchise.
His latest installment, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (©2023, W.W. Norton & Co.), is an exploration of cryptocurrency, effective altruism, and the man who tied the two together. To champions of either of those things, the book is a lament about what could and should have been; to those with a more accurate view of the world, it’s akin to a Shakespearean morality play on human hubris and finitude. The tragic hero of this lament, or the calculating villain of the play, is Sam Bankman-Fried, the twenty-something wunderkind who started his own cryptocurrency futures exchange and trading firm to amass the world’s largest pile of wealth so that he could give it away to those who needed it. Except that’s not what happened at all.
After an opening prelude about the chaos at FTX and Alameda (the twin companies Sam founded), Lewis dives into his origin story. We learn that Sam’s childhood was remarkable: as a small child, his mother took him to Six Flags and “hauled him dutifully from amusement to amusement” before he asked, perplexed, “Are you having fun, Mom?” (The implication: he wasn’t.) We learn of him at a young age making arguments about one of her academic papers that she deemed to be superior to those of her reviewers. (One might question here what sort of an educational system breeds reviewers who are bested by an eight year old, but Lewis does not.) At every turn, we learn of Sam’s prodigious intellect, unencumbered by social convention or obligation.
It was in 2012 that Sam first encountered the philosopher Will MacAskill at a talk that MacAskill gave to a small group of students at Harvard. As Lewis describes it, MacAskill illustrated the “binary choice” that Sam and his fellow students faced. This choice was not, as you might suspect, a choice between committing good or committing evil. It is instead the choice that faces only those who see all ethical action as that which occurs in a zero-sum, value-laden economy of goodness. In this framework, your only real choices are to be either “Direct Benefiters” or “Money-Makers.” The former are on the frontlines of charity work—think drilling wells in Uganda or working with Doctors without Borders in Haiti—while the latter send their money to the former to maximize the impact of their efforts. Sam decided on the path of the Money-Maker. As Lewis recounts:
[MacAskill]’s argument struck Sam as simply right. He’d long ago already decided that a person should judge his life by its consequences. MacAskill had made those consequences both dramatic and quantifiable: he should maximize the number of lives he saved. Sam had bought in instantly.
It turns out that “bought in” is not just a metaphor: It was this conviction that led Sam to found FTX and Alameda Research, two entities that shared bank accounts and whose entire raison d’être was to bring the lessons of HFT firms to the Wild West of cryptocurrency. To make a long story short, this experiment went badly. Sam briefly climbed the world’s list of billionaires before it all came tumbling down amidst SEC investigations and allegations of fraud. Along the way, Sam hobnobbed with the rich and famous, maintained a secretive on-and-off again romantic relationship with one of his senior executives,1 and is alleged to have absconded with client money for things like paying one hundred million dollar bribes to Chinese officials.
My interest here is not in recapitulating the spectacular fall of FTX by explaining exactly how the money was used, and how FTX and Alameda pooled their resources to make unacceptably risky bets on margin trades, and how Sam bamboozled investors into giving him millions of dollars. Michael Lewis does that well enough in Going Infinite, and I encourage you to read it if you want the sordid details. It’s a modern Icarus tale of flying too close to the sun.
Rather than the how, I’m more interested in asking, “why?” Why is it that this man and his cadre of vegan-inclined do-gooders have ended up either in prison or testifying against each other in a massive fraud case that rivals that of Enron? Something obviously went very wrong.
The Perils of Formlessness
Sam’s formation in the moral virtues appears to be fragmented and chaotic. His parents deliberately refused to marry (“in silent protest of the fact that their gay friends could not”) and halfheartedly celebrated Hannukah until “one year they simply forgot it.” Sam thought the notion of Santa Claus to be about as realistic as Bugs Bunny, which was a conviction he inexplicably extended to the notion of God. “I never understood why people bothered pretending about this shit,” he condescendingly muttered later. “Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out.” That Sam lacked the self-awareness to make such a pronunciation while he hatched ill-fated plans to become the world’s richest human is an accomplishment in itself.
Lewis is at pains throughout this book to illustrate that to Sam, the world populated by irrational sheep who were simply living in Sam’s world, and the reader might be tempted to draw a comparison here between Sam and other tech luminaries like Steve Jobs. In his biography of Apple’s founder, Walter Isaacson writes about Jobs’ “reality distortion field,” wherein he could see what no one else could see and somehow convince others to believe in it too. But Jobs’ vision, however misguided, was fundamentally different from Sam’s. Like Sam, he eschewed wearing shoes and had questionable habits of personal hygiene. He had no patience for dissenters. He was not interested in anyone’s expectations but his own. But Jobs was an artist. We can debate the virtues of his goals another time (and I think about this a lot), but ultimately Jobs wanted to make technology user-friendly, ubiquitous, and helpful. Sam wanted to make technology profitable.
Bankman-Fried’s ethical convictions were shaped profoundly by the work of modern utilitarian philosophers—for whom Will MacAskill is a leading light—who articulate “effective altruism.” This paradigm, or “EA” as its adherents have labeled it, is a badly descriptive term to indicate a commitment to a loosely defined set of core principles. Borrowing here from effectivealtruism.org, I’ll reproduce these four principles below, but with my own descriptions.
As you may have discerned from the above list, effective altruism is nothing more than old-fashioned utilitarianism repackaged in the language of cosmopolitan ethics. It’s quite simple, and flows logically as a corollary from a handful of premises, each equally as flawed as the last:
Each of us has a moral obligation to minimize pain and maximize pleasure;
Physical health and extension of life is the most important way to maximize pleasure;
Value is the most effective way to positively affect pleasure;
Money is the most efficient form of value;
Technology is instrumental to maximizing money;
Therefore: I have an obligation to use technology to make as much money as I can and give as much money as I can to these causes.
There’s nothing particularly new here. It’s utilitarianism with a veneer of Franciscan asceticism. But it is apparently compelling enough for a generation of tech titans. In a 2022 article, The New Yorker profiled Will MacAskill, a British academic who is, as the title describes, “the reluctant prophet of effective altruism:”
But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism. Singer, prompted by widespread and eradicable hunger in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought experiment: if you stroll by a child drowning in a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too much about soiling your clothes before you wade in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s location—in an actual pond nearby or in a metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to allowing a child to drown for the sake of a dry cleaner’s bill. For about four decades, Singer’s essay was assigned predominantly as a philosophical exercise: his moral theory was so onerous that it had to rest on a shaky foundation, and bright students were instructed to identify the flaws that might absolve us of its demands. MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it.
I won’t dive into all of the problems with utilitarianism or the Singer Principle per se, as I don’t have the space to do so. (If you’re interested, this paper by David Lyons is a good starting point.) But here I propose what I’ll call the New Singer Principle, which is glaringly simple: if your entire ethical framework is built upon the moral reasoning of an ethicist who says that baby killing can in fact be a moral imperative, then your ethical framework is flawed.
I don’t mean to be flippant (or at least not too flippant) to Dr. MacAskill and his fellow “effective altruists.” I certainly admire his Franciscan impulse to give to the poor, and we could all take a cue from him there. But the first principles from which “effective altruism” begins are teleologically bankrupt. Utilitarians (including the effective altruists) reduce the question of ethics to a series of “do” and “do not” propositions. They then base their answers to these propositions on an incalculable set of unknowable facts (there are children drowning in lakes! this mentally disadvantaged baby won’t possibly have a good life! if you pay for a beer in Oxford then a child in Africa will never be cured of blindness!), and insist on the necessity, not the optionality, of acting in accordance with those answers.
Let us briefly return to Peter Singer’s hypothetical scenario about a child drowning in the pond. Does it follow that we are obligated to forgo all material goods for the sake of drowning children in Bangladesh? No, of course not. I certainly can (and should) forgo spending my mortgage money on a Louis Vuitton monstrosity, but I have good reasons for purchasing a reasonable dress shirt at Kohl’s, all in keeping with a life of virtue I am trying to lead. Perhaps I’m attending church services or the funeral of a close friend. Or maybe I’m interviewing for a job to feed my family. I’ve made these decisions not because I hate children in Bangladesh, but because I’m trying to work hard, fulfill my interdependent obligations to those in my community, and to love my neighbor. If I choose to forego paying the dry cleaner, or buying a shirt at all, could I save a child? Maybe, but there’s no way to be certain, and in this hypothetical there’s not even a plausible mechanism of action. How, exactly, would sending thirty dollars to Bangladesh save a drowning child?2 It is, however, obviously the case that I can use that thirty dollars help to feed a dry cleaner’s family—or pay a Kohl’s employee’s healthcare premiums.
(Neither of my objections to Singer’s scenario even touches the calculation problem, which is how I would describe utilitarianism’s fatal flaw. The summary of this problem is bipartite: First, the calculation of happiness, which is qualitative, is fundamentally impossible; second, the claims of utilitarianism lead, I think irrevocably, to the Repugnant Conclusion. If you’re interested in some of the analysis of this problem as it relates to the work of Will MacAskill, check out Slate Star Codex’s review of his book What We Owe the Future.)
An Ethics to Nowhere
As you may know, this utilitarian approach is profoundly different from the virtues-based ethics of the ancient philosophers. In the classical world, questions about ethics were about how to live a good life, or “eudaimonia.” By “the good life,” I don’t mean sitting on the beach with your toes in the sand sipping a piña colada. That sounds nice, but it isn’t Aristotle’s definition. He is concerned with the cultivation of virtues that will make a person good, and with the importance of inculcating those virtues through repeated habituation. When the virtues are rightly ordered in a person, she or he will live an integrated life, and that person will form friendships with other humans and build fraternal and political communities.3
Another way of saying this is that utilitarians are mostly concerned about doing good, whereas virtue ethicists abstract one ontological level above that question and are more concerned with being good. What course of action today will cultivate the virtues in me that will make me a good person? How can I raise my children with an appreciation for the virtues? How can I develop these virtues within my polis, or city? This last question is a crucial one: human beings are not simply random atoms (Adams?) colliding together in haphazard ways, but “political animals” who tend toward interdependence, fraternity, and community. The ontological beginning of all of this is that the chief virtue is love (an insight St. Paul gave us in the 1st century), and that without it, all of our other efforts toward ethical action, however well-intended, are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
Back to Sam Bankman-Fried: He was ill-equipped for his moneymaking crusade. Throughout Going Infinite, Lewis’ intimate portraits of Bankman-Fried portray him as a socially disconnected, relationally starved adolescent who couldn’t answer interviewers’ questions without playing a video game at the same time. By pointing this out, I’m not poking fun at Sam’s obvious mental health needs. The poor chap was constantly on ADD medication and clearly had a hard time feeling normal human emotions.
Instead, I’m suggesting that the ethical framework that he made his cause célèbre was hardly adequate to the task of forming him for the great task that he chose. With a singular directive of “money making,” he cut corners, decided that the rules of the polis (read: tax jurisdictions) did not apply to him, inflicted emotional duress on his colleagues and employees, and eventually lost a lot of money.
History will not remember the social causes to which Sam Bankman-Fried donated his money. History will, however, remember that he was not a good man.
When tension in the relationship between Sam and Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, would reach a tipping point, the two liked to exchange business memos back and forth summarizing their feelings about the relationship. At one point Sam sent a memo outlining “ARGUMENTS AGAINST [Dating]” and “ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR” that included “There are a lot of really f***ed up things about dating an employee” in the former category, and “I really like f***ing you” in the latter. (Redactions mine>) Hardly a Jane Austen romance!
I’m being flippant, intentionally. Obviously Singer knows that I can’t mail a check to Bangladesh to save a child from dihydrogen monoxide. But his scenario fails precisely because it is not grounded in anything real. My life, and my interactions with my neighbors every day, is.
Interestingly, it follows from this view that political communities are not sterile walled gardens for the purpose of racial, economic, or religious segregation but naturally occurring associations for the benefit of all who belong to them.