Yev > Books: 0reviewed‎ (576)

The Remains of the Day's ending still sticks with me. It made me completely reevaluate my entire life philosophy. I didn't want to be Stevens, an old man alone with a life of subservience to a people and broader society who never really gave a shit about me, passing on everything I wanted on account of an outward-face I had assumed. It was the one book that I've read that changed my life more than anything I've ever read.

The Remains of the Day hit me incredibly hard, right through a chink in my armor. That deep sorrow of Stevens felt like it was aimed directly at people like me. I cried because it scared me more deeply than anything ever had before or since. I became terrified that I'd go through life with my armor up and my detachment so complete that, at my own twilight, I'd look back and regret the way I'd spent my life.

When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything.

“We weren’t close growing up,” he said, when I reached him. “I don’t think Sam liked school that much, but I don’t really know. He kept to himself. I would interact with him as another tenant in my house.”

To their dinner guests it seemed that Joe and especially Barbara were both a little afraid for, and of, their elder son.

Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want.

“Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out,” he said.

““Not being super close to that many particular people made it more natural to care not about anyone in particular but about everyone,” he said. “The default wiring I had was, ‘Yeah, there’s not anyone who doesn’t matter. So I guess I should care the same amount about everyone.’ ”

One other oddly big thing happened to Sam at the beginning of his junior year. Completely out of the blue, a twenty-five-year-old lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University named Will Crouch* reached out and asked to meet with him. Sam never learned how the guy had found him—probably from the writing Sam had been doing on various utilitarian message boards. MacAskill belonged to a small group inside Oxford that had embraced ideas hatched long ago by an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer.

What he’d done to Asher was no more than what Jane Street was doing to competitors in financial markets every day. “It was not like I was unaware I was being a piece of shit to Asher,” he said. “The relevant thing was: Should I decide to prioritize making the people around me feel better, or proving my point?” Sam thought his bosses had misread his social problems. They thought he needed to learn how to read other people. Sam believed the opposite was true. “I read people pretty well,” he said. “They just didn’t read me.”

“To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head—the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude,” he wrote. “And I don’t feel those things. But I don’t feel anything, or at least anything good. I don’t feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion. I feel the awkwardness of the moment enclosing on me. The pressure to react appropriately, to show that I love them back. And I don’t, because I can’t.”

they called a meeting to announce that they had persuaded the rich effective altruists who had lent them the $170 million to demand its return

And so, on April 9, 2018, his entire management team, along with half of his employees, walked out the door

“Sam forgets how many people thought he was a scammer at first,” said Ryan. “You’d expect to find a Sam behind any scam.”

It was a weird conversation—the CEO of one crypto exchange calling the CFO of another to inform him that, if he didn’t want to lose money on his new futures contract, he’d need to improve his market manipulation.

“He has absolutely zero empathy,” she said. “That’s what I learned that I didn’t know. He can’t feel anything.