How EA is portrayed in "Going Infinite"

How EA is portrayed in "Going Infinite" — EA Forum 
 
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 by EA Lifestyles , Kirsten Oct 7 2023 9 min read 17 95

 Community FTX collapse Sam Bankman-Fried Frontpage This is a linkpost for https://ealifestyles.substack.com/p/every-mention-of-ea-in-going-infinite Note: This post summarizes every mention of EA in Going Infinite. It is NOT a copy and pasted list of every sentence with the words "effective altruism".  
 

 Pinocchio is narrated by Jiminy Cricket; the Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick; Sam Bankman-Fried’s story is narrated by Michael Lewis. His book, Going Infinite, isn’t written from Sam’s perspective, exactly. Michael Lewis is a sympathetic fly on the wall documenting a tragically flawed underdog being destroyed by his own infinite ambition.

 But like the Great Gatsby, where Nick speaks so fondly about Daisy (who Gatsby loves) and so unkindly about Tom (who Gatsby hates), you get the sense that Sam’s love for the effective altruism movement colours a lot of what ended up in the book.

 Spectacle is another thing that colours what went into the book. Michael Lewis doesn’t take the tabloid road and make this a book about drugs and shrimp rings and “the polycule”, thankfully. But I can’t shake the feeling that most of the characters in the book are basically zoo animals on display for the public’s amusement.

 He’s constantly saying, implicitly or explicitly, that effective altruists are high iq children who don’t trust emotions or adults. It feels condescending: “Of course you failed. You’re children! Idiot savants, like something out of a Dostoevsky novel.”

 But he also seems to really believe EAs are genuine, and that’s not nothing.

 The first mention of effective altruism is in the preface. It doesn’t say effective altruism, exactly, but

 He [Sam] needed infinity dollars because he planned to address the biggest existential risks to life on earth: nuclear war, pandemics far more deadly than Covid, artificial intelligence that turned on mankind and wiped us out, and so on.

 And that really sets the tone for the rest of the book. At least according to his book, Michael Lewis believes that Sam, Caroline, Gary and Nishad were motivated to earn a lot of money because they wanted to give it to charity.

 Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the character of Sam, including the way he thinks about expected value and the way he taught himself to make facial expressions, and Chapter 3 properly introduces effective altruism.

 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 [Will MacAskill’s unmarried name] 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 variou

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