Looking Back 2024

The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsby Thomas S. Kuhn

“That is the structure of scientific revolutions: normal science with a paradigm and a dedication to solving puzzles; followed by serious anomalies, which lead to a crisis; and finally resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm.”

• “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”
• “Progress in science is not a simple line leading to the truth. It is more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with, the world.”

Normal Science:

• “Normal science is… just working away at a few puzzles that are left open in a current field of knowledge.”
• “Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover. Discovery comes not when something goes right but when something is awry, a novelty that runs counter to what was expected. In short, what appears to be an anomaly.”
• “Normal science is characterized by a paradigm, which legitimates puzzles and problems on which the community works. All is well until the methods legitimated by the paradigm cannot cope with a cluster of anomalies; crisis results and persists until a new achievement redirects research and serves as a new paradigm. That is a paradigm shift…”
• “First we frame bold conjectures, as testable as possible, and inevitably find them wanting. They are refuted, and a new conjecture must be found that fits the facts. Hypotheses can count as ‘scientific’ only if they are falsifiable.”

Three Types of Problems:

1. Determination of significant facts
2. Matching of facts with theory
3. Articulation of theory

Three Traditions of Research:

1. Theoretical
2. Experimental
3. Instrumental

Switching Paradigms:

• “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”
• “The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.”
• “A crisis involves a period of extraordinary, rather than normal, research, with a ‘proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals.’”
• “Science… is Darwinian, and revolutions are often like speciation events, in which one species splits into two, or in which one species continues but with a variant on the side following its own trajectory.”

The Nature of Light:

• “No period between remote antiquity and the end of the seventeenth century exhibited a single generally accepted view about the nature of light. Instead there were a number of competing schools and subschools, most of them espousing one variant or another of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory. One group took light to be particles emanating from material bodies; for another it was a modification of the medium that intervened between the body and the eye; still another explained light in terms of an interaction of the medium with an emanation from the eye; and there were other combinations and modifications besides.”

The Structure of Groups:

• “Note briefly how the emergence of a paradigm affects the structure of the group that practices the field… It is sometimes just its reception of a paradigm that transforms a group previously interested merely in the study of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline.”

Skipping First Principles:

• “Freed from the concern with any and all electrical phenomena, the united group of electricians could pursue selected phenomena in far more detail, designing much special equipment for the task and employing it more stubbornly and systematically than electricians had ever done before.”
• “When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writer of textbooks.”

The Widening Gulf:

• “Electrical research began to require translation for the layman before the end of the eighteenth century, and most other fields of physical science ceased to be generally accessible in the nineteenth.”
• “Although it has become customary, and is surely proper, to deplore the widening gulf that separates the professional scientist from his colleagues in other fields, too little attention is paid to the essential relationship between that gulf and the mechanisms intrinsic to scientific advance.”
• “Acquisition of a paradigm and of the more esoteric type of research it permits is a sign of maturity in the development of any given scientific field.”

The Success of a Paradigm:

• “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”
• “The success of a paradigm… is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise.”

Mop-Up Work:

• “Few people who are not actually practitioners of a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can prove in the execution. Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science.”
• “From Tycho Brahe to E. O. Lawrence, some scientists have acquired great reputations, not from any novelty of their discoveries, but from the precision, reliability, and scope of the methods they developed for the redetermination of a previously known sort of fact.”

Choosing Problems:

• “One of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions.”
• “One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving.”

Discovery and Invention:

• “Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected.”
• “Any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is.”

The Playing Card Experiment:

• “Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts.”
• “After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen… For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal.”
• “With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That’s the six of spades, but there’s something wrong with it—the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others.”
• “A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories… One of them exclaimed: ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!’”

Awareness of Anomaly:

• “In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed. Further acquaintance, however, does result in awareness of something wrong or does relate the effect to something that has gone wrong before. That awareness of anomaly opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated. At this point the discovery has been completed.”

Special Equipment:

• “Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes.”
• “Without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur. And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm.”

Isolate the Anomaly:

• “Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist’s first effort will often be to isolate it more precisely and to give it structure. Though now aware that they cannot be quite right, he will push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in experiments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance.”

The Scientist in Crisis:

• “He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess. Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease.”
• “It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers. Indeed, normal science usually holds creative philosophy at arm’s length…”

Extraordinary Research:

• “The proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research.”

Unanticipated Novelty:

• “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong.”

Learning to See:

• “The duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impressions can see different things; the inverting lenses show that two men with different retinal impressions can see the same thing.”
• “We do not see electrons, but rather their tracks or else bubbles of vapor in a cloud chamber. We do not see electric currents at all, but rather the needle of an am-meter or galvanometer… Seeing water droplets or a needle against a numerical scale is a primitive perceptual experience for the man unacquainted with cloud chambers and ammeters. It thus requires contemplation, analysis, and interpretation (or else the intervention of external authority) before conclusions can be reached about electrons or currents. But the position of the man who has learned about these instruments and had much exemplary experience with them is very different, and there are corresponding differences in the way he processes the stimuli that reach him from them.”
• “Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer a picture of a terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events. Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an inhabitant of the scientist’s world, seeing what the scientist sees and responding as the scientist does.”
• “Therefore, at times of revolution, when the normal-scientific tradition changes, the scientist’s perception of his environment must be re-educated—in some familiar situations he must learn to see a new gestalt.”
• “Paradigms are not corrigible by normal science at all. Instead, as we have already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gesalt switch.”

Education:

• “One of the fundamental techniques by which the members of a group… learn to see the same things when confronted with the same stimuli is by being shown examples of situations that their predecessors in the group have already learned to see as like each other and as different from other sorts of situations.”
• “Scientists, it should already be clear, never learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves… A new theory is always announced together with applications to some concrete range of natural phenomena… The process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory.”
• “That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together.”

Measurements:

• “Operations and measurements are paradigm-determined… scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.”
• “After a scientific revolution many old measurements and manipulations become irrelevant and are replaced by others instead. One does not apply all the same tests to oxygen as to dephlogisticated air. But changes of this sort are never total. Whatever he may then see, the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world.”

The Research Worker:

• “In so far as he is engaged in normal science, the research worker is a solver of puzzles, not a tester of paradigms.”

Competing Paradigms:

• “The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.”
• “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.”
• “Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.”
• “The proponents of competing paradigms are always at least slightly at cross-purposes. Neither side will grant all the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case.”

Translation:

• “Men who hold incommensurable viewpoints [should] be thought of as members of different language communities and that their communication problems be analyzed as problems of translation.”
• “To translate a theory or worldview into one’s own language is not to make it one’s own. For that one must go native, discover that one is thinking and working in, not simply translating out of, a language that was previously foreign.”

Faith:

• “The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.”

Conversion:

• “Before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.”
• “Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances.”

Tools & Technology:

• “Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been casually discovered, technology has often played a vital role in the emergence of new sciences.”
• “Special telescopes to demonstrate the Copernican prediction of annual parallax; Atwood’s machine, first invented almost a century after the Principia, to give the first unequivocal demonstration of Newton’s second law; Foucault’s apparatus to show that the speed of light is greater in air than in water; or the gigantic scintillation counter designed to demonstrate the existence of the neutrino—these pieces of special apparatus and many others like them illustrate the immense effort and ingenuity that have been required to bring nature and theory into closer and closer agreement.”

“The particular conclusions he does arrive at are probably determined by his prior experience in other fields, by the accidents of his investigation, and by his own individual makeup. What beliefs about the stars, for example, does he bring to the study of chemistry or electricity? Which of the many conceivable experiments relevant to the new field does he elect to perform first? And what aspects of the complex phenomenon that then results strike him as particularly relevant to an elucidation of the nature of chemical change or of electrical affinity?”

Science and the Modern Worldby Alfred North Whitehead

“The new mentality is more important even than the new science and the new technology.”

“If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.”

Philosophy:

• “Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and—so far as may be—efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.”
• “If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent—and the spiritual precedes the material.”
• “Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.”

Progress:

• “The progress of civilisation is not wholly a uniform drift towards better things. It may perhaps wear this aspect if we map it on a scale which is large enough. But such broad views obscure the details on which rest our whole understanding of the process.”

The Rise of Modern Science:

• “The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science. It was an age of ferment. Nothing was settled, though much was opened—new worlds and new ideas.”
• “It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society… The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread inheritance from generation to generation.”

Analysis of the Obvious:

• “Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
• “Nothing ever really recurs in exact detail. No two days are identical, no two winters. What has gone, has gone forever. Accordingly the practical philosophy of mankind has been to expect the broad recurrences, and to accept the details as emanating from the inscrutable womb of things, beyond the ken of rationality. Men expected the sun to rise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth.”

Greek Tragedy:

• “The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today, are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought.”
• “The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things… This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.”

Medieval Order:

• “The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles.”
• “[This conviction] must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”

Naturalism:

• “The rise of Naturalism in the later Middle Ages was the entry into the European mind of the final ingredient necessary for the rise of science. It was the rise of interest in natural objects, and in natural occurrences, for their own sakes.”

Anti-Rationalism:

• “Science has never shaken off the impress of its origin in the historical revolt of the later Renaissance. It has remained predominantly an anti-rationalistic movement, based upon a naïve faith. What reasoning it has wanted, has been borrowed from mathematics which is a surviving relic of Greek rationalism, following the deductive method. Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its faith or to explain its meanings; and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume.”

Climates of Opinion:

• “General climates of opinion persist for periods of about two to three generations, that is to say, for periods of sixty to a hundred years. There are also shorter waves of thought, which play on the surface of the tidal movement.”

Abstraction, Observation, Reason:

• “Thought is abstract; and the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect.”
• “Observation is selection.”
• “Faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness. It is the faith that at the base of things we shall not find mere arbitrary mystery.”

Mathematics:

• “Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.”
• “The originality of mathematics consists in the fact that in mathematical science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious.”
• “The first man who noticed the analogy between a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the history of thought. He was the first man who entertained a concept belonging to the science of pure mathematics.”
• “When we think of mathematics, we have in our mind a science devoted to the exploration of number, quantity, geometry, and in modern times also including investigation into yet more abstract concepts of order, and into analogous types of purely logical relations.”
• “The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction.”
• “The certainty of mathematics depends upon its complete abstract generality. But we can have no à priori certainty that we are right in believing that the observed entities in the concrete universe form a particular instance of what falls under our general reasoning.”

To Criticise an Argument:

1. “Scan the purely mathematical reasoning to make sure that there are no mere slips in it—no casual illogicalities due to mental failure.”
2. “Make quite certain of all the abstract conditions which have been presupposed to hold.”
3. “[Verify] that our abstract postulates hold for the particular case in question.”

“In criticising a mathematical conclusion as to a particular matter of fact, the real difficulties consist in finding out the abstract assumptions involved, and in estimating the evidence for their applicability to the particular case in hand.”

Induction, Pt. 1:

• “Things directly observed are, almost always, only samples. We want to conclude that the abstract conditions, which hold for the samples, also hold for all other entities which, for some reason or other, appear to us to be of the same sort.”
• “This process of reasoning from the sample to the whole species is Induction. The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy—and yet all our activities are based upon it.”

Unconscious Assumptions:

• “The trouble is not with what the author does say, but with what he does not say. Also it is not with what he knows he has assumed, but with what he has unconsciously assumed. We do not doubt the author’s honesty. It is his perspicacity which we are criticising. Each generation criticises the unconscious assumptions made by its parents. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.”

Utmost Generality:

• “Provided we know something which is perfectly general about the elements in any occasion, we can then know an indefinite number of other equally general concepts which must also be exemplified in that same occasion.”
• “[Pythagoras] insisted on the importance of the utmost generality in reasoning, and he divined the importance of number as an aid to the construction of any representation of the conditions involved in the order of nature.”

Measurement vs Classification:

• “The practical counsel to be derived from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus to express quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the biological sciences, then and till our own time, have been overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification.”
• “The popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle Ages. If only the schoolmen had measured instead of classifying, how much they might have learnt!”
• “Classification is a halfway house between the immediate concreteness of the individual thing and the complete abstraction of mathematical notions… Classification is necessary. But unless you can progress from classification to mathematics, your reasoning will not take you very far.”

Algebra:

• “Algebra is a generalisation of arithmetic. In the same way as the notion of number abstracted from reference to any one particular set of entities, so in algebra abstraction is made from the notion of any particular numbers.”
• “[Equations] are methods of asking complicated arithmetical questions. In this connection, the letters representing numbers were termed ‘unknowns.’ But equations soon suggested a new idea, that, namely, of a function of one or more general symbols, these symbols being letters representing any numbers. In this employment the algebraic letters are called the ‘arguments’ of the function, or sometimes they are called the ‘variables.’”
• “Algebra thus develops into the general science of analysis in which we consider the properties of various functions of undetermined arguments.”

General vs Particular:

• “Too large a generalisation leads to mere barrenness. It is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.”
• “For instance the idea of any continuous function, whereby the limitation of continuity is introduced, is the fruitful idea which has led to most of the important applications. This rise of algebraic analysis was concurrent with Descartes’ discovery of analytical geometry, and then with the invention of the infinitesimal calculus by Newton and Leibniz.”

Functions & Formulas:

• “This dominance of the idea of functionality in the abstract sphere of mathematics found itself reflected in the order of nature under the guise of mathematically expressed laws of nature. Apart from this progress of mathematics, the seventeenth century developments of science would have been impossible. Mathematics supplied the background of imaginative thought with which the men of science approached the observation of nature. Galileo produced formulae, Descartes produced formulae, Huyghens produced formulae, Newton produced formulae.

Periodicity:

• “Consider the notion of periodicity. The general recurrences of things are very obvious in our ordinary experience. Days recur, lunar phases recur, the seasons of the year recur, rotating bodies recur to their old positions, beats of the heart recur, breathing recurs. On every side, we are met by recurrence. Apart from recurrence, knowledge would be impossible; for nothing could be referred to our past experience. Also, apart from some regularity of recurrence, measurement would be impossible. In our experience, as we gain the idea of exactness, recurrence is fundamental.”
• “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the theory of periodicity took a fundamental place in science.”
• “The birth of modern physics depended upon the application of the abstract idea of periodicity to a variety of concrete instances.”

Concrete Fact:

• “The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.”
• “Mathematics is the science of the most complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.”
• “[Pythagoras] discovered the importance of dealing with abstractions; and in particular directed attention to number as characterizing the periodicities of notes of music. The importance of the abstract idea of periodicity was thus present at the very beginning both of mathematics and of European philosophy.”

Induction, Pt. 2:

• “Another unsolved problem which has been bequeathed to us by the seventeenth century is the rational justification of this method of Induction.”
• “Either there is something about the immediate occasion which affords knowledge of the past and the future, or we are reduced to utter scepticism as to memory and induction.”
• “We must observe the immediate occasion, and use reason to elicit a general description of its nature. Induction presupposes metaphysics. In other words, it rests upon an antecedent rationalism.”
• “I do not hold Induction to be in its essence the derivation of general laws. It is the divination of some characteristics of a particular future from the known characteristics of a particular past. The wider assumption of general laws holding for all cognisable occasions appears a very unsafe addendum to attach to this limited knowledge.”
• “Inductive reasoning proceeds from the particular occasion to the particular community of occasions, and from the particular community to relations between particular occasions within that community.”

Quantitative Science:

• “Science was becoming [in the seventeenth century], and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of physical quantities.”

The Philosophy of an Epoch:

• “When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.”

Space-Time and Simple Location:

• “The Ionian philosophers asked, What is nature made of? The answer is couched in terms of stuff, or matter, or material—the particular name chosen is indifferent—which has the property of simple location in space and time, or, if you adopt the more modern ideas, in space-time. What I mean by matter, or material, is anything which has this property of simple location.”
• “The answer, therefore, which the seventeenth century gave to the ancient question of the Ionian thinkers, ‘What is the world made of?’ was that the world is a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter, or of material, if you wish to include stuff more subtle than ordinary matter, the ether for example.”

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness:

• “There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It is an example of what I will call the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.’”
• “Whatever theory you choose, there is no light or colour as a fact in external nature. There is merely motion of material.”
• “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century… It is still reigning. Every university in the world organises itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organising the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival.”

Faith vs Reason:

• “The clergy were in principle rationalists, whereas the men of science were content with a simple faith in the order of nature.”
• “The Middle Ages were haunted with the desire to rationalise the infinite… The earlier period was the age of faith, based upon reason. In the later period, they let sleeping dogs lie: it was the age of reason, based upon faith.”
• “It is well to remember that reason can err, and that faith may be misplaced.”

Abstractions:

• “The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about.”
• “The advantage of confining attention to a definite group of abstractions, is that you confine your thoughts to clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut definite relations.”
• “You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction.”
• “[Philosophy] is the critic of abstractions.”
• “Almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.”

Mechanical Explanation:

• “In [the eighteenth century] the notion of the mechanical explanation of all the processes of nature finally hardened into a dogma of science.”

Antagonists of the Age:

• “No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.”

Prehension:

• “The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple locations.”
• “Space and time are simply abstractions from the totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.”
• “Nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily transitional from prehension to prehension… Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.”
• “An event has contemporaries. This means that an event mirrors within itself the modes of its contemporaries as a display of immediate achievement. An event has a past. This means that an event mirrors within itself the modes of its predecessors, as memories which are fused into its own content. An event has a future. This means that an event mirrors within itself such aspects as the future throws back onto the present, or, in other words, as the present has determined concerning the future. Thus an event has anticipation: ‘The prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.’”
• “There is in the world for our cognisance, memory of the past, immediacy of realisation, and indication of things to come.”
• “The concept of the order of nature is bound up with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in process of development.”

Radical Inconsistency:

• “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.”

Mitigating Mechanism:

• “Of course, we find in the eighteenth century Paley’s famous argument, that mechanism presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But even before Paley put the argument into its final form, Hume had written the retort, that the God whom you will find will be the sort of God who makes that mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a mechanic, and not merely a mechanic but its mechanic. The only way of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.”

Theories of Mind:

• “There are then two possible theories as to the mind. You can either deny that it can supply for itself any experiences other than those provided for it by the body, or you can admit them. If you refuse to admit the additional experiences, then all individual moral responsibility is swept away. If you do admit them, then a human being may be responsible for the state of his mind though he has no responsibility for the actions of his body.”

Theory of Organic Mechanism, Pt. 1:

• “The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But this principle of modification is perfectly general throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies.”
• “In this theory, the molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.”

Change, Endurance, Eternality:

• “Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts, change and endurance. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it, eternality, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted.”

Everything Everywhere All at Once:

• “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.”
• “You are in a certain place perceiving things. Your perception takes place where you are, and is entirely dependent on how your body is functioning. But this functioning of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance an aspect of the distant environment, fading away into the general knowledge that there are things beyond. If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a transcendent world, it must be because the event which is the bodily life unifies in itself aspects of the universe.”

Romanticism, Science, Technology:

• “The faith of the [nineteenth] century was derived from three sources: one source was the romantic movement, showing itself in religious revival, in art, and in political aspiration; another source was the gathering advance of science which opened avenues of thought; the third source was the advance in technology which completely changed the conditions of human life.”

Time Scales:

• “The scale of time is so absolutely disparate. For the steam-engine, we may give about a hundred years; for writing, the time period is of the order of a thousand years. Further, when writing was finally popularised, the world was not then expecting the next step in technology. The process of change was slow, unconscious, and unexpected. In the nineteenth century, the process became quick, conscious, and expected.”
• “In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.”

Method of Invention:

• “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”
• “It is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.”
• “The Germans explicitly realised the methods by which the deeper veins in the mine of science could be reached. They abolished haphazard methods of scholarship. In their technological schools and universities progress did not have to wait for the occasional genius, or the occasional lucky thought. Their feats of scholarship during the nineteenth century were the admiration of the world. This discipline of knowledge applies beyond technology to pure science, and beyond science to general scholarship. It represents the change from amateurs to professionals.”

Continuous vs Atomic:

• “Ordinary matter was conceived as atomic: electromagnetic effects were conceived as arising from a continuous field.”
• “The living cell is to biology what the electron and the proton are to physics.”
• “The astronomers had shown us how big is the universe. The chemists and biologists teach us how small it is.”

Theory of Organic Mechanism, Pt. 2:

• “Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms.”
• “What the entities are in themselves is liable to modification by their environments.”
• “An individual entity, whose own life-history is a part within the life-history of some larger, deeper, more complete pattern, is liable to have aspects of that larger pattern dominating its own being, and to experience modifications of that larger pattern reflected in itself as modifications of its own being. This is the theory of organic mechanism.”
• “The general principle is that in a new environment there is an evolution of the old entities into new forms.”
• “There are thus two sides to the machinery involved in the development of nature. On one side, there is a given environment with organisms adapting themselves to it… The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the neglected side, is expressed by the word creativeness. The organisms can create their own environment. For this purpose, the single organism is almost helpless. The adequate forces require societies of coöperating organisms. But with such coöperation and in proportion to the effort put forward, the environment has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical aspect of evolution.”

Theory vs Common Sense:

• “The new situation in the thought of to-day arises from the fact that scientific theory is outrunning common sense.”
• “The eighteenth century opened with the quiet confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. To-day we are at the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.”

Fresh Instruments:

• “The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments. In science, the most important thing that has happened during the last forty years is the advance in instrumental design… These instruments have put thought onto a new level. A fresh instrument serves the same purpose as foreign travel; it shows things in unusual combinations. The gain is more than a mere addition; it is a transformation.”

Quantum Theory:

• “Time is sheer succession of epochal durations.”
• “Temporalisation is realisation. Temporalisation is not another continuous process. It is an atomic succession. Thus time is atomic (i.e., epochal), though what is temporalised is divisible.”
• “The point of interest in [quantum theory] is that, according to it, some effects which appear essentially capable of gradual increase or gradual diminution are in reality to be increased or decreased only by certain definite jumps. It is as though you could walk at three miles per hour or at four miles per hour, but not at three and a half miles per hour. The effects in question are concerned with the radiation of light from a molecule which has been excited by some collision.”
• “Thus a molecule can radiate light of certain definite colours, that is to say, of certain definite frequencies. You would think that each mode of vibration could be excited to any intensity, so that the energy carried away by light of that frequency could be of any amount. But this is not the case. There appear to be certain minimum amounts of energy which cannot be subdivided.”
• “There is a further peculiarity which we can illustrate by bringing an Englishman onto the scene. He pays his debts in English currency, and his smallest unit is a farthing which differs in value from the cent… In the molecule, different modes of vibration have different frequencies… One mode can only radiate its energy in an integral number of cents, so that a cent of energy is the least it can pay out; whereas the other mode can only radiate its energy in an integral number of farthings, so that a farthing of energy is the least that it can pay out.”

Discontinuous Existence:

• “The discontinuities introduced by the quantum theory require revision of physical concepts in order to meet them. In particular, it has been pointed out that some theory of discontinuous existence is required. What is asked from such a theory, is that an orbit of an electron can be regarded as a series of detached positions, and not as a continuous line.”
• “Thus the locomotion of the primate is discontinuous in space and time. If we go below the quanta of time which are the successive vibratory periods of the primate, we find a succession of vibratory electromagnetic fields, each stationary in the space-time of its own duration. Each of these fields exhibits a single complete period of the electromagnetic vibration which constitutes the primate. This vibration is not to be thought of as the becoming of reality; it is what the primate is in one of its discontinuous realisations.”
• “Even if the periods were the same in the case of two primates, the durations of realisation may not be the same. In other words, the two primates may be out of phase. Also if the periods are different, the atomism of any one duration of one primate is necessarily subdivided by the boundary moments of durations of the other primate.”

Philosophers:

• “Philosophers are rationalists. They are seeking to go behind stubborn and irreducible facts: they wish to explain in the light of universal principles the mutual reference between the various details entering into the flux of things. Also, they seek such principles as will eliminate mere arbitrariness; so that, whatever portion of fact is assumed or given, the existence of the remainder of things shall satisfy some demand of rationality. They demand meaning.”
• “The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy now lie clearly before us. The study of mind divides into psychology… and into epistemology.”
• “The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.”

The Ultimate Limitation:

• “Aristotle found it necessary to complete his metaphysics by the introduction of a Prime Mover—God.”
• “Every actual occasion is a limitation imposed on possibility, and that by virtue of this limitation the particular value of that shaped togetherness of things emerges.”
• “God is the ultimate limitation, and His existence is the ultimate irrationality. For no reason can be given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose. God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”
• “The general principle of empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason. What further can be known about God must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis.”

Theory and Practice:

• “We are told by logicians that a proposition must be either true or false, and that there is no middle term. But in practice, we may know that a proposition expresses an important truth, but that it is subject to limitations and qualifications which at present remain undiscovered.”
• “Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; and Newtonian astronomers, adopting an absolute theory of space, said that both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement adopted.”
• “The two theories are contradictory… Scientists have to leave it at that, and wait for the future, in the hope of attaining some wider vision which reconciles both.”
• “We should wait: but we should not wait passively, or in despair. The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.”

Science and Religion:

• “Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values.”
• “In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety of opinion. Once and forever, this duty of toleration has been summed up in the words, ‘Let both grow together until the harvest.’ The failure of Christians to act up to this precept, of the highest authority, is one of the curiosities of religious history.”
• “We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained. Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”
• “The progress of science must result in the unceasing modification of religious thought, to the great advantage of religion.”
• “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”

Knowledge:

• “Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it. This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove.”
• “In short, the specialised functions of the community are performed better and more progressively, but the generalised direction lacks vision. The progressiveness in detail only adds to the danger produced by the feebleness of coördination.”
• “The novel pace of progress requires a greater force of direction if disasters are to be avoided. The point is that the discoveries of the nineteenth century were in the direction of professionalism, so that we are left with no expansion of wisdom and with greater need of it.”
• “Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. It is this balanced growth of individuality which it should be the aim of education to secure. The most useful discoveries for the immediate future would concern the furtherance of this aim without detriment to the necessary intellectual professionalism.”

Education:

• “In every country the problem of the balance of the general and specialist education is under consideration.”
• “We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine. The general training should aim at eliciting our concrete apprehensions, and should satisfy the itch of youth to be doing something.”
• “In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them.”
• “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.”

Art:

• “The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values.”
• “Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values. Human beings require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at.”
• “You cannot subdivide life, except in the abstract analysis of thought. Accordingly, the great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul’s self-attainment.”

Great Societies:

• “Material power in itself is ethically neutral. It can equally well work in the wrong direction. The problem is not how to produce great men, but how to produce great societies. The great society will put up the men for the occasions.”
• “Those organisms are successful which modify their environments so as to assist each other.”
• “In nature the normal way in which trees flourish is by their association in a forest. Each tree may lose something of its individual perfection of growth, but they mutually assist each other in preserving the conditions for survival.”
• “A forest is the triumph of the organisation of mutually dependent species.”
• “Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.”

“Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.”

“It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.”

“When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascend in the scale of being.”

Meditationsby Marcus Aurelius

“States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.” —Plato

Remember:

• “To have learned how to accept favors from friends without losing your self-respect or appearing ungrateful.”
• “To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once.”
• “To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.”

Be Like Antoninus:

• “The way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance—without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.”
• “His willingness to take adequate care of himself. Not a hypochondriac or obsessed with his appearance, but not ignoring things either. With the result that he hardly ever needed medical attention, or drugs or any sort of salve or ointment.”
• “This, in particular: his willingness to yield the floor to experts—in oratory, law, psychology, whatever—and to support them energetically, so that each of them could fulfill his potential.”

One Body:

• “One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all. One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share.”
• “I am a single limb (melos) of a larger body—a rational one.”
• “We came into the world for the sake of one another.”
• “We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
• “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.”

Change:

• “Constant awareness that everything is born from change… All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it.”
• “Nature’s job: to shift things elsewhere, to transform them, to pick them up and move them here and there. Constant alteration.”
• “The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”

Sameness:

• “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”
• “Anyone with forty years behind him and eyes in his head has seen both past and future—both alike.”
• “What dies doesn’t vanish. It stays here in the world, transformed, dissolved, as parts of the world, and of you.”

Harm:

• “Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure.”
• “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
• “It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out.”
• “In most cases what Epicurus said should help: that pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep in mind its limits and don’t magnify them in your imagination.”
• “The existence of evil does not harm the world.”

Perception:

• “External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it’s that you’re not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it? But there are insuperable obstacles. Then it’s not a problem. The cause of your inaction lies outside you. But how can I go on living with that undone? Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you’d done it, embracing the obstacles too.”

Distractions:

• “Concentrate every minute like a Roman… on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.”
• “Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions.”
• “People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.”

Live in the Moment:

• “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Expect Problems:

• “A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.”

Blame No One:

• “Don’t be irritated at people’s smell or bad breath. What’s the point?”
• “Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.”
• “When faced with people’s bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.”
• “Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you? No pointless actions.”

Straight, Not Straightened:

• “How to act: Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings. Don’t gussy up your thoughts. No surplus words or unnecessary actions. Let the spirit in you represent a man, an adult, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler. Taking up his post like a soldier and patiently awaiting his recall from life. Needing no oath or witness. Cheerfulness. Without requiring other people’s help. Or serenity supplied by others. To stand up straight—not straightened.”
• “Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.”

Self-Examination:

• “Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination, and the power to make of itself whatever it wants.”

Happiness:

• “Joy for humans lies in human actions.”
• “If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment… If you can embrace this without fear or expectation—can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)—then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that.”

Kindness:

• “Care for other human beings. Follow God.”
• “Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.”
• “Kindness is invincible, provided it’s sincere—not ironic or an act.”
• “At festivals the Spartans put their guests’ seats in the shade, but sat themselves down anywhere.”

Honesty:

• “A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.”

Fate:

• “He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us.”

Public Opinion:

• “Kingship: to earn a bad reputation by good deeds.”
• “Now they see you as a beast, a monkey. But in a week they’ll think you’re a god—if you rediscover your beliefs and honor the logos.”
• “Purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood.”

Morning Reminder:

• “When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic—what defines a human being—is to work with others.”
• “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

Don’t Give Up:

• “Just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others, obeying God.”
• “Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.”
• “Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so. In your interest, or in your nature.”
• “And why is it so hard when things go against you? If it’s imposed by nature, accept it gladly and stop fighting it. And if not, work out what your own nature requires, and aim at that, even if it brings you no glory.”

Do Less, Better:

• “Uncomplicate yourself.”
• “‘If you seek tranquillity, do less.’ Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”
• “Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.”

Acceptance:

• “You accept the limits placed on your body. Accept those placed on your time.”
• “You can live here as you expect to live there.”

Love What You Do:

• “Our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.”
• “People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat… When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.”
• “Love the discipline you know, and let it support you. Entrust everything willingly to the gods, and then make your way through life—no one’s master and no one’s slave.”

Quality of Mind:

• “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”
• “Identify its purpose—what makes it what it is—and examine that. (Ignore its concrete form.)”
• “What things gravitate toward is their goal.”

Overcoming:

• “Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.”
• “Not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should.”
• “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
• “Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.”
• “Disgraceful: for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.”

That’s All You Need:

• “The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That’s all you need to know. Nothing more. Don’t demand to know ‘why such things exist.’ Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.”
• “Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right.”
• “As if your eyes expected a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking. That’s what they were made for.”

Differences:

• “Does the sun try to do the rain’s work? Or Asclepius Demeter’s? And what about each of the stars—different, yet working in common?”
• “Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People with rabies are terrified of water. And a child’s idea of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you?”
• “Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things—they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well.”

Revere the Gods:

• “Honor and revere the gods, treat human beings as they deserve, be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
• “People ask, ‘Have you ever seen the gods you worship? How can you be sure they exist?’ Answers: Just look around you. I’ve never seen my soul either. And yet I revere it. That’s how I know the gods exist and why I revere them—from having felt their power, over and over.”

Welcome Death:

• “Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different.”

Going Infiniteby Michael Lewis

Creating Chaos, Pt. 1:

• “The funny thing about these situations was that Sam never really meant to cause them, which in a way made them feel even more insulting. He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to create chaos in other people’s lives. He was just moving through the world in the only way he knew how. The cost this implied for others simply never entered his calculations. With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d done some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time.”

Growing Up:

• “Every life is defined not just by what happens in it but by what doesn’t. The beginning of Sam’s life is as striking for what didn’t happen in it as for what did.”
• “It told you something not just about Sam but about his upbringing that he could live for almost ten years inside the United States of America without realizing that other people believed in God.”
• “This was Santa all over again, only worse. God—or rather the fact that anyone believed in him—rocked Sam’s world. Just sideswiped his view of other people and what was going on inside their minds… ‘I’d ask them, “Do you believe in God?” They’d equivocate—like, say something about a Being that started the Clock of the Universe. And I’d think, Quit fucking around: it’s a binary question. Just yes or no.’ He didn’t understand the unwillingness of even really smart grown-ups to get the right answer to this question.”
• “From the widespread belief in God, and Santa, Sam drew a conclusion: it was possible for almost everyone to be self-evidently wrong about something.”

Games With Changing Rules:

• “Sam didn’t care for games, like chess, where the players controlled everything and the best move was in theory perfectly calculable. Chess he’d have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly! Or almost anything—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.”
• “Sam thought time pressure favored him. It wasn’t that he thrived under pressure; it was that he didn’t feel it. He wasn’t better than usual when he was on a clock; he just wasn’t worse—and most people were.”

Effective Altruism:

• “Put bluntly: Should you do good, or make money and pay other people to do good? Was it better to become a doctor or a banker?”
• “Earn to give, MacAskill called his idea…”

Jane Street:

• “More than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam’s indifference to other people’s feelings… What surprised him was that his Jane Street bosses thought that he somehow missed the effect he was having on other people. He’d known exactly what he was doing. What he’d done to Asher was no more than what Jane Street was doing to competitors in financial markets every day.”
• “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.’”

Getting Into Crypto:

• “Late in the summer of 2017, he finally took a vacation. Once he was free to experiment, it took him little time to see that one of the options on his list was not like the others…”
• “In 2017, cryptocurrency had gone from being this bizarre hobbyhorse in which he had zero interest to a semi-serious financial market, entirely separate from other financial markets. That year alone, the value of all crypto boomed, going from $15 billion to $760 billion.”
• “Sam did a back-of-the-envelope calculation: if he could capture 5 percent of the entire market (a modest number, by Jane Street standards), he could make a million dollars a day or more. As the market never closed, that meant profits of $365 million a year or more. ‘That was my ballpark estimate,’ he said. ‘It seemed crazy. So I just cut it by a factor of ten. I was thinking thirty million a year. But I felt embarrassed showing that number to anyone else.’”

Co-Founding Alameda Research:

• “The business hadn’t even really been Sam’s idea but Tara’s… Her success led Sam to his secret belief that he might make a billion dollars by creating a hedge fund to trade crypto the way Jane Street traded everything.”
• “But he couldn’t do it by himself. Crypto trading never closed. Just to have two people awake twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he’d need to hire at least five other traders. He’d also need programmers to turn the traders’ insights into code, so that their trading could be automated and speeded up. Tara had been making a handful of trades a week on her laptop; what Sam had in mind was an army of bots making a million trades a day.”
• “Those first few weeks [in late 2017], they made no real money, but then they had only a few people and Sam’s bonus money… In January 2018 their profits rose to half a million dollars each day.”

Creating Chaos, Pt. 2:

• “In January [2018] they’d made half a million dollars of profits a day trading $40 million in capital; in February, with four times as much capital, they’d lost half a million dollars a day.”
• “[Alameda Research’s] finances were already in a state of chaos… On top of the trading losses, some additional millions had simply vanished. No one seemed to know where the money had gone—but the employees were in full panic mode.”
• “Amid the turmoil, Sam inhabited what amounted to his own reality. His attitude toward the missing money was, Eh, it’ll probably turn up somewhere. So let’s fucking trade!”
• “Modelbot was maybe the biggest point of disagreement between Sam and his management team.”
• “Sam’s Release-the-Kraken fantasy was to hit a button and let Modelbot burn and churn through crypto markets twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He had not been able to let Modelbot rip the way he’d liked—because just about every other human being inside Alameda Research was doing whatever they could to stop him. ‘It was entirely within the realm of possibility that we could lose all our money in an hour,’ said one. One hundred seventy million dollars that might otherwise go to effective altruism could simply go poof. That thought terrified the other four effective altruists in charge of Alameda Research.”
• “One evening, Tara argued heatedly with Sam until he caved and agreed to what she thought was a reasonable compromise: he could turn on Modelbot so long as he and at least one other person were present to watch it, but should turn it off if it started losing money. ‘I said, “Okay, I’m going home to go to sleep,” and as soon as I left, Sam turned it on and fell asleep,’ recalled Tara. From that moment the entire management team gave up on ever trusting Sam.”

The Law Is What Happens:

• “There were moments when the price of bitcoin in South Korea was 50 percent higher than the price of bitcoin in the United States.”
• “Ripple offered a path to exploit the insanity of the South Korean crypto markets: sell Ripple in South Korea, use the won to buy bitcoin, ship the bitcoin to the US, where you could sell it for dollars, and use the dollars to buy Ripple, which you could then send back to South Korea.”
• “‘It was borderline illegal, but in practice, who goes after you when you do this?’ said Nishad later. ‘No one.’ This was the very beginning of Nishad’s financial education: there were laws that, in theory, governed money; and then there was what people actually did with money. ‘That’s where I learned what the law is,’ said Nishad. ‘The law is what happens, not what is written.’”

The Missing Ripple:

• “Then one day in February [2018], someone—not Sam, who was frantically trading—noticed the missing Ripple. Four million dollars’ worth of it had vanished.”
• “In fairness, it was not then clear whether it was gone forever… So much Ripple and Bitcoin was flying around at any given time that it was at least possible that any missing Ripple was simply in transit.”
• “The other members of the management team were unconvinced. They insisted that Sam stop trading so that they could figure out where their Ripple had gone.”
• “Sam continued to insist that the missing Ripple was no big deal. He didn’t think anyone had stolen it. He didn’t actually believe that it was lost, or that they should account for it as lost. He told his fellow managers that in his estimation there was an 80 percent chance that it would eventually turn up. Thus they should count themselves as still having 80 percent of it. To which one of his fellow managers replied: After the fact, if we never get any of the Ripple back, no one is going to say it is reasonable for us to have said we have eighty percent of the Ripple. Everyone is just going to say we lied to them. We’ll be accused by our investors of fraud.”
• “That sort of argument just bugged the hell out of Sam. He hated the way inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong. So much of what made his approach to life different from most people’s was his willingness to assign probabilities and act on them, and his refusal to be swayed by any after-the-fact illusion that the world had been more knowable than it actually was.”

What About Bob?:

• “The missing Ripple reminded [Sam] of a favorite thought experiment. ‘You have a close friend, Bob,’ he explained. ‘He’s great. You love him. Bob is at a house party where someone gets murdered. No one knows who the murderer is. There are twenty people there. None are criminals. But Bob is less likely in your mind than anyone else to have killed someone. But you can’t say that there is a zero chance Bob killed someone. Someone got killed, no one knows who did it. You now think there’s like a one percent chance Bob did it. How do you see Bob now? What is Bob to you? And there is no updating: there is no new information about Bob.’”
• “‘Bob is either completely blameless or far more guilty.’ And yet assigning a probability to Bob’s character was, in Sam’s view, the only way to think about him, or indeed any uncertain situation.”
• “Life’s uncertainties often made a mockery of a probabilistic approach, but in Sam’s view there was really no other approach to take.”

Alameda Divided:

• “Apart from a shared alarm at his recklessness, the members of the management team were not perfectly unified in their opinions of Sam. Tara had long since decided that he was dishonest and manipulative. Ben still thought him well-intentioned—but terrible at his job. But all felt themselves on a suicide mission. ‘I had a conversation with Tara and Peter [McIntyre, another executive],’ recalled Ben, ‘and we were talking about how to help Sam and the conversation changed to: How do we get rid of Sam?’”
• “And so, on April 9, 2018, his entire management team, along with half of his employees, walked out the door, with somewhere between one and two million dollars in severance.”
• “Now [Alameda’s investors] had to decide: Was Sam a reckless, phony effective altruist who was going to steal or lose all their money, or were these other people simply unsuited to working in a start-up hedge fund?”

The Miracle:

• “What happened next, in retrospect, seems faintly incredible. With no one left to argue with him, Sam threw the switch and let Modelbot rip. ‘We turned it on and it instantly started making us lots of money,’ said Nishad. And then they finally found the $4 million worth of missing Ripple… In the background Sam heard someone shouting, ‘Holy fuck, we found them!’”
• “They’d even paid their taxes… And they resumed making millions of dollars a month in trading profits. They weren’t the same company, however. They were no longer a random assortment of effective altruists. They were a small team who had endured an alarming drama and now trusted Sam. He’d been right all along! To those who remained—and even to some who had quit—Sam went from someone they weren’t quite sure about to a leader to be followed even if they didn’t completely understand what he was doing, or why.”

The Fallout:

• “His civil war with his fellow effective altruists he now viewed as ‘the worst thing that has happened to me in my life.’ He’d pulled together a group of people he admired and who shared his values, and he’d wound up a pariah to half of them, who were still out there trashing him to their fellow effective altruists. ‘It made me question myself,’ he said. ‘It was the first time in my life I was surrounded by people I respected who are saying that I’m wrong and that I’m crazy. It made me question my sanity.’”
• “‘I did damage to the EA community,’ he wrote. ‘I made people hate each other a little more and trust each other a little less… and I severely curtailed my own future ability to do good. I’m pretty sure my net impact on the world has, so far, been negative and that is why.’”

Probability Distributions:

• “‘I’m a utilitarian,’ he wrote. ‘Fault is just a construct of human society. It serves different purposes for different people. It can be a tool to discourage bad actions; an attempt to recover pride in the face of hardship, an outlet for rage, and many more things. I guess maybe the most important definition—to me, at least—is how did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior?’”
• “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 worst nor the best thing they’d ever done. ‘I deeply believe and act as if people are probability distributions, not their means,’ he wrote.”

Going Public:

• “Up to that moment, in late November 2018, Alameda Research had operated in the shadows. They traded more than 5 percent of the total volume of crypto markets and were still a secret. Jane Street had left Sam with the view that there was no upside to publicity, and that the best thing to do was to avoid it.”
• “The Asian crypto exchanges had grown so accustomed to their customers not wanting anyone to know who they were that a few issued you a pseudonym when you started doing business with them.”
• “I’m Hot-Relic-Fancier, Sam would say… No, you’re not, was the typical reaction… He needed to pull out his phone and open the trading account and show them his money before these people believed him. Once he’d done that a few times, a lot of people wanted to meet Sam.”
• “He had never been big on face-to-face encounters, but he now had to concede that their effects were astonishing… ‘All of a sudden I’m in a room with an important person from every single crypto company,’ said Sam.”

FTX, Futures Exchange:

• “[Sam was proposing] an exchange that traded only crypto futures contracts.”
• “A futures exchange was different in important ways from a spot exchange. On a futures exchange, traders put up as collateral only a fraction of the bets they made. On a trade that was losing money, the exchange typically asked for more collateral at the end of the day. If a trade went bad fast, it could wipe out the collateral and leave the exchange on the hook for losses—whereupon the exchange turned to its customers to cover the losses, as crypto exchanges had, historically. The design that FTX (Gary) had come up with solved the problem, in an elegant way. It monitored customers’ positions not by the day but by the second. The instant any customer’s trade went into the red, it was liquidated. This of course was unpleasant for the customers whose positions went into the red. But it promised to do away with socialized losses, which had plagued crypto exchanges from the beginning. The new exchange’s losses would never need to be socialized, because the exchange would never have losses.”

Becoming Famous:

• “Inside of crypto Sam was becoming famous; outside of crypto he was still unknown and, therefore, untrusted. Part of Ramnik’s odd new job was to help fix that. ‘How do you determine something is credible?’ he said. ‘It’s by association. Trust comes from preexisting relationships.’”
• “Ramnik noted that people didn’t identify with companies; they identified with people. They might never trust this new crypto exchange, but they might trust its founder, odd as he was, if they thought they knew who he was.”
• “‘The first thing we asked was can we get Sam on TV,’ said Ramnik. ‘That seemed like a long shot. But Natalie somehow did it.’”
• “‘Whatever the closest thing in my PR experience has been to this, nothing is close,’ [Jay Morakis] said… ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. All my guys want to meet Sam. I have CEOs calling me and asking: Can you do for us what you did for Sam?’ He’d had to explain, back in 2021, that he actually hadn’t done anything. Sam had just sort of… happened.”
• “FTX was spending a fortune learning how to market a product on the fly, without much input from anyone who had done it before. In one way, the approach clearly worked: in the mind of the American consumer, FTX became better and better known, and Sam Bankman-Fried became more and more famous.”

FTX, Rocket Ship:

• “FTX was now the world’s fastest-growing crypto exchange, and the casino of choice for big professional traders. In less than three years, it had gone from 0 to 10 percent of all crypto trading. In 2021, it would generate $1 billion in revenues.”

FTX, Law-Abiding Exchange:

• “When Forbes looked at Sam in the fall of 2021, they saw the richest person in the world under the age of thirty. When the VCs looked at Sam, they saw the guy who might very soon replace CZ as the richest person in the world, period. All of that explained what Sam was about to do at this moment—and what would later feel a lot harder to explain or even to believe. He set out to establish FTX as the world’s most regulated, most law-abiding, most rule-following crypto exchange. To acquire as many licenses to allow him to operate legally and openly in as many countries as he could.”

Moving to the Bahamas:

• “[Caroline Ellison] clearly needed help. Once again she was thinking aloud to her boss about either quitting her job or breaking up with him, or both. Before she could do either, Sam left again, in August 2021, on another trip—to the Bahamas, to see if maybe it might serve as host to a satellite office or a disaster recovery site if, say, the Chinese government shut them down. He liked the place so much that, pretty much on the spot, he decided to stay. For the second time in three years he messaged a group of people he was meant to be leading to say he wouldn’t be coming back.”

Grown-Ups:

• “Except for the psychiatrist, and a lawyer or two, there was still no one inside FTX who had much experience doing whatever it was they were doing, other than the experience they were gaining by doing it for FTX. No one saw any reason to make an exception for the architects.”
• “‘We said just give us a list of the employees, give us anything,’ said Ian. ‘Claire said, “I know it’s weird, but we don’t have any of that—even the number of employees.”’”
• “‘We tried having some grown-ups, but they didn’t do anything,’ [Sam] said. ‘This was true for everyone over the age of forty-five. All they did was worry.’”

Not Talking About Alameda:

• “Then there was Caroline Ellison. Caroline was apparently alone in charge of the twenty-two traders and developers working inside Alameda Research, about half of whom had followed Sam from Hong Kong to the Bahamas. This surprised George a bit. ‘She never said anything about Alameda,’ said George. ‘Neither did Sam. This was clearly wanting not to think about it.’”

Alamada vs FTX:

• “It was never clear where Alameda Research stopped and FTX started.”
• “There were other, even more mysterious billions inside of Alameda that no one knew about. ‘FTX is smaller than people think, and Alameda is bigger,’ said Ramnik. ‘Way bigger.’”

Investments:

• “[Sam] asked for a vote from the other two. ‘No,’ said Nishad. ‘No, or a very low amount,’ said Ramnik. With that, the meeting ended. What I did not realize—but both Nishad and Ramnik by now both just took for granted—was that Sam might still hand over some large sum of money to Elon Musk. He was perfectly capable of asking for a vote and then ignoring the result.”
• “When they heard that Sam was about to hurl $5 billion at a total stranger, Ramnik and others inside FTX became alarmed. With a lot of help from FTX’s lawyers, Ramnik and Nishad had argued the $5 billion down to $500 million—or at least they thought that’s what Sam had agreed to. Much later, Ramnik learned that Sam, as usual, simply did what he wanted to do, and pledged to invest $3 billion in various Kives-run investment funds.”
• “Inside of three years, Sam would deploy roughly $5 billion on a portfolio of three hundred separate investments—which worked out to a new investment decision roughly every three days.”

Crypto Collapse:

• “Between the start of the boom in 2017 and June of 2022, crypto had re-created the institutions of traditional finance, without the rules and regulations and investor protections that exist in traditional finance.”
• “The whole edifice relied on a fantastic amount of trust. By late October that trust was gone, and crypto was in a souped-up version of an old-fashioned financial crisis.”
• “As late as the final days of October 2022, you could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.”

FTX, Bankrupt:

• “I was only gone for a week or so. By the time I returned, Ramnik, along with pretty much the entire corporate org chart, had fled the island.”
• “The day I landed, Friday, November 11 [2022], the signs on the airport walls were still cheerily pitching crypto—even though at four thirty that morning, Sam had DocuSigned the papers that threw FTX into bankruptcy in the United States.”
• “‘You know what’s weird to think about?’ [Sam] said, as we left the office behind. ‘Saturday. Saturday everything was normal.’”
• “She knew what everyone now did: at least $8 billion belonging to crypto traders, and meant to be safe and sound inside FTX, had wound up instead inside Alameda Research.”

The Run on FTX:

• “The run on FTX was in its own way spectacular. There had been $15 billion in customer deposits on the exchange. Or there was meant to be that amount, held in either fiat currency or bitcoin and ether. On a normal day, $50 million or so either came into or left the exchange. Each day between November 1 and November 5, $200 million fled. By late Sunday night, the sixth, $100 million was leaving every hour. FTX customers withdrew $2 billion that day, and then tried to withdraw another $4 billion on Monday. By Tuesday morning, $5 billion had exited, and the exchange was clearly not going to be able to come up with enough cash to pay the swelling number of customers who wanted their money back. It didn’t formally shut down withdrawals, but it more or less stopped actually sending money back to the customers.”
• “The panic was driven by an assumption: if Alameda Research, the single biggest owner of FTT, was making a big show of being willing to buy a huge pile of it for $22, they must need for some reason to maintain the market price at $22. The most plausible explanation was that Alameda Research was using FTT as collateral to borrow dollars or bitcoin from others.”
• “By Tuesday, the relevant math was fourth-grade level. Before the crisis, FTX was meant to be holding about $15 billion worth of customer deposits. Five billion of that had already been paid out to customers, and so, still inside FTX, there should have been roughly $10 billion. There wasn’t.”

Liquidity:

• “‘They wouldn’t answer questions directly about where the money went,’ he said. ‘When I entered the room, no one acknowledged that money was being mishandled. The money was all there. We just had a liquidity issue.’”
• “Though Caroline was in charge of Alameda Research, she seemed totally clueless about where its money was. She’d come onto the screen and announce that she had found $200 million here, or $400 million there, as if she’d just made an original scientific discovery. Some guy at Deltec, their bank in the Bahamas, messaged Ramnik to say, Oh, by the way, you have $300 million with us. And it came as a total surprise to all of them!”
• “Above all, Ramnik did not know why Sam so urgently needed money. Ramnik could see that money was leaving FTX, but he didn’t view it as a big deal. The customers might panic and pull out all their money. But once they realized that there was nothing to panic about, they’d return, and their money would too.”
• “‘I pinged Sam and asked, “Should I do damage control?” “Yup,” he said.’ Zane then sent Sam a message asking three questions: ‘One, are we insolvent, two, did we ever lend out customer funds to Alameda, and three anything I didn’t ask that I need to know?’ Sam didn’t reply—and then went totally silent on him. He’d vanished on Zane in the same way he’d vanished on Christina Rolle.”
• “Christina Rolle didn’t think Sam was going to run, and she didn’t think he was hiding billions. Her biggest worry about him was that when she asked him questions, he wouldn’t give her straight answers. ‘I don’t think he knows why people don’t trust him,’ she said. ‘It’s not hard to see you are being played by him, like a board game.’”

Losing Everything:

• “Most FTX employees had lost their life savings. Some had lost their spouses, their homes, their friends, and their good names. There were Taiwanese employees of FTX still in Hong Kong who couldn’t afford plane tickets home.”

No One Ever Asked:

• “‘No one ever asked about liquidation,’ said Constance. ‘And no one ever asked, “Is our money actually inside Alameda?”’ Sam was right: People don’t see what they aren’t looking for.”
• “Sam said much the same thing to me. ‘No one ever asked about the risk engine,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if asked. I would have done one of two things. Either I would have answered a different question, or I would have made a word salad.’”

But Why?:

• “It made no sense [because] FTX had been so wildly profitable. ‘I know how much real revenue we were making: two bips [0.02 percent] on two hundred fifty billion dollars a month,’ said Zane. ‘I’m like, Dude, you were sitting on a fucking printing press: why did you need to do this?’”
• “To Zane it didn’t matter. There was one question he dwelled on: Why had neither he nor anyone else he knew seen this coming? He had the beginning of an answer. ‘Sam’s oddness,’ he said. ‘His oddness mixed with just how smart he was allowed you to wave away a lot of the concerns. The question of why just goes away.’”

Where Did the Money Go?:

• “At what point was there less money in all of Sam’s World than was supposed to be inside of FTX? Exactly when did FTX go broke?”
• “Six months into the Easter egg hunt, there was a decent argument to be made that FTX was solvent right up to the moment it collapsed, even if Sam’s Serum was worthless. The hunt had gone better than anyone without a very deep working knowledge of Sam’s motives and methods could have expected. At the end of June 2023, John Ray filed a report on his various collections. ‘To date, the Debtors have recovered approximately $7 billion in liquid assets,’ he wrote, ‘and they anticipate additional recoveries.’”
• “Ray was inching toward an answer to the question I’d been asking from the day of the collapse: Where did all that money go? The answer was: nowhere. It was still there.”

“‘The smartest minds of our generation are either buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an ad,’ [Ramnik] said. ‘This is the tragedy of our generation.’ The effect of the tragedy had been to shrink his ambition. He was thinking less and less about changing the world and more and more about making himself and his wife comfortable within it.”