Excerpts from From Michael Lewis' Going Infinite:

Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn't really register the damage hed caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. He has absolutely zero empathy, she said. That's what I learned that I didn't know. He can't feel anything.

Sam didn't care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.

Other people felt emotions; he did not.

Maybe most alarmingly, more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam's indifference to other peoples feelings. As an example, the Jane Street executives cited what Sam had done to a fellow intern, here called Asher Mellman.

He'd long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn't feel the emotion didn't mean he couldn't convey it. He'd started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to move in ways they didn't naturally. It's not totally trivial to fake things, he said. It was physically painful. It felt unnatural. And I wasn't good at it. It didnt look right.

I don't feel pleasure, he wrote one day, late in his Jane Street career. I don't feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be.

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

He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.

And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. [Somehow indeed. Why would there be any reason to believe these unhappy "EA" proponents would know anything about how to manage the happiness of others.]

Even if the VCs didn't all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn't care what they had to say. Ramnik came to think that Sam's indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him.

In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness.

As a group, they eased a worry George [FTX's psychiatrist] had about himself: the limits to his powers of empathy. When ordinary people came to him with their ordinary feelings, he often found himself faking an understanding. [Sam and other EA followers at FTX used a shrink who himself could not feel emotions.]

What he liked about George was that George simply took him as he was and actually didn't seem all that interested in engaging in pointless conversations about his feelings.

One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn't, not really, which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn't matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philanthropy. It was always fueled by a cool lust for the most logical way to lead a good life.

[How many people would want to live in an EA "utopia" where emotional states are incomprehensible to the self-appointed experts responsible for managing the world's "happiness". To these people emotions have zero utility. How many people want to live in that world. There is no sense of humour. Nothing. Will anyone be given an opportunity to "opt-out". SBF will provide for our happiness. What an interesting idea. Not.]