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My top take on how to react is: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w6aLsNppuwnqccHmC/in-defense-of-sbf

And in response to your post I posit that:

1) Sam believes that the only intrinsic good in the world is happiness and the only intrinsic bad is suffering. Utilitarianism follows. EA follows. And he got into EA prior to Jane Street. Indeed EA is the reason he joined: https://felicifia.github.io/thread/657.html#p5945

2) Risk-neutrality also follows. At least on a fundamental level — in practice, your risk appetite will always look like something else.

3) The question of whether Sam has DAE is kind of uninteresting. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, depending on exactly how you define it. He certainly tries not to let personal sentiment get in the way of what he thinks is the absolute best thing to do for the world. Thus, people call him cold and unfeeling and he says that in many ways he doesn’t have a soul.

4) He has extremely little respect for other people’s opinions — he won’t take your word for anything, you need to fully lay out your evidence and arguments and convince him.

5) He is not a naive utilitarian. He realizes that rules have utility.

6) He tries to never technically lie but he will sometimes mislead, who doesn’t? Although not to the extent nearly everyone thinks he does.

7) Ryan Salame bought him a fancy car. He did not care for a fancy car. Plus it would make people think he wasn’t serious about giving lots of money away. So he got a not-fancy car instead. Where is the problem.

8) “personal benefit: luxury real estate, private jets, personal loans, and political donations”. Translation: he invested in real estate, he bought a jet to travel to DC meetings and back all the time not for jollies, he put money wherever he thought was best for making more money or more directly doing good within the confines of the law (the judge disallowed testimony relating to Sam’s reliance on legal advice on the grounds that it was confusing and barely relevant, so this aspect is under-reported), and yes, he made political donations…that’s always been the point? To donate huge sums to pandemic prevention and the like?

9) Tara’s opinion of Sam carries little weight: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b83Zkz4amoaQC5Hpd/time-article-discussion-effective-altruist-leaders-were?commentId=tgrLLmuYfH7LRN2bA If Tara had been the one with the humongous fuckup, Sam would be exclaiming “I told you she was a $*%@!” (Except that he wouldn’t, because he’s not like that.) One man’s “maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise” is another man’s “now all these unprofitable effective altruists were demanding to be paid millions to quit—and doing whatever they could to trash Sam’s reputation with the outside world until they got their money.”

10) There’s been no such thing as independent opinions of Sam since November 2022. *Everyone* has enemies. We *all* have people who will cry “I told you so!!” and pile on even more insults than before the moment it becomes socially acceptable to hate us. Sam has been, in his own words, “borderline depressed” his whole life, yet he is incredibly dedicated to helping others, he’s in prison thanks to his efforts, and his friends and colleagues act like he hasn’t suffered enough. Yes, many many globally wealthy people have probably permanently lost a fair chunk of the money they put into FTX due to this fuckup. Yes, the EA movement has suffered significant damage in the wake of the collapse, in large part through turning on each other. But come on, everyone. He’s a human being.

Thank you for the feedback. It’s true that we could summarize the piece in many fewer words. However, the purpose of this post was to do a deep dive into the different explanations for SBF’s actions and the evidence for and against each explanation. The aim was not to provide the shortest possible explanation (without back-up evidence).

We could have provided a short summary at the top, but we chose not to. The intent behind this choice was to allow readers to review and form their own conclusions based on all the evidence available.

Are you saying there are many grifters and frauds in EA outside of SBF? If so, what is an example of one? Or do you just mean that you’d expect that grifters and frauds would be attracted to EA?

Please point me to where SBF ever said that. Maybe what you’re talking about is the Kelsey Piper messages he sent, which I discuss in detail in this post? I don’t believe they indicate what you’re claiming (if those are the messages you mean). But if you think I’m wrong, would appreciate you making the case for me being wrong (e.g., point to a quote of him where he says this)

Are you delusional? He himself stated EA was a bullshit smokescreen. If you’re going to hem and haw over fairly overt and blatant theft and fraud then you plainly have no ethnical stature from which to preach. C’mon.

I probably see a wider middle ground between Theory B and C than you allow for here, something like “genuinely EA-influenced status seeking”.

You mention that he was brought up believing utiliarianism was a correct moral theory, so as he became a (highly status-seeking) adult, he knew that the best way of acquiring status was: a) making persuasive arguments for utiliarianism; b) being respected by the best utilitarians there are, the EAs; and c) actually doing things that his peers viewed as positive utility. So his status-seeking “production function” was set according to utilitarian and EA-adjacent principles. It’s obviously very hard to distinguish this production function and a “true believer” production function, but perhaps his actions in the later FTX days seemed a bit more geared towards EA-flavoured status seeking than actual EA values (perhaps because a true EA would not risk the movement’s reputation with that kind of scandal).

But I’m a bit reluctant to cast too many doubts on his sincerity. It’s tempting to think that there’s something inherently insincere about his beliefs, because of his seeming lack of emotional attachment to EA concerns, but I think this is a dangerous path to go down – if only genuine emotion or affective empathy can serve as a basis for moral belief or action, this is incredibly limiting and pushes us towards overly subjective ethical norms.