With that in mind, here are seven thought experiments related to happiness and suffering that might make you see your intrinsic values a bit differently:

— we don’t necessarily know our values —

Unfortunately, our deepest values are not something we automatically know about ourselves. The conscious side of our mind doesn’t have direct access to the rest of our mind. And much of what we care about lies in the subconscious, meaning that our explicit beliefs about our values may not be comprehensive or even accurate. So this at least opens the possibility that we might subconsciously value increasing strangers’ well-being more than we realize.

— our values are affected by our beliefs —

Some of what we value hinges on our beliefs about what’s true. And so if some of our relevant beliefs are false, or we haven’t fully explored all the implications of those beliefs (e.g., two things we believe imply a third thing but we haven’t realized that), then what we think we value may be, in a certain sense, “wrong”. So this at least opens the possibility that we might hold beliefs that are false or that contradict each other, such that, once they are corrected or the contradictions are resolved, we may end up caring more about increasing the well-being of strangers than we think we do now.

— our understanding of our values evolves —

We figure out our own values over time as we carefully introspect, discuss our values with others, compare options, notice and resolve contradictions, refine our understanding of the truth, flesh out the implications of what we already think is true, and infer things about ourselves from our own reactions. Hence, it is not that strange to think that our understanding of our values may change as we engage in reflection.

— a growing ember of classical utilitarianism —

So we may not fully understand what we value.

And I am proposing that through thought experiments about values, if carefully considered and reflected upon, quite a lot of people may realize that they care more about working to increase happiness or reduce suffering than they had originally thought. That many people are *partly* classical utilitarians in their values, even if they haven’t realized it, and that thought experiments can expose this.

— the thought experiments —

Warning: references to intense suffering and very difficult tradeoffs

(1) Suffering is bad, and not just for me

Remember that time when you felt really intense physical suffering (e.g., maybe you had a really nasty stomach flu)? Don’t dwell on that time, because I don’t want you to suffer now, but remember it just for a moment. Remember how much that suffering sucked?

Now take a few seconds to imagine a stranger. Someone you’ve never met and never will meet, but perhaps you passed them on the street at some point in your life. Take a moment to picture their face.

Now, suppose that right now this stranger is suffering in that same exact way that you recalled yourself suffering a moment ago. Assume this person is not someone who has done something terrible to deserve that suffering.

How do you feel about a state of the world where this stranger is suffering? Contrast it to a state of the world where that person is happy. I bet you think the latter world is better than the former.

I ran a survey asking people about their intrinsic values, that is, those things they value that they would continue to value even if no other consequences occurred as a result of that thing. In it, 49% of people (from the general U.S. mechanical Turk population that seemed to understand the question) reported that “people I don’t know suffer less than they do normally” is an intrinsic value, and 50% reported that “people I don’t know feel happy” is an intrinsic value.

It’s tough to measure people’s intrinsic values, and this is not a population that is fully representative of the U.S. population, so the exact numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. But these results suggest to me that many people do care about the suffering of strangers.

But now, the next question is, what properties should your caring about strangers have?

—

(2) Your friends care about the suffering of their friends

You presumably want the world to contain more of what your friends value (and less of what they disvalue) insofar as these values don’t conflict with your own.

Well, there’s a very good chance that one of the things your friends value is that their friends don’t suffer. Another thing your friends probably value is that their own friends get the things they value too, which presumably includes not wanting the friends of their friends (who are the friends of your friends’ friends) to suffer.

In other words, just by caring about the values of your friends, you may also care about the suffering of a whole host of other strangers. Not necessarily all strangers, but a lot of people you will never meet.

—

(3) More suffering is worse (a.k.a. scope sensitivity)

Suppose that 1 innocent person experiences a painful electric shock for one hour. How bad do you feel that is? Now suppose that, instead of that, 100 innocent people each experience the same electric shock for one hour. How much worse does that seem to you? Take a moment to consider it.

Now 10,000 people. How bad is that? Now 1,000,000 people. How bad is that?

At first, you may feel on a raw gut level that the 1,000,000 suffering is not that much worse than 1 person suffering. But are you really taking into account how many people 1,000,000 is? That’s about the entire population of San Francisco.

Notice how, when you really think about it, and you really try to get the enormity of the large numbers, 1,000,000 innocent people each experiencing a painful electric shock for one hour is way, way, way worse than 1 person experiencing it. Not just, say, twice as bad. But MUCH worse.

That implies that, for instance, eradicating a common and horribly debilitating disease that ten million people would otherwise get is not just a little bit more valuable than helping, say, 1000 people live slightly easier lives. It’s way, way, way more valuable!

I’m not saying you necessarily value a reduction in 1 million units of suffering as being 1 million times more valuable than a reduction in one unit of suffering, just that you probably do think it’s MUCH more valuable.

—

(4) Selfishness does not dominate

What’s the thing you value most in the world? Your life, maybe? Or your happiness? Or maybe something involving another person? My guess is that no matter how much you value this, there is an amount of suffering you’d be willing to give this up to alleviate.

For instance, if you had to give up your life to prevent all future suffering on earth, I bet you would do it, as terrible and unfair a choice as it would be to make.

—

(5) We should help suffering strangers when it is easy (a version of the famous drowning child thought experiment that Peter Singer has popularized)

Suppose a stranger you’re walking behind suddenly teeters and then collapses in front of you. The person is now lying on the ground, clearly in tremendous pain. You are the only person nearby.

I think most of us feel that even though we didn’t cause this person to be ill, we still have a moral obligation to try to help them. That is, (a) not being the cause of suffering doesn’t make us totally off the hook with regard to trying to relieve that suffering.

Furthermore, suppose that it would be a small inconvenience for us to help this person (e.g., we might have to show up 15 minutes late to a fairly important work meeting). I think most of us would still help this person (and would feel that it is the right thing to do). If true, that suggests that (b), if the size of the potential reduction of suffering to another person is much greater than our own loss by our helping them, we probably should help.

Finally, suppose that instead of this being a stranger right in front of us, we imagine that this is a stranger who we happened to have accidentally just Skype called by accident (by entering our friend’s user ID incorrectly). Assuming we don’t believe the person on the other end is faking, shouldn’t we still try to figure out some way to help this person (assuming it is feasible), even though they are far away? Of course, if we have no way to help them, obviously, we have no obligation to help. But suppose we can think of an easy way to help, shouldn’t we do it? This suggests that (c) our obligation to help doesn’t depend on how far away someone is, only on our ability to help that person.

We must then remember, of course, that there are people we could help around the world at little inconvenience to ourselves.

Even if you agree with (a), (b), and (c), that doesn’t mean that you think you should devote all your time and money to helping people who are suffering. But if you do agree with those points, then I suspect your value system tells you that you should expend at least some of your resources helping reduce suffering in others, if you have the means to do so without too much sacrifice.

—

(6) Other values may seem to diminish when happiness is even slightly reduced as a consequence of them

Suppose that you happen to have found out that (through no action on your part) certain people have a false belief about a certain topic. Furthermore, you know they would believe you if you corrected this belief.

The problem is that these people would all be slightly less happy if they knew the truth about this thing, and in fact, nobody would benefit in any way from this truth being known.

Would you tell these people? Well, you may think truth is important (I do too), but you may feel that it substantially takes the wind out of the sails of truth if all people involved are less happy because of it, and nobody benefits. I think in this case, some people will say, “What is the point of the truth if everyone suffers slightly more because of it?” In other words, they might feel the value of truth is reduced to almost nothing.

This isn’t just about truth. For instance, you can do a version of this thought experiment about equality (what if, in a particular group of people, you could make the group more equal in some dimension, but every single member of the group would be slightly less happy as a result). Or you can do it for almost any other value.

My guess is that these other values seem quite a bit less valuable (and perhaps to some not even valuable at all) when everyone is slightly less happy as a consequence, highlighting the potential importance of happiness in your value system.

Note that you may not necessarily feel this property is symmetrical with other values. For instance, suppose that someone reduces suffering a significant amount, but in doing so causes the people involved in the situation to have slightly less accurate beliefs. You may not feel that the slight reduction in accurate beliefs makes the reduction in suffering itself any less valuable.

—

(7) We can at least agree on suffering

Some people like apples and others like oranges. Some want to spread atheism, and others want to spread theism. Some people think you should obey authorities, while others value freedom of thought. But one of the few dimensions we are just about all similar on is that we don’t want to suffer ourselves, and we don’t want the people we love to suffer.

Some people are perhaps exceptions (e.g., Christopher Hitchens claimed Mother Teresa believed suffering to be at least sometimes good, quoting her as saying “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”) I’m not sure what she meant by that or whether she would apply that to her own suffering or that of her loved ones, but it’s a possible exception.

That being said, though, disagreement on the badness of suffering seems really rare. Nearly everyone seems to find suffering bad, at least when it happens to themselves or their loved ones.

So if we all had to work as a species to reduce one thing, suffering seems like a pretty good contender. It’s hard to think of another thing we all dislike more.

— final thoughts —

Taken together, these thought experiments suggest (insofar as you buy into them) that you may believe:

(1) Suffering is bad when it happens to strangers

(2) You at least somewhat care about the suffering of many strangers by virtue of caring about the values of those people you care about

(3) More suffering of strangers is worse than less, and way, way more suffering is much worse still

(4) Your own self-interest is not more valuable than the potential for reducing all the suffering in the world

(5) We should put at least a little effort into reducing the suffering of strangers if it’s not too costly for us to do so, and we should not care whether those strangers are far away or near

(6) Most other values don’t seem as great if the result of producing them is to cause everyone involved to suffer slightly more, with no one benefiting, and these other values may even seem to lose their value in these cases

(7) We can all at least agree that suffering is bad and work together to reduce it

These points are not the same as classic utilitarianism, but they point in roughly the same direction as it does, I think. And anecdotally, some people seem to be quite impacted in their ethical views by thought experiments like these (though of course we can’t be sure it’s because they are revealing their deeper values as opposed to actually reshaping those values).

I don’t think that increasing the happiness of and/or reducing the suffering of conscious beings is the ONLY thing you care about. Nor do I think you SHOULD only care about those things.

But perhaps these thought experiments will make you realize that you care more about them than you thought you did, or that you’re more of a classic utilitarian than you realized.

This piece was first written on June 2, 2018, and first appeared on my website on December 2, 2025.

—
Myth #1: Narcissists don’t know they are narcissistic.

Surprisingly, quite a number do. Since narcissists are rarely able to see their own flaws clearly, there are 2 positions they usually take:

i) I’m narcissistic, but that’s good, actually

or

ii) I’m not narcissistic

In fact, enough highly narcissistic people know they are narcissists that on anonymous surveys, the single-item narcissism scale works reasonably well: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist. (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)”

—
Myth #2: Narcissists love themselves and are confident.

While many of them project confidence, and they may feel confident much of the time, they usually have unstable egos and desperately seek attention and admiration. Without it (such as when criticized), their ego can easily collapse, spiraling them into self-loathing.

—
Myth #3: Narcissists have zero emotional empathy.

While this is true of some, usually, they do have empathy, but it’s conditional. Narcissists can be very empathetic when it’s low cost. But if your needs or desires conflict with theirs, their empathy typically vanishes immediately.

—
Myth #4: Narcissists are common.

While many people manifest some narcissistic traits at times, true narcissists (i.e., people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder) are about 1%-6% of the population. You very likely know one or more, but they aren’t as common as some assume.

—
Myth #5: A narcissist wouldn’t be nice, give me compliments, talk about how great other people are, be a victim, or give donations.

Since admiration and attention are major drives for narcissists, they learn behaviors that get them admiration and attention. So…narcissists are nice (sometimes charming) initially, so you admire them, give compliments, so you like them and give compliments back, talk up their “amazing” friends (because it makes them feel special), and donate or tell stories of being victims (for attention/admiration).

—
Myth #6: All narcissists are bad people.

While they’re certainly at elevated risk of acting immorally and harming you, some narcissists are not bad. For instance, some learn to live by healthy, pro-social principles (e.g., they might realize that living by their instincts badly backfires). Some others, fortunately, have compensating traits, such as unusually high empathy, that make them less likely to cause harm. But it’s wise to keep in mind that romantic, friend, and work relationships with narcissists come with a greatly elevated risk of experiencing psychological harm.

—
Myth #7: You’ll spot narcissists immediately because they’ll come across as obnoxious or unlikable.

The reality is that, on average, more narcissistic people actually make better first impressions than the average person. For instance, evidence suggests they tend to dress well and make likable facial expressions that cause them to be instantly liked. It’s only over time that unfavorable qualities come out.

—
Myth #8: There’s no choice but to cut off narcissists.

While some people will very reasonably decide to fully cut narcissists out of their lives – especially if they’ve suffered narcissistic abuse – others will choose to (or have no choice but to) interact with some. To minimize harm to yourself, two strategies (used at the same time) can help:

Strategy (1): If the narcissist steps over your boundaries, assert your boundaries clearly, state what you’ll do if they are violated again, and enforce without fail. Ex: “Sorry, this topic makes me uncomfortable. Please don’t bring it up again, or I’ll leave.”

Strategy (2): Avoid hurting the narcissist’s ego or coming across as “against” them. If you do, they may grow angry or lash out. So, when asserting boundaries, try to do it in a way that leaves their ego unhurt.
Using these strategies is not a panacea and will still expose you to risk. A major challenge is simultaneously enforcing boundaries (as in 1) while not triggering the ego (as in 2). With some extreme narcissists, disconnecting will be the only viable option – for instance, if they continually violate the boundaries you set.

This piece was first written on June 20, 2025 and first appeared on my website on August 12, 2025.

I’ve been trying to figure out how someone who appears to believe deeply in the principles of effective altruism (“EA”) could do what SBF did. It has been no surprise to me to see that the actions he was convicted of are nearly universally condemned by the EA community. Could it be that he did not actually believe in EA ideas despite promoting EA and claiming to believe in it? If he does believe in EA principles (which, as you probably know, are focused on how to use reason and evidence to make the world better), there seems to be a genuine mystery here as to why he took those actions.

There are a few theories that could potentially explain the seeming mystery. In this post, I’ll discuss the strongest evidence I’ve been able to find for and against each of the three theories that I find most plausible. 

It seems important to me to seek an understanding of the deeper causes of this disaster to help prevent future such disasters. It also seems to me to be essential for the EA community, in particular, to understand why this happened. An understanding of the disaster and the person behind it might be necessary (though probably not sufficient) for the community to prevent similar events from happening in the future.

A few important things before we begin the analysis

In this piece, I assume that SBF committed all the crimes that he was convicted of. If it somehow turns out that SBF isn’t guilty of these crimes, then some parts of this post would not apply (and you should consider most of this post withdrawn).

It’s also important to note that the opinions I express in this post are, for the most part, informed by studying publicly available details about SBF and the FTX collapse, as well as confidential conversations I’ve had with a number of different people who knew SBF (some who worked with him, some who knew him as a friend). I promised confidentiality to these people to help them be more comfortable sharing information honestly with me, so I won’t use their names or other indications of how they know him. I shared this post with them prior to publishing it to help reduce the chance that I introduced errors in what they said to me. 

I’ve also pulled quotes from the new book about SBF, Going Infinite, and from podcast interviews with its author, Michael Lewis. Lewis spent a lot of time with SBF (starting from late April 2022 and continuing into SBF’s period under house arrest), so he had a lot of time to form impressions of him.

I also had some interactions with SBF myself, which I discuss in more detail in my podcast episode about the FTX disaster. The podcast episode is a good place to start if you are fuzzy on the basic facts of what happened during the FTX disaster and want to know more. I also recorded an earlier podcast episode with SBF about crypto tech (prior to accusations of wrongdoing against him), but it doesn’t provide much information relevant to the topic of this post. My first-hand experience with him was limited; it informs my viewpoint on him much less than other evidence I’ve collected.

I am very interested in hearing your own arguments or evidence with regard to which theory you think is most likely about the FTX calamity (whether it is one of the three outlined below or another theory altogether).

Defining DAE

Throughout this post, I’ll use the term DAE (“deficient affective experience“) to refer to anyone who has at least one of these two traits:

1. Little or no ability or tendency to experience affective (i.e., emotional) empathy in response to someone else’s suffering
2. Little or no ability or tendency to experience the emotion of guilt

For instance, whereas most people would experience a strong empathetic emotional response to watching a dog being tortured, someone with DAE may have no emotional response to it. And whereas most people would feel very guilty if they learned that they had badly injured someone by accident, a person with DAE may have no emotional experience of guilt upon learning that.

Someone with DAE may still have the capacity to be abstractly convinced that it is bad that others suffer (i.e., they may logically agree that suffering is bad or believe in a philosophical theory that says suffering is bad) and may still have personal moral principles that they try to avoid violating, even though they may not feel guilty if they violate them.

To be characterized as having DAE in the way that I’m using the term (which, for the purpose of this post, I’m attempting to define in a more precise way than the typical usage), someone wouldn’t have to have a complete absence of such experiences (affective empathy and/or guilt), but they would have to have a very low amount of one or more of them relative to the general population.

It’s also important to note the distinction between “emotional empathy” – which a person with DAE lacks or has little of (e.g., feeling the emotions of another person when you see them suffering) – and “cognitive empathy,” which a person with DAE may be fully capable of (e.g., rationally understanding that a person is suffering when you see them suffering, and knowing what to expect about their behavior as a consequence).

Similarly, some researchers distinguish between affective guilt (based on empathy) and cognitive guilt (based on an acknowledgment of responsibility). A person with DAE may be capable of regretting having taken certain actions (e.g., because they think things would have turned out better if they had taken other actions) without having the emotional experience of guilt that most people would feel.

I believe that DAE is likely positively correlated with other personality tendencies, including: 

• An absence or reduction in prosocial emotions related to attachment with others, such as love
• Manipulativeness, deceptiveness, and willingness to use people as a means to an end
• An increased frequency and intensity of anger
• A dampened fear response (perhaps especially dampened in relation to the fear most people experience at the thought of violating strong societal norms, rules, and laws)
• A sense of being superior to most or all other people

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone with DAE has these traits.

Ethics for someone with DAE

There is an important distinction between whether someone has DAE and whether they act unethically. Someone who lacks empathy and guilt may still act ethically because, for instance, they distinguish between right and wrong and care about doing what is right. On the other hand, a lack of empathy is correlated with criminality and causing harm. 

One way to think about this is that there are multiple reasons why most people try to avoid unethical behavior. In particular:

1. Affective Empathy: They feel empathy for those who would be harmed
2. Guilt: They want to avoid feelings of guilt, or they feel motivated by past feelings of guilt to avoid actions that were similar to those past actions that produced guilt
3. Mimicry: They have been taught certain default behaviors that involve good behavior, or they may mimic others because it makes them fearful to stand out or seem weird, or they mimic the good behavior of others around them merely because of the natural social mimicry instincts that most people seem to possess (e.g., in many social circles, it is not socially acceptable to punch someone during a disagreement, so most people in these social circles won’t do that regardless of their other traits)
4. Belief systems about right and wrong: According to their belief system, an action is wrong, and they don’t want to take actions that they believe are wrong (e.g., a Christian might try to avoid breaking the Ten Commandments even if they aren’t worried about going to hell, or a utilitarian might try to avoid taking actions that cause suffering because they cognitively believe it’s wrong to cause suffering)
5. Punishment avoidance: They don’t want to be punished (by others, by society, or by the legal system) for doing harm

People with DAE don’t want to be punished and may still adhere to strong belief systems about right and wrong, so, like everyone else, they may be motivated by (4) and (5) to avoid taking unethical actions. They may also engage in social mimicry (though, perhaps less so than the average person, due to less social fear), so (3) may still motivate them to avoid certain kinds of unethical behavior. However, someone with DAE is likely to be much less motivated by (1) and/or (2) than most people are. 

So it’s not that people with DAE have nothing motivating them to avoid causing harm or acting unethically, but they have fewer forces pushing them not to do so than most people do. With fewer such forces pushing them away from unethical actions, they are more likely to harm others, even though there are plenty of people with DAE who act ethically and are productive members of society.

I know a number of people who I believe have DAE. Some of them are good and work to make the world better. Other people I know with DAE are genuinely frightening (for instance, one of them told me that he enjoyed it when his girlfriend would catch him cheating because it would give him an opportunity to trick her, which, to him, is a fun game).

Theories of how SBF could have caused the FTX disaster

While other theories about what happened are possible (e.g., “perhaps one or more of the people he worked with did all the bad stuff, and he was just a victim, despite the conviction”), I’m going to limit this post to considering just the three theories in the diagram above because I currently think they are the most likely ones. If you think there is a theory that’s more likely than any of these three, please let me know in the comments.

I also want to point out an obvious theory that is not included here, namely, the one that would be in the missing bottom left quadrant of the chart above (i.e., SBF does not have DAE, but also, he did not genuinely believe in EA). This theory seems unlikely to me because it would require a non-DAE-based explanation for why he constantly lied about believing in EA (even going back to his pre-FTX days), and I don’t have such an explanation. For reasons that will become clear later in this post, if he didn’t believe in EA (and was just publicly pretending to believe in it), I think it’s likely he had DAE.

Let’s briefly review the three theories.

Theory A says that SBF genuinely believed in effective altruism when running FTX, and he does not have DAE. Additionally, this theory says that his unethical behaviors were just the result of some mixture of incompetence and bad luck (possibly, though not necessarily, exacerbated by a belief in naïve utilitarianism). In this theory, he did not intentionally defraud anyone, though he was, at the very minimum, extremely reckless. This theory says that he was either so incompetent that he didn’t know he was behaving unethically and breaking the law, or else he was able to justify his behaviors to himself (even if he felt very bad/guilty about his actions) via a naïve utilitarian calculus based on his guess that doing so would yield more utility in the world in the long-run for all conscious beings (compared to if he followed the law and behaved ethically). 

This theory seems to be in line with what SBF himself said about the disaster. As Fortune described it:

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” Bankman-Fried told reporter Andrew Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened this month. And reconstructing it, there are things that I wish I had done differently.”

…SBF admitted that he “made a lot of mistakes” as CEO but denied that he used FTX’s funds at Alameda.

“I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” he said, arguing that it was a “failure of oversight” rather than anything malicious.

SBF went on to distance himself from Alameda altogether in the interview. 

“I wasn’t running Alameda,” he said. “I was nervous because of the conflict of interest of being too involved.” 

SBF went on to claim that he was not aware of the depth of the relationship between FTX and Alameda Research, nor the sizable amount of funds transferred between the exchange and trading house.

“I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I didn’t know the size of their position,” he said.

Theory B says that SBF has DAE but that he also genuinely believed in EA when running FTX and that his behavior and choices were guided by a combination of the two (a lack of emotional empathy and/or guilt, plus a belief system genuinely based on EA principles). While bad luck and/or incompetence may also have played a role (perhaps a substantial role), these other factors (DAE and a genuine belief in EA) played a critically important role in the calamity. 

You may immediately object to Theory B, wondering whether a person with DAE could (or would) ever believe in EA, given that EA is a philosophy about doing good in the world. But EA is a cluster of beliefs, and while one’s emotional capacities and tendencies can influence what beliefs a person has, I think that almost any set of emotional capacities can co-occur with almost any set of beliefs. For instance, someone who is born incapable of experiencing empathy and guilt could be raised Christian, Muslim, secular humanist, etc., and, like most people, I think would typically continue with whatever belief system they were raised with into their adulthood. 

I will also add that I have met a few different people with DAE who seem to strongly believe in specific abstract belief systems (such as utilitarianism). Of course, they could be lying, but for whatever it’s worth, I was pretty convinced (when talking to them) that they believed in these systems, and their behavior seemed to back that up.

Theory C says that SBF has DAE, that his DAE is an important factor in his behavior with FTX, and that he was only pretending to believe in effective altruism when running FTX. 

Basically, this theory says that he was playing a long con, presumably aimed primarily at gaining some combination of wealth, status, pleasure, and/or power for himself (and perhaps also for his close companions, although it’s possible that his companions were also just a means to an end for him). 

In this theory, EA was just another part of that con. While luck and/or incompetence may have played a role in the disaster (perhaps even a substantial role), this theory says that he has DAE and that understanding him as having DAE is necessary to understand the calamity (and that his claims of EA beliefs were just a front).

Note that it’s important to distinguish between having DAE and being broadly sadistic. I believe that most people with DAE do not actively enjoy harming people who they have no special negative feelings towards (though they might enjoy harming people who they feel have wronged them or who they think are bad in some way). 

So, Theory C (which hinges on DAE) is not a hypothesis that SBF hurt people merely because he enjoyed hurting people. I think that, thankfully, it’s very, very rare to find people who indiscriminately enjoy creating suffering. Even in cases of school shooters and terrorist attacks, if the attackers express joy in hurting people, I believe it’s usually because they view the people they are hurting as evil or lump together the people they are hurting as all being from a group that they feel they or their group was wronged by. So, if Theory C is true, I think the most likely explanation of SBF’s behavior would be selfish motivations (along with indifference towards harming others), not motivations specifically to harm other people. It’s a theory about DAE, not a theory about sadism.

SBF and risk-taking

As we consider each of the three theories, I’m going to make the assumption that SBF has far less risk aversion (i.e., has a far more risk-taking attitude) than the average person.

I think that all of the most likely explanations for the FTX disaster involve SBF taking risks that most people would be reluctant to take.

Here is some evidence of his lack of normal risk aversion:

(1) In an interview with Tyler Cowen, he suggests that he would be willing to take a bet with a large positive expected value even if it put the entire world at risk. (The specific thought experiment he was responding to was: “51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears.”) 

(2) He explicitly rejected Kelly-Criterion betting (a common approach to the sizing of bets when making gambles so as to balance the growth of capital with risk of ruin to achieve an optimal long-term growth rate). He said that he would bet more than the Kelly-Criterion suggests and that “My utility function isn’t really logarithmic. It’s closer to linear.” If he’s accurately describing how he approaches trading and betting, then his approach is out of line both with fairly commonly accepted standard practices and with most people’s natural response toward risk.

(3) One person who worked with him also said to me that he was willing to take huge risks without seeming to mind on an emotional level.

(4) In a podcast interview, SBF’s explanation of his approach to expected value calculations suggested that he was not at all concerned about the potential downside risks associated with his decisions.

SBF: So, if your goal is to maximize the expected value of the impact that you have, then I think it implies interesting things about how you should behave. And in particular, the expected value of how much impact you have, I think, is going to be a function sort of weighted towards upside tail cases. That’s what I think my prior would be. And if your impact is weighted towards upside tail cases, then what’s that probability distribution of impact probably look like? I think the odds are, it has decent weight on zero. Maybe majority weight.

(5) One real-world example of SBF’s risk-taking behavior is provided by Lewis’ description of the first time that SBF switched on “Modelbot” at Alameda: 

“It was entirely within the realm of possibility that we could lose all our money in an hour,” said one [of the executives at Alameda]. 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 and 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.

(6) Later in Alameda’s early history (emphasis added): 

By early April, the other executives at Alameda Research had ceased to be interested in Sam’s thought experiments…They’d all wearied of Sam’s stubborn unwillingness to manage anyone. They’d all grown to fear how little he worried about where exactly their money was. They were making two hundred fifty thousand trades a day and their system had somehow lost, or failed to record, some large number of them. Among the many problems their shoddy recordkeeping caused was the difficulty of filing an honest tax return.

(7) Caroline Ellison (former co-chief of Alameda) said on the stand:

Whereas most people are risk-averse, Bankman-Fried views himself as “risk-neutral”

(8) In episode 1 of the Judging Sam podcast (Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis), Lewis said (emphasis added):

He had an appetite for risk that at first I thought was kind of funny, and then, it’s like, you’re in a game of chicken, and then you realize that you don’t want to be playing chicken against this person because he actually will do the things that most people won’t do – watch out because he will actually do it.

Distinguishing three theories using two questions

Let’s consider the chart of the three theories again:

These three theories hinge on two main questions:

1. Does SBF have DAE? If yes, that eliminates Theory A; if no, that eliminates Theories B and C.
2. Did SBF believe in EA principles while running FTX? If yes, that eliminates Theory C; if no, that eliminates Theories A and B.

We will consider each of these two questions in turn.

Does SBF have DAE?

As a reminder, in this piece, I define having DAE (“deficient affective experience“) as follows: having little or no ability or tendency to experience affective (i.e., emotional) empathy in response to someone else’s suffering and/or little or no ability or tendency to experience the emotion of guilt. 

Evidence in favor of SBF having DAE:

(1) Convicted criminals such as SBF are more likely to have DAE compared to people in the general population, all else equal. The traits in our definition of DAE are typically considered part of the core traits used to define psychopathy, so (other things being equal) activities that are evidence of a person having psychopathy also raise the probability of the person of interest having DAE. This is relevant because crime is strongly linked to psychopathy. According to the American Psychological Association:

About 1.2% of U.S. adult men…are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. Those numbers rise exponentially in prison, where 15% to 25% of inmates show these characteristics.

So, people with psychopathic traits are vastly overrepresented among those committing crimes. I think the way that these conditions are sometimes diagnosed (using crimes as evidence of the condition) may inflate the correlation between psychopathy and crime to at least a small degree, but I still think that the overrepresentation of people with psychopathic traits in prison populations is substantial enough that the mere observation that SBF committed the crimes he committed raise the probability that he has high levels of psychopathic traits.

Some readers may think that this sounds circular: if I’m trying to explain why someone would do what SBF did, how is it valid to use the fact that he did it as a piece of evidence for the explanation? But treating the convictions as evidence for SBF’s DAE is valid in the same way that, if you were trying to explain why the grass is wet, it would be valid to use the fact that the grass is wet as evidence for the hypothesis that it rained recently (since wet grass is typically substantial evidence for rain). It isn’t definitive proof (alternative explanations exist), but the fact that the grass is wet is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that it rained recently (because rain typically results in wet grass more often than the lack of rain leads to it), and in a similar way, the fact that SBF committed these crimes (assuming he is guilty of what he’s been convicted of) is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that he has DAE (because people with DAE are more likely to commit crimes than typical people).

Relatedly, there is evidence that SBF lied to the public. The Verge says:

Although Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison previously stated that she and Bankman-Fried keep the two companies “quite separate in terms of day-to-day operations,” the CFTC makes a pretty strong argument indicating that this, too, could be false.

FTX’s terms of service said that none of the digital assets in a user’s account “shall or may be loaned to FTX Trading.” According to the CFTC complaint, that was a lie. The use of customer funds wasn’t authorized by FTX customers, and they didn’t know their funds were being used by Alameda Research, the complaint says.

The CFTC’s complaint also indicates that Bankman-Fried may have lied to Congress about FTX’s terms of service during his appearance on February 9th, 2022. At the time, Bankman-Fried told US lawmakers, “As a general principle, FTX segregates customer assets from its own assets across our platforms.”

In November 2022, he also tweeted these statements (and later deleted some of the statements): 

(2) If the allegations against him are true, then in addition to his other crimes, he seemed to have had extreme disregard for protecting his customers from very early in FTX’s history. For instance, reports indicate that FTX co-mingled customer funds with Alameda’s investment assets and that he may then have lied about this when presenting to Congress well before the collapse of FTX (“As a general principle, FTX segregates customer assets from its own assets across our platforms.”) 

The SEC claimed that SBF:

commingled FTX customers’ funds at Alameda to make undisclosed venture investments, lavish real estate purchases, and large political donations

They also state that he:

built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto.

If these allegations are true, DAE could explain why he seemingly had such complete disregard for protecting customer funds.

Regarding this, he claimed to Kelsey Piper at Vox regarding commingling funds: 

oh, FTX doesn’t have a bank account, I guess people can wire to Alameda’s to get money on FTX….3 years later…oh fuck it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that, and so it was never delivered to FTX.

(3) There are multiple sources suggesting that he has a tendency and willingness to lie and deceive others.

(3-i) In Going Infinite, Lewis explains how SBF’s cofounder at Alameda, Tara Mac Aulay, “had long since decided that he was dishonest and manipulative” by the time the Alameda “schism” happened.

(3-ii) In episode 1 of the Judging Sam podcast (Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis), Lewis expanded on SBF’s “style” of dishonesty: 

I became kind of awed by how…everything he said would check out. Now, what he would do is not answer things I asked, in very crafty ways, sometimes I would ask something and he would give me an answer to a slightly different question, but over time I came to be able to rely on him more than I did in the beginning…it all checked out and it kept checking out.

This could suggest that either SBF was actually saying true things, or that he was saying untrue things and that SBF was deceitful in a very skilful way (skilful enough that Lewis couldn’t find examples of him being probably wrong about something he said). 

One of the specific examples of the style of dishonesty described above (that Lewis described in Going Infinite) is the way in which SBF answered a question someone asked him (about funding Tom Brady and his then-wife Gisele Bündchen) in a way that was “strictly true” while also failing to “capture the spirit of the relationship.”

(3-iii) There are also multiple examples throughout Going Infinite of SBF going out of his way to give people an impression of his inner state that didn’t actually reflect reality:

He didn’t think of himself as frightening. He didn’t intend to intimidate. But he wasn’t going to change human nature, and so he decided that, going forward, he would bury any negative reactions he had to anything anyone said or did. He would give human beings with whom he interacted the impression that he was far more interested in whatever they were saying or doing than he actually was. He’d agree with them, even if he didn’t. Whatever idiocy came from them, he’d reply with a Yuuuuuuppp! “It comes with a cost, but it’s on balance worth it,” he said. “In most ways, people like you more if you agree with them.” He went from being a person you’d be surprised to learn approves of you to a person you’d be surprised to learn that, actually no, he doesn’t.

(3-iv) During her time at the witness stand in SBF’s trial, Caroline Ellison also gave examples of how the way in which SBF presented himself to the world appeared to be calculating and potentially deceitful. On the one hand, SBF had presented himself to others (including Lewis, judging by the way he writes about him in Going Infinite) as if he did not care what others thought about him, and as if he did not care at all about external appearances. However, Ellison said that he had swapped his nice company car for a Toyota Corolla because it was “better for his public image.” She also reported that he had purposely dressed sloppily and that he thought his hair was “very valuable” and key to the narrative. 

(3-v) The Bahamas chief financial officer, Christina Rolle, thought that SBF tended to “play” people like a board game:

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.”

(4) There are multiple sources of direct evidence that he lacks affective (emotional) empathy and has a deficient affective experience (i.e., has DAE).

(4-i) SBF has shown awareness at multiple times that he lacks affective empathy.

In Going Infinite, Michael Lewis quotes SBF’s personal writings. In a letter to Ellison, SBF had written (emphasis added): 

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.

SBF believed that his theory of mind (ToM) was intact, however. Lewis describes a particular example of this in Going Infinite, when SBF was approached by seniors at his workplace, Jane Street Capital, about his treatment of a fellow intern, who Lewis calls Asher Mellman, whom SBF had embarrassed in front of other interns (by making a show of taking him up on a bet where he had obviously negative expected value). SBF’s seniors at Jane Street had assumed that SBF could not read the Asher’s discomfort, but SBF felt confident that they were wrong about that: 

He wasn’t surprised to learn that Asher Mellman felt wounded. 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. “It was not like I was unaware I was being a piece of shit to Asher,” he said. “The relevant thing was: Should I decide to prioritize making the people around me feel better, or proving my point?” Sam thought his bosses had misread his social problems. They thought he needed to learn how to read other people. Sam believed the opposite was true. “I read people pretty well,” he said. “They just didn’t read me.”

(4-ii) There are many people who know SBF well who describe him as lacking empathy. 

(4-ii-a) CNBC quotes one FTX employee saying, “I’ve never seen an empathetic version of Sam, so I can’t imagine he’ll change his tune now.” 

(4-ii-b) In Going Infinite, Lewis describes how Constance Wang, the Chief Operating Officer of FTX, said that she tried to get an explanation from SBF in the month or so following the collapse. She said how she would “poke, and each time I poke, he says a little more, and more.” But she eventually only learned one thing about SBF in the month or so of questioning him:

Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn’t really register the damage he’d 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.” 

Soon afterward, Constance’s friend and colleague Quinn Li (who’d been helping Constance) wrote a note and left it in a kitchen for Lewis to find it. It said: “Why can’t Sam love? – By Quinn.”

(4-ii-c) Lewis also reports that “Sam didn’t care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.”

(4-ii-d) In Judging Sam: Nishad Singh Takes the Stand, Michael Lewis describes how Nishad perceived SBF’s complete absence of empathy (emphasis added): 

[Nishad] was also very open, extremely open about Sam’s lack of any kind of emotional intelligence and how hard it had been on everybody for the previous four years to have this guy sitting at the top of the company who did not care at all about people’s feelings and was uninterested in dealing with them.

(4-ii-e) In Going Infinite, Lewis also describes how “more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam’s indifference to other people’s feelings” (emphasis added).

(4-iii) In addition to lacking empathy, SBF wrote (in his journal) about the fact that he was incapable of other prosocial emotions: he reports that he is unable to form genuine feelings of gratitude, love, devotion, or kinship: 

He knew he should feel grateful to Jane Street for finding value in him that no one else had, but he also knew that he didn’t. “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.”

(4-iv) There is also a group that did an analysis of the language SBF used during ten interviews and compared it to the language of other CEOs. I have no idea how valid their methods are (and I think there are some significant confounds, such as the context for his interviews being different than for the average CEO they used as a comparison group). But they say that they found evidence for a lack of both kinds of empathy (i.e., both cognitive and affective empathy):

The language SBF used during his interviews came across as significantly less cognitively empathetic than the average CEO’s language during earnings calls…Similarly, results also showed that SBF’s language indicates significantly lower emotional empathy than the average CEO (i.e., SBF’s language expressed lower compassion and greater callousness)…Results showed that SBF used significantly less language depicting social processes and affiliation than that of the average CEO. In other words, SBF comes across as less focused on (relationships with) other people than the typical CEO, which suggests a sense of social aversion consistent with deficits in empathy…Our results demonstrated that SBF used significantly higher rates of I-words and significantly lower rates of we-words than the average CEO. These findings support the notion that SBF is much more self-focused than other-focused and complement his language patterns that reflect low empathy and social aversion.

(4-v) He seems to be unemotional even under high-pressure or high-stakes conditions.

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. Other people felt emotions; he did not.

(5) After the crash, I talked to multiple people who knew him well. The information that those people shared has led me to think that SBF is very manipulative. Three people who know him well described him to me in the following ways (paraphrased): 

• “He was one of the most manipulative people I’ve ever met.” 
• “He is very effective at one-on-one manipulation.” 
• “He was a very scheming person.” 

Note that these were not references to the FTX disaster, but to SBF’s personality. Furthermore, each of these conversations were one-on-one and independent of each other. It’s possible that the views expressed by these people were mere speculations based on reactions to the FTX crash, rather than views formed prior to the crash about SBF as a person, but in all of these cases I made it clear I was talking about SBF’s personality. Note that manipulativeness is a trait that’s been found to correlate substantially with DAE, and one of the main recognized factors of psychopathy is deficient affective experience. 

(6) One person who knows SBF well told me that he would routinely pursue women who worked for him as sexual conquests. They also told me that once SBF grew tired of these women, he would relegate them to unimportant roles in the organization where they had little power. This is echoed in this Time article, which says:

Bankman-Fried could be “dictatorial,” according to one former colleague. Three former Alameda employees told TIME he had inappropriate romantic relationships with his subordinates.

(7) One person I spoke to told me about frightening threats he made to destroy the reputation of another person who he used to be friends with (threats of a sort that I think most people would not make).

(8) DAE might help explain other strange behaviors of SBF. For instance, perhaps it could help explain his strange behavior after the FTX collapse (e.g., ignoring his lawyers’ advice to not speak publicly, tweeting strange things, and saying to the New York Times that he’s still sleeping better than you might think, etc.). 

Having said this, I honestly don’t put much stock in this point because I think that people often act strangely when in very bizarre and stressful situations. For instance, Amanda Knox was falsely convicted of murder (and later completely exonerated). After she was arrested but long before it was known she was innocent, people made a big deal of her “strange” behavior after being arrested (e.g, doing the splits at the police station). I think it’s just not very easy to predict how people would react in extremely stressful situations, and tough to validly read into their reactions in those situations.

In Going Infinite, Lewis quotes SBF as saying:

The place I am strongest is the place where you have to do things other people would find shocking.

It’s not quite clear what the word “shocking” here refers to, but there are interpretations of this quote that are strongly suggestive of DAE.

(9) Business Insider reports that he lived in a $30 million penthouse, suggesting a lavish lifestyle, consistent with a goal of self-enrichment (rather than genuine altruism).

Some people interpreted stories of him sleeping in a bean bag and driving a Corolla as claims that he was living frugally, though I am not aware of him actually ever having claimed to live frugally, and these stories seem to more accurately be about him working long hours and not caring about cars.

I don’t see the expensive penthouse as providing much evidence though. While clearly this home is very expensive, my understanding is that roughly 10 people lived in it, and it’s extremely common for billionaires to live in expensive homes (I’m not aware of any that don’t, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a few frugal billionaires exist who live in less valuable homes).

On the other hand, according to the Verge:

The CFTC claims that Bankman-Fried, his parents, and his employees at FTX and Alameda used customers’ funds for personal benefit: luxury real estate, private jets, personal loans, and political donations.

If he actually used customer funds (rather than the profits of his business or the sale of his own assets) to live luxuriously, I think that is much stronger evidence of DAE.

(10)  There is at least some evidence of him using tactics to control employee behavior that at least some people would likely see as being manipulative. Lewis reports that: 

In Sam’s view, everyone at once became a lot less motivated to work fourteen-hour days. And so he did a very Sam thing: he changed the terms of the employees’ Serum. In the fine print of the employee Serum contract, he’d reserved for himself the right to extend Serum’s jail time, and he used it to lock up all employees’ Serum for seven years. Sam’s employees had always known that he preferred games in which the rules could change in the middle. They now understood that if he had changed the rules once, he might do it again. They became less enthusiastic about their Serum. “It was very unclear if you had it or if you didn’t have it,” said Ramnik, who had watched in irritation as Sam locked up a bunch of tokens that he’d bought with his own money on the open market before he joined FTX. “I guess you would know in seven years.”

(11) There is some evidence he has higher-than-normal narcissistic traits, and there’s a positive correlation between narcissistic traits and DAE. I think there is more evidence of him having DAE than there is of him having narcissistic traits, but here are some points of evidence suggesting the possibility that he’s narcissistic: 

(11-i) He garnered a lot of attention (and he seemed to seek out this attention in certain ways, such as by giving lots of interviews), and attention is something that narcissists tend to pursue more than other people do

(11-ii) Narcissists tend to outwardly express excessive self-confidence, which he did as well. Though, unlike most highly narcissistic people I’ve encountered, he didn’t have a strong tendency to brag. 

(11-iii) He allowed the famous author Michael Lewis to embed with his team for a long time so that Michael could write about their work, a very strange decision for someone who seemed to have been committing crimes – but this is compatible with a narcissistic grandiosity and tendency to want to be written about.

(11-iv) One person who knows SBF well told me that he seemed chronically unhappy (even prior to the collapse), but that the main thing that made him happy was respect from people he admired. Of course, nearly everyone values being respected by people they admire – the claim here more specifically that this was nearly the only thing that made him happy. Though he also said he didn’t care what others thought of him. In my experience, narcissists care deeply about being admired, though I think more typically, they are less discriminating about who that attention comes from, so it’s unclear to me if this is evidence in favor of him being narcissistic or evidence against it.

(11v) Based on Lewis’ account in Going Infinite, SBF also had some narcissistic tendencies in his youth:

He maintained what he later called a “romantically positive” view of himself. “I didn’t think it was a happy thing that I was different,” he said. “I thought it was a cool thing.” His only weapon for defending himself against the derision of his schoolmates was a shallow contempt, and a weak sense of his own superiority. “But I never had a super principled reason for it. It was, I better think that, or what do I have going for me?” He was perfectly positioned, emotionally and intellectually, to make a religion of himself.

Let’s now consider the available evidence against the possibility of him having DAE.

Evidence against him having DAE:

(1) Having DAE to the level I’m claiming is rare, so a priori wouldn’t be very likely (you’d need quite strong evidence to overcome this prior). 

I am not aware of any figures about the prevalence of DAE, but there are some related statistics available about psychopathic traits (which is connected to, but not the same as, DAE). As mentioned earlier, it is estimated that only about 1% of people in the U.S. are psychopathic.

I would predict that, since EA is an altruistic movement focussed on alleviating suffering, the percentage of EAs who have DAE is a bit lower than the rate in the general population, but that’s just my own guess, as I am not aware of any data existing on this topic.

Having said this, psychopathy may be more prevalent among business managers and executives than in the general population. For instance, this study‘s corporate sample found that 6% of people met the threshold for “potential” or “possible” psychopathy compared to about 1% for a community sample. Another estimate puts the rate of psychopathy among CEOs at around 4%.

(2) He seemed to genuinely want to help improve the world and seemed to genuinely think that, for example, human and animal suffering is very bad. These are beliefs that seem less likely to be held by people with DAE. But a genuine belief in EA principles (in spite of DAE) would help explain this.

(3) According to Michael Lewis’ book, SBF ruminated on the fallout he’d had with his co-founders at Alameda; he had even written in his journal about the fact that his impact on the world had been net negative so far. The fact that he cared about it enough to write about it in this way would seem to be evidence that he may have been feeling guilty or at least remorseful.

In a similar vein, in an interview with Tiffany Fong while he was under house arrest, SBF said that the fact that he has done harm weighs “enormously” on him:

SBF: Um, if my life ended now, I would almost certainly have done net harm to the world and I don’t know. It’s hard to spin that.

Tiffany Fong: How does that thought weigh on you? Like, is it something that… 

SBF: So, it doesn’t weigh on me that people *think* I’ve done that harm. The fact that I *have* done that harm weighs enormously on me. [Very long pause.] I try not to think about it, and just think about the ways to make it as good as possible, rather than on the sunk cost, but, um, that’s….[long pause]…um…[long pause]…I’m…a lot more subdued and, um, I’ve…there’s a limit to how long I can, sort of…[long pause]…I dunno, it’s…[trails off]

However, although this does provide evidence of SBF experiencing guilt, it’s not necessarily evidence of him experiencing affective guilt. In the context of the large amounts of evidence for his lack of affective empathy, it seems more likely that the quote above is an example of cognitive guilt rather than affective guilt. (In other words, he could feel regretful due to the cognitive understanding of the harm he has done, without feeling empathy for the people he has affected.) As mentioned earlier, Constance Wang came to the conclusion that he had “zero empathy” and so, although he said he didn’t mean to do anything wrong, in Constance’s view, SBF “didn’t really register the damage he’d caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have.”

(4) In a letter to his employees shortly after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (but before criminal charges were brought against him), SBF expressed regret (though it’s hard to know for sure whether he was experiencing the emotion of guilt or if this was just a cognitive regret):

“I feel deeply sorry about what happened. I regret what happened to all of you. And I regret what happened to customers. You gave everything you could for FTX, and stood by the company—and me.

I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, and I would give anything to be able to go back and do things over again. You were my family. I’ve lost that, and our old home is an empty warehouse of monitors. When I turn around, there’s no one left to talk to. I disappointed all of you, and when things broke down I failed to communicate. I froze up in the face of pressure and leaks and the Binance LOI and said nothing. I lost track of the most important things in the commotion of company growth. I care deeply about you all, and you were my family, and I’m sorry.

I was CEO, and so it was my duty to make sure that, ultimately, the right things happened at FTX. I wish that I had been more careful.”

(5) A number of good and well-intentioned people in the EA community who knew him clearly trusted him and believed in him. Would this really have been the case if he has DAE? I think this does serve as some evidence against him having DAE, but not very much evidence. The reason is that I have, on a number of occasions, seen people with DAE be part of communities while maintaining a positive reputation and not being identified as having DAE, even by people who know them quite well. I think that high-functioning, highly intelligent people with DAE are, for instance, much harder to identify than similarly high-functioning, highly intelligent people with narcissistic traits.

However, there is a counterargument to this that’s worth noting: some people actually spoke out against him a long time ago. The most obvious example was his former co-founder Tara Mac Aulay who attempted to warn people about him. According to Time:

Mac Aulay specifically flagged her concerns about Bankman-Fried’s honesty and trustworthiness, his maneuvering to control 100% of the company despite promising otherwise, his pattern of unethical behavior, and his inappropriate relationships with subordinates, sources say.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but it would be interesting to know if there was additional evidence about SBF’s potential for bad behavior years before the collapse.

Did SBF believe in EA principles while running FTX?

Let’s consider the evidence regarding whether SBF believed in EA principles when he was running FTX. Some of the evidence we’ll consider relates to whether he believed in EA when he was younger (since belief systems are quite sticky, and believing in something at one point in time is evidence for believing it later).

Evidence in favor of SBF genuinely believing in EA:

(1) Before his empire collapsed, SBF had begun to give away substantial amounts of money to EA-related cause areas, including to causes that would be unlikely to make him look especially good outside of the EA community. SBF also brought in some very ethical people who believe deeply in EA principles to figure out how to allocate the funds (via the Future Fund). The Future Fund is reported to have donated $160 million. 

One potential piece of information that, in some people’s view, undercuts this is that the amount the Future Fund gave away before the collapse was likely less than the amount FTX spent on promoting their own brand: for instance, they were reported to have spent approximately $135 million on naming rights for Miami Heat’s basketball stadium/arena and about $30 million on a single Super Bowl advertisement. I don’t find this counterargument particularly persuasive, though, because, of course, FTX spent lots of money on trying to grow their business – that’s what any business will aim to do if they’re able to get a good ROI on that marketing expenditure, regardless of whether their owner is genuinely philanthropic or not. If there was evidence that these marketing expenses were not about growing the business but rather about self-aggrandizement, that would be a different matter, but I am not aware of evidence of that. It’s, of course, also always possible that even the charitable giving was something SBF viewed as a “marketing expense” rather than caring about doing good for its sake.

(2) Multiple sources of evidence point to SBF being a utilitarian. While utilitarianism and EA are not the same thing, utilitarianism is dramatically more popular among genuine EAs than among almost any other group, and so believing in utilitarianism is evidence for genuine belief in EA.

(2-i) As recently as 2018, SBF was writing diary entries (that were meant for his eyes only, at the time) that refer to himself as a utilitarian:

“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?”

(2-ii) SBF’s mother referred to him like this in her book Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought: 

I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, “What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labeling it ‘the Repugnant Conclusion’?” Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the well-being of all people and to counting each person—alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us—as one.

(2-iii) SBF was raised in a utilitarian family: “[Sam’s father, Joe Bankman] was also interested in helping the world, and he was a staunch believer in utilitarianism, the doctrine that the most ethical thing is to work on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people”). This provides some evidence that SBF believed in EA principles because people very often believe in the principles they are raised with (though, of course, this is not always the case).

(2-iv) One person who knows SBF well said to me that SBF might be the most utilitarian-minded person they know in a certain sense – in that, they felt he was willing to take the conclusions of utilitarianism seriously in a logical way to a degree they’ve rarely encountered (even among EAs).

(2-v) There are a number of posts on utilitarianism that were most likely written by SBF. In particular, I’m fairly confident that this blog post, this blog post, and this blog post were written by SBF. The posts are from July 2012 (when Sam was roughly 20 years old) and are part of a series of posts on utilitarianism. In the second one, he argues against “average utilitarianism” and concludes at the end of the post: “And so I am a total utilitarian.” In the first post, he also says:

I am a utilitarian.  Basically, this means that I believe the right action is the one that maximizes total “utility” in the world (you can think of that as total happiness minus total pain).  Specifically, I am a total, act, hedonistic/one level (as opposed to high and low pleasure), classical (as opposed to negative) utilitarian; in short, I’m a Benthamite.  In future posts I’ll argue for all of those choices; I’ll also try to respond to the Repugnant Conclusion and the Utility Monster, and argue that Decision Theories are silly.

Why do I think this series of posts was written by him? 

• The most direct evidence is that he says this in the last post in the series:
  • “By the way, I’m naming the above thought experiment the ‘if-you-disagree-with-Sam-Bankman-Fried-on-this-then-you-probably-have-a-crush-on-Lord-Voldemort conclusion’, or ‘Sam Is Great’ for short, and would appreciate it if it were referred to as such.”
  • In the same post, the author links to the other posts in his “series on utilitarianism”
• The author of the first post signed off as “SBF”
• Commenters on both the first and second post referred to the author as “Sam,” and the author replied to them without correcting them
• One of the commenters on the second post was “Barbara F.” (SBF’s mother’s name is Barbara, and her last name begins with F.)
• This Reddit post claims that it is his blog (though there seem to be two other people who posted articles on that same blog as well, other than Sam)
• Another post on the same blog says, “Sam made a post a couple weeks ago analyzing votes (and money) for congressional elections. This is a post about analyzing votes for US Presidential elections. This is the result of a 2am conversation-calculation with Sam and a mutual friend Gary Wang.” The post that is linked to there is by the same blog author as the utilitarian series of posts, and Gary Wang is the name of the co-founder of FTX

(3) There are multiple sources of evidence suggesting he believes in EA ideas (not just utilitarianism).

(3-i) Reportedly, it was EA thinking that at least partly inspired SBF’s decision to leave the quant fund Jane Street (where he worked) and start Alameda. This was described in Sequoia’s glowing article about SBF (written before the crash). It tells the story of him being utilitarian from a young age and making career decisions based on EA ideas. (Note, though, that someone close to the situation told me that the article gets some of the precise details wrong, so I’m not going to quote from it extensively.) Here are some clipped segments of the basics of what it says compiled together:

SBF is from the Bay Area—the eldest son of two Stanford law professors, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number. One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate…SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion…During his freshman year, SBF went vegan and organized a campaign against factory farming. As a junior, he was wondering what to do with his life…In 2017, everything was going great for SBF. He was killing it at Jane Street. He was a trader’s trader: so fluent with transactions that others would come watch him work, like one might watch an esports athlete streaming on Twitch. He was giving away 50 percent of his income to his preferred charities..SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.

(3-ii) People who know him well have insisted to me that he believes in EA principles. However, one person I spoke to who knows him well also said that, while SBF does believe in EA principles, he suspects that SBF puts himself before those principles. Of course, almost everyone puts themselves above their principles at times, so I’m not convinced much should be read into that.

(3-iii) SBF’s interest in EA is actually congruent with his personality. As he described to Lewis in Going Infinite:

“It felt unambitious to not care about what happened to the rest of the world,” said Sam. “It was shooting too low to only think about what was going to impact me.”

(3-iv) SBF did work for farmed animal advocacy prior to FTX, which (as far as I can tell) was not glamorous or popular and seemed unlikely to benefit him directly. SBF was also serving vegan meals and talking about his adherence to EA principles when he was at Jane Street, before he became a public figure. So it seems he cared about EA before it could potentially benefit him from a publicity perspective.

(3-v) Based on interviews with him, SBF appears to me to be very knowledgeable about EA – not just someone who assimilated these ideas at a shallow level.

(3vi) In episode 1 of the Judging Sam podcast (Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis), in response to a question about whether SBF actually believed in EA, Lewis said:  

His identity is all wrapped up in being the most important person in this movement, and he had a sense of himself being special because of this movement…Mixed up in it all, of course, is this sense of ambition: that he wanted to think of himself as an important person and this was a mechanism for thinking of himself as an important person. 

In the same episode, Lewis also said: 

When he collides with the effective altruism movement when he is a junior in college and is swept up in it, it’s all sincere, and he becomes a proselytizer for this movement…So when he says I’m doing it for this reason, he thinks that’s true. He’s not just saying that to try to trick you…I was charmed by his single-mindedness; I thought that was interesting.

And: 

The effective altruists who gather in Berkeley to create a crypto hedge fund are all, in their minds, generating money in order to mitigate existential risk to humanity. Sam, who himself has a two- or three-year background on Wall Street…has proposed this to a whole bunch of people who have no background in trading, that we’re going to gather together, and we’re going to exploit the inefficiencies in crypto, to make billions of dollars, to give it away…and they’re all in on this.

In another interview, Michael Lewis is quoted as saying: 

If you think he wasn’t an Effective Altruist, or that he didn’t care about that, you’re out of your mind. His whole life was wrapped up in that. I sat through endless meetings with these people; endless discussions with his Effective Altruist colleagues. 

(3-vii) He called his fallout with effective altruists at Alameda in 2018 “the worst thing that has happened to me in my life.” 

According to Going Infinite:  

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.” When he flew to Asia, he was still writing and rewriting about the traumatic event. “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.

Elsewhere in Going Infinite, Nishad is quoted as saying that, after the schism, the other executives at Alameda were telling investors that “he was faking being an EA,” but the reason Nishad reported that they were saying this was simply “because it was the meanest thing they could think to say.” 

(4) A true belief in EA principles could explain some actions that might otherwise seem like they weren’t in SBF’s best interests.

(4-i) EA is a poor choice to use for “ethics washing” to a mainstream audience (where you pretend to take ethical actions or have ethical beliefs in order to come across as a moral person). Since EA ideas are not widely adopted, and since some EA ideas are actively unappealing to most people, a purely selfish and rational attempt to ethics wash seems likely to involve mainstream non-EA cause areas (e.g., focussing just on poverty alleviation or the environment). On the other hand, if for some reason he only cared about doing ethics washing for a very particular audience (e.g., if many of the people whose opinion he cared about believed in EA ideas), then EA could still be a form of ethics washing.

(4-ii) SBF feeling deeply connected to the EA community could be the explanation for why SBF would have this conversation with EA-affiliated journalist Kelsey Piper. During that conversation, he said things like, “fuck regulators – they make everything worse.” Making such a statement to a journalist seems to have big downsides and no upside. Overall, the conversation made SBF look really bad. SBF said of the conversation: 

It was not meant to be a public interview, it was a longtime friend of mine who I stupidly forgot was also a reporter…I thought I was speaking in a personal capacity. 

That would make sense as an explanation, except that, from the information I’ve gathered, it seems not to be true. Two people I asked about this told me that Sam and Kelsey never were friends, though they likely had met before. So perhaps what really happened is that SBF viewed Kelsey as part of his EA ingroup and hence trusted her not to divulge what he told her despite them not being friends. Of course, it’s also possible the conversation was just the result of him acting impulsively, or even that he knew the conversation would get leaked and he was playing some kind of inscrutable four-dimensional chess.

(5) During SBF’s trial, Tiffany Fong reported that:

Caroline said she felt these balance sheets were dishonest and knew they were wrong. She said that Sam was able to justify this behavior because he’s a utilitarian, and to him, the only thing or rule that mattered [was] maximizing utility or the greatest good for the greatest number. She said that things like lying and stealing didn’t factor into his calculation and said that, years ago, she never would have imagined sending false balance sheets to anyone, but basically that working at Alameda over the years made Caroline more and more open to lying and stealing.

(6) During an interview while he was under house arrest, SBF continued to express what sounded like a sincere desire to have a positive impact:  

Tiffany Fong: If you hypothetically were in prison for life…

SBF: I’m trying not to think about it. I don’t think it’s helpful to think about. But…when I do ruminate, I tend to not…[pause]….I tend to focus even in my ruminations upon like what the choice, like what the pathways I’ll have are and what, like, um, my ruminations are half ruminations, half daydreams, and they always have some component of, like, ways that I can make things…[long pause] ways that I can make thing better. Ways that I can do something for the world. Ways that I can, like, have some impact. 

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Let’s now examine evidence on the opposite side of the question.

Evidence against SBF believing in EA:

(1) His actions appeared to be strongly antithetical to EA principles. Would someone who believes in EA principles really act in such a harmful way (assuming the allegations are true) by committing a variety of criminal acts and harming so many people? Given that the actions he is alleged to have taken are nearly universally condemned by EAs, presumably, the fact that he committed these acts is evidence against him believing in EA ideas. 

On the other hand, if it turns out that he has DAE, then that could help explain why he would do these actions even while believing in EA principles, especially if he was an adherent of a naïve form of hedonistic utilitarianism (which says that you should always take whichever action you predict produces the greatest expected value of utility for all conscious beings, even if that action violates common norms of behaviors or would involve taking actions that most people would consider unethical). 

Perhaps a naïve utilitarian with DAE actually would behave in precisely this way: a lack of empathy and guilt may make it far easier to justify any action, no matter how harmful or unethical (according to most people), so long as you predict that, in expected value, it produces a lot of utility. Even if most utilitarians would not take utilitarianism in that direction, I think that a utilitarian with DAE would be substantially more likely to do so compared to a utilitarian without DAE.

I know a lot of people who identify as utilitarian, and, in my experience, they are almost all kind, try to avoid hurting people (even as they try to improve the world), try to avoid lying, follow the law, and endorse doing all of these things. 

Sometimes, they endorse these things on pragmatic grounds (i.e., they believe that, in practice, doing so tends to lead to more total utility than trying to do a utility calculation for each action). But (in my view) a major part of why they do these things is because of their personalities: they have a lot of empathy and would feel guilty about lying, breaking the law, or hurting others. That is, I think that they are people with a lot of personal virtue, and their utilitarianism builds on top of their kind and honest personality. On the other hand, someone with DAE who is a naïve utilitarian may lack the guardrails that empathy and guilt provide. That doesn’t necessarily mean that such a person will cause harm, but they may be at much greater risk of doing so.

As an additional side note, while utilitarianism is very popular among EAs compared to the general population, it is a mistake to treat EA and utilitarianism as the same thing (as, for instance, this Bloomberg article seems to have done by claiming that “Effective Altruism is a form of utilitarianism”). There are utilitarians who are not EAs, and there are lots of EAs who are not utilitarians. For instance, while this other article mistakenly refers to both Toby Ord and Will MacAskill (two of the founders of the EA movement) as utilitarians, they have both clearly stated that they are not:

• Ord has said, “I certainly wouldn’t call myself a utilitarian, and I don’t think that I am.”
• MacAskill has said: “I think I’m neither a pluralist nor a utilitarian. A pluralist is someone who thinks that there are many sources of moral reasons. A utilitarian thinks there’s only one. I say I’m not a utilitarian because — though it’s the view I’m most inclined to argue for in seminar rooms because I think it’s most underappreciated by the academy — I think we should have some degree of belief in a variety of moral views and take a compromise between them.”

Returning now to the main thread of evidence against SBF believing in EA:

(2) SBF may have gotten some benefits from being associated with EA, which could explain why he would associate with it even if he didn’t believe it. For instance, while EA is not an ideal choice for ethics washing to a mainstream audience, it at least provided him with positive PR. EA may also have just provided him with a community where he felt wanted and special. Additionally, he may have benefited from EA connections (e.g., for recruiting for his business). Time magazine describes how almost all the work in the early days at Alameda was carried out by people from the EA community:

“Almost everyone who came on in those early days was an EA. They were there for EA reasons,” says Naia Bouscal, a former software engineer at Alameda. “That was the pitch we gave people: this is an EA thing.” Mac Aulay and Bankman-Fried originally planned to donate 50% of company profits to EA causes, and many of the executives also planned to donate most of their salaries. The initial funding for Alameda came from two influential EA donors…

On the other hand, making an explicitly EA org seems to me like more evidence for believing in EA than the potential recruiting benefits that EA had to offer is evidence for the reverse. 

(3) Some people have interpreted a statement he made in his messages with Kelsey Piper as implying that he does not believe in EA. Here’s what he said to her:

My own interpretation of this is that when he says the “shibboleths” of “woke westerners,” that seems to me to be specifically referencing a common point of view that is different from EA (that would seem to me a very strange way to refer to EA if that’s what he was trying to do).

According to Axios, SBF later: 

acknowledged that part of his image was curated, but maintains that effective altruism was his driving force — even if the EA movement would prefer to disown him.

“The thing that was bullshit was not EA,” said Bankman-Fried. “EA, I happen to care about deeply. I believe in blockchain and crypto. Those things are absolutely real.”

Other information about SBF’s personality

Below I’ve including a few more pieces of information about SBF’s personality, because while it is not clear exactly what bearing these have on the three hypotheses that this post is about, this information seems potentially important for understanding who SBF is as a person:

(1) SBF seemed to experience anhedonia. From Going Infinite:

Sam was not happy…”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.”

(2) SBF seemed to be very isolated from a young age. 

In episode 1 of the Judging Sam podcast (Judging Sam: Going Infinite – Jacob Weisberg interviews Michael Lewis) Lewis says that SBF is:

Good at some things, but the whole human thing…I could not believe how isolated [his childhood] was. It was beyond, I mean it isn’t just he didn’t have close friends, he had nobody, he really just kind of lived on his own and was sorting out the world all by himself.

From Going Infinite: 

Although he found it easier to talk with adults than with children, the connections he made with the adults were no stronger than those he made with other kids. In some deep way, he sensed, he remained cut off from other human beings. He could read them, but they couldn’t read him…

(3) There is contradictory information about SBF’s respect for other people.

In Going Infinite, Michael Lewis quotes SBF’s personal writings. In a letter to Ellison, SBF had written (emphasis added): 

I make people sad. Even people who I inspire, I don’t really make happy. And people who I date—it’s really harrowing. It really fucking sucks, to be with someone who (a) you can’t make happy, (b) doesn’t really respect anyone else, (c) is constantly thinking really offensive things, (d) doesn’t have time for you, and (e) wants to be alone half the time.

However, in contradiction to the quote above about not respecting anyone, he mentions respecting people who started Alameda with him: “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.”

Which theory is most likely?

Let’s review our theories about SBF again, at a high level:

Please take a moment to consider the evidence presented above, as well as other evidence you have seen as well.

Which of these three theories (or which other, unlisted theory) do you think is most likely?

After you’ve considered it, scroll down if you want to see what I think.

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Based on the evidence I’m aware of, I currently think that Theory B is most likely: that SBF both genuinely believes in EA principles and simultaneously has DAE. But I am far from certain. I assign it, perhaps, an 80% chance of being true.

I’ve run this theory by four people who knew SBF well. Perhaps surprisingly, some of them seemed not to have considered it before. Not one of them said it seemed implausible or strongly disagreed. In all four cases, my impression was that their reactions fell somewhere on the spectrum from “that seems plausible” to “that seems likely,” though it was hard to tell exactly where in that range they each landed.

In addition to the fact that people who knew him well thought that Theory B was plausible, another thing I find especially compelling about the theory is that it helps to explain multiple apparent contradictions in SBF’s behavior – how he could act in such a blatantly unethical way (assuming that all the most severe allegations are true) while seeming to believe in EA ideas.

Something else I wonder about is whether pure hedonistic utilitarianism is especially risky as a life philosophy for someone with DAE. Most hedonistic utilitarians are, in practice, going to also be guided by their empathy and guilt, whereas someone with DAE may not have those as guides. I suspect that the most ethical people with DAE tend to be ones who have strong guiding ethical principles that not only guide their actions but also make it hard to self-deceive or “lawyer” around the rules. With naïve versions of utilitarianism, it’s relatively easy to justify harmful actions (that most people would avoid out of empathy and/or guilt) by convincing yourself that it’s for the greater good based on a half-assed (and potentially self-serving) expected value calculation.

I’m very interested to know:

1. Do you have additional information, arguments, or evidence that could shed light on which of these three theories (or another theory) is true? If so, please share it in the comments or (if it’s sensitive) send it to me privately. I will keep anything sent to me privately in complete confidence unless you specifically tell me that you’d like it to be shared.
2. Which of these three theories (or which other theory not mentioned here) do you find most persuasive?
3. Did you see anything in this post that you think is inaccurate? If so, please let me know what it was and why you think it’s inaccurate.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the anonymous informants who knew SBF well and who generously shared their experiences and impressions. Thanks also go to everyone who commented on or otherwise helped to improve this piece. Clare Harris contributed to this piece via discussions and via assistance with writing/editing.

We recently conducted qualitative research by crowd-sourcing over 100 open-ended responses to the question:

“What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy or who are likely to hurt you if they become your close friend or partner?”

We thought the answers contained some insights that may help you to identify people with whom it would be risky to get too close. 

Here is a summary of the common themes that our respondents suggested as potential red flags or warning signs for an untrustworthy or harmful person:

1. Manipulation: This takes many forms, including guilt trips, gaslighting, peer pressure, negging, emotional blackmail, and a variety of more subtle behaviors, such as when someone is excessively nice early in a relationship in a way that is not congruent with their underlying personality. These are attempts to control or influence others without being straightforwardly coercive and without appealing to rational persuasion.

2. Inconsistency and Dishonesty: This includes inconsistencies in narratives they tell and dishonesty, but also more subtle forms of deception (such as repeated small untruths and inconsistencies between words and actions) or a lack of continuity in self-presentation over time. This can also include describing projects, connections, or behaviors in grandiose ways that are detached from reality. 

3. Self-Centeredness: This includes a lack of awareness or care regarding the impact of their actions on others, with a focus just on how situations impact themselves. This self-centeredness can also appear as an over-concern with outward appearances (or how situations make them look), frequent bragging, an excessive focus on seeking attention, and the tendency to only talk about themselves without inquiring about others.

4. Anger: Everyone experiences anger sometimes, but frequent, uncontrolled, or unexpected anger tends to be seen as a red flag. Similarly, approval of vengeful or vindictive behavior (or engagement in these behaviors) can be problematic.

5. Lack of Empathy: A lack of empathy for the suffering of others or an absence of kindness in words or actions can signal that someone is more likely to harm you if you become close friends with them or enter into a relationship with them. 

6. Extreme Emotionality: This refers to emotional instability or extreme mood swings. It is even more problematic when accompanied by blaming others for their emotional reactions, especially when those reactions are highly inappropriate (given the circumstances). Extreme emotional reasoning can cause people to become detached from reality (e.g., “Since I feel angry, you must have seriously wronged me!” or “Since I feel anxious, you must be threatening me!”).

7. Avoidance and Poor Communication: It can be difficult to be close to someone who is extremely avoidant of conflict, who hides intense negative feelings that they experience (e.g., pretending not to be angry when they are furious), or who has poor communication skills, especially when resolving issues or conflicts.

8. Lack of Responsibility and Accountability: This includes impulsivity, recklessness, a lack of consideration for others’ safety, an inability to take responsibility after making mistakes, failing to follow through on commitments, or blaming others for their own shortcomings. This can also include serious addiction issues that they are not seeking treatment for, constantly identifying as a victim of their circumstances while not taking responsibility for their role, and projecting personal issues onto others (or lacking self-awareness of their serious faults).

9. Poor Handling of Their Other Relationships: It can be offputting if someone seems unable to healthily handle other relationships in their life or if they treat people poorly if they disagree with or dislike them. Other behaviors, such as asking to borrow money from someone early in a relationship with them, may reflect a lack of common sense or a general inability to navigate relationships in a healthy way.

10. Negative Talk and Gossip: It does not bode well when someone often speaks negatively of others, especially as a source of entertainment or habitual gossiping. This can include talking badly about past associates or partners, such as saying that all their exes were “crazy.”

11. Judgmentalness: Signs of judgmentalness could include passing harsh negative judgments of others based on little information or being very critical or judgmental of other people’s minor faults.

Please note that these traits and behaviors are a summary of over 100 people’s views, not our personal opinions and not professional advice. If you’re concerned that you might be in an abusive relationship, we strongly encourage you to seek support. Seeking help is a brave and important step toward ensuring your safety and well-being. Remember, you’re not alone, and there are resources and people ready to assist you. 

If you are in a relationship that you want to improve, we have a few free tools that might help:

1. Kind And Effective Communication (15 Minutes): Learn and practice principles of non-violent communication to build stronger relationships, resolve conflicts, and improve your self-understanding and awareness.
2. The Relationship Review (15 Minutes): Examine different aspects of your relationship with a partner, close friend, or family member using an open, non-judgmental approach
3. Managing Arguments In A Relationship (20 Minutes): Learn how to navigate arguments effectively and kindly using a situation of your choosing.

Having social interactions and spending time with a variety of kind people is an essential part of our general well-being, but this can become counterproductive when your interactions are with people who are untrustworthy or who aim to harm you.

We hope this “wisdom of the crowds” summary helps you to identify some of the warning signs of unsafe people!

This first appeared on Clearer Thinking on November 3, 2023, and first appeared on this site on November 8, 2023.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

I’ve noticed that it’s quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it’s also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations.

With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here’s a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is a *good* idea to do in such cases.

Part 1: things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is going through a mental health challenge

1. “Just think positively.”

For most mental health challenges, the problem is not a lack of positive thinking, and even if it were, being told to “think positively” would not enable them to actually be able to do so. This advice also trivializes people’s problems and so can come across as quite annoying or condescending.

2. “Focus on everything you have to be grateful for. Other people don’t even have enough food to eat!”

While it may be true that their life objectively has a lot of good things in it, their mental health challenge is not going to go away just by observing that. Gratitude can be a very useful mindset, but it is not a solution to mental health challenges, and being told to be grateful for what you have can lead to feelings of guilt (e.g., “I’m such a screw-up that I can’t even be happy when I have all these good things!”)

3. “You have to choose to be happy.”

It’s extremely rare that people choose to have a mental health challenge, and very few people, if any, know how to take the ongoing action of “choosing” to be happy. This framing of “choice” can also come across as though you are blaming the person for their mental health challenge, which is likely to be counterproductive.

4. “Today is the first day of your new life!”

This assumes that they can suddenly break out of their old patterns by reframing their life as starting anew, but this is a very unrealistic assumption. 

5. You should read “The Secret”/”The Power Of Positive Thinking” (or similar books)

These are in a genre of books that tell you that your problems are the result of not thinking the right way and that if you just start to think differently (e.g., imagine yourself succeeding and believe it with certainty), you will suddenly start to have the life you want. These techniques usually do not work for people with mental health challenges and can leave the reader feeling blamed for how they feel.

Part 2: things that usually *ARE* helpful to do with someone who is struggling with their mental health:

1. Ask open-ended questions about how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing, without pushing them to reveal more than they’re comfortable with. Listen carefully. Try to really understand what they are going through.

2. Learn about the condition. Reading a book or two about the condition they are struggling with, or talking to an expert about it, can help you better understand what the other person is dealing with and can improve your ability to support them in helpful ways. Keep in mind, however, that their manifestation of the condition may differ from the typical manifestation, so be careful about jumping to conclusions about what they must be experiencing.

3. Empathize with them and show compassion. Don’t blame them for what they’re experiencing. And don’t use their struggles as an excuse to spend a lot of time talking about your own struggles. Though if you have been through similar challenges, they may appreciate knowing that.

4. Encourage them (with gentleness and compassion) to seek professional help (e.g., an excellent psychologist or psychiatrist). If they’re struggling to get started, ask permission to assist, and if they agree, reduce the effort for them (for instance, by trying to track down an excellent professional and provide them with the contact info). Thankfully, most people will improve when they are given evidence-based treatment that is carried out by a competent mental health professional (though it may take a few tries and failures to find a treatment that works well).

If they aren’t willing to see a therapist, you can ask if they would be up for reading a book that is specifically designed to help people who have mental health challenges. If they agree, you can research what the best book is on the topic and buy it for them.

For instance, many people have benefited from the David Burns books Feeling Good (for depression) and When Panic Attacks (for intense fears, such as social anxiety and phobias). Chronic worriers may benefit from The Worry Cure by Robert Leahy. For people who are mean to themselves (e.g., engaging in negative self-talk), the book Self-Compassion (by Kristin Neff) may be useful. For people who have very intense emotions or who have Borderline Personality Disorder, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay may be useful.

If the person expresses openness to it, you may also want to encourage them to engage in other healthy behaviors that may be beneficial (such as eating healthy food, walking outside daily, and getting regular exercise at the gym). It’s ideal if you can make these behaviors easier for them, such as by offering to go to the gym with them three times per week or by buying them a healthy meal delivery plan as a gift (with their permission, of course).

5. Avoid advice until they are ready to hear it. In an attempt to be helpful, people are often much too quick to give advice, which can be very frustrating to the receiver (especially when the advice-giver doesn’t really understand the circumstances well). The time to give advice is after you have done a lot of listening and when the other person has indicated that they would like your advice. If you aren’t sure if they want advice, you may want to ask something like, “Would it be helpful if I gave you some suggestions now for how to do X, or would that not be useful at the moment?” Of course, once they are ready for advice, you should absolutely give it. When you do give advice, try to make it clear when you are confident in what you’re saying versus when you aren’t as sure (and they may want to consult someone else, such as a mental health professional).

6. Do nice things for them that you know (based on past experience with the person) they’re likely to appreciate – whether it’s spending more time together, sending a random compliment, reminding them you love them, giving an extra hug, planning a fun activity for the two of you (that they feel well enough to enjoy), or offering to help them clean their apartment. What matters, of course, is what they would actually appreciate in their current state, not what you would appreciate if you were them, and not what they would appreciate if they weren’t in their current condition.

7. Make your help sustainable. Remember that it is not your job to “fix” this person’s mental health, nor will you be able to do so. Mostly, you can only help someone when they WANT to be helped and only in ways they are WILLING to be helped. It’s also important that you take care of yourself in the process. This person may have a mental health challenge for a long time, so (other than in cases of acute crises where extra action is needed), it’s not a good idea to extend yourself in a way that will not be sustainable. Don’t jeopardize your relationship with this person by taking on more than you can realistically handle, which could lead you to experience burnout or resentment. Just because someone is experiencing a mental health challenge does not mean you should let them violate your boundaries. If the person is acting in a way that is harmful to you, it’s important that you clearly assert your boundaries to prevent yourself from being harmed (while you continue to help in whatever ways you can, without giving up on those boundaries).

Conclusion

Everyone is different, so it’s always possible someone would benefit from items in the “bad” list above or dislike items in the “good” list. But I believe that following these guidelines will, more often than not, make you more effective at helping the people you love.

In summary, as a friend/family member, your job is to provide love, empathy, and the level of support that you can sustainably manage. Avoid giving shallow suggestions such as to “think positively.” Instead:

• ask open-ended questions

• learn about their condition

• empathize with their experience

• encourage the person to get high-quality professional help

• avoid giving advice (until they want it)

• do nice things

• make your help sustainable

This piece was first written on January 8, 2023, and first appeared on this site on May 28, 2023.

The squirrel lay there on its back, quivering.

I knew it was totally screwed. Its back was probably broken, but it was clearly still alive.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Look at how much it’s suffering. Should I kill it to put it out of its misery?”

I stood there pondering the question, trying to decide if the ethical thing to do was to kill it.

It then suddenly flipped over, ran through a hole in a fence, and climbed up a tree.

That was a great reminder of why one should set the bar extremely high for harming another creature “for a greater good.” It’s disturbing to me to consider the possibility I could have killed that squirrel in a foolish attempt to prevent its suffering.

It’s also a reminder that I don’t know shit about squirrels.

If you’re wondering how a squirrel could be okay after such a drop, a quick google search suggests it’s due to their high floofiness to mass ratio, plus their amazing falling instincts (they position their body and tail so as to increase drag).

But size is also a surprisingly important factor when it comes to falls. The smaller you are, the lower your kinetic energy is when you hit the ground, and the greater your surface area is relative to your mass, which means that air resistance has more effect. If dropped from a high place, an ant lands gracefully on the ground, whereas a whale practically explodes.

So if you ever fall from the top of a tall tree, I’d recommend being an ant or at least a squirrel, and definitely not a whale.

This was first written on November 16, 2022, and first appeared on this site on November 18, 2022.

It has been estimated that over 70% of adults in the world have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Consequently, the majority of friendships and relationships will involve at least one person who has experienced trauma.

This article investigates how one person’s trauma can “clash” with another person’s trauma to cause relationship breakdown and what you can do to resolve conflicts like this if you experience them yourself. You might find it helpful to read if you…

• have some trauma in your past that sometimes gets triggered by other people’s behavior;
• find that your friends or romantic partners sometimes suddenly hurt you for inexplicable reasons;
• struggle to understand other people’s hostile reactions to actions you take;
• want a new model that might help you understand conflict with people close to you.

Let’s look at some specific examples of what we mean by Clashing Trauma: 

1. Trauma from anger and abuse 

Bob is sensitive to teasing because of a physically and emotionally abusive ex that used to tease him incessantly. Anne lightly teases him in what she thinks is a playful way, and he blows up in anger. Anne is sensitive to anger due to trauma in her childhood. She stops replying to Bob’s messages, which makes Bob even angrier. 

2. Trauma from abandonment and unwanted sexual advances 

Bob is physically affectionate with his close friend Anne. It starts to freak Anne out – when male friends have acted this way in the past, they have usually tried to initiate a sexual relationship with her in a way that she found traumatic. To prevent this, Anne stops being warm to Bob. Bob, however, regards Anne as a dear and platonic friend. Because Bob had a traumatic experience of abandonment in the past, he finds Anne’s sudden coldness very upsetting. The fear of abandonment causes Bob to be more affectionate toward Anne as he tries harder to reconnect. This triggers Anne further, causing her to withdraw even more, leading to Bob feeling even more hurt and confused. 

3. Trauma from substance abuse 

Anne has a history of alcoholism that Bob doesn’t know about. Years ago, she resolved to stop drinking when she realized she was becoming like her parents, whose drinking would often lead to physical fights that she found distressing. Bob drinks around her and encourages her to drink, which makes her angry. Bob has protected himself from people’s anger in the past using humor, so he tries to downplay Anne’s reaction by joking around and making light of the situation. Anne finds herself even more triggered and upset by Bob’s behavior – she wants her anger to be taken seriously because alcoholism was a huge challenge in her past.

In all three examples above, one person’s reaction to their trauma being triggered in turn triggers the other person’s trauma response. Clashing Trauma is an example of a broader pattern of Clashing Reactions, where one person’s reaction to an action that upsets them triggers the other person to become upset or angry, which in turn intensifies the first person’s negative emotions, and so on. We’ve noticed that a surprisingly high proportion of fights between people who care a lot about each other fit this basic pattern. The cases of Clashing Reactions on which this essay is focused involve reactions that have their foundations in trauma, but be mindful that trauma doesn’t have to be at the root for similar patterns to occur.

What is trauma?

Trauma refers to enduring changes in your emotional reactions or self-protective behaviors that are the result of painful or frightening incidents in your past. Examples of trauma that people are usually familiar with include experiences with war, abuse, or sexual assault. For example:

• A soldier who was shot at in combat may find that loud noises that sound like gunshots cause her to panic, even in completely safe environments.
• A man who was sexually assaulted by someone with an English accent may feel anxious around people with those same accents.

But it is important to remember that trauma occurs on a spectrum; many people have emotional reactions to reminders of upsetting experiences in their past, even when those experiences were not life-threatening or severely upsetting. For instance:

• Someone who received bad news over the phone may experience a sense of dread and anxiety when they receive a call from an unknown number.
• Someone who was teased by a school teacher for stuttering during a class presentation may find that they get nervous when asked to speak in front of people.

Trauma is the result of a mechanism your brain uses to protect you. This mechanism is often helpful – by sensitizing you to patterns that are similar to ones where you were hurt or frightened in the past, your brain tries to protect you from getting hurt again. Unfortunately, this protective mechanism sometimes goes too far, leading to reactions that can seriously impact people’s welfare (at which point we call it “trauma”).

The soldier, who is now in essentially no danger of getting shot, may have recurring panic attacks that reduce her quality of life and avoid places she used to love just because there are loud noises there. Trauma can manifest in relationships, too; many people are hurt by those close to them (unintentionally or not), and this can make us extra vigilant about avoiding similar painful experiences in the future.

What is going on when people’s trauma clashes?

Here is what we think is going on in situations where friendships or relationships break down due to Clashing Trauma:

1. Anne takes an action that seems normal and reasonable to her. Anne doesn’t know it, but her close friend (or partner) Bob is sensitive to this kind of action due to trauma in his past. Consequently, Bob experiences intense negative emotions as a result of her action.

2. Bob instinctively tries to protect himself from this negative emotion using whatever approaches seemed to help him during past traumatic events (e.g., by avoiding Anne, yelling at her, getting very distraught, or trying to control her behavior). But he doesn’t explain clearly to Anne what is happening. Anne is caught off guard by Bob’s reaction—she doesn’t understand why he’s behaving this way. Even worse, due to trauma in her own past, she gets triggered by Bob’s reaction and starts experiencing intense negative emotions of her own.

3. Anne now acts instinctively to try to protect herself from the way that Bob is making her feel (e.g., by lashing back out at him, avoiding him, shutting down, or trying to control him). This reaction results in Bob feeling even more upset, causing him to intensify his self-protective behavior.

You can now see how Clashing Trauma works:

• From Bob’s perspective, Anne suddenly did something that triggered his trauma, and when he tried to protect himself, she doubled down and hurt him more.
• From Anne’s perspective, Bob suddenly started acting in a strange and hurtful manner, and when she acted to protect herself, he hurt her even further.
• From the outside view, it’s clear that neither person intended to hurt the other, yet both feel hurt, and the relationship suffers.

Incidentally, if you think that you might be Anne or Bob, you’re not alone. When we shared a draft of this article, one friend of the author reached out asking if Anne represented them, and another reached out asking if they were Bob. But the post wasn’t actually about either of them! We are trying to describe a general pattern that we’ve observed many times. Or, put another way: if you think you are Anne or Bob, then this post may well apply to you, but it’s also about lots of other people as well.

How can you prevent Clashing Trauma?

Strategy 1: Prevention

The best way to prevent this pattern of conflict is to discuss in advance with trusted friends and romantic partners what triggers you each have, how to avoid these triggers, and what the best actions to take are if you trigger each other by accident.

For instance, Bob could have told Anne in advance that he can feel very attacked when someone is critical of him and that he tends to lash out in anger as a defense mechanism. Then Bob and Anne can work together to plan how Anne can give Bob feedback in ways that won’t trigger him.

Strategy 2: Interception

Barring Prevention, upon being triggered the first time, Bob would ideally wait until he’s calm and then tell Anne (without blaming her) that her action triggered negative emotions for him, explaining what the trigger was and how to avoid it. (See our post on non-violent communication for advice on how to communicate this kind of thing without making the other person feel bad.)

Then, Anne, caring about Bob, would ideally apologize for inadvertently hurting him and commit to trying to avoid those triggering actions in the future. But behaviors can take time to alter—Anne should set realistic expectations about how quickly she can make that change.

Interception is hard, but appreciating the negative consequences of unresolved Clashing Trauma might help motivate you to implement this strategy.

Strategy 3: Repair

If it’s too late for Interception, try Repair: once Anne is hurt by Bob’s response to her behavior, Anne could wait until she feels calm and then initiate a conversation with Bob.

During the conversation, she could explain how Bob’s behavior seemed (to her) to suddenly and mysteriously change and how this had hurt her, while expressing interest in hearing Bob’s experience of the situation. She would try to genuinely understand Bob’s experience (non-violent communication could also be a helpful way to employ this strategy).

Bob could then explain what he experienced in the situation and what made him react that way towards Anne. They could each commit to new behaviors to reduce the chance they trigger each other in the future.

Understanding trauma

Each of the Prevention, Interception, and Repair strategies involve Anne or Bob explaining their triggers (and/or the trauma that underlies them) to each other. These strategies will therefore be harder to implement if you don’t understand your own trauma or what can trigger it. One way to build an understanding of your trauma and triggers is to discuss it with a trained therapist or trusted friend (or partner). Conveniently, this is a great segue into setting up Prevention strategies with a trusted friend or partner so that you can avoid triggering each other!

Did you find this model of relationship breakdown helpful?

The next time you feel suddenly and unexpectedly hurt by a close friend or romantic partner, it may be worth asking yourself – could this be an instance of Clashing Trauma? Or, more generally, could it be a case of Clashing Reactions? In either case, consider the strategies of (1) Prevention, (2) Interception, and (3) Repair. A lot of great friendships and romantic relationships end for preventable reasons. We hope you can use these strategies to stay close to the people that you love.

This essay was first written on April 17, 2022, was turned into an article on Clearer Thinking (coauthored with Holly Muir) on May 5, 2022, and first appeared on this site on May 6, 2022.