After hearing about his defrauding FTX, like everyone else, I wondered why he did it. I haven’t met Sam in over five years, but one thing that I can do is take a look at his old Felicifia comments. At that time, back in 2012, Sam identified as an act utilitarian, and said that he would only follow rules (such as abstaining from theft) only if and when there was a real risk of getting caught. You can see this in the following pair of quotes.
I’m not sure I understand what the paradox is here. Fundamentally if you are going to donate the money to THL and he’s going to buy lots of cigarettes with it it’s clearly in an act utilitarian’s interest to keep the money as long as this doesn’t have consequences down the road, so you won’t actually give it to him if he drives you. He might predict this and thus not give you the ride, but then your mistake was letting Paul know that you’re an act utilitarian, not in being one. Perhaps this was because you’ve done this before, but then not giving him money the previous time was possibly not the correct decision according to act utilitarianism, because although you can do better things with the money than he can, you might run in to problems later if you keep in. Similarly, I could go around stealing money from people because I can spend the money in a more utilitarian way than they can, but that wouldn’t be the utilitarian thing to do because I was leaving out of my calculation the fact that I may end up in jail if I do so.
Quote #2. Regarding act vs rule utilitarianism, he said:
I completely agree that in practice following rules can be a good idea. Even though stealing might sometimes be justified in the abstract, in practice it basically never is because it breaks a rule that society cares a lot about and so comes with lots of consequences like jail. That being said, I think that you should, in the end, be an act utilitarian, even if you often think like a rule utilitarian; here what you’re doing is basically saying that society puts up disincentives for braking rules and those should be included in the act utilitarian calculation, but sometimes they’re big enough that a rule utilitarian calculation approximates it pretty well in a much simpler fashion.
Act utilitarianism is notoriously a form of morality that comes without guard-rails. In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The thing is that even if, for a minute, we assume act utilitarianism, it seems clear that somewhere along the line to defrauding $8B, the stakes have become large enough that you need to do a utility calculation, and it’s hard to envisage how the magnitude of destruction wrought by the (not so unlikely) FTX crisis would not render his fraudulent actions negative EV. Maybe he became deluded about his changes of success, and simply mis-calculated, although this seems unlikely.
Alternatively, maybe over the course of the last decade, he became a nihilist. Some may speculate that he was corrupted by the worlds of crypto and finance. Maybe he continued to identify as utilitarian, but practiced it only occasionally—for instance, maybe when the uncertainties were large, he papered over them by choosing a myopically selfish decision. But really, it all just seems very unclear. Even in Kelsey’s interview, I can’t tell whether he was disavowing all of morality, or only the rule-following business-ethics variety. And one can’t know when he is telling the truth anyway. So I don’t feel confident that this is going to be any clearer over time, either.
I could go around stealing money from people because I can spend the money in a more utilitarian way than they can, but that wouldn’t be the utilitarian thing to do because I was leaving out of my calculation the fact that I may end up in jail if I do so.
Wow, I guess he didn’t pay heed to his own advice here then!
Maybe he became deluded about his changes of success, and simply mis-calculated, although this seems unlikely.
I don’t think this is that unlikely. He came across as a deluded megalomaniac in the chat with Kelsey (like even now he thinks there’s a decent chance he can make things right!)
SBF’s views on utilitarianism
After hearing about his defrauding FTX, like everyone else, I wondered why he did it. I haven’t met Sam in over five years, but one thing that I can do is take a look at his old Felicifia comments. At that time, back in 2012, Sam identified as an act utilitarian, and said that he would only follow rules (such as abstaining from theft) only if and when there was a real risk of getting caught. You can see this in the following pair of quotes.
Quote #1. Regarding the Parfit’s Hiker thought experiment, he said:
Quote #2. Regarding act vs rule utilitarianism, he said:
Act utilitarianism is notoriously a form of morality that comes without guard-rails. In order to avoid taking harmful actions, an act utilitarian has to remember to calculate, and then to calculate correctly. (Whereas rules are often easier to remember and to properly apply.) The thing is that even if, for a minute, we assume act utilitarianism, it seems clear that somewhere along the line to defrauding $8B, the stakes have become large enough that you need to do a utility calculation, and it’s hard to envisage how the magnitude of destruction wrought by the (not so unlikely) FTX crisis would not render his fraudulent actions negative EV. Maybe he became deluded about his changes of success, and simply mis-calculated, although this seems unlikely.
Alternatively, maybe over the course of the last decade, he became a nihilist. Some may speculate that he was corrupted by the worlds of crypto and finance. Maybe he continued to identify as utilitarian, but practiced it only occasionally—for instance, maybe when the uncertainties were large, he papered over them by choosing a myopically selfish decision. But really, it all just seems very unclear. Even in Kelsey’s interview, I can’t tell whether he was disavowing all of morality, or only the rule-following business-ethics variety. And one can’t know when he is telling the truth anyway. So I don’t feel confident that this is going to be any clearer over time, either.
Wow, I guess he didn’t pay heed to his own advice here then!
I don’t think this is that unlikely. He came across as a deluded megalomaniac in the chat with Kelsey (like even now he thinks there’s a decent chance he can make things right!)