SBF did terrible acts from many different moral viewpoints, including that of consequentialism. In addition to those he directly harmed, he harmed the EA movement.
However, from review of what I have read, it seems as if he acted from a sincere desire to better the world and did so to the best of his (quite poor) judgment. Thus, to me, his punishment is a tragedy, though a necessary one. From a matter of ultimate culpability, I don’t know if I would judge him more harshly than the vast majority of people in the developed world: those having the capability to save or dramatically better the lives of people in the developing world, but decline, or those who thoughtlessly contribute to the torture of animals through their participation in the animal product economy.
I wish him comfort and hope that he can find a wiser path forward with the remainder of his life.
However, from review of what I have read, it seems as if he acted from a sincere desire to better the world and did so to the best of his (quite poor) judgment.
Although none of us can peer into SBF’s heart directly, I think a conclusion that he acted from mixed motives is better supported by the evidence. It would take a lot to convince me that someone who was throwing money around like SBF on extravagances (or a $16.4MM house for his parents) was not motivated at least in considerable part by non-benevolent desires.
If one thinks he viewed luxuries bought as part of his fraudulent enterprise as ultimately altruistic because what makes SBF productive --> makes FTX richer --> makes the world better through philanthropy, then we have a framework under which it is impossible to categorize his motives because any behavior can be recast as ultimately motivated by altruism. The base rate of fraudsters being motivated by personal gain is very high, so—unless there’s a clear way to verify lack of personal-gain motivation—I think assuming its absence is doubtful.
I think a conclusion that he acted from mixed motives is better supported by the evidence.
I disagree, but it obviously depends what exactly we’re discussing.
Was his judgment for not coming clean when things were only starting to get bad compromised by not wanting to lose his influence, money, and reputation? Probably!
However, do I think he made some of his most consequential decisions to a significant degree because he thought he could get nice things for himself that way? I actually don’t think so!
Making big decisions for reasons other than impact would ruin his score in the game. It looks to me like his primary drive was optimizing his life for impact like a video game, trying to score the most points. Making a big life decision for self-oriented reasons would be forfeiting points he could otherwise have gotten, which would feel deeply unsatisfying for someone who’s always thinking about how to get the highest score.
Also, $16 million is peanuts for someone who’s personally worth $2-10 billion, which SBF probably “”somewhat reasonably”″ thought he was worth when things were going well (or when he optimistically thought he could make them well again soon enough). It’s like what a couple hundred bucks is to someone with a net worth of $80,000 – not that significant! Imagine you’re making decisions for tens of millions every day. I can’t emphasize enough how unimportant it then becomes whether you pay 1 million or 16 million for your parents’ house (which you may or may not also plan to use for yourself or some of your coworkers/flatmates). Just like with offices or the building where he planned to sleep in, the price isn’t the relevant variable (what’s more relevant is, “Does it take up your time or people’s time with high opportunity costs? Is it close to the office where you work? Is it convenient?” Etc.)
I feel like,
if someone displays as much single-minded obsessiveness as SBF,
and his conversations with the people around him tell you he’s hyperfocused on impact (he wasn’t just obsessing about how to grow FTX for money, he was also constantly discussing ideas around grantmaking strategies or paying Trump to not run again for election),
and his close social circle is reinforcing the impact-orientedness,
and there’s a credible ideology behind it which generated many other examples of similarly impact-obsessed people (hopefully the vast majority of them without the recklessness and “no fear of bad consequences” part),
then I’d say the evidence points to being primarily impact-driven pretty much as strongly as it gets. Of course, no one has the motivations of a perfect utilitarian robot, but I think SBF was trying, so it doesn’t seem fair to call it “acted from mixed motives.”
Edit to add: We could discuss whether he was “unusually biased” for someone who’s trying to have a ton of impact – hopefully yes (otherwise EAs don’t stand a chance of getting impact right), but that’s still meaningfully different from “acting from mixed motives.” (Also, I’d say the most severe bias was probably a blindspot around risk taking and risks of things going badly, rather than e.g., being too much into a rich lifestyle or being too much into fame or whatever. FWIW, my best guess is that he also was too much into wanting power/influence; I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem like the primary reason things went so poorly.)
Edit2: Somewhat relevant comment I made a year ago about why I think SBF having dark triad traits is compatible with the above picture.
Also, 16 million is peanuts for someone who’s personally worth 2-10 billion
If you’re going to compare outflows to guess at motivation, I think it’s better to use actual charitable giving numbers as the comparator rather than perceived wealth. Doubtless underinclusive on both numbers, but IIRC the grants through FTXFF were ~$150MM and the outflows to his parents alone were ~$25MM (there was also ~$10MM in cash). That doesn’t suggest the self-serving cashflows were peanuts in either a relative sense or an absolute sense.
If you assumed based on past actions that ~ 90% of the money was going to end up donated to charity, then ~$1B of the loss found by the district court today was attributable to the 10% that wasn’t. Given SBF’s crimes, and the fairly brazen nature of his perjury at trial, I would credit his observed actions over what he said he’d do with all the money in the end.
That’s a good point. If there weren’t a convincing story for why more donations weren’t made or at least set up to be made soon, I’d say your point counts for quite a lot!
However, in this specific case, I feel like there are good reasons why I wouldn’t expect that many donations to be made right away:
FTX did have a hole in the bank! It’s interesting that donations were made at all given that they were strictly speaking insolvent. (Of course, he had to keep up appearances or pay for previously-made commitments, etc., so it’s not too surprising. I’m just saying it probably wouldn’t have been wise even for someone as risk tolerant and unconcerned-by-the-illegality-of-it as SBF to donate much more when there was still a hole in their wallet.) (Edit: Admittedly, this point also cuts against giving money to his parents.)
Longtermist grantmaking (which SBF thought was most impactful, I believe) already started to feel a bit crowded once FTX Future Fund came in, so it’s not actually that easy (or sensible) to deploy $100s of millions on short notice in that cause area.
The FTX Future Fund was still relatively new; it makes sense to scale up giving as you learn things and do various types of preparatory work for your grantmaking/”active grantmaking.”
“Donating now vs later” isn’t actually the most obvious of EA strategy questions, esp. if you think you’re greatly beating the market on investment returns, which he had been doing at least in his own mind.
SBF’s entire philosophy was about massive wins and game-changing ambitious stuff, so he probably thought of the donations he had already made or was making at the time as not that significant compared to what he was gonna do later, and probably had tentative ideas for long-term plans like “amass enough money to buy a chip company and then use that as leverage to get more AI safety work done at labs,” or something super ambitious like that, for which it felt worthwhile to keep investing in the growth of his FTX empire.
Lastly, and somewhat related to the previous bullet point of weird super-ambitious ideas, he did discuss the paying Trump thing and, at least according to Michael Lewis’s sources, he was entertaining the thought (though probably not super seriously because this was when they had a massive hole in the bank?) of paying a sum for it that would have been a lot bigger than the $150 million in charitable contributions you mentioned. (But sure, you can say that, since nothing happened there, it was only talk. We don’t know, but I find it plausible that he’d have liked the thought of being the guy who prevented Trump from running!)
Edit: If someone says “giving 10 million to his parents (and a house, but we’re not sure if the house had other uses) shows he must have had mixed motives,” I’d be like: Okay, yeah, it does look like this isn’t what a utilitarian robot would’ve gone for, but when I hear “mixed motives,” I think of something like 50-50 or at least 40-self-oriented, 60-altruism, whereas giving money to get your parents to retire early could also be compatible with something like 10-90 (or even 5-95), “focus on impact for the big decisions, but do something nice for your parents once you’ve made it big.”
SBF likely had mixed motives, in that there was likely at least some degree to which he acted in order to further his own well-being or with partiality toward the well-being of certain entities (such as his parents). The reasoning that you mentioned above (privileging your own interests instrumentally rather than terminally such that you as an agent can perform better) is a fraught manner of thinking with extremely high risk for motivated reasoning. However, I think that it is one that serious altruists need to engage with in good faith. To not do so would imply giving until one’s welfare was at the global poverty line, which would probably impair one too much as an agent. Of course, I’m not saying he was engaged in good faith regarding this instrumental privileging argument, but I cannot preclude the possibility.
Regardless, I have been persuaded by everything that I have seen that a significant part of SBF’s motivations were to help advance a world of higher well-being. Of course, from a deontological perspective he did wrong by his dishonest and fraudulent actions. From a consequentialist perspective, the downside risks had such incalculable costs that it was terrible as well.
But the sincere desire of his to make the world a better place makes me sympathetic of him in a way that I probably would not be with similarly sentenced other convicts. Given a deterministic or random world, I understand that all convicts are victims too. But I cannot help but feel more for one who was led to their crime by a sincere desire to better the world, than say, to kill their spouse in a fit of rage, or advance themselves financially without any such altruistic motivation.
This is just not true if you read about the case, he obviously knew he was improperly taking user funds and tells all sorts of incoherent lies to explain it, and it’s really disappointing to see so many EAs continue to believe he was well-intentioned. You can quibble about the length of sentencing, but he broke the law, and he was correctly punished for it.
Please note that my previous post took the following positions:
1. That SBF did terrible acts that harmed people.
2. That it was necessary that he be punished. To the extent that it wasn’t implied by the previous comment, I clarify that what he did was illegal (EDIT: which would involve a finding of culpable mental states that would imply that his wrongdoing was no innocent or negligent mistake).
3. The post doesn’t even take a position as to whether the 25 years is an appropriate sentence.
All of the preceding is consistent with the proposition that he also acted with the intention of doing what he could to better the world. Like others have commented, his punishment is necessary for general deterrence purposes. However, his genuine altruistic motivations make the fact that he must be punished tragic.
All punishment is tragic, I guess, in that it would be a better world if we didn’t have to punish anyone. I guess I just don’t think the fact that SBF on some level “believed” in EA (whatever that means, and if that is even true) - despite not acting in accordance with the principles of EA—is a reason that his punishment is more tragic than anyone else’s
SBF did terrible acts from many different moral viewpoints, including that of consequentialism. In addition to those he directly harmed, he harmed the EA movement.
However, from review of what I have read, it seems as if he acted from a sincere desire to better the world and did so to the best of his (quite poor) judgment. Thus, to me, his punishment is a tragedy, though a necessary one. From a matter of ultimate culpability, I don’t know if I would judge him more harshly than the vast majority of people in the developed world: those having the capability to save or dramatically better the lives of people in the developing world, but decline, or those who thoughtlessly contribute to the torture of animals through their participation in the animal product economy.
I wish him comfort and hope that he can find a wiser path forward with the remainder of his life.
Although none of us can peer into SBF’s heart directly, I think a conclusion that he acted from mixed motives is better supported by the evidence. It would take a lot to convince me that someone who was throwing money around like SBF on extravagances (or a $16.4MM house for his parents) was not motivated at least in considerable part by non-benevolent desires.
If one thinks he viewed luxuries bought as part of his fraudulent enterprise as ultimately altruistic because what makes SBF productive --> makes FTX richer --> makes the world better through philanthropy, then we have a framework under which it is impossible to categorize his motives because any behavior can be recast as ultimately motivated by altruism. The base rate of fraudsters being motivated by personal gain is very high, so—unless there’s a clear way to verify lack of personal-gain motivation—I think assuming its absence is doubtful.
I disagree, but it obviously depends what exactly we’re discussing.
Was his judgment for not coming clean when things were only starting to get bad compromised by not wanting to lose his influence, money, and reputation? Probably!
However, do I think he made some of his most consequential decisions to a significant degree because he thought he could get nice things for himself that way? I actually don’t think so!
Making big decisions for reasons other than impact would ruin his score in the game. It looks to me like his primary drive was optimizing his life for impact like a video game, trying to score the most points. Making a big life decision for self-oriented reasons would be forfeiting points he could otherwise have gotten, which would feel deeply unsatisfying for someone who’s always thinking about how to get the highest score.
Also, $16 million is peanuts for someone who’s personally worth $2-10 billion, which SBF probably “”somewhat reasonably”″ thought he was worth when things were going well (or when he optimistically thought he could make them well again soon enough). It’s like what a couple hundred bucks is to someone with a net worth of $80,000 – not that significant! Imagine you’re making decisions for tens of millions every day. I can’t emphasize enough how unimportant it then becomes whether you pay 1 million or 16 million for your parents’ house (which you may or may not also plan to use for yourself or some of your coworkers/flatmates). Just like with offices or the building where he planned to sleep in, the price isn’t the relevant variable (what’s more relevant is, “Does it take up your time or people’s time with high opportunity costs? Is it close to the office where you work? Is it convenient?” Etc.)
I feel like,
if someone displays as much single-minded obsessiveness as SBF,
and his conversations with the people around him tell you he’s hyperfocused on impact (he wasn’t just obsessing about how to grow FTX for money, he was also constantly discussing ideas around grantmaking strategies or paying Trump to not run again for election),
and his close social circle is reinforcing the impact-orientedness,
and there’s a credible ideology behind it which generated many other examples of similarly impact-obsessed people (hopefully the vast majority of them without the recklessness and “no fear of bad consequences” part),
then I’d say the evidence points to being primarily impact-driven pretty much as strongly as it gets. Of course, no one has the motivations of a perfect utilitarian robot, but I think SBF was trying, so it doesn’t seem fair to call it “acted from mixed motives.”
Edit to add: We could discuss whether he was “unusually biased” for someone who’s trying to have a ton of impact – hopefully yes (otherwise EAs don’t stand a chance of getting impact right), but that’s still meaningfully different from “acting from mixed motives.” (Also, I’d say the most severe bias was probably a blindspot around risk taking and risks of things going badly, rather than e.g., being too much into a rich lifestyle or being too much into fame or whatever. FWIW, my best guess is that he also was too much into wanting power/influence; I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem like the primary reason things went so poorly.)
Edit2: Somewhat relevant comment I made a year ago about why I think SBF having dark triad traits is compatible with the above picture.
If you’re going to compare outflows to guess at motivation, I think it’s better to use actual charitable giving numbers as the comparator rather than perceived wealth. Doubtless underinclusive on both numbers, but IIRC the grants through FTXFF were ~$150MM and the outflows to his parents alone were ~$25MM (there was also ~$10MM in cash). That doesn’t suggest the self-serving cashflows were peanuts in either a relative sense or an absolute sense.
If you assumed based on past actions that ~ 90% of the money was going to end up donated to charity, then ~$1B of the loss found by the district court today was attributable to the 10% that wasn’t. Given SBF’s crimes, and the fairly brazen nature of his perjury at trial, I would credit his observed actions over what he said he’d do with all the money in the end.
That’s a good point. If there weren’t a convincing story for why more donations weren’t made or at least set up to be made soon, I’d say your point counts for quite a lot!
However, in this specific case, I feel like there are good reasons why I wouldn’t expect that many donations to be made right away:
FTX did have a hole in the bank! It’s interesting that donations were made at all given that they were strictly speaking insolvent. (Of course, he had to keep up appearances or pay for previously-made commitments, etc., so it’s not too surprising. I’m just saying it probably wouldn’t have been wise even for someone as risk tolerant and unconcerned-by-the-illegality-of-it as SBF to donate much more when there was still a hole in their wallet.) (Edit: Admittedly, this point also cuts against giving money to his parents.)
Longtermist grantmaking (which SBF thought was most impactful, I believe) already started to feel a bit crowded once FTX Future Fund came in, so it’s not actually that easy (or sensible) to deploy $100s of millions on short notice in that cause area.
The FTX Future Fund was still relatively new; it makes sense to scale up giving as you learn things and do various types of preparatory work for your grantmaking/”active grantmaking.”
“Donating now vs later” isn’t actually the most obvious of EA strategy questions, esp. if you think you’re greatly beating the market on investment returns, which he had been doing at least in his own mind.
SBF’s entire philosophy was about massive wins and game-changing ambitious stuff, so he probably thought of the donations he had already made or was making at the time as not that significant compared to what he was gonna do later, and probably had tentative ideas for long-term plans like “amass enough money to buy a chip company and then use that as leverage to get more AI safety work done at labs,” or something super ambitious like that, for which it felt worthwhile to keep investing in the growth of his FTX empire.
Lastly, and somewhat related to the previous bullet point of weird super-ambitious ideas, he did discuss the paying Trump thing and, at least according to Michael Lewis’s sources, he was entertaining the thought (though probably not super seriously because this was when they had a massive hole in the bank?) of paying a sum for it that would have been a lot bigger than the $150 million in charitable contributions you mentioned. (But sure, you can say that, since nothing happened there, it was only talk. We don’t know, but I find it plausible that he’d have liked the thought of being the guy who prevented Trump from running!)
Edit: If someone says “giving 10 million to his parents (and a house, but we’re not sure if the house had other uses) shows he must have had mixed motives,” I’d be like: Okay, yeah, it does look like this isn’t what a utilitarian robot would’ve gone for, but when I hear “mixed motives,” I think of something like 50-50 or at least 40-self-oriented, 60-altruism, whereas giving money to get your parents to retire early could also be compatible with something like 10-90 (or even 5-95), “focus on impact for the big decisions, but do something nice for your parents once you’ve made it big.”
SBF likely had mixed motives, in that there was likely at least some degree to which he acted in order to further his own well-being or with partiality toward the well-being of certain entities (such as his parents). The reasoning that you mentioned above (privileging your own interests instrumentally rather than terminally such that you as an agent can perform better) is a fraught manner of thinking with extremely high risk for motivated reasoning. However, I think that it is one that serious altruists need to engage with in good faith. To not do so would imply giving until one’s welfare was at the global poverty line, which would probably impair one too much as an agent. Of course, I’m not saying he was engaged in good faith regarding this instrumental privileging argument, but I cannot preclude the possibility.
Regardless, I have been persuaded by everything that I have seen that a significant part of SBF’s motivations were to help advance a world of higher well-being. Of course, from a deontological perspective he did wrong by his dishonest and fraudulent actions. From a consequentialist perspective, the downside risks had such incalculable costs that it was terrible as well.
But the sincere desire of his to make the world a better place makes me sympathetic of him in a way that I probably would not be with similarly sentenced other convicts. Given a deterministic or random world, I understand that all convicts are victims too. But I cannot help but feel more for one who was led to their crime by a sincere desire to better the world, than say, to kill their spouse in a fit of rage, or advance themselves financially without any such altruistic motivation.
This is just not true if you read about the case, he obviously knew he was improperly taking user funds and tells all sorts of incoherent lies to explain it, and it’s really disappointing to see so many EAs continue to believe he was well-intentioned. You can quibble about the length of sentencing, but he broke the law, and he was correctly punished for it.
Please note that my previous post took the following positions:
1. That SBF did terrible acts that harmed people.
2. That it was necessary that he be punished. To the extent that it wasn’t implied by the previous comment, I clarify that what he did was illegal (EDIT: which would involve a finding of culpable mental states that would imply that his wrongdoing was no innocent or negligent mistake).
3. The post doesn’t even take a position as to whether the 25 years is an appropriate sentence.
All of the preceding is consistent with the proposition that he also acted with the intention of doing what he could to better the world. Like others have commented, his punishment is necessary for general deterrence purposes. However, his genuine altruistic motivations make the fact that he must be punished tragic.
All punishment is tragic, I guess, in that it would be a better world if we didn’t have to punish anyone. I guess I just don’t think the fact that SBF on some level “believed” in EA (whatever that means, and if that is even true) - despite not acting in accordance with the principles of EA—is a reason that his punishment is more tragic than anyone else’s