flags that are red and green

Published: 2025-01-08 Edited: 2026-07-14 Reading time: 7 min Tags: everblue Draft: Yes Part of: everblue notes

green

agentic
- do things
- a very strong attitude of “getting it done now”
- i could — and probably will — write a full essay on agency. for now, i’ll just list some examples and assume you get the vibe.
- ex:
  - h/t alexey guzey:
    - delivered a ton of interesting projects that weren’t helpful for anything in particular (whether it’s writing, coding, leading or anything else)
    - have a history of embarrassing cold emails
  - she’s able to Get The Ball Rolling
  - she makes sure someone is on-point for every, single, goddamn thing
  - she’s able to effectively select options from a wide space, without consistently going to the default path
- good parenting is being deeply agentic toward your child
  - heroic responsiblity is constantly at play — what, your excuse is that it’s the baby’s fault? it’s always going to be on you, at the end of the day.
  - you’re constantly selecting from a super wide option space, often without any clear default path
    - or the default path is just clearly bad parenting (e.g. ipad kids), and you decide not to take it
- people who embody this most, in no order:
  - MG, WS, austin chen, juan gil, joseph pendleton, oli habryka, jacob lagerros, rachel weinberg, ricki heicklen, william kuchenbuch
  - casey shea dinkin
links:

some are examples, some just talk about agency, etc. just haphazardly throwing down links.
- &
- &
- ,
- REALLY DOING THINGS, h/t joseph pendleton [private]
caring [maybe conviction?]
- values things
- cares deeply about that which she values and disvalues
  - visceral, intense, core, deep
- people who embody this most, in no order:
  - WS, MG, austin chen, tom shlomi, oli habryka,
  - ~most EAs i know
  - casey shea dinkin
  - my parents, about their children
  - my sister
act on beliefs & values [fix tense issues in wording; maybe “sincerity”] // acts according to that which she cares about
- sincerity, a la jcarlsmith
- is willing to make significant personal sacrifices for things she actually values, act in alignment with her values
  - ex: go vegan, drop out of undergrad, donate 10% of her income, work for [insert your choice of traditionally distasteful political coalition], acting illegally with a high chance of getting caught, quitting a job, cutting off a friend [^note: i don’t necessarily think these are good ideas. in fact, most of the time, for most people, most of these aren’t. i don’t endorse making significant personal sacrifices on a whim; i do endorse thinking really, really hard about your values, then caring deeply and making significant sacrifices for things about which you care deeply.]
  - not doing this is often a form of self-deception
  - meta ex: do you think that i am a deceptive person? do you think i’m agentic or caring? do you think i act in alignment with my values? how are you behaving in light of your answer?
- there’s a sorta mental trick where someone realizes something intellectually, then doesn’t change their behavior at all
  - this is surprisingly easy to spot, if you’re looking out for it — people do this constantly
  - socrates: “It is better to change an opinion than to persist in the wrong one.”
  - saul: “It is better to change an opinion than to persist in the wrong one. But that’s just the first step: once your opinion is changed, it is better to change your actions accordingly than to persist in the wrong ones.”
- people who embody this most, in no order:
  - austin chen, david rapperport, WS, MG, juan gil, oli habryka
  - ~many EAs i know
  - joseph pendleton
chill
- this is really hard to pin down, it’s much more of a vibe
- sorta like the opposite of annoying?
- questions to pin down if someone’s chill:
  - do you feel yourself relax in their presence? alternatively, do you often feel on-edge, restless, or uptight around them?
  - do you feel more comfortable around yourself when you’re with them? do you feel chill when you’re with them?
  - does conversation with them feel like a breeze? like you’re barely trying, and you don’t need to be trying? or are you constantly trying to ensure that good outcomes happen, planning out the tree diagrams of human interaction? [LINK TO DYNOMIGHT “TIPS ON INTERACTING WITH HUMANS” OR WHATEVER THE FUCK IT IS”]
- this might be thought of as “high baked-in social calibration”
- (personal note: i’m not a very chill person. this is something i’m working on, and if you have good advice [LINK], let me know!)
- low neuroticism
- people who embody this most, in no order:
  - chris sims, aaron zhang
  - max schumaker
  - rafe

red

deceptive
- toward random people
  - ex: homeless person asks her for money, she says “i don’t carry cash” when she in fact does — instead of saying “no :(”
- toward people she cares about (e.g. parents, siblings, friends)
  - ex: telling a friend that they can’t hang out because they have class/doctor’s appt/etc, when in fact they’re just tired and want to take a nap
  - ex: when their parents ask if they’ve studied for a final/done some other nonfalsifiable thing, they say “yup” when they haven’t, in fact, done that thing
  - ex: blame strict parents for not going out with friends, when in fact they don’t have strict parents
- toward themself
  - ex: “i’m not too worried about that final. it’s fine. it’s whatever.”
  - ex: ignores thoughts you can’t think, see e.g. nate soares on “‘should’ considered harmful” [LINK]
    - “If you find yourself unable to think about a certain outcome, it can be very useful to think all the way through the painful outcome — not to convince yourself that everything would actually be fine, but just so that you can actually think about it. It's the thoughts you can't think that really screw you.”
- most importantly, toward me
  - this is (obviously) the hardest to detect, so i normally try to use deceptiveness toward others as a proxy for how deceptive they’re likely to be toward me
  - there are still a number of tiny, tiny ways in which people can be deceptive to you without even realizing they’re being deceptive.
  - exs:
    - i ask if they’re listening, they say “yup” and keep looking at their phone/computer
    - they don’t telegraph their moves [LINK] — e.g. when they’re running late, they don’t let me know
  - the above examples are tiny. agreed. also, they’re instances of people being mildly annoying. agreed.
    - but they aren’t just instances of people being annoying — they’re also being deceptive. even though it’s a tiny, miniscule form of deception that they probably wouldn’t even think about, that barely anyone gives two shits about, it’s been sufficiently predictive of a general pattern of deception for me in the past that i’m willing to act on it.
[update from my previous thinking, written jan25]

i think i used to be a bit too harsh here — my fundamental thinking wrt deceptiveness hasn’t changed, but my practical orientation toward good people who otherwise tend to exhibit “normal” amounts of deceptiveness has changed pretty substantially. in particular: i don’t think i put enough effort into understanding what causes people to behave deceptively. IMO, people often find themselves surrounded by incentive gradients where there’s reward for marginal deception, and punishment for marginal non-deception. as someone stays in such an incentive gradient, their ability to become (if they never were) or remain (if they ever were) non-deceptive degrades/deteriorates/atrophies/decays. i think the opposite is pretty true, too — that time spent in incentive gradients that reward truth-telling and (to some extent) punish deception cause people to become less deceptive. i’m encouraged to spend time praising friends for not being deceptive, and explicitly frowning upon deception — particularly when it’s done “for my sake.” much of my thoughts here were downstream of reading “Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality,” from oli habryka.
obvious ones
- annoying
  - this is sorta the opposite of chill, and quite hard to pin down
- unhygenic?
- incapable of dancing and/or drilling (see Dancing vs drilling in conversation)
- sees relationships as ledgers of obligation (see friendships shouldn’t be seen as ledgers of obligation)

scratchpad

green
- competent
  - generally competent
  - competent at things they or i care about
- able to decouple
- kind
  - a good person, in a virtue/character sorta way
- sincerity, cf joe carlsmith?
- enjoys listening
- ability to actually keep things confidential
- aesthetics
- funny/clever/witty/smart (h/t conflux)
red

notes

the properties of the things i was look to find, ordered by importance:
- good signal — finding the flag is a really strong indication of whether i enjoy time spent with them
- findable — it’s not difficult to find, comes up fairly quickly, isn’t costly to uncover, etc
- maximally exclusive — the less correllated the flags are, the more ground they cover
- maximally surprising/non-obvious
i tried to roughly categorize green flags as supererogatory, and red flags as [supererogatory but for bad things, where you’re probably not morally forbidden, but it’s still bad]
many of these use the example of a woman, because i was originally thinking about this in terms of dating, and i happen to be a straight man
- however, i think it’s ~entirely applicable to anyone with whom i’d like to spend time
this was mostly descriptive, not normative — i’m not (necessarily) sure that these are the way that things ought to be, but i’ve noticed that i really, really hate when people are deceptive, and really, really love when people are agentic, and really care, etc.
- obviously, hitting all of the green flags and avoiding all of the red flags is entirely unnecessary
they’re meant as signals, proxies, indicators, etc — many people whom i love entirely miss one or more of them
some of these often trade off against each other! e.g. becoming marginally more chill will probably mean, in some cases, acting on fewer of your beliefs & values
value-change — extremely important, write more about this