An Exegesis of Luigi Mangione: Part 3.5 – Who Is Luigi?

My assessment of Luigi’s personality, interests, and life trajectory

This is part three-and-a-half of a five-part series on Luigi Mangione:

• Part 0: Preamble - Background and stage setting for the series

• Part 0.5 – My Intentions – Why am I writing this series and what do I hope to gain?

• Part 1: Social Media Timeline – a unified timeline of his social media history

• Part 1.5: More Social Media – Luigi’s Instagram and Twitter Lists

• Part 2: Our Relationship – My relationship with Luigi and what I thought of him

• Part 3: Social Media Analysis – Summarizing and analyzing Luigi’s online activity

• Part 3.5: Who Is Luigi? – My assessment of Luigi’s interests, life, and personality

• Part 4: Did He Do It? – Exploring possible motives or alternative explanations

• Part 5: Wat Mean? – What does the shooting mean for our society

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Introduction

One of the primary reasons I am writing this series is because everyone I’ve seen try to assess Luigi does so with frankly very un-rigorous methods, making just about every mistake you can to ensure you come to biased conclusions.

And this is a problem because if figuring out his motive for doing the shooting—or whether he did it at all—was easy, we would have figured it out a long time ago. The fact that everyone is still arguing is a clear sign that we are missing significant information. And the only way to come to anything remotely credible in that kind of environment is to get serious about rigorous and careful thinking.

While there are probably a dozen reoccurring methodological errors I see often, the three most troublesome are:

Error #1: Assume he did the shooting

First, most who are deep-diving Luigi’s social media assume he did the shooting and are scouring it for said motive. This is understandable, given that Thompson was obviously shot, and our assumption that Luigi did it is part of the reason most any of us care to dig into his social media in the first place.

But the problem with this is that it causes you to under-index on significant things about him but which don’t immediately speak to motive (ex his deep interest in the cultivated meat industry which is plastered across every one of his profiles) while over-indexing on less significant ones but which you think would speak to it (ex his reading and impartial review of a single essay by Ted Kaczynski).

Error #2: Projecting ourselves onto him

Most who are interested in Luigi not only think he did the shooting but also either support what they perceive his reasons to be or at least feel sympathy for how someone might come to do it. And this is very often because they themselves are dissatisfied with the current world order, feeling alienated, depressed, or even “oppressed” by “the system”. And this causes them to make the second major error of assuming that the reason they would have taken some social media action is why Luigi did—projecting their own experience, beliefs, and worldview onto him without considering the kind of person he was and whether he is anything like them.

Error #3: Over-indexing on post-shooting information

The third major error I see frequently is to weigh “evidence” by how often it is repeated rather than the quality and credibility of the claim itself. Whether that be (alleged) letters received by fans, news articles written by journos, “leaks” of evidence by police, or even behaviors and actions taken by Luigi or his legal team since his arrest: none of this information is credible and should all be taken with a huge grain of salt if not ignored entirely.

Just as an example, I very easily found two “facts” about Luigi—namely, the date of his surfing injury and the claim of continued issues after his surgery—which are completely unsubstantiated, and which all the evidence points to something entirely contradictory to what everyone regurgitates about them without question. In reality, each of these stems from some out of context media claim which people just repeated without verifying. And this is from information that literally anyone could have found if they’d even looked. How many more “facts” about Luigi are equally as false, but which no one knows because they are actually hard to verify?

From fake letters to fake sex tapes, people love to fabricate things for attention and clicks, and the media is often the worst offender. And while it’s extremely unlikely Luigi’s legal team would fabricate anything, their job is to win the case, not get to the truth. Any half competent lawyer (which is the understatement of the century describing his lawyer) would be coaching and monitoring and approving every last action he takes, even down to minutiae like the clothes he wears in the courtroom or the body language he uses, to maximize how sympathetic a jury will be to him. And given how involved they would obviously know the court of public opinion is playing into his trial, how sympathetic the public will be to him too.

What I’m trying to do differently

So, while I of course cannot remove all my own biases or projections, it’s not actually really that hard to remove most of them if you just try to do it at all. And as a “High Rung Thinker” or “Rationalist” (or at least Post-Rationalist) or whatever you want to call me, I have spent fifteen years cultivating the skills to avoid these traps better than the vast majority of people—separating the data from the hypothesis, and testing it against many hypotheses, accepting which ever one fits it best regardless of which one I would like it to be.

And this is exactly why I’ve spent close to 30,000 words laying out his social media profiles in increasingly digestible ways in Part 1, Part 1.5, Part 2, and Part 3 before making a single claim about who I think Luigi actually is. And why I will spend 13,000 words in this post meticulously laying out what I’ve learned from them before I even consider the shooting or whether he may or may not have done it.

Like any researcher with a shred of integrity should have, I have written this article and everything in the series thus far from the frame that it is still July 2024. For all intents and purposes, Luigi is still out there living his life and I am simply going for the Guinness World Record on world’s most autistic stalker. And I will only go further than that after squeezing every last drop we can out of everything before it.

Finally, this should be obvious and go without saying, but there are a lot of Reddit brained retards out there so I will make it explicit: every speculation I make here is dependent on Luigi’s social media being accurate and representative of who he actually is. Obviously, no one’s social media is a perfect representation of them. And it’s entirely possible many of these speculations are wrong. But his social media profiles are by far the most credible information we have to go on at the moment, and I am thus confident mine are the most well-reasoned and intellectually rigorous in the entire Luigiosphere today. And while that is a rather low bar, it will have to do for now.

With all that out of the way, Let’s first dive into my general assessment of his interests, views, and life trajectory. After which I will go into his psychometric profile and personality.

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General Assessment

Education

For high school, Luigi went to Gilman School in Baltimore Maryland, a prestigious prep school that costs $40,000 a year. It is ranked number one for all-boys high schools and fifth for K through 12 schools in all of Maryland. And it is in the top 5% and 1% in these categories nationally.

He graduated valedictorian, meaning he had the highest GPA out of everyone in his graduating class (likely about 200). Thus, Luigi was the top 1% of his class at a top 1% school in the country.¹

For college, he went to University of Pennsylvania and studied Computer Science. UPenn is one of only eight Ivy League schools in the country and is ranked in the top 10 best overall and top 20 for computer science nationally. He graduated Cum Laude in 2020 earning both a Bachelors and Master’s degree.²

He also ran a Computer Science club all four years, while doing one to two internships at any point in time.

Overall Luigi’s educational achievements are extremely impressive and highly prestigious. He was inarguably in the top 1% of college graduates and was fully set up for his pick of jobs at any number of prestigious companies.

Interests

General

Overall, Luigi is clearly a very curious person with a plethora of different interests. He also often discovers new ones which he adds to his roster. The eight that are staples across multiple social media accounts are…

Physical Fitness and Sports

The first and most obvious thing we see from Luigi online is his physique, something he was clearly proud of, evident by putting a thirst trap in his Twitter banner. And based on his Reddit comments, Goodreads, and Linktree it is clear he was a very active person interested in everything from weightlifting to hiking to yoga to football to surfing, and that physical activity was a core component of his life.

Computer Science

Computer Science appears to be another long-term staple of his interests. Though we don’t see too much of it on his social media. There are only a few X posts about AI or UX Design, and a few books about programming.

This could be due to all his experience and fulfillment from it in college and his career. However, when someone is truly passionate about something as their life purpose, they generally can’t stop talking, thinking, or researching about it no matter how much they get.

Thus, it is my contention that while Luigi certainly liked CS, I don’t think it was his deepest passion. Instead, believing it as the interest of his most likely to be a good career choice.

Animals, Animal Welfare, and Agronomics

Animals, animal welfare, and agronomics was clearly one of Luigi’s passions. And one I see as way under discussed relative to the importance it appears to hold for him. It is one of the few, if not the only, topic that spans every single one of his social media profiles and comes up over and over again from many different angles. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if a more thorough content analysis found it as the single most dominant theme spanning his online presence, maybe second only to technology.

One thing of particular note is the “rational” approach he took to it. Have you heard the old joke “how do you know someone is vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you within five minutes”? We do not see this from Luigi. We don’t even know if he was vegan, which is strange for someone so enthusiastic about animal welfare. He certainly shared his interest and signal boosted companies and innovations in the sector, but he always approached it as a logical rather than moral imperative. For example, in his attempts on Reddit, Goodreads, and X to get people interested in the sector because it would be a good financial investment.

Furthermore, he had more than two dozen books on his Goodreads of in-depth explorations on the lives, systems, and histories of plants and animals.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Luigi’s most read category of books was Sci-Fi & Fantasy, making up 26% of his total books read. While it does not quite appear to be a “passion” of his, it was clearly one of his favorite ways to decompress, likely enjoying the alternative or future possibilities that great Sci-Fi and Fantasy enables.

It also appears we share the same favorite book series, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, which is cute.

Gaming

Luigi was a serious gamer, with almost 3,000 hours of playtime on Steam alone. Clearly a huge passion of his. I would not be surprised to find he had double or triple this across all of his various gaming platforms.

Pokémon GO in particular dominated his early Reddit activity, and he mentions in a comment that his passion for it heavily influenced him to go into Computer Science.

It is thus no surprise to me that seemingly his final online act on July 7^th, 2024, was to get a round of PUBG: BATTELGROUNDS in, his most played game on Steam at over 400 hours.

Self-Improvement

From improving his discipline to removing bias and building habits to increasing his agency, Luigi was clearly adamant about improving who he was as a person. Self-improvement books were his second largest category of his books read after Sci-Fi & Fantasy.

While I have not done full data analysis on his Twitter posts, a cursory review suggest that self-improvement content was likely the largest single category, and possibly even the majority of his tweets overall.

Travel and Nature

Luigi appears to have loved travel and nature, his Instagram full of various tropical destinations, and spent several years in remote Hawaii hiking around and enjoying being “offline”. And in 2024 he appears to have stepped things up significantly, traveling the world (by himself?) living out of only one backpack.

Genetics and Evolution

While not an exceptional interest of his per se, he has many books, Twitter lists, and discussions about genetics and evolutionary psychology. And as I will describe more in the Philosophical Views section below, it was one of the core mental models he used for assessing truths about the world.

Political Views

Up until age 24 in 2022, Luigi appears to have held all the chic progressive beliefs of his liberal elite education. From animal welfare and sustainability to climate change and anti-misogyny. Though he does not appear to hold any with a particularly strong conviction besides the first one. It thus seems most likely that he holds them, like all good boys and girls do, as the obviously correct political positions without too much consideration.

The only thing which struck me as being even remotely dissonant with it up until this point was his high school WordPress post that he saw efforts to “close the gender gap in STEM [as] unnecessary and artificial” and that “if women want to participate more in the field, more will do so over time”. Though even this could be chalked up to him still seeing this as an important end, but just that it will come naturally and we should not force anyone to study things they are not interested in.

Around 2022 however, seemingly instigated by his reading of Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem, he starts to question some of these, most notably adopting Urban’s perspective that modern Progressivism has turned into a neo-religion, coined “Social Justice Fundamentalism”, and lost touch completely with its classically liberal and progressive principles.

Though his new, more “independently” formed beliefs were not all a move rightward. For example, he became increasingly critical of capitalism, particularly around the ways in which technology and technology companies were having negative effects on the wellbeing of society.

The only “moves rightward” that are well substantiated by his social media appear to be accepting that there are biological differences between men and women, becoming somewhat sympathetic to religion, and seeing things like pornography as socially degenerative.

Also, the only view he expressed that could be argued as particularly “radical” was his quoting of a Reddit comment from r/climate in his Industrial Society and its Future review which states “when all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.” However, even this is often taken out of context.

Luigi explicitly states in the review that “[Kaczynski] was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people” and only that he found the quote “interesting”. If we admit nothing else about Luigi’s eclectic intellectual considerations, it must be that he found many perspectives as “interesting” which he did not personally believe. And thus, again, most way over index on the importance of this fairly impartial review.

Overall, while Luigi obviously does not fit neatly into any political box, I think it’s reasonable to speculate he would have scored in the libertarian-left quadrant of the Political Compass Test, albeit fairly close to the center.³ And furthermore, it is evident that he strongly rejected political extremism and took active efforts to boost the signal of those who fought against it.

Philosophical Views

Rationality

Philosophically, Luigi’s most deeply held conviction was in the value and importance of rationality and critical thinking. He was an enormous fan of Tim Urban’s work, which touted the importance of assessing all claims through the lens of the Scientific Method and Bayesian Inference.

He was thus open to heterodox ideas, willing to hear or entertain anything, but requiring that all prove themselves through public debate and critique.

Furthermore, he was staunchly against “ideological zealotry” (weak positions, strongly held), and made significant efforts to promote communicators encouraging people to question their convictions, even when that is uncomfortable or destabilizing.

Darwinian Evolution

The second philosophical perspective that appears to be at the root of Luigi’s thought processes is that of Darwinian Evolution. However, he did not just apply this in the typical way of “humans evolved rather than were intelligently designed by God” and leave it at that. He rather considered deeply the implications of us being “animals”, influencing his pursuit of ideas and behaviors like a diet of natural, whole foods; the importance of exercise and connection with nature for our physical and mental well-being; how biological differences between men and women can impact our dating strategies; and concerns about our over-reliance on technology.

Furthermore, he considered the ways in which the process of “selection” applies not just to our biology (genes) but also our culture and ideas (memes). Luigi understood that memes follow very similar processes, and that only those which provided selective advantage (ie improved survival) of their hosts replicated throughout the minds of others, and, equally as importantly, forward through generations. This is likely what led to his interest and appreciation for Lindy (old and time-tested) beliefs, and skepticism of novel and untested ones, such as his recent sympathy for religion, concerns of modern technologies, and promoting of Jash Dholani (whose stated aim is to help us recover old, forgotten ideas so we may harness their wisdom in the modern world).

Other Views

Psychedelic Drugs

Luigi clearly supported the use of psilocybin mushrooms for their mental health benefits, though there is no evidence on his social media to confirm whether he was actually using them nor in what dosage or frequency. However given his frequent X posts, multiple books on Goodreads, “mushroom mind” emoji in his Link Tree, telling me explicitly in DM that he was “high” when he wrote a post, and overall propensity for being an action oriented person, I find it unlikely this was just an intellectual curiosity.

And if he was using psilocybin mushrooms it may be distinctly relevant, given that a single psychedelic experience with them has been demonstrated in numerous studies to cause rather significant shifts in neurochemistry and personality. Most notably, a lasting increase in trait Openness to Experience of roughly a half standard deviation.

This is a positive development for most people, as Openness to Experience is effectively measuring our mind’s ability to “compartmentalize”, with those low in it having less permeable “mental boundaries”, and those high in it having more permeable ones. This is why Open people are more creative, curious, self-reflective, and interested in unconventional ideas. However, taking someone who is naturally mentally permeable and making them even more so can in some cases lead to significant struggles for them.

First is a reduced capacity for long term sustained focus towards one’s goals, getting distracted and abandoning them before they are actually achieved. In ambitious people, having this happen consistently can lead to frustration and even depression.

Second, high Openness to Experience can make one more receptive to getting “mentally hijacked” by ideas, both “good” and “bad”. For example, it has been demonstrated to be predictive of someone’s susceptibility to hypnosis. This seems to be because it engages our intuitive and emotional centers, but often in a way that we still perceive of as rational and logical. When this goes well, it can result in creative breakthroughs that a more “pragmatic” and “analytical” methodology missed. But it can also sometimes go very poorly, leading people to self-destructive or other-destructive ideas while maintaining certainty they are logically sound.

As I will elaborate further in the Personality section below, Luigi obviously exhibits very high Openness to Experience, with his curiosity, eclectic interests, intellectualism, and novelty seeking. What his “innate” levels are, whether he used psychedelics, used them enough to have personality changes, and whether that had any negative downstream effects, we can only speculate. But it is something worth considering none the less.

Other Drugs

Luigi confirmed the use of alcohol in college on Reddit, but claimed that it worsened his brain fog. We do not know what his alcohol use is beyond this, though I would not be surprised to find that he reduced his usage significantly in an effort to improve his mental acuity.

He also retweeted an X that was implicitly critical of caffeine, though it is not clear whether Luigi just saw this as an interesting observation or an actual issue.

As far as weed, the only evidence we see that he may have been sympathetic to or used it is the About page of his High School video game company, AppRoar Studios. On it is a meme of a cat smoking a blunt with the text “yolo” and flashing weed leaves. Below the image is the text “AppRoar is a startup by high school students in the Mid-Atlantic area, and we pride ourselves in the amount of weed brownies we can consume within one minute, something we believe is essential for any successful company in the modern day.”

This is obviously hyperbolized for the sake of humor, exemplifying the jokes popular in gaming culture at this time promoting a lifestyle of smoking weed, even by those who don’t. And thus should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Minimalism and efficiency

While somewhat subtle online, Luigi’s valuation of minimalism and “efficiency” appears to pervade much of his life. This is most notable in his long Reddit essay in r/onebag. He describes how as a child when him and his friends fantasized about their “dream homes”, they drew elaborate mansions with swimming pools and multi-car garages, but he sketched a small basic home with only the bare necessities. This was when he first realized that he was not materialistic, instead preferring the bare minimum for the most efficient and simple living, which he saw his eventual living out of a singular, perfect backpack as the pinnacle of.

Health Issues & Healthcare

Based on his Reddit comments, Luigi’s health woes appear to have started in early childhood with spondylolisthesis, a slipped vertebrae in the spine. He does not specify whether it is dysplastic (born with it) or isthmic (slow development from overuse), but states that he has had back pain all his life, though it was minor and led only to discomfort when standing for too long.

In 2011 at age 13 he contracted Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks with symptoms such as headaches, nerve pain, fatigue, inflammation, and brain fog. It was treated, however two years later he experienced “cognitive decline” which he hypothesized as related to his previous Lyme infection.

By age 19, shortly after entering college, his issues became debilitating, severely impacting his memory and focus, as well as causing gastrointestinal distress, and poor sleep and recovery. He saw the doctor frequently, receiving a barrage of tests, including those for Lyme, but which appear to all have come back negative.

In July 2018 he writes a long and heartfelt Reddit comment about his struggles and how they have limited his enjoyment of college and life.

While these appear to mostly subside in 2020 after graduating, it leaves a lasting interest in diet and overall physical and mental wellness.

Unfortunately, his wellbeing does not last for long, as sometime in 2022 he severely aggravates his spondylolisthesis via a surfing accident and then subsequent fall from slipping on a piece of paper. Media reports say this occurred in July based on an ER visit, however his Reddit and Goodreads suggest much earlier.

For example, in February he adds “Back Mechanics”, a book on understanding and resolving back pain, to his “Want to Read” list and marks it read in April. In May he starts commenting in r/spondylolisthesis, his first ones being detailed explanations of different surgery methods, indicative that he has been researching this for a while. In November he writes a comment saying he has had “long-time grade 2/3 spondy but sciatica and low back pain only starting in January of this year [with] numb right big toe and foot tingling from March to August”. In July 2023, he says the surfing injury happened “1.5 years ago”. There is more, and perhaps it seems pedantic and unimportant, but this is just one of many issues with the coverage of him, where everyone is regurgitating a regurgitation of this July 2022 date, despite that all the actually credible evidence points to it occurring six months prior.

His back issues continued to worsen over the succeeding 1.5 years, wherein he tried various non-invasive methods and saw several doctors. He wrestles in many comments with whether or not to move forward with surgery, saying “I have put my life on hold [over the last year] while I waffled on the decision [to get surgery or not]” and how “[being an energetic person who must be sedentary] is one of the worst aspects of sciatica”.

In July 2023 he finally concludes to go through with L5/S1 surgery. And then not even two weeks post op he comments on Reddit borderline raving about its success, saying that in only a week he was off his pain meds and feeling better than he has since the injury.

For the next full year of Reddit activity until he goes offline in June 2024, he continues to only say positive things about his surgery, encouraging others who are in agony to reconsider it and even coaching them on how to stand up to their doctors who are dismissive of their suffering.

Throughout all of this, he does not express a single modicum of frustration or resentment at the healthcare industry, instead praising how we “live in 2023 with access to modern medicine” to encourage other Redditors that there is hope in more invasive solutions.

If one could claim there is any frustration or resentment on his part, it is expressed rather toward dismissive doctors unwilling to offer anything besides symptom management. This is further supported by his rating of 2 stars for “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry” which is dismissive of surgery, suggesting he sees this perspective as unhelpful to those in situations like his.

Also, he claims in 2018 to have had Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance, and multiple seemingly credible reports have come out since then from United Healthcare that neither he nor anyone in his family were ever customers.

Two final notes on this:

First, the frequently regurgitated claim that his back pain persisted into 2024 is also entirely unsubstantiated. They all appear to hinge on a single testimony of a friend he lived with in Hawaii at the time, who appears to me to very clearly be referring to Luigi’s issues prior to surgery, making no statements about anything after it. Every piece of actual evidence I can find point to his back issues being resolved. To be clear, this does not guarantee that they were, only that there is zero evidence they weren’t.

Second, it is my suspicion that his health struggles during high school and college were burnout (stress) rather than Lyme induced. Luigi was burning the candle at both ends throughout this time, appearing to be doing sixteen-plus hour days of school, exercise, socializing, and studying all while running clubs or doing internships at two of the most competitive schools in the country. While this is obviously speculation, and I cannot be sure whether it is true or whether Luigi would have agreed, I believe this played a significant role in the life choices he made after college, which I will explain more in the Career and Personality sections below.

Career

Beyond Luigi’s interest in agronomics, the other huge thing I see under-discussed about him is his career trajectory.

As I illustrate in the Education section above, Luigi’s educational achievement is nothing short of exceptional. He was inarguably well into the top 1% of graduates in the country and should have had his pick of jobs at the most prestigious and well-known companies in the world like Apple, Google, Netflix, Meta, and all the rest.

And yet, for some reason, he chooses to work at a small one (less than 500 employees) that no one has heard of (TrueCar), in a role outside his area of expertise (data engineering) in a industry he had no interest in (online car sales), making a relatively low wage (about $100K), and doesn’t even pursue leadership there (something he seems deeply talented in and passionate about).⁴

This appears to me a job that likely any guy with a masters in CS from any school, or perhaps even a Bachelors, could have gotten. And especially given that in late 2020 job postings in tech and the ease of getting hired at a prestigious big tech company were at all time highs this just does not make any sense.

What gives? What could possibly explain this flat lining, if not significant retracement, in prestige trajectory after college?

I think the answer can be found in Truecar’s Linkedin page.⁵ Look carefully at the company’s About Us and you will notice something very unique. Go give it a look and tell me if you can guess. I will wait.

What should immediately pop out is that they have almost twice as many words talking about their employee benefits like remote work, casual culture, and generous PTO than they do about the product they are building.

My hypothesis is that Luigi chose Truecar not because he cared about the company or saw it as worthy of his pedigree, but because he wanted something easy he could do in his sleep so as to pursue things outside of work like health, travel, new experiences, and philosophy.

Furthermore, this opens another very important yet under-discussed question: what if he never actually even cared about prestige in the first place?

One key piece of evidence for this possibility can be found in his review of Tim Ferris’s The Four Hour Work Week. Quoted in part below:

All of the suggestions in this book, from questioning traditional career advice to re-evaluating the [minutia] of everyday living, stem from Tim’s disdain for simply accepting things because “that’s the way they are.” I believe that’s why this book resonated with me so strongly, as I’ve shared this frame of mind since I was a kid.

I’m reminded of a long-standing debate at my childhood dinner table. Whenever we’d eat steak, I would use my knife in my left hand and my fork in my right, which would infuriate my mother. She’d remind me to cut with my right hand since I was right-handed and to switch my fork to my right hand for each bite. When pressed for a reason, she’d reply “because that’s how to cut”. Dissatisfied, I’d press further. She’d reply “because that’s proper manners”.

As a six-year old, I found this to be the most pointless and inefficient process in the world, and I’d voice this opinion. Why would I switch hands every single bite to maintain some arbitrary convention? The final reply: “One day you’re going to meet a nice girl, and when you go out to dinner with her you’ll need to use proper manners”. My response then, and still a fundamental belief to this day, is that anyone who cares about something so small and insignificant, is maybe not someone I want to spend my time with.⁶

Clearly his mother felt very strongly about the proper etiquette of being a member of the upper class. And his grandfather was a business mogul who built himself up from nothing, likely something that hung over Luigi’s head his entire life up until this point. Could it be that it was actually his parents pushing him to prestige maxx rather than an intrinsic motivation?

Of all the theories I can come up with to explain why the moment he graduates he immediately moves thousands of miles away to a remote island to chill and have fun while he pursues his passions and hobbies, this one makes the most sense. And furthermore, would explain all his seeming complete abandoning of prestige to read obscure books and associate with “random autists” on the internet.

Assessment Summary

If you look at Luigi prior to college graduation you would think he was a prestige maxxer, seeking to further the Mangione name into even greater status and wealth. But anytime after that you would think he was a guy who just wanted to travel, chill, have fun, and engage in interesting discussions.

However, I don’t think it’s the case that Luigi “gave up”. Rather, I believe that he deeply cared about imparting something positive to the world, and just did not feel passionate about doing so via the means his family set out for him.

While I don’t know if I would go quite so far to say that he felt “alienated”, it is certainly clear that he beat to the tune of his own drum, and did not share the values and interests of those he grew up with. And thus, as soon as he had the opportunity, he went out into the unknown, exploring far and wide, to carve his own path and find the unique contribution he would offer to earn his place in life.

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Psychometrics

Introduction

One might reasonably wonder, who cares about Luigi’s psychometric profile and why would some BiG eViL NaZi have a credible take on it anyway?

The answer to the first question is because psychometrics seek to identify the core traits, beliefs, and principles of individuals. And thus a good psychometric profile can be predictive of why someone has exhibited particular behaviors or interests in their past and, most relevant to us, what behaviors they might take in the future and why they might take them.

The answer to the second is because I have over a decade of experience doing psychometric assessments professionally, with thousands of hours of research into the topic and personally administering and analyzing well over a hundred people on a barrage of popular personality assessments.

While I could speculate about Luigi on close to a dozen of them, I will focus only on the three I think I am the most likely to be correct about and which will be the most relevant to the exploration we will do in Part 4. Namely, his Intelligence Quotient (IQ), Big 5 Personality Traits (Big 5), and Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

While I understand most on the left do not believe in IQ, seeing Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man as incontrovertible, they are sadly wrong. IQ is the most thoroughly researched, empirically validated, and real-world predictive finding in all of psychology—the test far better than any other, including the Big 5, MBTI, or any other you may find reputable. And thus anyone not engaged in motivated reasoning to avoid confronting the very dark and unfortunate realities of IQ disparities must admit this if they are to claim psychology is capable of producing any scientific findings with a single iota of credibility.⁷

If you do not believe this and refuse to consider arguments to the contrary (I recommend “Intelligence: All That Matters” by Stuart Ritchie or “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life” by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray) feel free to skip to the next section. Else, here is my speculation.

Luigi’s IQ:

I have debated with myself whether Luigi was a mid-wit (115 IQ or SD1), a full-wit (130 IQ or SD2), or a genius (145 IQ or SD3).

I quickly realized the mid wit option was unlikely and my consideration of it stemmed from other’s opinions rather than my own. Those who contend this appear to have done very little research on him and believe either A) he did it but only because he got “oneshotted” by psychedelics or progressivism or some other info/cognito hazards that his “puny midwit brain” was not equipped to defend against or B) regardless of whether he did it or not, the fact that he was seemingly unwilling to consider any ideas that are exceptionally controversial and socially taboo must be due to an IQ limitation.⁸

In reality, Luigi’s educational achievements alone are very unlikely for a mid-wit. And his capacity to understand Tim Urban’s work in his early twenties and certainly my work years younger than even I did seems extremely unlikely for someone well below SD2.

On the other end, SD3+ is possible and I’m not able to rule it out entirely. However, if this were the case I think we would observe far more novel takes from him, including way more schizo posting, rather than the signal boosting he mostly does.

So while I will entertain SD3 in Part 4 in the interest of thoroughness, I think it is safe to assume somewhere around SD2 is most likely.

Big 5 Personality Traits (Big 5)

The Five Factor Model of personality (FFM), also known as the “Big 5 Personality Traits” (Big 5) is one of the most popular personality assessments today. More importantly, it’s considered the gold standard among psychological researchers because it is backed by decades of empirical evidence validating its ability to predict real-world outcomes like job performance, relationship satisfaction, mental health, and much more.

For these reasons, it is the obvious first choice for trying to assess the kind of person Luigi was.

The Big 5 is called such because it breaks personality down into five “factors”:

• Openness to Experience (imaginative and philosophical vs. pragmatic and matter-of-fact)

• Conscientiousness (diligent and organized vs. haphazard and careless)

• Extraversion (bold and energetic vs. shy and bashful)

• Agreeableness (sympathetic and cooperative vs. cold and competitive)

• Neuroticism (moody and nervous vs. relaxed and calm)

The most popular FFM model is the NEO-PI-R which adds six “facets” for each of the five factors to total thirty dimensions. And if this was a psychometrics blog where you were all deeply knowledgeable about the nuances of each facet, it would probably make sense to use that. But this isn’t. And most readers probably know little if anything about the Big 5. So I will instead be using the much simpler Big Five Aspect Scale (BFAS) model which only has two “aspects” for each factor to total ten dimensions because I can teach it to you along the way, getting 90% of the same result for way less effort for both of us.

Thus, in the below I will have a section for the five factors, provide a description of each and their two aspects, and then I will provide my speculations on where I think Luigi would score.

(All quoted definitions are taken from the Big 5 Personality wikipedia page.)

Openness to Experience

“Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty, and willing to try new things. They tend to be… more creative and more aware of their feelings. They are also more likely to hold unconventional beliefs. Open people can be perceived as unpredictable or lacking focus, and more likely to engage in risky behavior or drug-taking. Moreover, individuals [high in this trait] are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences.”

“Conversely, those with low openness want to be fulfilled by persevering and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven – sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.”

Openness to Experience is broken into two sub aspects of Intellect and Openness.

Intellect: reflects a person’s curiosity and enjoyment of abstract thinking, driving them to explore complex ideas, engage in philosophical debates, or tackle intellectual challenges.

Openness: captures a person’s appreciation for sensory experiences and emotions, fueling their love for art, beauty, and imaginative pursuits like daydreaming or creative expression.

Luigi’s Openness to Experience

Overall high. Likely above 80^th percentile but not higher due to low Openness dragging down his exceptionally high Intellect, which I would peg at or above 90^th percentile. I base this on his overwhelming curiosity and deep interest if not obsession with complex ideas, philosophical debate, and rationality.

For his Openness, I would put him around average or slightly below. Probably 30^th to 50^th percentile. People high in this trait are obsessed with art, music, poetry, theatre, and aesthetic beauty. While we do see a heavy interest in fiction, that’s about all we see on this aspect, everything else is very detached, technical, and intellectual.

Conscientiousness

“Conscientiousness is a tendency to be self-disciplined, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. It is related to people's level of impulse control, regulation, and direction. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused… [and] indicates a preference for planned rather than spontaneous behavior. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.”

Conscientiousness is broken into two sub aspects of Industriousness and Orderliness.

Industriousness: reflects a person’s drive to work hard, achieve goals, and persist through challenges, marking them as diligent and ambitious.

Orderliness: captures a preference for structure, tidiness, and organization, driving individuals to keep their environments and schedules neat and predictable.

Luigi’s Conscientiousness

Luigi likely scores average overall. With his low orderliness dragging down his higher industriousness. Though gauging the latter is a bit tricky.

Looking at him prior to graduating college I would say it’s very high, likely in the 80^th or 90^th percentile. However, after college he appears to drop off significantly into average or maybe even below that.

As I’ve speculated in previous sections, I think the most likely explanation for this discrepancy is that he is not intrinsically motivated to work extremely hard but was “forced” to by familial expectations. While I think he genuinely wanted to be higher in this trait—which drove his interest in habits, discipline, and grit—he eventually realized that he is not happy doing sixteen-hour days every day like he did in College and so fell back to what is more “natural” to him once he graduated and moved away.⁹

If this speculation is correct, it’s worth noting that he might score higher than his post-College activity would suggest but that he was simply “making up for lost time” by chilling extra hard for a few years.

Does him having an impressive physique contradict this? Maybe. But probably not. While being physically fit is usually associated with high conscientiousness, it’s possible that Luigi was just a very energetic person (something he stated multiple times on Reddit) and so simply found working out and sports cathartic and enjoyable. And furthermore, could have been naturally lean.

Though it is worth noting that a key difference between people who score average vs high on this is the latter feel so much guilt when they are not doing something they will literally invent things to do just to keep busy. While the former are totally willing to work hard when they care deeply about something but just see work as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. And thus, it would not be inconsistent with my ranking for Luigi to only be willing to work hard when he is interested in the domain or the payoff seemed worth it, which likely were both true for him about physical fitness.

To be safe, Let’s say he was somewhere between the 50^th and 70^th percentile in Industriousness.

For his Orderliness, I am confident in below average. Likely 20^th to 40^th percentile. Everything we see on his social media is rather disorganized. He is always trying some new system or routine and then abandoning it later. There are too many to mention but just to name a few:

• Twitter Lists – He appears to have started and then abandoned creating many of them.

• Goodreads updates - He consistently “binges” adding two dozen updates in one day and then does not make any for months.

• Goodreads mistakes – he makes frequent little mistakes like marking a book “read” when he meant to mark it as “want to read”, leaving books which he almost certainly completed as “In Progress” for years, etc.

• Goodreads Reviews - pretty much every single review he left used a different format and style. And those he spent the most time on the review for rarely correlated with those that had the most influence on him. For example, he gave What’s Our Problem, seemingly his favorite book ever, only a one sentence review meanwhile wrote 12 pages of digital notes for “How to Break Up With Your Phone”, and 14 pages of handwritten Notes about “Grit”, which he only rated 4 stars.

Extraversion

“Extraversion is characterized by breadth of activities (as opposed to depth) … and pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts enjoy interacting with people and are often perceived as energetic. They tend to be enthusiastic and action oriented. They possess high group visibility, like to talk, and assert themselves. Extraverts may appear more dominant in social settings...”

“Introverts [by comparison] have lower social engagement and energy levels than extraverts. They tend to seem quiet, low-key, deliberate, and less involved in the social world. Their lack of social involvement should not be interpreted as shyness or depression [though], but as greater independence of their social world than extraverts. Introverts need less stimulation and more time alone... This does not mean that they are unfriendly or antisocial; rather, they are aloof and reserved in social situations.”

Extraversion is broken into two sub aspects of Enthusiasm and Assertiveness.

Enthusiasm: reflects a person’s warmth, sociability, and positive energy, making them eager to connect with others and enjoy social interactions.

Assertiveness: captures a person’s confidence and dominance, driving them to take charge, lead, and express themselves boldly in social or competitive settings.

Luigi’s Extraversion

Overall, Luigi seems extremely high in both Enthusiasm and Assertiveness. Certainly above the 90^th percentile. I hope I don’t need to make the case for this given the overwhelming evidence but just to name a few that are massive extrovert energy:

• Being willing to jump straight into DMs with people you’ve never talked to (Twitter)

• Offering random strangers to DM you if they want to talk more (Reddit)

• Speaking up in conversations despite not being an expert on the topic (Twitter)

• Giving advice to people who you hardly know (Twitter, Reddit)

• Running a bunch of clubs (LinkedIn, Instagram, news media)

• Traveling the world and making friends wherever you go (Instagram, news media)

Agreeableness

“Agreeableness is the general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. They are… considerate, kind, generous, trusting and trustworthy, helpful, and willing to compromise their interests with others. Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature.”

“Disagreeable individuals [in contrast] place self-interest above getting along with others. They are generally unconcerned with others' well-being and are less likely to extend themselves for other people. Sometimes their skepticism about others' motives causes them to be suspicious, unfriendly, and uncooperative. Disagreeable people are often competitive or challenging, which can be seen as argumentative or untrustworthy.”

Agreeableness is broken into two sub aspects of Compassion and Politeness.

Compassion: reflects a person’s empathy and emotional concern for others, motivating them to be kind, supportive, and caring in their interactions.

Politeness: captures a tendency toward respectfulness and cooperation, driving individuals to avoid conflict and maintain harmonious relationships through courtesy.

Luigi’s Agreeableness

I suspect Luigi is high, somewhere between the 60^th to 80^th percentile. Probably being slightly higher in Compassion than he is in Politeness.

His high compassion is evident in his deep interest in animal welfare and dozens of Reddit comments advising and helping others.

His high politeness is evident in the respectful way he communicated in most public conversations. However, it is not exceptionally so given some of the other public comments he left on X and his private criticism of me (which is actually kind of ironic that he very impolitely told me to be more polite).¹⁰

Also, a tell-tale sign of a very high Openness to Experience and high Agreeableness person is an interest in every idea under the sun except the mean and bad ones (eg misogyny, racism, bigotry, etc).

One thing worth noting is that Luigi does appear to have some degree of intellectual arrogance, referring to “normies” as “NPCs”, and likely felt some degree of frustration at the lack of rigor in the thought process of most. Those high in both intelligence and Compassion often have significant internal conflict in both wanting to get along with and take care of others yet also feeling some degree of contempt for having to “mask” their intelligence and analytical nature to do so.

It is possible that Luigi’s high Extraversion allowed him to prevent too much inner turmoil on this, but it is worth noting none the less.

Neuroticism

“Neuroticism is the tendency to have strong negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression… Neurotic people are emotionally reactive and vulnerable to stress. They are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening. They can perceive minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. Their negative emotional reactions tend to stay for unusually long periods of time, which means they are often in a bad mood. For instance, neuroticism is connected to pessimism toward work, to certainty that work hinders personal relationships, and to higher levels of anxiety from the pressures at work… these problems in emotional regulation can make a neurotic person think less clearly, make worse decisions, and cope less effectively with stress.”

Neuroticism is broken into two sub aspects of Withdrawal and Volatility.

Withdrawal: reflects a tendency toward anxiety, fear, and avoidance, causing individuals to shrink back from stress or perceived threats.

Volatility: captures emotional instability and irritability, driving people to experience frequent mood swings or react strongly to frustration.

Luigi’s Neuroticism

I foresee getting the most pushback on this one but: low. Somewhere between 20^th and 40^th percentile overall, with his slightly higher Withdrawal dragging up his very low Volatility.

I rate his withdrawal around or slightly below average. My main evidence is things like his Pokémon GO post he made on Reddit but deleted after receiving criticism from other users, the X post he was initially proud of and sent to Tim Urban and I but then deleted later, and the way he self-reflected and recalibrated several times in our interactions. And then obviously the fact that he to some degree “withdrew” from the world by traveling by himself for many months.

Some might see this as evidence of above average withdrawal. However, as I described previously, it is my suspicion that this act was more exploratory and people read too much into this as some kind of Ted Kaczynski “receding into the wilderness while planning his evil plot to murder”. And while you could theoretically be right you must remember that this article is not about the Luigi of today who (allegedly) killed a CEO but the Luigi that existed over ten years on social media up to July 2024. And in that Luigi we do see some signs of Withdrawal. But not a lot.

As far as Volatility, we see basically zero evidence of it. Given that he added a few mental health related books to his “Want to Read”, had some other mental health related interests on Twitter including sharing of meditation and Stoicism related content, I think we can probably say somewhere between 10^th and 30^th percentile but beyond that, I see no evidence for.

Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Introduction

I have a love hate relationship with the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). On one hand, it has extremely poor scientific validity and is mostly used as this like doofus pop psychology 100 IQ HR lady test. On the other hand, I have come to believe this is exclusively a problem with the oversimplified MBTI model and is not true of the much more complex Jungian Functions from which it is derived.

This stems primarily for my experience using the test and finding that roughly one in four people end up “mistyped” relative to their “true” Jungian type. And more importantly, that when I am finally able to get them typed properly, the model transforms into something extremely predictive of how they intake and organize information (their iNtuitive and Sensing aka their “perceiving” functions) and then make decisions and take action (their Thinking and Feeling aka their “judging” functions). Personally, I suspect that if everyone was actually typed correctly, MBTI would have predictive powers rivaling (dare I say, exceeding) the big 5.

With that said, convincing you MBTI is not dumb would probably take its own five-thousand-word essay. And then explaining what the functions are, how they work, and what they mean would require another. So I won’t be doing that. I will assume that you have a general understanding and appreciation for MBTI and go from there. If you’re new and want to learn: here's a good intro article.

Now, let’s dive in.

Why He Is Definitely Extroverted Intuitive

Based on his extremely high Extraversion and Openness to Experience, particularly the Intellect aspect, I don’t think a reasonable case can be made for either Introvert or Senser. Thus we can immediately narrow him down to ENxx.

That leaves us with ENFJ, ENFP, ENTP, and ENTJ.

First, let me dispel why I think ENTJ and ENFP are very unlikely.

Why ENTJ is Unlikely

ENTJ stack: Te Ni Se Fi

While we definitely see behavior consistent with Extroverted Sensing (Se) such as his constant interest in sports and fitness; some with Introverted Intuition (Ni) in his tendency to “rabbit hole” on certain topics; and maybe even some with Inferior Feeling (Fi) such as his views on animal welfare, we see very little consistent with the most important and dominant function in the ENTJ stack: Extroverted Thinking (Te).

Yes, Luigi was certainly interested in topics of effectiveness and efficiency.

But first of all, Introverted Thinking (Ti) and Extroverted Thinking (Te) have very different definitions of “efficiency”. To Te “efficiency” means finding the thing that takes 20% of the time and achieves 80% of the results. Te dominants pretty much never waffle on the best decision to make. And furthermore, they never spend time deep in the law of diminishing returns trying to “perfect” some tool or decision. While to Ti “efficiency” means spending likely way too long finding or crafting the “one perfect tool” (or decision or model) that now allows “efficient” action in all future situations.

To give you a concrete example, a Te dominant user would likely spend very little time selecting their travel backpack, relying on the top Amazon reviews and finding something “good enough”, and then just filling it with stuff that they need as issues come up. While a Ti dominant user would instead spend hours researching it, trying many options to find the “holy grail” of backpacks, and then meticulously crafting the perfect items within it such that they have no more and no less to handle every possible travel scenario.

Obviously, Luigi did the latter. So much so that likely the most thorough thing written on the entirety of his social media is detailing his exact process and the contents of said backpack.

The second major blow against Te is: For all MBTI types, your dominant function is the overwhelming majority of your personality, in many ways the “essence” of who you are. It is the thing you are naturally talented in and better than everyone at without even breaking a sweat.

Thus, it is very rare to read books that improve your skills at your dominant function. You write these books, not read them. And you definitely don’t write fourteen pages of detailed hand-written notes on them as if you are really struggling to understand them. And in the rare instances where one does do this (or honestly look for external assistance in any way), it is only when they are competing with everyone else who has that dominant function, seeking to be world class in this domain.

If Luigi had Te and was also reading books on improving Te, it is extremely unlikely we would see him just kind of farting around as an engineer. Even while traveling and working minimally, an ENTJ would have quickly been promoted into a leadership role for their innate ability to identify the most important business problems and delegate their work to others. And with Luigi’s pedigree, intelligence, and high Extraversion, he could have likely been a director or even have started his own company by now if this were the case.

Obviously, we do not see this. While Luigi did get promoted every year or so, he remained an engineer at a rather small organization and does not appear to have made any attempt to start any kind of business (besides the little project he and his friends ran briefly in high school). He instead spent the majority of his non-work time traveling and exploring topics of philosophy and rationality, behavior consistent with Ti and discordant with Te.

Furthermore, he added a whole lot more books about developing his Te than he actually read. It thus seems much more likely that he wanted to cultivate Te but it was not in any way something that came naturally to him without conscious effort.

Finally, if you need any more convincing: an ENTJ is unlikely to ever make all the silly jokes he does like PhD or naming his chess profile “sexytwerker69” or analyzing his 8-year-old-self’s predictions in his Instagram story. ENTJs are way too serious, always playing social chess to maximize the status and respect they receive from others. Crude jokes like this would only be reserved for their closest and most intimate of relationships.

With that hopefully sufficiently deboonked, lets now look at ENFP.

ENFP

ENFP Stack: Ne Fi Te Si

While I don’t think anyone is actually considering this, walking through it will be useful for sussing out the other two options:

We certainly see behavior consistent with Extroverted Intuition (Ne), such as his love of travel, exploration, and new ideas. However we see very little if any with auxiliary Introverted Feeling (Fi).

Users with Fi high in their stack have very well-developed moral values which they are never shy about. And when they get in a disagreement with you, it’s not over whether you are being irrational it’s whether you are being evil.

Do you see this anywhere from Luigi? I don’t. Again, the only value we see from him remotely consistent with Fi would be his interest in animal welfare. But even there, we do not see the distinctive Fi behavior of pushing their values onto others (or at least standing firm when pushed themselves).

These were things he was personally passionate about, yes, but that’s where it ended. Whenever we see him arguing with and pressuring anyone about anything, it is always because they are being irrational not immoral, a tell-tale sign of Ti. Even when he was telling me to stop being an internet bully, his argument wasn’t “because being a bully makes you evil” but because “being a bully is illogical to what I believe your aims to be”. His appeal was entirely Ti Fe based. And so was everything else we see about him.

This leaves us with only two options: ENFJ or ENTP. Let’s look at ENFJ first.

ENFJ

ENFJ stack: Fe Ni Se Ti

Up until late February, more than two months into this project, it was obvious to me that Luigi was an ENFJ. From his Reddit comments dominated with providing advice and offering support to others; to his blanket rule of being friendly and willing to engage with anyone regardless of their beliefs or values; to his ability to “mirror” others’ conversation styles and identify and resolve points of conflict; and of course his constant “leadership” in his personal life of running clubs, coaching students; and all the rest, he practically exuded Extroverted Feeling (Fe) from every facet of his being.

And if we assume he did the assassination, and that the manifesto is legit, him sacrificing his life for the greater good of the oppressed and downtrodden in exchange for deity status is peak ENFJ (most historically significant leaders of cults or social movements were xNFJ).

And, as discussed in ENTJ above, his interest in deep ideas, mental models, and signs of addictive personality (“rabbit holing”) coupled with an active lifestyle is totally consistent with Ni auxiliary and Se tertiary.

Sure, inferior Ti for an engineer in tech is rare, but it is not unheard of—I know several ENFJ’s who are programmers.

And being a high prestige, super hardworking, top achiever who everybody loves is just quintessential ENFJ.

So case closed right? Well that’s what I thought when I wrote this comment. And when some foid wrote this reply linking to this personality database submission from some supposed INFJ who allegedly knew him saying they are certain he is an ENTP, I of course knew they were an idiot LARPing because no real INFJ could mistype someone so badly as this!

But now the worm was in my brain. “Well, okay fine. Sure, rawdonuts is an idiot. No doubt about that. I mean what kind of name is rawdonuts anyway? Sounds disgusting. But I should just double check, to be sure, you know? I’ve already got a lot of people looking for any opportunity to discredit me. Don’t want to come out all confident with ENFJ and then not have even considered all the alternatives. So let’s put the puzzle pieces we have onto ENTP and see what sticks. Again, of course, just to prove that it’s absurd and so I can tout how cool and smart I am for being so unbelievably correct.”¹¹

Narrator: Max was not correct.

ENTP

Stack: Ne Ti Fe Si

The first crack in my certainty on ENFJ was reflecting further on just how much of a silly goose Luigi is. Similar to ENTJ, ENFJ are very image and status conscious (though because they are secretly insecure rather than because it is the most effective means to power) and thus are unlikely to post all the very playful and often crude things he did.

The second crack was the nagging confusion in my mind over his steep drop off in prestige trajectory after college. While an ENFJ would certainly use different methods to continue their status achievement than ENTJ, wooing people with their social rather than business aptitude, it would be very strange for them not to maintain or frankly increase the slope of that trajectory unless something was seriously wrong. Choosing a “chill” job with great benefits so he can travel and explore (Ne) and staying in an engineer role and being obsessed with becoming more rational (Ti) all make far more sense coming from an ENTP. But even this I could maybe force into the frame that he was an ENFJ and just needed a break after his stressful college years.

The third was him clearly being higher in industriousness than orderliness, usually a tell-tale sign of someone being a Perceiver rather than a Judger.

The fourth was just the ever-increasing pile of strange idiosyncrasies in his behavior. The lack of established systems that slowly improve over time (Ni), instead seemingly just trying on some new system of the week and then abandoning it the next (Ne). Or all the weird little “schizo” things he said in his communications with me, Skallas, Gurwinder, Datepsych, and even Tim Urban (ex No ENFJ would ever say something so boorish as this to one of their greatest idols).¹² I had previously chalked all of these up to that he maybe had done too many psychedelics or something and messed up his Ni.

But that made me realize actually this is not the only way in which his Ni is broken. Rather, it is fundamentally broken, failing to do “the Ni obsession process” at all as far as I can tell.

For the unfamiliar, All xNxJ’s (those with Ni as their primary perceiving function), have one and only one way of learning new things: They hyper fixate and obsess over it until they’ve beaten it to a complete pulp and mastered it, after which they almost never feel the need to entertain it again.

Luigi does not do this at all. He will add new interest to his purview and maybe pursue them with a bit of extra fervor for a bit, particularly those relevant to active problems he was having (such as his spondylolisthesis) but then continually “dabbles” in those same ideas for years or even decades all while exploring many more in tandem. Luigi very distinctly exhibits this “broadly but shallowly” learning process quintessential to Ne rather than the “deeply but narrowly” one quintessential to Ni.¹³ And this is only further corroborated by the hundreds of video games he put only a few hours into.

At this point, Ne dominant tipped for me into “more likely than not”. After which I realized that yes while every individual thing he does might exhibit Fe and Ti, he uses his Ti much more than his Fe, and both are subordinate to an overarching structure of Ne.

The latter only becomes clear when you zoom out and examine his social media timeline from a birds eye view and see that besides some light trends on his Reddit, there’s functionally no distinct pattern of Ni obsessive interests—rather all just a kind of amalgamation together at once, jumping from this to that then back to this, then over to this totally unrelated thing—at which point it eventually finally clicks the water in which we are swimming is the beautiful schizophrenic chaos of Ne.

Lastly, his willingness to put his face to challenging the chic elite ideas of the day is in my view the final nail in the coffin against Fe dominant. Asking an ENFJ to publicly question the values most conducive to gaining status is like asking them to remove a limb without anesthesia. And while yes, not all ENFJ’s are progressives, all ENFJs born and raised in liberal elite social circles definitely are. And every last one of them would kill themselves before they would even consider promoting a bunch of books and people critical of Social Justice Fundamentalism on accounts with their real name.¹⁴

Overall, his career trajectory, rationality and travel obsessions, “contradictory” views (ex being both a tech accelerationist yet also a Luddite), and even his interest in psychedelic drugs, while they don’t totally rule out ENFJ, all fit way better with ENTP.

And wanting to explore every idea and every place, being willing to try anything once, and above all else caring about logical consistency within ideas but at the same time having no problem with contradiction between them is so characteristic of ENTP that at this point I don’t see how anyone who has read and fully digested everything in the series so far could still make a case for anything else.

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Conclusion

Now, with a complete picture for who Luigi was up until July 2024—or, again, the best we can possibly come up with based on the limited credible information we have—we can finally consider the shooting, what could have possibly motivated him to do it, or whether he even did it at all.

I will detail various hypotheses on this in Part 4. If you’d like to be notified as soon as it is released, be sure to…

1. None of his high school information is included on his social media but I think the claim is credible and relevant enough to justify breaking my rule and including it.

2. Roughly half of UPenn graduates get Cum Laude or higher. So, obviously not as highly ranked as his Highschool graduation. However, I wouldn’t necessarily consider this as evidence on decline on his part, as the requirements were almost certainly an order of magnitude tougher.

3. It is my experience that the overwhelming majority of Rationalists use centrism as a heuristic for truth, which is obviously irrational, presuming that the Overton Window is an accurate representation of reality (it isn’t). Furthermore, I believe that Rationalists in general care much more about appearing to be reasonable, using Bayesian Inference selectively, to ensure they never end up with any “extremist” positions. I mean, besides Yudkowsky and his AI Doomerism, who likely gets a pass only because he basically invented internet rationalism, to conclude on any “extreme” position immediately gets you kicked out of the Rationalist club, now a “Post-Rat”. It appears to me that LM defaulted to this methodology but made efforts to overcome this bias, which is rare.

4. While I cannot find a job posting for Data Engineer 1 at True Car, which he started as, I did find one for a Data Engineer 3 which is only making $150K in 2025 dollars. Given the 23% increase in COLA since 2020, it is likely DE3 was only making $125K or so back then and DE1 was below $100K.

5. Lol literally a few days before I posted the article TrueCar completely rewrote their LinkedIn bio, removing all the stuff about culture and benefits. The initial version of this article linked to the live page, but now links to an archive.org page with the old bio.

6. Implicit in the last sentence of his Four Hour Work Week review is not only a critique of potential dating partners, but also of his mother. This personality clash likely played a role in why he moved half way across the world away from his family as soon as he had the opportunity.

7. I predict I will get a dozen comments on this article with people bitching about this singular, utterly unimportant paragraph.

8. Far right intellectuals believe they entertain dark ideas because they are smarter than everyone. But it’s actually just because they are very low in trait agreeableness. In reality, it is the rule rather than the exception for SD2+ IQ people to be left rather than right wing. Regardless, the fact that all on the far right pretty much dismiss Luigi as a midwit for not being “one of us” should further dispel concerns that Luigi is an “evil right wing Nazi”.

9. If you need further evidence of Luigi’s not-high industriousness: you don’t write 14 pages of detailed hand written notes about how to become more industrious (“Grit” has a correlation with Conscientiousness of like 0.9) if you are already exceptionally industrious.

10. Being kind in public but tough on in private is a key sign of high Extraversion, high Agreeableness people. They are capable of being tough and blunt but not in a way that will harm your reputation or social standing (unlike low Extraversion, high Agreeableness people who struggle to be anything but super nice all the time regardless of setting; or high Extraversion, low Agreeableness people who are prickly and blunt regardless of setting).

11. Rawdonuts, if you ever read this: you’re obviously a genius and I love you. I’m sorry for ever doubting you.

12. Also, Ne makes more sense if it is true that he misread some of what I said and some of what Gurwinder has said. Ne perceives things in kind of a blurry way, refined only by Ti, but this means the refining happens internally. It is thus not uncommon for xNTP’s to hear things slightly differently than what was intended, and very common for xNTP’s to reiterate it back in a way that makes sense to them but not to others even when they did genuinely understand the original statement.

13. Don’t want to belabor this point unnecessarily but this was actually one of the main reasons I made the social media timeline. I assumed he was ENFJ and thus we would see his distinct ideological phases and shifts from this rabbit hole to the next. However we distinctly do not see that. I thought maybe it’s just because he was auxiliary Ni rather than dominant, and Fe Se was just kind of mitigating his rabbit holing compared to an Ni dom. But as I dug further, Ni seemed less and less likely.

14. Just as an example: I am an INFJ with only auxiliary Fe and I would never tell anyone left of center (most people in my social circles) that I was reading Ted Kaczynski or frankly even the idea that men and women have biological differences if I did not deeply trust them and know we have a strong enough relationship to handle it. The degree to which I can do this online is only because it has no ties to my real identity and have Ni dominant and Ti tertiary, capable of pursuing the truth even when Fe is screaming at the top of her lungs to stop.