I’m actually not criticizing SBF here.

I am criticizing people, possibly including myself, who should have developed more realistic and convincing models clarifying why his behavior was increasingly suboptimal despite his near-linear personal utility function.

His behavior doesn’t really look like self-deception to me. It looks like blindness to poorly articulated limitations of a mathematical model he was taught and understands very well, and I suspect he wouldn’t have been so blind without the “poorly” above.