I do wonder what addictions he has. It seems amphetamines and gambling are at least two. Or it’s possible they’re more sociopathic tendencies.

> Why would he give a billion dollars to charities, when he could risk it, flip it into $20B, and give it to charity? Why would he give $20B to charity when he could risk it, and flip it into $150B? etc...

But that would be the rational thing to do...

$1B less donated to charity is only roughly 1/20 as bad as $20B donated to charity is good, because there are also other people donating large amounts. In other words it's not at all like betting everything and ending up homeless if you lose the bet. At $20B vs $150B the catastrophe of losing $20B starts to become more significant, but I would absolutely still take that bet.

It's easy to see that this logic leads to a Zeno's paradox where you can never donate anything because it would cut into potential future profits that you could donate in the future. Since it leads to contradiction, it is obviously wrong in some of its assumptions.

No, because you are talking about compounding returns (which I was not), but improving people's lives today gives far greater long-term benefits than investing the money at reasonable return and donating more in the future, for well-known reasons.

In your post above, you justified not giving 1B to charity because it could be bet until it raised to 150B. But there is no reason why, by the same logic, you couldn't justify playing that 150B to raise it to any number rather than giving it away to charity today.

The point I was trying to make in my post* was that at some point you should stop gambling, because losing the bet would be catastrophic to humanity, but that point is maybe around $10-100B. (Depending on odds, obviously). It's because you pick the low hanging fruit of good causes, so every doubling of the amount gives marginally fewer gains. Eg. just look at how Bill & Melinda Gates have complained about how hard it is to give away billions per year.

*Aside: obviously it was tone-deaf for me to reply to that quoted sentence out of the context in this case of the money being stolen

That, I think, is the basis of the advice from Aaronson. There should be some natural rational limit to the tendency because of exactly the types of events that just happened.

Good luck finding that limit though, especially when the market seems undefeatable.

important point. best predictor for future behaviour is past behaviour. also the reason why somebody gets euch never suddenly becomes genuinely altruistic.