Why can't you feel sympathy for someone whose money was _stolen_

Sympathy, charity and considering them idiots aren't mutually exclusive feelings.

To me, a gamble is something where you go in with the intention of let's say, a 55% chance of winning, and a 45% chance losing it all; or a 10% chance of massively winning, and a 90% chance of losing it all. Whereas investing in things like equities is less binary (as it's rare for things to go to $0), and if you have good investment skills, investing seems to me to offer much greater ways to exploit inefficiencies in the market than what gambling does, and can create much better returns, no matter the asset class.

Obviously one has to be careful which asset class one invests in. High yield bonds are riskier than investment grade bonds; equities are riskier than high yield bonds; bluechip crypto is riskier than equities, and speculative tokens are riskier than bluechip crypto. I think all that is understood, and I was well aware of that aspect of the risk. But an aggressive choice of asset class doesn't necessarily turn it into a gamble, so I reject the way you framed this as a "gamble".

The one thing I would consider a gamble was my "gamble" that FTX would not go under before I had a chance to take my money out. I think it's probably fair to call that a gamble, if that's what you are referring to.

In either case, it's interesting how humans tend to be a quite a compassionate species in face of adversity, and yet, this specific topic seems to trigger something in the human psyche that elicits vitriol and compassion in roughly equal amounts, even as many people are clearly facing adversity. I'm not judging that reaction, but I'm curious as to why it's happening.