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Comment by stravant | Hacker News Reader

That assumes he would have stopped with the shenanigans, which is a pretty big if.

Proudly proclaiming on the Conversations With Tyler podcast that given a double or nothing bet with a 51% chance of success he'd keep playing forever.

Not forever. He'd have nothing soon enough.

It is probably just a coincidence, but it's darkly funny how well this lines up with the strategy described in a rather infamous LessWrong post. The title is "Solutions to the Altruist's burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick", but you probably know it by a different name. The author is one Roko Mijic.

Probably not a total confidence; it’s EA/rationalist theory taken to ludicrous extremes in both cases.

*coincidence

Yeah, not a total coincidence of thinking style. I just don't think it's likely that SBF was literally thinking about Roko's post as he did the crimes.

Isn't that just the right thing to do, statistically? Vegas has been operating profitably this way for decades.

The context was double or nothing the entire human population of the universe.

It's not the same due to the Law of Large Numbers. The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.

> The risk involved in many small 51% bets is very different from the risk in a single all-or-nothing 51% bet.

Right, but parent didn't say anything about an all-in bet, just double-or-nothing on a positive EV bet.

Frankly, I'd repeatedly bet on a positive EV bet too; it's a guaranteed win if you're allowed to go on for as long as you want to.

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