On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

Between all forms of gambling, Americans are probably making in excess of $1 trillion in bets annually.

This would have been a good bargain, and not just in hindsight; a Manifold market at the time presciently assigned SBF a 71 percent chance

You could tell that the Manifest conference was a rationalist rather than an EA event because of the presence of people who were either considered unwoke (like Hanson, who told me he’d basically been canceled from EA events since a 2018 blog post in which he wrote sympathetically about the idea of redistributing sex to incels),

“The rationalist utopia is a power trip,”

worth literally trillions, which he claimed he could put toward EA-related causes. Who knows what the limits were; he’d even told Ellison there was a 5 percent chance he could become president of the United States. His utility function was “closer to linear,” he explained; the trillionth dollar really was almost as good as the first. Technically sp

“You’re essentially indirectly competing against the smartest, most informationally savvy groups in the world.”

But although SBF might or might not have underestimated how bad a crash would look, he probably did underestimate how likely one was.

Lucky people “constantly encounter chance opportunities” and try out new things. Lucky people “make good decisions without knowing why.” They listen to their intuition. Lucky people have positive expectations so their “dreams, ambitions and goals have an uncanny knack of coming true.” Lucky people “have an ability to turn their bad luck into good f

they’re both dependent on recreational bettors to make their profits. In

But not everybody is playing the same game. People have different incentives, and they may be following their incentives rationally, but it nevertheless creates profitable opportunities for DFT, which just wants to make money. Maybe conscientious contrarianism