It's wild to me how quickly the term Ponzi scheme has devolved from its original meaning. I'm guessing it started happening around the time the stuff with Madoff came to light. People use the term basically as an insult now, trying to convey that the investment they're talking about is stupid, irrational, immoral, or some other negative value judgment. It should be obvious to people familiar with the term than an investment into Anthropic isn't a Ponzi scheme. So characterizing it as such leads to confusion among people who might not be that familiar with the term.

Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud in which the fraudster misrepresents whats happening with your money. Investments in stock market or crypto happen with knowledge of the risks and people buy and sell them freely. Maybe they feel similar to you because a Ponzi scheme is pretending to be an investment, which is the fraud part.

> So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.

No, I don’t agree I’m “not acting rationally”. How do you define “rationality”?

1. based on or in accordance with reason or logic

And rationality is defined as the opposite of whatever is doing things "on vibes" is. You said it yourself, you are going with the vibes on your investment instead of reasoning and logic. And with so little information as there is about Anthropic's IPO reasoning and logic to invest are hard to come by.

There's a distinction between theoretical reason–what it is rational to believe, what arguments one rationally ought to accept or reject; and practical reason–what it is rational to do. Logic is primarily about the former; choosing whether to invest in an IPO is primarily about the later. An action can be theoretically irrational if it is motivated by or involves the acceptance or promotion of irrational beliefs; but making a decision based on "vibes" isn't such a thing.

Have you ever heard the story of Buridan's ass? A perfectly rational donkey placed precisely midway between two bales of hay; it has no logical reason to prefer one to the other, so instead of picking one, it starves to death. That donkey was irrational, not through lack of logic, but through having too much of it. The donkey who picks which bale of hay to eat first based on vibes is more rational than the donkey which completely rejects vibe-based decision making.

I see where you are going. And I agree with the principle. I do not agree that it applies to invest in that IPO, thou. I do not see that investment as equidistant to all other options.

Consider this investment strategy: put most of your money in passive index fund ETFs (e.g. VOO), put a minority in a random selection of other things based on “vibes” - is that actually an “irrational” strategy?

I bought US$350 of stock in some random Australian microcap because my dad worked there in the 1980s. Worst case scenario I lose US$350. And I get to have some fun conversations with my dad. What’s irrational about that?

> if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken

First time?