Reply-edit for clarification to expand my response to one of your points: I think it is worth, in a lot of situations, judging based on “should it have worked,” instead of “did it work.” That your model predicted it shouldn’t work and it did work is evidence your model is seriously flawed, just to be clear, I’m not arguing we should completely throw out the experiment and just go with our previous model, but, also, we shouldn’t say “the one guy who won the lottery was right and everyone else was wrong,” because everyone who bought a ticket had the same chance of winning, and ex ante the lottery was a losing bet for all of them.
(Unless the lottery was crooked but that’s a side note.)
So, even if it worked, I still think the protagonist’s motive was unreasonable; even if it worked, I don’t feel it should have worked, statistically speaking, as opposed to him getting immediately spotted, arrested, and spending the next five years of his life in jail in which he can do no good at all. Or someone’s angry brother taking a shot at him with a firearm, causing him to die instantly after he’d donated only $8000 to Givewell’s top charities, as opposed to if he’d peacefully sat back and worked a high-paying job he would have donated $800,000 over the course of his life. Or someone successfully suing to get all the donated money back as a class-action suit, causing the Against Malaria Foundation to go bankrupt because it already spent it all on bed nets and couldn’t get a refund. Not that all of those are equally likely, but there are a lot of ways for his kind of plan to fail at levels of badness approaching these, and if they fail this way he definitely killed people, and I don’t find the assumption that he knew none of them would happen very persuasive.
Reply-edit for clarification to expand my response to one of your points: I think it is worth, in a lot of situations, judging based on “should it have worked,” instead of “did it work.” That your model predicted it shouldn’t work and it did work is evidence your model is seriously flawed, just to be clear, I’m not arguing we should completely throw out the experiment and just go with our previous model, but, also, we shouldn’t say “the one guy who won the lottery was right and everyone else was wrong,” because everyone who bought a ticket had the same chance of winning, and ex ante the lottery was a losing bet for all of them.
(Unless the lottery was crooked but that’s a side note.)
So, even if it worked, I still think the protagonist’s motive was unreasonable; even if it worked, I don’t feel it should have worked, statistically speaking, as opposed to him getting immediately spotted, arrested, and spending the next five years of his life in jail in which he can do no good at all. Or someone’s angry brother taking a shot at him with a firearm, causing him to die instantly after he’d donated only $8000 to Givewell’s top charities, as opposed to if he’d peacefully sat back and worked a high-paying job he would have donated $800,000 over the course of his life. Or someone successfully suing to get all the donated money back as a class-action suit, causing the Against Malaria Foundation to go bankrupt because it already spent it all on bed nets and couldn’t get a refund. Not that all of those are equally likely, but there are a lot of ways for his kind of plan to fail at levels of badness approaching these, and if they fail this way he definitely killed people, and I don’t find the assumption that he knew none of them would happen very persuasive.