Oh, at least fifty or sixty.
More seriously, one can do both. Sure it's hard to perfectly and completely solve the problem of best using unlimited gold, taking into account appreciation etc. But on the margin, it's pretty clear the world could stand a few more billions given to charity without hurting the economy too much.
And, there's no evidence Flamel has used his vast wealth to benefit humanity - certainly not in proportion to that vastness. In a counterfactual world where Flamel spent a year out of every ten using gold to benefit humanity, we wouldn't see nearly as many good causes that could really use another million dollars.
Yeah, it is odd that we haven't seen evidence of the world being improved by large anonymous donations of gold. Maybe I was wrong to assume Harry was talking nonsense when he decided the stone creating gold was just a rumor.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: