r/SneerClub archives
newest
bestest
longest
Of course there was a rationalist dating app. With carefully aligned economic incentives. Publicising EA. On the blockchain. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/18/practically-a-book-review-luna-whitepaper/)
48

The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee.

No he hasn’t.

You think I’m joking, but can you be sure?

Yes I can be sure. You can’t buy a state.

Am in Tennessee, can confirm.
Prescient Scott was there nearly 10 months before someone decided to tell Trump to buy Greenland

Cursory glance over what luna seems to have produced. No dating app, but it did already have coins (on several blockchains even). So def a scam. Also no communication from the luna team since nov 2018.

One of the people behind the idea of luna(*) also claims to be enlightened and made this post (note no way to know for sure if it is really him).

*: he thought of the idea, and then gave it to the luna team, who promptly said, we should add AI. :)

So, Blockchain, NLP, AI, Game Theory, any other buzzwords?

E: also, it is silly in a way that while Scott hopes this thing was real, he doesn’t realize that it doesn’t serve 2 vital groups. Nerds looking for love who aren’t rich, and women who are looking for love, not rich guys.

Oh goodness I remember that whole r/iamaverybadassguru shitshow in the comments of that Gupta post, it was so... enlightening.
Stealing somebodies joke: "Apparently enlightenment involves a lot more anger than I thought". (And it is weird that after that shitflinging flamewar, it seems nobody was banned/warned, Gupta going, 'I'm enlightened because I redefined what it means so it applies to me' was pretty funny whoever. [His energy in that thread](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcIMIyQnOso) (it gets even more nuts, when it looks like he takes a mythical tale like a true story)).
My favorite part: >And for the people saying “internet tough guy”, no, I’m pretty fucking tough in person – 20 years of martial arts starting at 8, and I can casually bounce around Krav Maga instructors 20 years my junior, and have done in the last year or so. I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents, and backed down one such group who tried to harass me on the street last year. In fact a substantial part of my religious training and role was to act as the bodyguard to a guru who occasionally dealt with genuinely risky situations, and I excelled in this work. > >So, with all due respect, you are jackals among lions. Sit the fuck down and shut up, you racist beggars. > >It’s all about cultural superiority in the end. The underlying narrative here is simple: “how dare the Asians be better at something than we are, and how dare they not be cowed by our anger.” > >I am not a Tibetan Buddhist teacher begging for your support by pretending to Sainthood. I am not a yoga teacher persuading you to pay twenty dollars an hour to sweat in the mystic traditions of the east. I’m a scholar and a warrior, I think, and I fight. I did not ask Mr. Alexander to feature my work – he did that of his own accord. I did not ask you jackals to piss on my work – you did that of your own accord. In short, I’m not here to sell you anything, and if you piss me off, I’ll bite your ears off. Someone should have told him that the Navy Seals copypasta is America's crowning cultural achievement, and that he wasn't allowed to plagiarize it.
>20 years of martial arts starting at 8, >casually bounce around Krav Maga instructors 20 years my junior, 8yo Krav Maga instructors?
That's fucking brilliant. Never noticed that.
Soon he is going to star in a hollywood movie about his life. > An Enlightend Guru becomes a one-man vigilante squad after his dating site is murdered by rationalists, he randomly goes out and kills would-be lesswrongers on the mean streets after dark. Sorry [Charles Bronson](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071402/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_2).
I went down the Vinay Gupta rabbit hole and it led me to this: [William Shatner Authentication](https://mattereum.com/wsa/)
He really has a specific target niche, rich nerds.
There was actually a dating app at one point. I think the project/website is mostly shut down by now, but the app did exist.

Market forces are the known solution to the problem of connecting resources to their highest-value use.

Wow, that’s great! Finally, a dating site that will treat men fairly and stop reproducing the chad/*cel dynamic.

But everywhere this solution is tried, it runs up against its one great weakness – rich people with mild preferences can outbid poor people with strong ones.

Whoops, now I’m a moneycel.

Also, “connecting resources to their highest value use” is about the grossest way I can think of to say “allowing men to talk to women”.

> Whoops, now I'm a moneycel. i've been calling bitcoiners "fincels" for a while now
Or perhaps, EAGTOW - Economic Actors Going Their Own Way. I actually think this is a very apt analogy. Most of the political interest in bitcoin is really nothing more sophisticated than the same asocial entitlement that drives manospherian politics - women are complicated human beings in a gender milieu, so let's hand-wave their humanity and manipulate, enslave, or replace-with-sexbots them. Building alternative economic systems also involves complicated human beings and pre-existing economic milieus, so let's just hand-wave those away and pretend bitcoin is tantamount to a political movement.
The cryptocurrency do include stuff in their currencies, I mean etherium has the smart contract thing to help deal with those issues. Bitcoin was explicitly developed as a theoreticall thing

I like that Scott says “this is run by people I know and trust” but also says “I don’t know why they’re doing this blockchain part, it might be a scam”. If they’re people you know and trust, why not…reach out to them and ask them about it before you make a big public blog post saying “hey these guys might be scamming everyone maybe”?

because that's not how you do rationalist science - thinking hard at a problem is the only thing you're allowed to do
See also: my flair
>thinking ~~hard~~ “Hard” at a problem You missed some punctuation there. Thinking intensely about a problem might occasionally yield a solution, whereas this example is just (implicitly) declaring the problem unsolvable and leaving it at that.
Part of rationalism is never reaching out and inquiring. You have to be able to work through all of your ideas completely on your own with no outside input. That being said, he only says that he knows some people who work there; they might just be employees and not owners with the authority to share proprietary information about the company.
Uh isn't part of rationalism to inquire about problems? That's basically what they do in their discussions and whatnot, it's what reading those external sources are for (outside the sequences et Al)
trust is irrelevant with smart contracts, duh!
We should ask Scott why he didn't ask ;). (Lets not btw, he will just feel harassed).

We’re building a better way to connect that incorporates the best of data science, psychology, and game theory.

LOL

I am happy that the SSC guy calls them out for using a blockchain though. I’m willing to form a querfront on this topic.

[deleted]

To part fools from their money

Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to work:

Fees which comprise Luna’s revenue only occur in the case of successful communication. As described in 3.1, when a user receives and reads a message boosted with Stars, they also receive the Stars used to boost that message. Luna intends to take a small fee for this transaction, but only if the recipient responds to the message within a window of a number of days yet to be determined. If the recipient does not respond, or only responds after more than this number of days, this fee will be re-paid to the sender. The number of Stars transferred to the recipient, however, will remain the same, whether they respond to the message or not. In this way Luna’s financial incentives will be aligned with users’ goals at Stage IV in the exchanging of messages.

Where are the Stars that comprise the fee Luna takes coming from? The passage is very clear the recipient of the message gets all the Stars used to boost it, so it has to come from the sender right? Does that mean if you want to boost a message with (say) 100 Stars it actually costs 100+X Stars, where X is Luna’s fee? So then the recipient doesn’t get all the Stars used to boost a message.

Perhaps Luna doesn't take a fee, they are doing it out of the generosity of their own hearts, and adds. (of course, you just buy the Stars, from the global coin markets, wonder who has the largest stockpile of those coins..., A more paranoid person might think that as converting crypto to real currency is the real problem of becoming rich which non mainstream cryptos, all this 'dating site' hype is perhaps just a way to trick people into buying the Luna crypto, converting the crypto into real dollars for the creators of Luna. Of course, for this to be true, they would have been focussing on building their crypto product before their dating site product, which would just make the scam pretty easy to see, and obvious, they would never do tha... [oh no](https://medium.com/lunalabs/lunas-token-sale-by-the-numbers-984ceb54be98) (*)). *: To be fair to Luna, they did release a [few beta versions](https://medium.com/lunalabs/luna-0-2-1-released-74c6b4b578e4) of their dating app a few months later. So it isn't totally a scam, but selling tokens before you have a product is weird. Imagine World of Warcraft selling gold before they had a game running (I get that WoW gold and crypto tokens are not totally comparable, as the second also counts as a weird sort of venture capital). E: sorry, this small post grew a little bit (I edited it after posting the initial part) while I was looking for the sources I read a few days ago.
said "crypto is like selling WoW gold before world of warcraft exists" to the WoW-playing loved one and they giggled

Oh boy, that app (if it exists even according to the comments here) will be a sausage fest