posted on November 23, 2021 04:58 PM by
u/ProfColdheart
42
u/ProfColdheart48 pointsat 1637686754.000000
I know Wilkinson is on the periphery of the LW circle, not deep in
the heart of it, but that fucking sentence, man. C’mon.
EDIT: it’s also emblematic of the worst parts of the rationalist
mindset - stepping back and examining a discourse on a controversial
subject with zero reference to the material or historical interests of
the sides involved. Why do so few crypto skeptics hold any
cryptocurrency? Why are crypto enthusiasts mostly holders of
crypto? I don’t know; why are so few landlords Maoists? This is
only a hard question because you’re making it hard.
Either an amazing number of smart people are getting snookered or an
amazing number of smart people are uninformed and unimaginative
Weird that he never considers the third option - maybe intelligence
is not a point arranged on a single axis and maybe an amazing number of
smart people are smart in some ways and not in others.
(or, in a meaner fashion - maybe the people he thinks are smart
just…aren’t actually that smart?)
>maybe intelligence is not a point arranged on a single axis and maybe an amazing number of smart people are smart in some ways and not in others.
Or maybe intelligence is impotent against conformity, hype, and other emotional impulses. The sooner rationalists realize that, the less rationalization of their worst impulses we'll have to see taken seriously.
There is also confirmation bias, lot of smart people are not pro cryptocurrencies. [Programmers love crypto](http://www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com/) (link via r/crypto (note how you can't even post topics there atm due to cryptocurrencies, their stickied post is from 3 years ago, which considering the cryptocurrency subs grew 50% last year (aka, half people who bought into cryptocurrencies prob did so the last year) points a pretty horrible picture for the crypto people).
I assume it is just as bad for any other programming related subreddit. (This is just examples of the effects of cryptocurrencies on the wider community (which are even worse than this, as cpu cycles can now be monitized, there is no more free start services for a lot of people), and not the opinions of the programmers/cryptographers themselves). (Crypto people love to go 'it isn't that bad for the environment' or 'the environmental effects will be fixed when we implement magical new tech X in ~~2017~~, ~~2018~~, ~~2019~~, ~~2020~~, 2021', but almost never address this destruction of the commons). And im not even mentioning ransomeware here, a thing which only was grown to the current economy destroying proportions by crypto (and this also lead to plausible deniable 'cyberweapons' such as [Notpetya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petya_(malware)) which due to extreme luck only caused 10 billion dollars in damages).
It's just a false dichotomy is all. There's several more options he could take that he completely ignores.
(also cryptocurrency is in fact super dumb, so it is in fact very hard to believe that everyone who thinks its dumb is just "uninformed and unimaginative".)
That’s a very funny sentence. Well, thankfully it continues ‘or you
get more information’, so maybe if I read the rest of this post he’ll
say something intelligent (not holding much hope).
There’s real comfort in the idea that crypto’s nothing but a faddish
planet-wrecking house-of-cards scam; it’s a buffer against nagging FOMO,
regret, or a sense of obligation to learn something
FOMO? Seriously? Speak for yourself, dude.
Well, you obviously can’t trust the negative Nancies dug into
derisive ignorance as defense against FOMO. I mean, they proudly admit
that they don’t know what they’re talking about. But you also can’t
trust the exhausting monorail-salesman WAGMI hype.
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. why are those the only two
options. why are you presenting them as equivalent, when the fault
of one is apparently that they categorically don’t know what they’re
talking about, and the fault of the other is that . . . they’re
kind of annoying?
Because his monster thread below exploring all this stuff embodies
the open-minded, spitballing, tinkering attitude this kind of task
requires, I’ve adopted Venkatesh Rao as my spirit guide in this
quest.
Ah, I’m glad he’s enlisted the services of someone who knows what
they’re talking about.
The whole thread is just Rao doing a bunch of crypto stuff and then
being like, hmmm, yes, this sure is a bunch of stuff that I’m doing.
There’s no actual attempt to examine the downsides of it, it’s just
trying to explore a new weird thing that coincidentally happens to be
making a ridiculous amount of money for the time he invested into it.
Which is fine, I guess, but not exactly a balanced examination of the
pros and cons that Wilkinson is sort of implying is what’s
going on in his article.
Anyway, what I did to get started was learn to use Metamask and buy
some NFTs.
So of course Wilkinson goes the same route. I guess if you’ve started
from the position that crypto-skeptics have nothing useful to say then
all there is left is to go looking for any potential positive aspects
and pretend it justifies the whole endeavor.
In particular, I find the diffuse capitalization, ownership, and
control of these kinds of networks extremely appealing.
I’m sure there won’t be any implicit coercion or centralization that
occurs as a result of these totally free market interactions! In theory
this sounds great, but most of these people are fucking
liberals, and they think basically the same thing about
capitalism.
Oh, and look at the top comment:
But this is not a very convincing piece because you don’t actually
address the damning technical problems that well-informed critics of
blockchain technology point to, perhaps because- as you candidly admit-
this is a subject that’s well outside your own area of expertise.
Great point! Maybe reading a twitter thread and just thinking about
it really hard is not the secret to all knowledge.
So much words used to say ‘I dont know what to think and who to
trust, but I want to figure out what is true’.
The roblox example is funny, considering how hard it is there in that
community to make any real money. Crypto isn’t going to make it any
easier to make money or cash out, esp as that isn’t in the best
interests of the people integrating the crypto into their systems. (You
can use any amount to buy in, but only cash out when you have a minimum
amount etc was already a common thing in the past, remember when you
could make money buy having some clicker running, or being shown some
advertisements in the early 2000s? It was already almost impossible to
get actual money then, and that was only about a few 100 bucks (and even
then the best way to make money was to secretly install it on peoples
machines, or just fake the data (if you managed to find one of the
programs which actually had money to pay out, and didn’t scam you in
return))).
This remark shows how naive he is. This data center thing is something you now can also do on other peoples computers. So this will wreck trust in open source free software (and even paid software can just do this on the side, because why not, paid software also just sells your user data for advertising).
Your cheap Internet of crap devices might be running a data center without you knowing, either because they were hacked by a hacker, or because the people who made the cheap thing just don't care and want to make more money.
And guess what, if there is no centralization, nobody can stop these attacks without group consensus blocking them at a software level.
My point was more that “in your garage” and “reliably and securely” are diametrically opposed to each other in ways that he does not understand. Sure, you can slap some cryptography and decentralized redundancy on top of this to try and polish the turd, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Hey, who knows, maybe that guy in the garage will go ahead and get his SOC2 certification.
Your points are certainly valid, but I see them as an illustration of why the idea is flawed from the start. Do I want my businesses data potentially stored on someone’s refrigerator? Or a Russian hacker groups server? No matter how much obfuscation is layered on top?
Wilkinson: You need high levels of expertise across multiple
technical domains to evaluate the claims of crypto proponents! What’s a
virtuous Bayesian to do?
Me: Yeah, it’s a tough situation. I guess you either acquire the
domain knowledge or carefully look for any sub-claims you can
evaluate
Wilkinson: I’m going to blow a few hundred bucks on Axie
Infinity coalesce the gestalt of comprehension
Why does “adopt the Pyrrhonian skeptical stance, suspend judgment,
set your p at .5 and go Swiss” sound like instructions for a game of
Mornington Crescent?
I’m more or less crypto illiterate. I know how the mining works for
the most part, and hence the environmental implications as running so
many machines for so many cycles is hot work. I also generally get the
public ledger for decentralized transactions. I get the attacks about it
“not being a currency” because it’s not widely used for exchange. But
Does anyone have good links that summarize technical criticisms of
cryptocurrency that aren’t Peter Schiff complaining about how it’s not
like gold or complaints about “intrinsic value”? I want to learn
more.
* it's not about technology
* except to obuscate that it's a get rich for free scam
* it's all about people and the flows of cash
* specifically, from you to them
The problem is that there are better tools available for record keeping. Why not a database? Why not a distributed database? Why not signed transactions on the database to prove authorship?
There’s no need for proof of work or mining in a “record keeping” system, because there’s no need to limit the rate of new transactions, add any kind of “minting”, award values to “wallets”, etc. Blockchains are overcomplicated, slow, and expensive for the task.
I've seen some things about it in the past, so I was just wondering. Obviously there would be corporate involvement (re: for profit) but it wouldn't have the tulip poplar aspect of the whole thing. The reason I ask is that early on I had heard alot about how blockchain could change (always the word "revolutionize" was used lol) things outside of minting digital coins, and that chatter has seemed to die down in recent years, suspiciously, but not surprisingly. I did find this recentish paper on the idea, but not much else. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7010942/
basically all the good results are set in the hypothetical world of "could".
that particular article is blitheringly stupid for various reasons, but I set out some of the extremely good reasons that nobody would ever put medical records on a blockchain [here](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/04/20/medical-records-on-the-blockchain-the-history-of-a-bad-idea/).
Rule 1 of blockchain: If the application doesn't need to be decentralised, you don't need a blockchain.
Rule 2: You don't need your application to be decentralised.
I was disappointed in this he usually posts decent stuff. He spends
most of the post not even talking about the actual benefits or drawbacks
of crypto just discussing meta issues surrounding the crypto discourse
and then concludes “crypto is the future because it’s
decentralized”.
I know Wilkinson is on the periphery of the LW circle, not deep in the heart of it, but that fucking sentence, man. C’mon.
EDIT: it’s also emblematic of the worst parts of the rationalist mindset - stepping back and examining a discourse on a controversial subject with zero reference to the material or historical interests of the sides involved. Why do so few crypto skeptics hold any cryptocurrency? Why are crypto enthusiasts mostly holders of crypto? I don’t know; why are so few landlords Maoists? This is only a hard question because you’re making it hard.
Weird that he never considers the third option - maybe intelligence is not a point arranged on a single axis and maybe an amazing number of smart people are smart in some ways and not in others.
(or, in a meaner fashion - maybe the people he thinks are smart just…aren’t actually that smart?)
That’s a very funny sentence. Well, thankfully it continues ‘or you get more information’, so maybe if I read the rest of this post he’ll say something intelligent (not holding much hope).
FOMO? Seriously? Speak for yourself, dude.
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. why are those the only two options. why are you presenting them as equivalent, when the fault of one is apparently that they categorically don’t know what they’re talking about, and the fault of the other is that . . . they’re kind of annoying?
Ah, I’m glad he’s enlisted the services of someone who knows what they’re talking about.
The whole thread is just Rao doing a bunch of crypto stuff and then being like, hmmm, yes, this sure is a bunch of stuff that I’m doing. There’s no actual attempt to examine the downsides of it, it’s just trying to explore a new weird thing that coincidentally happens to be making a ridiculous amount of money for the time he invested into it. Which is fine, I guess, but not exactly a balanced examination of the pros and cons that Wilkinson is sort of implying is what’s going on in his article.
So of course Wilkinson goes the same route. I guess if you’ve started from the position that crypto-skeptics have nothing useful to say then all there is left is to go looking for any potential positive aspects and pretend it justifies the whole endeavor.
I’m sure there won’t be any implicit coercion or centralization that occurs as a result of these totally free market interactions! In theory this sounds great, but most of these people are fucking liberals, and they think basically the same thing about capitalism.
Oh, and look at the top comment:
Great point! Maybe reading a twitter thread and just thinking about it really hard is not the secret to all knowledge.
So much words used to say ‘I dont know what to think and who to trust, but I want to figure out what is true’.
The roblox example is funny, considering how hard it is there in that community to make any real money. Crypto isn’t going to make it any easier to make money or cash out, esp as that isn’t in the best interests of the people integrating the crypto into their systems. (You can use any amount to buy in, but only cash out when you have a minimum amount etc was already a common thing in the past, remember when you could make money buy having some clicker running, or being shown some advertisements in the early 2000s? It was already almost impossible to get actual money then, and that was only about a few 100 bucks (and even then the best way to make money was to secretly install it on peoples machines, or just fake the data (if you managed to find one of the programs which actually had money to pay out, and didn’t scam you in return))).
Also no mention of the undercurrent of this in the crypto community.
For the record, I also post on r/buttcoin the anti crypto subreddit, so here, im showing my epistemic bias.
Will wrote that unironically. I’m not sure I could write a sentence that felt more “used car salesman” to hype up blockchain.
Wilkinson: You need high levels of expertise across multiple technical domains to evaluate the claims of crypto proponents! What’s a virtuous Bayesian to do?
Me: Yeah, it’s a tough situation. I guess you either acquire the domain knowledge or carefully look for any sub-claims you can evaluate
Wilkinson: I’m going to
blow a few hundred bucks on Axie Infinitycoalesce the gestalt of comprehensionWhy does “adopt the Pyrrhonian skeptical stance, suspend judgment, set your p at .5 and go Swiss” sound like instructions for a game of Mornington Crescent?
I’m more or less crypto illiterate. I know how the mining works for the most part, and hence the environmental implications as running so many machines for so many cycles is hot work. I also generally get the public ledger for decentralized transactions. I get the attacks about it “not being a currency” because it’s not widely used for exchange. But Does anyone have good links that summarize technical criticisms of cryptocurrency that aren’t Peter Schiff complaining about how it’s not like gold or complaints about “intrinsic value”? I want to learn more.
I was disappointed in this he usually posts decent stuff. He spends most of the post not even talking about the actual benefits or drawbacks of crypto just discussing meta issues surrounding the crypto discourse and then concludes “crypto is the future because it’s decentralized”.