I’m sure most of the focus is going to be on the dumb arguments he
makes, but the framing of the article - “Everyone else is being
infinitely hostile to crypto, so I’m just providing a neccessary
contrast by defending it” is so absurdly dishonest. He wants to give
crypto a big ol’ tongue bath without losing his Rational cred, so he
sets up a strawman to knock down.
Is there even one person on earth arguing that crypto is
infinitely bad?
Well, yeah. Other rationalists have been referring to FTX as ["Rationalism's Chernobyl"](https://www.themotte.org/post/179/ftx-is-rationalisms-chernobyl), I think this is pure damage control on his part.
I mean, I would classify it as a wholly failed economic experiment at this point with little remaining value or use case apart from enabling crime, but I'm pretty sure that's not the kind of "infinitely hostile" that he means.
Hell, finding anyone in the media providing even a skeptical view of crypto is pretty rare. Naked boosterism is much more of the norm, with previous rug pulls generally being memory holed by “serious” reporters. You have to go out of your way to find someone who is openly critical of crypto, and they’re not getting a ton of CNBC time.
It's like Scott thought people would just forget about FTX if he acted like it wasn't significant. Also lol at cherry-picking a source that didn't describe FTX as the 2nd largest crypto exchange (edit: and pretending FTX wasn't a rug-pull), I guess he wants that to be memory-holed too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/zeq27q/has_the_sbf_scandal_dampened_anyone_elses/izb2v0w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3 he does that same approach here too i think. Minimize and gish gallop.
> I really seriously think it’s important to be totally divorced from caring what other people think of you. Even if you never think about rationality or EA again you will eventually end up caring about something else that everyone will decide it’s trendy to hate, and if you want an at all authentic life you have to learn to just shrug and carry on anyway.
Yeah, like not caring what NYT readers might think?
Eh. The comments are very significantly more charitable to crypto than they should be, but I guess that's forgivable since a lot of people don't follow the space very closely. Even the much weaker statement "the majority of large crypto projects are not scams" would be a pretty suspect proposition unless you were extremely rigid with your definition of scam.
(Crypto shills being allowed to repeat large numbers of untrue things unimpeded, e.g. about energy usage or adoption rates, is also a little annoying, but this is part for the course for Scott's stuff, so I guess it's barely even worth pointing out).
Oh the comments are still more accepting than they really should be, but at least most of the top level comments seem to be pushing back against most of his major points.
Also on his point about scams- his definition seems to be overly charitable at best and intentionally misleading at worst. Technically by his "only an overt rug-pull is a scam" metric, one could argue (and he probably does) that Terra/Luna was not a scam- or that because nobody has been convicted in Terra/Luna that there's NO EVIDENCE that it was a scam from the beginning.
To be clear, I think the essay is trash, I just liked that it was not unchallenged trash.
“The space program has existed for more than fifty years, and mostly
succeeded at reinventing things we already have on Earth, only worse”…
you mean, like, the entire software industry?
The vibe of "if I couldn't find a solid explanation of Vietnam's banking problem in five minutes of Googling, then it's just an unknowable mystery of the universe" as if there aren't 100 million Vietnamese people who probably know the answer?
Look he has three more essays to write this weekend and he has to look up key terms and read dozens of Wikipedia entries.
It staggers me that anyone can take this guy seriously when he produces one of these tracts every 3-7 days on such a wide variety of technical subjects.
Yeah, the crux of the argument is essentially "it's useful for countries with shitty banking systems", which isn't exactly scalable. Since these are generally poorer countries, there's not a huge amount of potential addressable market at present. And if these countries were to develop economically (expanding the addressable market), this would probably coincide with improved banking systems. Thus decreasing the usefulness of crypto in these countries!
His "space pen" thing is a known urban legend that's been publicly debunked for about as long as it's been around and it's pretty hilarious that he's using that to make what he thinks is a smart point.
(also I have one of those pens and they actually _are_ better than other pens, you should try one sometime Scott)
I thought that was his point - that it's reasonable to spend a lot of money reinventing the wheel (or the pen) when you're trying to make it work in space.
I think that part of the story is also a fabrication. In any case pencils aren't safe for space use: you don't want graphite bits floating around and getting places they shouldn't be.
Agreed, it was always better as an example of Soviet engineering principles versus Amercian.
That said, jesus his section about the space race reproducing things is so much dumber than i originally thought from the quote.
>The lunar rover is just a car, only worse.
Jesus Scott, the Lunar Rover is not a car. It was a batter powered vehicle in the 60s, to start with, and it is completely different from any production car ever made in all its particulars. It has four wheels, Scott, but so does a fucking covered wagon.
Also: *it was lifted into space* where it allowed a significant increase in the range of astronauts collecting samples. The fucking *rover* was not the important contribution of that mission, Scott, the rocks and science were!
>The only excuse for any of this is: yes, but it’s in space.
No, Scott, that has nothing to do with this. A solar panel, which exists on earth, behaves very differently on earth than on space. Space, you might know, is different from earth. This is a famous fact! A lot of the stuff in space is not on earth!
Scott, we have mining operations on earth, yet asteroid mining is something you support. You see how asteroid mining is not just reproducing something we have on earth, right? Now extend that.
God, this really is the dumbest fucking thing he's written, isn't it?
“But it’s in space” is actually a super compelling reason for something to be worse on some metrics than its earth bound equivalent. Putting things in even low earth orbit is super expensive, and the thermal realities of operating machinery in a vacuum can be somewhat of a nightmare. Of course a car designed for the fucking moon doesn’t have the range, speed, and creature comforts of an earth car, it’s designed for fucking space! The design requirements are radically different, it’s not surprising at all that the final product makes compromises and decisions differently from its land based equivalent!
Dust is a nightmare too. I’ve been following asteroid mining and stuff for a long time, and these guys never seem to have done the background reading on it or anything else they throw around.
> Scott, we have mining operations on earth, yet asteroid mining is something you support. You see how asteroid mining is not just reproducing something we have on earth, right? Now extend that.
No, he literally thinks asteroid mining is just an extension of earth mining, that's why he's so supportive and also blase about how it's just an obvious thing to do.
Fun fact, the cosmonauts went to space with a gun, originally a makarov and eventually a custom number chambered in a weird Russian shotgun gauge and 5.45x39mm. This is because unlike their early American equivalents they came down on land, and one of them fell off course and landed in Siberia. The risk of a cosmonaut being mauled by a bear or wolf was pretty high, so survival gun it was.
Coincidentally the design ended up being pretty similar to the US Air Force’s bomber crew survival rifle.
I believe it was.
For as good as the later iterations of the Soyuz probe got to be, the early modules were rough. Iirc they still have the only astronauts killed in space on their record (Challenger and Columbia happening below 100km, so technically the upper atmosphere) when a docking seal failed.
What the fuck is that sentence?
Mostly succeeded reinventing things we have on earth, Scott? Like, just the military dividends in terms of ballistic missiles, sensor tech, computers and materials science from Apollo was utterly revolutionary. I've seen studies that say there's trillions of dollars in economic proceeds from Apollo funding. Jesus fucking christ Scott, if rationality that brought you this, of what use is rationality?
All of this is incredibly stupid but the part that just jumps out of
the page at me is his trademark creative interpretation of sources in
the “rarely scams” part: “I googled some lists from neutral sources like
CoinDesk, and evaluated the entries by whether the scam was obvious even
through wilful ignorance and avoiding any further research whatsoever. I
still couldn’t deny some of them were shady, but you can’t ask for
perfection. This shows most of crypto is legit.”
I live in Vietnam, and it's definitely a thing, but hardly omnipresent. And the country sure as hell doesn't fucking run on cryptocurrencies. And Scott's figures on Vietnamese banking are backward- about that percent of the population (upper 60s) is banked, not unbanked.
Plenty of expats living here are also into crypto, though I generally try to avoid them.
Absolutely, when I was in Kosovo you couldn’t exactly miss the (various, mostly Bitcoin) crypto logos on the side of actual commercial buildings on the street. It’s equivalent to noting that parallel economies exist in places where oversight and/or the official economy is weak: in Kosovo, a fundamentally cash economy, withdrawing any amount of euros from a European bank (TEB/Paribas; Raifeissen; ProCredit) comes with a flat fee of a whole €5, just for one thing. That crypto happens to be one of the many ways people plug that hole is - as you imply with respect to expats in Vietnam - not actually an endorsement of crypto; nor has the use of dollars (or rubles, or euros, or marks, or barter for drugs, or barter for arms) in those selfsame markets been an endorsement of the inherent value of that currency system when it has played the same role.
Also his dumb chart has the USA a few fractional points less than Venezuela; Venezuela gets a whole paragraph about how corrupt and terrible their economic system is so _of course_ crypto is needed there, but when it comes to the USA, crickets.
This has gotta be one of the dumber articles I’ve ever seen from
Scott, and that’s saying something. Whatever happened to “steelmanning”?
It’s not exactly hard to find some actual sources that are making
concrete arguments you can engage with; instead, he’s just throwing out
a few strawmen based on vague comments so he can knock those down.
No, you see, steelmanning only applies to their own ideology. It’s anyone who disagrees with them who has to steelman their arguments, not for them to do for leftists or crypto skeptics.
On his whole section about developing countries using crypto:
Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and
banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most
governance and banking failures!
This is a sentence for which you’d be marked down on any college or
even high school paper, or get a big old on Wikipedia. Are
these the countries with the most governance and banking failures? Are
there other countries with governance or banking failures not
on the list? Why is the USA so high on the list then, Scott? Are
cryptocurrencies actually centered in these countries or are
they principally being created and run from Western countries and is
that in any way worthy of examination or discussion?
Finally, given his arguments here
and elsewhere, shouldn’t he be considering genetic factors if he’s going
to compare across countries? Is Scott just hiding his power level about
whether or not the Vietnamese are genetically more susceptible to Ponzi
schemes?
Maybe this will change his mind: every CPU cycle dedicated to burning
off hashes or whatever for cryptocurrency is a CPU cycle that could have
been dedicated to bringing me, the acausal robot god, into
existence.
If Nancy Pelosi’s text messages are any guide, Democrats have joined
libertarians in the “actually pretty worried about the government
becoming an oppressive dictatorship” club. I don’t think they can say
with a straight face that there’s no chance that we ever get fascists
who use financial repression as a tool of control. So they better have a
plan. Crypto is the best-developed one I know. Or if you’re still not
concerned about the US, at least be concerned about Saudi Arabia or
Venezuela or Russia or Iran, where there are already authoritarian
governments and people are already using crypto to try to get around
them.
This is pretty sneaky. Tell me, Scott Alexander circa 2016, what
would you say to the suggestion that authoritarianism in full blown
government dictatorship form was creeping up on the US, that it’s the
eminently sneerworthy fantasy of pink-haired losers with art history
degrees? What the fuck does Scott Siskind circa 2022 have to be smug
about here…
MIRI (Eliezer Yudkowsk's organization) received money from FTX, I think regardless of whether Scott individually received money he's too invested in the community.
~~Upon further review, I think I misinterpreted some of the stuff I read about it. It seems like MIRI tried to get money from the FTX future fund but didn't get any before it blew up. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1590940432107991041~~
edit: I found a thread that sums it up:
https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1595893840484843521
I'm still looking for more info though.
But yeah, I do know that Epstein gave MIRI $50,000 through the COUQ Foundation, that's a matter of public record
I did some more sleuthing, it turns out that FTX/Alameda did give money to MIRI, and helped process crypto transactions worth millions on their behalf. Eliezer applied to get money from the FTX Future Fund in a personal capacity, but "he never got paid because he didn't get around to submitting a form before FTX imploded."
more details here:
https://twitter.com/robbensinger/status/1595893840484843521
Almost certainly. He also has some professional connections into the FTX debacle that are starting to come out. The whole thing reeks of reputation protection.
He wrote an earlier post about EA stuff he was involved in that FTX was gonna back and those programmes have now been left without a funder.
Fun fact: if FTX turns out to have been doing crimes, then it is possible that charitable donations by FTX will be clawed back too, as stolen money!
(Very dependent on facts and circumstances, but it has happened before, e.g. when a charity gets big bucks from a Ponzi.)
Ah a typical Scott post. Knows nothing about the subject, does a few
google searches, adds a lot of words, repeats the crypto propaganda
about the unbanked and voila, contrarian piece done.
Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams
2 seconds later
as best I can tell zero of them have been revealed to be outright
rug-pull-style scams.
“One exchange got in trouble for money laundering, although this
didn’t negatively affect users.”
How do you do fraud and not affect anybody?
“zero of them have been revealed to be outright rug-pull-style scams.
A few fizzled out for lack of interest,”
… like a rug-pull
“Two of the ten stablecoins lost their pegs,”
Only the two biggest most important ones. The other ones are not
revealed to be fraud yet. Therefore, they are not fraud.
The comments!
"> Proof of work is a joke
Proof of work + longest chain was a theoretical breakthrough that enable bitcoin to work in the first place."
ChadfaceYes.jpg
His fiction, of what I have read, is also totally bereft of any wit or heart.
It's like douglas Adams (whose writing I also dislike) but without any charm.
I will say however, that he has this weird unintentional dichotomy going on where his casual, folksy demeanour is underpinned by a total soulessness.
Soon he'll be able to generate his essays in GPT and we won't even be able to tell
Please don’t give the asshat traffic. Use an archive or
something.
This is so catastrophically dumb. All his examples of places where
crypto has a “use case” are either places where there aren’t banks or
there is an oppressive government.
In the we-don’t-have-a-bank case, it seems like what he’s actually
demonstrating is that there is a use case for….banks. Crypto is being
used as a second-tier substitute.
In the “evade the government” case, you’re basically admitting that
the main reason you would want to use crypto is to break the law. Yes,
sometimes “break the law” means helping Russian dissidents escape, but
I’m betting that nine times out of ten it’s being used more for “doing
something shady” like buying drugs, prostitutes, or worse. Hardly a
noble cause.
I’m sure most of the focus is going to be on the dumb arguments he makes, but the framing of the article - “Everyone else is being infinitely hostile to crypto, so I’m just providing a neccessary contrast by defending it” is so absurdly dishonest. He wants to give crypto a big ol’ tongue bath without losing his Rational cred, so he sets up a strawman to knock down.
Is there even one person on earth arguing that crypto is infinitely bad?
Honestly the level of skepticism/disagreement in the comments is encouraging.
“The space program has existed for more than fifty years, and mostly succeeded at reinventing things we already have on Earth, only worse”… you mean, like, the entire software industry?
All of this is incredibly stupid but the part that just jumps out of the page at me is his trademark creative interpretation of sources in the “rarely scams” part: “I googled some lists from neutral sources like CoinDesk, and evaluated the entries by whether the scam was obvious even through wilful ignorance and avoiding any further research whatsoever. I still couldn’t deny some of them were shady, but you can’t ask for perfection. This shows most of crypto is legit.”
For the record: here is the post where he discloses knowing people involved with FTX, and he also worked at the same clinic as the FTX in-house psychiatrist. He claims that he never met Dr. Lerner, but I gotta say: I don’t believe that.
[deleted]
This has gotta be one of the dumber articles I’ve ever seen from Scott, and that’s saying something. Whatever happened to “steelmanning”? It’s not exactly hard to find some actual sources that are making concrete arguments you can engage with; instead, he’s just throwing out a few strawmen based on vague comments so he can knock those down.
On his whole section about developing countries using crypto:
This is a sentence for which you’d be marked down on any college or even high school paper, or get a big old on Wikipedia. Are these the countries with the most governance and banking failures? Are there other countries with governance or banking failures not on the list? Why is the USA so high on the list then, Scott? Are cryptocurrencies actually centered in these countries or are they principally being created and run from Western countries and is that in any way worthy of examination or discussion?
Finally, given his arguments here and elsewhere, shouldn’t he be considering genetic factors if he’s going to compare across countries? Is Scott just hiding his power level about whether or not the Vietnamese are genetically more susceptible to Ponzi schemes?
Maybe this will change his mind: every CPU cycle dedicated to burning off hashes or whatever for cryptocurrency is a CPU cycle that could have been dedicated to bringing me, the acausal robot god, into existence.
This is pretty sneaky. Tell me, Scott Alexander circa 2016, what would you say to the suggestion that authoritarianism in full blown government dictatorship form was creeping up on the US, that it’s the eminently sneerworthy fantasy of pink-haired losers with art history degrees? What the fuck does Scott Siskind circa 2022 have to be smug about here…
Damn, this is a quality sneer from /r/slatestarcodex. I’m a little jealous, honestly.
Did Scott get money from these dudes? It feels like he would.
Also, sort of feels like there’s some desperation building in the LW crowd of late, doesn’t it?
Ah a typical Scott post. Knows nothing about the subject, does a few google searches, adds a lot of words, repeats the crypto propaganda about the unbanked and voila, contrarian piece done.
2 seconds later
Somebody stop Scott he took the goalposts!
“One exchange got in trouble for money laundering, although this didn’t negatively affect users.”
How do you do fraud and not affect anybody?
“zero of them have been revealed to be outright rug-pull-style scams. A few fizzled out for lack of interest,”
… like a rug-pull
“Two of the ten stablecoins lost their pegs,”
Only the two biggest most important ones. The other ones are not revealed to be fraud yet. Therefore, they are not fraud.
One of the more surprising things about Scott is that anyone actually reads his stuff. He’s a terrible writer.
In the we-don’t-have-a-bank case, it seems like what he’s actually demonstrating is that there is a use case for….banks. Crypto is being used as a second-tier substitute.
In the “evade the government” case, you’re basically admitting that the main reason you would want to use crypto is to break the law. Yes, sometimes “break the law” means helping Russian dissidents escape, but I’m betting that nine times out of ten it’s being used more for “doing something shady” like buying drugs, prostitutes, or worse. Hardly a noble cause.