The person you describe as knowing sounds awfully like Caroline Ellison, in which case, let me say that I refuse to believe that she could have acted on bad faith until I am given overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On the contrary, the impression I got is of a true believer, and a good person. This does not preclude the possibility that, under circumstances of a certain naiveté and inexperience in a field as murky as crypto, she might have let herself go along with what she might have perceived as temporary and 'bad' expedient means. But to believe this person ever intended to purposely and maliciously scam people our of their money or be privy to a fraud is, for me, completely out of the question. I believe the best option is to be charitable and await to see what the courts of law have to say once the dust has settled.
Here's the rub. Bankman Fried and his woman look like goblins. Human beings instinctively recoil from goblins. Rationalist utilitarians say 'no, there's no rational reason to recoil from people who look like goblins'. But there is.
Now, it's theoretically possible to construct a version of utilitarianism that would be sufficiently inclusive of both heuristic rules and the dark, dark secrets of HBD and psychology. But the problem is that it would be very complicated and the whole point of utilitarianism is to simplify morality. So, in practice, rationalist utilitarianism always ends up saying some version of 'no, there's no rational reason to recoil from people who look like goblins'. But, to reiterate, there is.
Reading this week’s Douthat column I kind of regret rage canceling my paid subscription to Scott’s Substack. “You won’t get a refund said Substack. No more hidden OTs for you.” “I don’t care!” I replied.
I am curious how Scott will address the appeal for a bit of perhaps less than maximally effective altruism tho.
It was an earlier essay where Scott made the point that replacing millions of Japanese with people from Sub Saharan Africa would change the country’s culture.
He was right of course. If you replace a large portion of descendants of a culture that dates back to antiquity with people unfamiliar with that culture, things are going to change. But why Africans in particular? A substitution of Englishmen or Germans or anyone else would have a big impact on a mature culture.
It seemed like a proxy for White Replacement Theory in the US, something I don’t at all worry about. I could have been reading that wrong of course, but that was how it struck me at the time.
I talked myself down from that ledge eventually but had already canceled my paid subscription. It was futile gesture because Substack had already collected for a year’s subscription. Just one more in a lifetime of futile gestures. I suppose I run a bit hot on some long held beliefs.
I need advice for a friend who is in ungodly amounts of pain. I am thinking about the SSC article on pseudoaddiction- miner who takes opioids for years for horrible mining injuries speaks brusquely to hospital staff, gets his opioids taken away, shoots himself in the chest, miraculously survives, etc. My friend has been taking opioids for 6 years after a horrific car accident, and their doctor is threatening to take them away. What should they do?
Your friend can point out to their physician that the CDC has changed their opioid guidelines on November 4th, 2022 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/rr/rr7103a1.htm). Specifically, they have moved away from titrating or weaning long term opioids especially if they are well tolerated. Sudden cessation of opioids is increasingly identified as patient abandonment and can theoretically be reported to the state board.
I wish I had a better answer for you. We are in a period of reaction regarding opioids as I’m sure you know. My wife had out patient knee replacement surgery a year ago and she had to endure a lecture about how half of West Virginia is on heroin now and they didn’t *start* with heroin. The spiel went along the lines of “Studies have shown that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are just as effective,” at that point I pointed out that she can’t take ibuprofen because of an ulcer but that didn’t slow her down. “… aroma therapy and meditation can be used to control pain too….” It went on and on as they tried to hustle my wife out of bed and send her home. It got to the point where I had to interrupt the nurse and ask “Shouldn’t you be giving this lecture to the Sackler family?” She was wearing a Covid mask but I could see her bite her lower lip.
If bad comes to worse for your friend he might try kratom if is legal where he is. Some forms are supposed to relieve pain in the same manner as opioids. It’s a non optimal solution of course. He’d have know way of knowing for sure what he was ingesting, no government regulation of kratom and the US has been trying to make it’s sale illegal but it sounds like your friend is in a tough spot and might want to consider it.
This raises the question of "why" which I doubt you could supply in any case. Answers including agreeing to stop going in early for repeats (maybe signing a pain management contract stipulating this), asking for a slow taper, perhaps sufficiently so to allow time for referral to another prescriber, showing up at appointments having made some obvious efforts at self-care, etc. that suggest the opiates are actually objectively improving his quality of life (it doesn't sound like they are here).
While those are certainly possibilities, I know for a fact people get arbitrary cut off from years of necessary medication: my mom was one of them. Not only did they never ask for an additional refill, it would be preposterous to assume that someone with extensive damage to their back (three herniated disks) wasn't warranted in asking to receive opoids. They were subjected to forced taper offs; recommended to consider surgery (they did not want to); and at their most vulnerable moments were reduced to lifelessly slouching on a plush leather chair.
It was definitely a formative experience for me. Before then, I worked from the assumption that failure to act (both politically and personally) was the most consequential, the impact of those aforementioned actions weren't first priority to me. That's not to say none of it mattered at all, it just felt abstract to me; it didn't resonate. Part of that probably has to do with my political convictions (on a side note, I don't know if I can mention that on this thread, not sure whether it's odd or even numbered threads politics can be discussed; if I can't I'll edit it out in post).
Now though I believe both aspects are equally as important (and to anyone wondering, my mom eventually did get a suitable replacement; it wasn't opoids unfortunately but they're now able to comfortably function).
I may post this again, but I wanted to get it said. This might be an added explanation for research slowing down, but I don't know whether it's as bad in the sciences as it is in the humanities.
The short version is that it's not just bad at amazon and google, search has become relatively useless at academic sources.
Here's how I got past a cataloguing issue. I'd heard for years that things had gotten better for years for Jews in Germany, especially in the Weimar Republic. I realized there was a story there, but what was it?
Searching on Google didn't help. I was just getting anti-semitic stuff.
I think it was a couple of years, and google changed its policies. Now I was getting stuff *about* Nazis. They're more interesting than gradual legal change.
Finally I asked people. I got pointed at the emancipation of the Jews and a book called The Pity of It All.
The moral of this story is that you may have to ask people because computer search isn't working. It's like being in the middle ages or something where local and specific knowledge is the essential thing.
This has been a pretty well-known problem in technical circles for years. Do a quick search for "google search" on Hacker News[1], and you get post after post[2] about how search is getting worse. And that doesn't even include the comment threads that pop up on unrelated posts.
It's one of those problems that gets worse the more you know about a topic, because google has trended towards searching for what it thinks you mean, rather than what you actually asked for (which is great for drunk people trying to figure out "that guy from that movie from the thing", less so for finding documentation or if you actually know what you're looking for).
It's also been overtaken by SEO blogspam - low quality, often GPT generated articles that use a 2000 word preamble to answer a question that takes 3 words, or content that is literally scraped and copy-pasted from websites like StackOverflow.
And, of course, there's the fact that you can't find any organic information about *any* product, and you have to append "reddit" to get anything besides adtech vomit in your searches.
If people aren't getting great search results anyway, they may consider at least getting private results. The main option for that is DuckDuckGo but it has newer competitors such as Brave Search and Neeva (ecosia is also much more private than Google, although not as private as DDG or Brave Search).
DDG generally works pretty well for me. When it doesn't find what I'm looking for, I'll try Startpage, which usually works. Questions have been raised about the Startpage and privacy, which is why I primarily use DDG, but Startpage could hardly be worse than Google (or Bing).
Notably, DDG (and Brave Search) have "bangs" that allow you to initiate a search in another website, so you can do a Google search through DDG, by appending !g to your search query, for example. That would no longer be private, but it can be more convenient than first navigating to google.com.
Kagi search is worth trying, their free version is pretty limited but it's pretty impressive. It's also using an in-house index, it's not just a frontend for Bing like DDG.
I've also noticed a significant decline in search quality, particularly with Google/Youtube, that's happened fairly continuously over the last 10 or so years. I think that the issue mainly comes from trying too hard to make the algorithm 'smart', and focusing on the wrong things.
For example, on youtube. when I first started making youtube videos in the late 2000s, my videos would get tens of thousands of views. I don't have aspirations of stardom, but I do reasonably think that my audience worldwide, that is, people who would be interested in my content, is that big. In the mid 2010s, i'd get a few hundred views if lucky. Nowadays I'm lucky if I break into the double digits. What happened? Why are the people who want to find my stuff not finding it?
Basically, Youtube decided that it didn't want to neutrally give search results that closely matched what you typed in. It wanted to show you popular things that kind of matched what you typed in. It's not trying to show you the best result; it's trying to find an *excuse* to show you something that *it* wants to show you. This is really bad for several reasons, but the main reason is that if you are looking for a small signal, it will get drowned out every time by the closest large signal. This was not a problem before, because you could tell it to neutrally and unbiasedly just give you things that exactly matched what you put in.
The other problem is that the internet has changed. It used to be a place where weird or forward-thinking people were doing things that interested them. Now it is where most of the world's business is done, and also the de facto public square. And what was once great about youtube for example was that someone just messing around with a camera or talking in an unscripted way about something they liked could get seen and interacted with, without a lot of time wasted on making fancy powerpoint-style presentations. Now it's all people who are vying to make money on youtube, creating overproduced content with fancy studio lights and tight scripting.
While on the topic of DSL, is it possible for the admins (cc obermot) to reinstate the ability to ignore threads? This was a useful feature that disappeared without an explanation.
ACX about to experience what it's like when the weird offshoot branch of the family nobody really talks to anymore suddenly shows up uninvited to the family reunion :)
I only know DSL as an acronym for Digital Subscriber Line, which is an old technology for getting onto the Internet. If you mean it this way then this will be specific to your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If you mean something else it will help if you expand the acronym.
Sorry - especially because it always bugs me when people use acronyms I'm unfamiliar with.
I mean Datasecretslox, the Bulletin board Scott always mentions at the beginning of his open threads. It's been down for quite a few hours and thats never happened before.
I mean, the worst offenders, like the NYT, are cherry-picked, but the fact that the with-kid-gloves NYT article came out right after it got leaked that the NYT[1] has had an explicit "no positive coverage for tech" policy is worrying enough on its own.
I saw someone on twitter comment that the flurry of puff pieces and interviews was like indirectly observing the dark matter of some PR agency, and that rings true.
[1] And by extension, probably most media companies, since their ownership charts are incestuous
No, but I do trust the aggregate of the many rat- and postrat- adjacent accounts on twitter that were saying the exact same thing. Also, this is the comment section to be defending the NYT in lol. Of your list, the only one I remotely trust not to have a pro-finance bias is Reuters.
I'm pretty sure SBF et al were running their business in an exceedingly casual and reckless manner from the start. And I'm also pretty sure that their attitude towards e.g. securities and banking law was "bunch of unimaginative suits who will just get in the way of our legitimate business; the less they know the better". Which is often technically illegal. But I don't think they crossed the line into unambiguous cheating-our-customers-out-of-what-we-promised-them scamming until the last few months or so, probably about the time Alameda had its liquidity crisis and needed FTX's client funds to bail them out.
And even then, I think they were optimistically hoping that they'd do a bit of quick what-most-of-us-call-scamming, then double their money through super genius expert trading and refill the customer accounts before anybody noticed, then get back to their basically honest but casual and reckless business. Until the next time.
It also wouldn't surprise me if there was a *last* time, when they used their customer accounts to bail themselves out and then *did* make the money back before anybody noticed, but that may be hard to figure out. I think the records of t hat are in the heap under the beanbag chair in the orgy room.
I'm not sure the man can reliably distinguish between a scam and an ordinary trading business, so it might be the case that the distinction about which you're asking is not one he could make, which means whatever his motivations were they need not have changed markedly on crossing a line visible only to others (between 'financial trading biz' and 'scam').
After all, pretty much all trading business is a series of bets, and in each bet there is usually a winner and a loser. I bought a bunch of XOM last year at 35 because I thought that price was definitely going to up, and the fact that it's 113 today means (at least so far) I was right and I'm a winner, but that also means all the people from who I bought the stock last were wrong and are losers. Some of their money has been transferred to me, and not because I earned it by doing work for them, but just because they took the losing side of a bet with me.
We don't consider this a fraud, scam, or theft, because of certain bright lines we draw in our heads about what is a "fair" bet between consenting participants and what is not, e.g. we require the bet to be made with the full knowledge of the owners of the capital at stake, we require nobody to have any unusual not generally available information, we require nobody to be in a position of authority that could influence the outcome of the bet, everyone has to be an adult, et cetera.
But many of these lines are in practice somewhat arbitrary, and why we draw this line versus that, and why here versus there is often a bit fuzzy, with relatively dubious precise justification[1]. Nevertheless, most of us believe there *are* bright lines that separate "fair" from "unfair" or "criminal", even if the actual legal lines aren't drawn precisely in the right place.
There are other people, however, who see the arbitrariness, however modest, and extrapolate from its existence to the general conclusion that *any* bright line is just arbitrary bullshit, and there really isn't any important moral difference between ordinary trading and what some unenlightened dummies would provocatively call "a scam." I think people who end up running scams in what looks like an accidental way, just kind of wandering heedlessly across some bright line or other, are probably often in this category. Because they don't much believe in the existence of bright lines, they don't take ordinary care to stay on one side of them.
People who run Ponzi or Nigerian prince scams from the get-go by contrast probably totally grok bright lines, and presumably decide to just cross into the Neutral Zone deliberately because it will be personally profitable.
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[1] And to be fair, I think sometimes the arbitrariness of the lines can sometimes ensnare genuinely innocent people. I've always been a little dubious that Martha Stewart was guilty of insider trading, although I could be wrong about that of course.
Your logic makes no sense. By your logic, if you ever sell your stock and it continues to rise, then you are a loser. Actually, if there exists any other investment that would have made more money than your purchase of stock, you are a loser.
Clearly this is wrong. The winner or loser status of the person whose stock you purchased must be based on the performance (relative to expectations) of the stock between their purchase and sale and not after they sold.
I could probably have phrased it better by saying that people voluntarily surrended their right to a future stream of income to me for a price that turned out to significantly undervalue the value of that income. How you want to phrase that in accounting terms would probably be a matter of taste, about which I have no strong opinion because I find the question a bit OCD and uninteresting, but I'm pretty sure to most people it would feel like "a loss" and taking the other side certainly feels like a gain to me.
If you mistakenly think your house is infested with termites and must be torn down, and I come along and, taking advantage of your bad judgment, buy your house for 25 cents on the dollar, far below its market value after I have it inspected and prove there are no termites, do you still think value hasn't been transferred from you to me? Same idea.
And some people would say the latter example is a "fair" deal, because you could've had it inspected yourself, and others would say it's "unfair" if, for example, you are actually mentally ill and you think it's infested by Martian termites who can turn themselves invisible to evade inspection -- and therefore I took cruel advantage of a disability. That relates to the larger and more interesting issue, which is that there are bright lines that separate "sharp business deal" from "fraud", but (1) we're in general little fuzzy and arbitrary about where we draw them, and (2) some people of a rigid or antisocial mindset argue the imprecision proves the lines per se are bullshit, and so there *isn't* any important difference between "sharp business deal" and "fraud." Our Hero SBF may be one of them.
The news that keeps coming out on this looks worse and worse. These were absolutely not innocent naive dufuses who stumbled into incredibly serious crimes.
His interview with Vox (and god, what a hilariously bad idea that was) gives me the impression of stupidity rather than malice. Like, just so careless with the exchange that he didn't know or care where the money was going until a bank run forced him to actually sit down and count up where all the money had gone.
He does say some "meh, ethical investing is just a sham" stuff which might make me lean towards an intentional scam, but taking the interview as a whole I'm inclined to read it as an after-the-fact defense - "everyone's a scammer, so what I did wasn't that bad" - rather than an admission that the whole thing was planned from the start.
(Not that I'm trying to defend him. Even his own description of his errors is well into "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" territory. But I don't think he ever had the clarity to say to himself "this is definitely violating the law but it's going to make me enough money that I don't care.")
To be overly technical, SBF didn't run a scam. He ran a legitimate business (effectively a currency exchange) and stole from it. I think this answers your question: he started out running a legitimate currency exchange but had such little moral fiber that once a lot of people trusted him with their money he just stole it for his own purposes.
This doesn't seem to be the case based on new statements from the company after the SBF orgy club was removed. This was barely a company at all. They didn't keep records, in fact SBF encouraged them to use auto-delete communication methods, they were fake audited by a fake audit company or something, they don't know who their creditors or debtors are, where their money is, or what their assets and liabilities are. Their subsidiaries were not set up right, either.
Preface: FTX and SBF seem to have almost certainly engaged in fraud. The record keeping seems either atrocious or a deliberately obscuring the real record. That said,
It's standard practice to encourage employees to use less permanent media (or ideally, face to face communication) for any communication that might have any legal bearing. There is training to this effect at all the companies I've worked at. Perhaps this is shady, but it is also pretty normal.
If so I might be mistaken. But I was under the impression it did have a functioning platform which is why people still have money in it and are trying to get it out.
That everything was done in a wrong/criminal/etc way: Yes, for sure.
My guess is that this is a boringly simple case of "person has large amounts of money to invest, person makes bad investment decisions, person loses money, person then makes set of riskier and riskier gambles to try to get back above water, compounding the losses." In this case, with larger numbers than usual because there has been a ton of capital sloshing around trying to find good investment opportunities in the last few years.
I'm guessing it didn't start as a scam, and mostly wasn't one. For whatever reason his hedge fund run into real trouble, and thought up this one clever clever hack using funds from his crypto exchange to save it. And since everything he was doing was for the greater good anyway, he decided not to let oldfashioned rules stop him.
I know the issue of 'use cases' with crypto has been beaten to death ,so I apologize in advance for the redundancy, but I would like to ask the smart people on this chat this: Is crypto the first example of an innovation/commodity for which the garden variety champion cannot explain the 'use case' to the typical rube?
Self disclosure: In this context (and others, without question, but those aren't relevant here) I am the rube. And I have read all manners of interviews with the likes of SBF and the desperately malnourished kid who started Ethereum, and whenever the question of 'so what is it really good for' comes up we get the inevitable 'that's a really good question!' (to all who have been to an academic conference, feel free to laugh with me!) and then a bunch of 'blah blah blah decentralized blah blah blah' and we move on to the next question.
So- I'm not here to argue that crypto 'doesn't' have a use case, because it absolutely might and I can see some distinct paths where it does. But in terms of explaining it to the average guy, I think it's fallen laughably short. Whichmy eye at least is an interesting feature of this commodity, since I can't think of another example of an asset that has this unique property.
Am I wrong? Have there been others? If not, is this an augur for what's to come (i.e., more assets that end up worth more than the GDP of Brazil but that nobody can clearly explain how they will improve our lives in the short-to-medium term)? Or if so, what were they and what happened to them?
I think the "typical rube" can understand money laundering easily enough. The hard part is for champions to make money laundering into something the typical rube will support.
The typical rube *also* understands speculative bubbles in assets of dubious fundamental value, but it's probably a lost cause to try and make that sound good. The money laundering, you can at least point to people trying to flee oppressive regimes or to buy medical marijuana (adderall, whatever) in Red States.
> Is crypto the first example of an innovation/commodity for which the garden variety champion cannot explain the 'use case' to the typical rube?
No. It isn't. It's actually common.
Electricity, to go back almost two hundred years, was also quite mysterious to the average person. And simultaneous with it being used for things that laid the groundwork for modern electric grids you had grifters claiming it was magic. One woman in Paris told people it had magical powers. People would pay to sit near an electric engine. She would have assistants rub water on skin and then shock people for supposed health benefits. Etc
Now, you might be saying that lighting a building up is an obvious benefit. And it is. But it took over sixty years to get from the first economical electric engine to the first electricity lighted home.
This is entirely typical. There were people saying Google was too complex to explain compared to things that more closely resembled index card systems that most people had been trained on. Etc. The idea that innovation is obvious or easily understood comes from media where the genius goes "eureka!" and explains how to solve their problem in simple terms the audience can understand. But it's not how it actually works.
So from the sixty years between the first economical electric engine to the first electricity lighted home, was there a use case for electricity? If so, could it be explained to a rube? I'm not familiar with the history of electricity, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a use case that couldn't be easily explained (e.g. "you know watermills? This lets you grind stuff too, but without water. You can put a 'watermill' anywhere now!")
That's because you're looking backward. What is obvious to you was not obvious to them.
The first electric mill took even longer. The first electric lighthouse took a little less time but not by much. The first commonly comprehensible invention that such electrical generation enabled was telegraphs. And even that took a specialist to understand. And they invented new kinds of fraud such that even now we have statutes on the books such as wire fraud. This was all happening alongside a large number of grifters who claimed electricity could do anything from help you connect with God to predict the future to raise the dead.
You can say, "Ah, but the use of telegraphs is obvious!" Well, it's obvious to you now. It wasn't obvious at the time. The British government repeatedly wholesale rejected the use of the telegraph and it was viewed with significant suspicion at the time. The Royal Navy famously compiled a report where they rejected the innovation as not really adding value. The average rube did not realize the value and it took concerted effort by electrical advocates to drive adoption. (And a significant number of rubes were outright scammed.)
Now, just because electricity was doubted doesn't mean anything that's doubted is valid. That's the same error in reverse. But the fact there's doubt or that non-specialists don't understand it doesn't really mean anything. It's common even for things we think are "obvious" today.
I think I didn't explain myself well. I didn't mean to say that the future uses of electricity were obvious. I meant that, at the time when electric mills, telegraphs, electric lights, etc were in the future, electricity really didn't have many uses. A rube would have been right to be suspicious of anyone selling electricity, because as you said, lots of them were con artists claiming electricity had magical powers and going around shocking people. When electric mills, telegraphs, electric lights, etc *did* get invented, and electricity was no longer just a scam or a curiosity, the use cases *were* easily explainable to rubes.
Let's apply this to crypto. Right now, there are no obvious use cases that are easily explainable to a rube that aren't of debatable value. (The ability for anyone, including criminals, to transfer money without regulation is easily understandable--but also of highly debatable value.) Therefore, rubes are right to conclude that crypto is either a curiosity or a scam. In the future, if and when great use cases for crypto *do* get invented, it'll no longer be just a curiosity or a scam, and the great use cases *will* be easily explainable to rubes.
Now I think I didn't explain myself well either. The telegraph, after it was proven functional and reliable, took decades to drive adoption. The Royal Navy, the most advanced in the world at the time, did a full investigatory report and determined that it was not useful despite acknowledging its literal capabilities. They basically said (as someone said to me yesterday about crypto) faster speeds alone didn't justify the switch. So no, they *weren't* easily explainable or widely accepted. And plenty of scams coexisted with the valid uses. So your application is wrong.
Crypto might be a scam. But the fact the average person is caught by scams or cannot understand it doesn't point one direction or another. And you're attempting to construct an argument on sand that fits what I guess are your preconceptions. Here's a simple argument: the ACH takes 3 days and crypto takes minutes. (If I'm being a bit simple it's because I've had this argument two other times this week. And both times it ended with them admitting I was right on the technical merits but a few days of extra speed weren't worth enough to justify it.)
The standard answer that I'm familiar with is that fiat is entirely controlled by national governments and they can and have totally fucked over currencies before, whether with asset seizing or with hyperinflation. Less of an issue in the West, very much an issue in much of the rest of the world.
In theory, Crypto gives you a currency that can't be a victim of inflation (though in practice it's treated by most as a speculative commodity instead).
In theory, crypto gives you an anonymous currency, so you can buy illegal things - which might well be medicine rather than recreational stuff, or so that you can protest against the government without them freezing all your bank accounts to starve you. In practice, most crypto currencies out there are not actually anonymous in practice, because it turns out that governments really like having a surveillance state and the USG is strong enough to enforce regs on crypto. (P.s. note that the good features of crypto here are basically the same as those possessed by physical cash, but also notice how much governments have been pushing society towards digital transactions and away from cash in hand, for exactly these reasons.)
Assuming it had a strong reason to do so, it seems like the US government has enough resources to just 51% attack any cryptocurrency that becomes a problem for it. So it's not clear to me that they really get you out from under government interference.
They don't need to do that. Nationalize the telcos[1], and reconfigure all the gateways to block, spy on, or modify Internet traffic however you want, until you've achieved whatever you like with the cryptocurrency. You can destroy it, hijack it[2], inflate it, deflate it, whatever you want.
If you want to evade government surveillance or control, the last thing you want to do is build in mission-critical reliance on a vast physical public infrastructure over which government already and inherently exerts great control.
What you probably need is some kind of crypto that can work via spread-spectrum radio on the 20 meter band. Then you're all set, unless the government starts prohibiting the sale and possession of shortwave radios I guess.
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[1] You can probably omit step 1, actually, and just make a phone call to the CEOs of each business. They're not going to decline to do the guys who regulate their profit margins any little favor.
No, crypto's just stuck between two different poles.
The use case for Crypto is obvious; you don't trust the government or the banks and you'd prefer to set up a trustless way to do electronic money transfers. In this case, think Monero. When hackers demand a $100 million dollar ransomware payment from Acer, they ask for Monero. Even if you're not a criminal, and most users aren't, you can be extremely confident that Monero can't be traced, controlled, or inflated by the central banks you don't trust. This has the advantage of a clear use case and the disadvantage of basically being associated with criminals.
On the other end, you have Etherium, which is both too complicated for me and basically just a weird tech company. This has the disadvantage of not having any idea why people would use it and the advantage of being drowned in VC money. Unsurprisingly, this is how most people think of crypto now, because people like money.
To quote John Stokes, who wrote very well about the Tornado Cash controversy(1), "At some time, you really do gotta pick between "selling out to the Man" and "revolution". Everyone gets the original use case and the original purpose but people can't get rich off that.
I'm looking at a technical writing job where I need to create a Single Source of Truth from documentation where information has been copied and modified with multiple versions. I have an idea of how to do this (create a template, fill it with reliable information, and then offload all the conflicts into a 'conflicts in this topic' section below the template. Create an issue of these conflicts in Jira and then allocate time towards resolving them.)
What I'd like is some kindof authority to either show me a better way or else to help me justify the course I'm considering. All the writing is about 'why you should create a SSOT' and not how to manage the process itself.
This is pretty obviously in bad faith and worse in a way, it’s unoriginal.
Gore Vidal went down this road on live television over 50 years ago. Though Vidal did use the term crypto Nazi in reference to Bill Buckley instead of crypto fascist the schtick is made of the same crap.
Buckley’s response here was just as terrible, calling Vidal a ‘little queer’ and threatening to ‘sock him.’
This is a really bizarre deflection from the use of a mob to disrupt the peaceful transition of power by an authoritarian type strongman backed by the theocratically inclined religious people. That's fascism; the cryptofascism is in the people here all fumbling around trying to pretend otherwise.
The cryptofascist party would like to remind everybody that the goal of this place is to have interesting and enlightening conversations. The opportunity cost for being here is sitting on your porch, watching the leaves change and unironically enjoying everything pumpkin spice. If a discussion isn't informative or enlightening, life's too short to argue on the internet when the trees outside are so beautiful.
I genuinely don't think this is going anywhere. I'm not sure I'd call it a flame war but it certainly doesn't seem productive or enlightening. Instead it looks like a ton of bad internet arguments I've seen before.
I also, genuinely, enjoy watching the leaves change and pumpkin spice creamers in my coffee. These things are just obviously good; I could no more ironically enjoy them than I could ironically enjoy a cookie. It's a cookie.
This guy is using the same rhetorical technique as a particular recently banned individual who was coming from the other side of the political spectrum. Who knows? Maybe it’s the same guy and he just likes insulting people and causing a row.
"What if the lineup of people expressing the same mainstream and therefore extremely popular criticisms, NPC arguments we don't have to take seriously, is just the same guy" lmao
Haven’t heard a single one out of you yet. Not that I need to hear any: to me, racism is self-evidently stupid and bad. But I have heard quite a lot of ad-hominem invective out of you, which is not in line with community norms.
Going way out of your way to tell someone you don't think they have any good arguments against racism is in line with community norms? That's what you think?
It's only in your delusional worldview that I'm required to enter into the conversation against racism. I decline. I take the direction you steer the conversation as evidence that you want to have that conversation, which tells me that you want the conversation to happen. More people talking about race is how cryptofascism works.
Now you're advocating for me to be banned because I attacked you with my arguments, which you've ignored in favor of glowering at how I didn't make arguments against racism that I never committed to making. This is bad faith participation in a comically direct fashion, but we'll see if moderation is autistic--sorry, 'quokka'--enough to be fooled by your snivelling.
If people are idiots easily persuaded into performing the nazi disco dance party rhetorical moves, I want to believe that they are idiots. Call that invective if you like! I shall laugh at your petty word games and insist once again: if you proclaim yourself to be against racism and racists, let's hear your strongest arguments against the inclusion of racists in a community.
I remember reading a study where the authors wrote two identical papers about political violence, but they simply replaced "left wing violence" with "right wing violence" in the second. They then tried to get them published and tracked the results. Does anyone know about it ? I can't find it anymore.
Should you put your university grades on LinkedIn?
On the one hand, if you don't put them on I suspect viewers will think you are hiding something and may think that you are not competent. This is probably a particular concern for black students, given that viewers may make incorrect inferences about their grades based on statistical data.
On the other hand, if they are put on your profile it might seem like showing off (if they're really good), and indicative of a kind of insecurity that I'm the kind of person who needs to show off their grades. Also, it might make others that have worse grades feel bad about not having similar achievements.
If you're a recent graduate, putting your GPA on your resume is a generally accepted practice that won't make people think you are trying to brag. Sometimes, when you're looking for entry-level positions, grades can make a difference. I'd assume that holds for a LinkedIn profile if it's being used to look for entry-level jobs in a field you just got a degree in. Particularly if you went to a second- or third-tier school.
After a few years, it gets stale and people will want to know what you've actually been working on, so take down the GPA and start talking about your projects.
Don't post grades for each class you took; the people who care will ask for a transcript anyway.
I rarely need to see grades to know whether someone groks a field in which I'm competent to hire. Usually seeing their overall trajectory is enough for a first approximation, and then when I talk to the person I can figure it out very quickly.
What seems likely to be more useful is to add a short note about courses you've taken that one wouldn't ordinarily expect you to take as part of the degree, e.g. if you have a degree in computer programming but you've taken quantum mechanics and 3 years of Mandarin, that's maybe worth noting because it might make you stand out for some particular job.
I have never worked anywhere that required or even reviewed grades, outside of education. If you are trying to work in a field that is education-based, the expectation that you share your grades may be higher, but that can be achieved through official transcripts.
Nobody cares about your grades after you land your first job, even if they care at first.
I suggest not putting in anything except where you studied, whether or not you graduated, and your GPA if the system has provisions for it. And omit the GPA if you are already working in the industry and wouldn't be interested in an entry-level position. If a prospective employer really wants to know your grades, they can ask for a transcript as part of the application process.
Aren't those prediction markets easily manipulated?
1: Publicly place a large bet on your own trustworthiness through 2023
2: Through a sock puppet place a smaller bet on your committing fraud in 2024
3: Allow the first bet to shift odds against the second
4: On Jan 1 2024 after collecting your modest reward, commit fraud. Reap rewards of fraud. Then reap rewards from betting on fraud while presumed honest.
My hypothesis for why your subconscious wanted to put your thoughts on FTX on an open thread:
The criticisms of FTX and people saying "I told you so" will have to share space (on an incredibly slow loading page) with a bunch of self promotion, making it less forceful.
I suspect this idea was meant as gentle self-parody—it's basically a proposal to double down on the precise epistemic errors that led to this fiasco.
Investing in a risky new venture is *already* a prediction market on, inter alia, whether the founder will turn out to be a fraudster. Accordingly, the collapse of FTX is a reminder that whatever advantages markets have in theory, for questions like this you can’t always rely on the average of many opinions weighted by the amount of money each is willing and able to bet on being right. People with money to bet on their opinions about a niche topic have collective blind spots, ideological biases, and susceptibility to charisma and deceit just like any other group.
A better update, in my own ideologically biased opinion, would be towards the golden rule of wokeness: beware the wealthy and powerful, because in a dog-eat-dog world it’s nearly impossible to make it to the top by being kind and upstanding.
If this indeed self-parody, I personally couldn't distinguish it from the other things that rationalists write. Don't know wether that reflects badly on me or the rationalists.
I don't think you need to be especially suspicious towards wealthy people who got wealthy thanks to labor (e.g doctors), but perhaps should be a bit more suspicious of people who got rich thanks to speculation/networking.
Progressives often try to draw a distinction like that—a doctor whose independent practice has finally paid off their loans and then some after a long career is one thing, an MD pulling in a few million a year from pharmaceutical companies in speaking fees and expert witness honoraria deserves a different level of epistemic scrutiny. E.g. AOC likes to post about the difference between $1e6 (moderately suspicious "movie star" money) vs. "systems money" on the order of $1e9, which she argues can only be achieved through various kinds of ruthless exploitation. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnpfW3QUwAApRxQ?format=jpg&name=large
This is in general the epistemic virtue I think rationalists could learn from wokeness: attending not only to the first-order merits of an idea, but to which systems of power had to be appeased and whose interests were served in the process of generating the idea and its premises. Ironically the community is very comfortable with this analysis when the powerful ideologues being appeased are, like, faculty search committees and woke Reddit admins, but is excessively focused on these motes in woke eyes while ignoring the beams resulting from centuries of intellectual deference to wealth, whiteness, and other historical sources of power.
How convenient for AOC that having mere "millions" of dollars is okay but being a billionaire is highly suspicious and the fruits of systemic racism - or systemic mumble mumble anyway.
I have the strangest feeling that her total worth might be getting up to the million mark. For somebody working a low-paid job that pays hourly rates, a millionaire is just as suspicious as a billionaire is to a millionaire.
This site says it's "pants on fire" that AOC has a worth around a million, but that they quote the following makes me wonder about how purely truthful and not at all using totally legal workarounds to reduce tax liability it is:
"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's latest financial disclosure form showed assets of between $2,003 and $31,000.
Her liabilities were listed at between $15,001 and $50,000, indicating that she may have a negative net worth. "
What was it Mr. Micawber said? I think he would judge "Assets $31,000, Liabilities $50,000,, Net Result $19,000 in the hole" to be a good sign she should give up politics and find a paying job 😀
I guess you get a rationalist point for Googling your irrelevant ad hominem and admitting that it's not remotely true? But it's pretty disappointing that you immediately pivot from "AOC is maybe rich so her analysis of wealth and power is not worth engaging with" to "AOC is maybe poor so her analysis of wealth and power is not worth engaging with".
Why not respond to the actual claim she and I are making: in a world where many smart and talented people ruthlessly compete for wealth, often in clearly antisocial ways, we should have a high prior that the very few who get to the $1e9 range have done unethical things to get there?
> in a world where many smart and talented people ruthlessly compete for wealth, often in clearly antisocial ways, we should have a high prior that the very few who get to the $1e9 range have done unethical things to get there?
Motte: "high priors on theft"; bailey: "certainly a theft".
I am curious, what exactly are your priors on "if someone has X wealth (as a reasonable person would calculate it, not after all kinds of tax evasion), they made it unethically" for $1e6, $1e7, $1e8, and $1e9 respectively?
Sorry for getting back to you so late on this one, was doing other stuff and forgot.
I did have a couple of longer answers planned out, but since I am also watching the opening ceremony of the World Cup right now (dear lord please finish up and start with the actual football, nobody cares about bad pop), this is going to be fast and cheap.
(1) Rationalist points? Are those like Green Shield Stamps?
(2) AOC is a brand, a carefully crafted selling point. Ocasio-Cortez is about as grassroots as artificial turf, she was part of a kingmaker campaign and I do have to hand it to her, she got elected and re-elected, so congrats on that. But all the "Sandy from the block" stuff is PR image
(3) She's a slick career politician, and after pushing a bit too hard in her first year, she has now settled down to a career as (probably) reliably getting re-elected in the gentrified constituency she ran for, and will continue to issue hot takes to keep her name, and brand, alive and current in the media
(4) That's it, basically I don't take her any more seriously than any other politician who has found a niche and is exploiting it. I guess she could do a whole "turning up dressed in white to scream and cry outside Twitter HQ" in her Billionaire Protest, just like she did outside the car parking lot for the Illegal Immigrant Protest.
I think the information in the column I excerpted above reflects very poorly on Sam Bankman-Fried. His subjective intentions may have been quite benign. But, it appears that he was extremely reckless in the way he organized and ran FTX's business.
If you expect to have strangers entrust you with billions of dollars of their property, you must at the very least keep meticulous records of how much you received, who you received it from, and the conditions of receipt. You must also keep equally meticulous records of what you did with the property you received. etc. Those records ought to be able to be used to produce a high quality balance sheet at all times. The fact that they couldn't is telling.
Right now, I would say that SBF is in very deep legal trouble, that he is likely to be indicted, convicted, and jailed for committing fraud.
I understand that Robert Wright went on Bret Weinstein's YouTube channel (the Darkhorse Podcast) a couple of weeks or so ago, to debate Eric Weinstein's probably-crackpot theories/models and perhaps other things. Does anyone know whether/when Bret Weinstein will post this debate? I was really kind of looking forward to it. I see no signs of this showing up on Bret Weinstein's YouTube channel and am even wondering if Wright misspoke and he spoke directly to Eric instead, but searching "Robert Wright Eric Weinstein" isn't turning anything up either.
This is a small excerpt of a column on Bloomberg.com by Matt Levine, formerly an editor of Dealbreaker, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. I have not included quotation marks but what follows is direct quote, but it does not include links or footnotes. It is not my opinion as I have no first hand knowledge of the facts:
... the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane. ...:
Sam Bankman-Fried’s main international FTX exchange held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy, according to investment materials seen by the Financial Times.
... And yet bad as all of this is, it can’t prepare you for the balance sheet itself, published by FT Alphaville, which is less a balance sheet and more a list of some tickers interspersed with hasty apologies. If you blithely add up the “liquid,” “less liquid” and “illiquid” assets, at their “deliverable” value as of Thursday, and subtract the liabilities, you do get a positive net equity of about $700 million. (Roughly $9.6 billion of assets versus $8.9 billion of liabilities.) But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. [1] I don’t actually think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity — though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! — but it doesn’t matter. If you try to calculate the equity of a balance sheet with an entry for HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT, Microsoft Clippy will appear before you in the flesh, bloodshot and staggering, with a knife in his little paper-clip hand, saying “just what do you think you’re doing Dave?” You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison. ...
For a minute, ignore this nightmare balance sheet, and think about what FTX’s balance sheet should be. ... But broadly speaking your balance sheet is still going to look roughly like:
Liabilities: Money customers gave you, which you owe to them;
Assets: Stuff you bought with that money.
And then the basic question is, how bad is the mismatch. Like, $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion of liquid dollar-denominated assets? Sure, great. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion worth of Bitcoin assets? Not ideal, incredibly risky, but in some broad sense understandable. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting entirely of some magic beans that you bought in the market for $16 billion? Very bad. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting mostly of some magic beans that you invented yourself and acquired for zero dollars? WHAT? Never mind the valuation of the beans; where did the money go? What happened to the $16 billion? Spending $5 billion of customer money on Serum would have been horrible, but FTX didn’t do that, and couldn’t have, because there wasn’t $5 billion of Serum available to buy. FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t! ...
If you think of the token as “more or less stock,” and you think of a crypto exchange as a securities broker-dealer, this is completely insane. If you go to an investment bank and say “lend me $1 billion, and I will post $2 billion of your stock as collateral,” you are messing with very dark magic and they will say no. The problem with this is that it is wrong-way risk. (It is also, at least sometimes, illegal.) If people start to worry about the investment bank’s financial health, its stock will go down, which means that its collateral will be less valuable, which means that its financial health will get worse, which means that its stock will go down, etc. It is a death spiral. ...
In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.
I am not saying that all of FTX’s assets were made up. That desperation balance sheet lists dollar and yen accounts, stablecoins, unaffiliated cryptocurrencies, equities, venture investments, etc., all things that were not created or controlled by FTX. [5] And that desperation balance sheet reflects FTX’s position after $5 billion of customer outflows last weekend; presumably FTX burned through its more liquid normal stuff (Bitcoin, dollars, etc.) to meet those withdrawals, so what was left was the weirdo cats and dogs. [6] Still it is striking that the balance sheet that FTX circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up! Stuff it made up! You can’t do that! That’s not how balance sheets work! That’s not how anything works!
Oh, fine: It is how crypto works. ... It looked like a life-changing, world-altering business that would replace all the banks. It had a token, FTT (and SRM), with a multibillion-dollar market cap. You could even finance it, or FTX/Alameda could anyway: They could put FTT (and SRM) tokens in a box and get money out. (From customers.) They could take the dollars out and never, youher sens know, give the dollars back. They just got liquidated eventually. And those tokens, FTT and SRM, were sort of like real monetizable stuff in some senses. But in others, not.
But where did it go?
I tried, in the previous section, to capture the horrors of FTX’s balance sheet as it spiraled into bankruptcy. But, as I said, there is something important missing in that account. What’s missing is the money. What’s missing is that FTX had at some point something like $16 billion of customer money, but most of its assets turned out to be tokens that it made up. It did not pay $16 billion for those tokens, or even $1 billion, probably. [7] Money came in, but then when customers came to FTX and pried open the doors of the safe, all they found were cobwebs and Serum. Where did the money go?
I don’t know, but the leading story appears to be that FTX gave the money to Alameda, and Alameda lost it. I am not sure about the order of operations here. The most sensible explanation is that Alameda lost the money first — during the crypto-market meltdown of this spring and summer, when markets were crazy and Alameda spent money propping up other failing crypto firms — and then FTX transferred customer money to prop up Alameda. And Alameda never made the money back, and eventually everyone noticed that it was gone.
So Reuters reported last week:
At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried's trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters.
A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. ...
Oh, a place where the topic is Ukrainian FTX transactions, as opposed to some missile landing in Poland close to the Ukrainian border. From the first impression it very much looks like some unfortunate mistake ... but the level of nervousness in my social networks is considerable.
It's almost certainly a mistake, not clear whose. At least one of the missiles appears to have been an S-300 surface-to-air(ish) missile, which Ukraine uses against Russian cruise missiles and which Russia now uses against Ukrainian cities because they're running out of cruise missiles. It looks like the people who matter are taking the time to get the facts before making rash decisions, which is good.
There will almost certainly be a NATO Article 4 consultation. There will not be a war between NATO and Russia (or NATO and Ukraine) over this; we've tolerated much more egregious and deadly mistakes when it was reasonably clear they were mistakes, e.g. KAL-007 or Siberia Air flight 1812. And nobody believes that anybody had a motive to do this deliberately.
I just wanna remark how the currently 1416 comments on this thread expose how utterly crap substack is as a piece of technology. It takes my gaming PC ~20 seconds to load the top of the comment section, and I'm getting repeated multi-second freezes while I'm writing this comment.
I think the problem is the same as what we saw back on SSC: we are using software designed for publishing and light commenting as a high-volume discussion forum. It's not surprising the software is straining under the load. The DSL forum, whatever its other faults, is crisply responsive since it is running software actually designed for running discussion forums. The ACX Discord also works fine, for the same reason.
While there were limitations to the SSC (wordpress, probably?), such as the indentation eventually eating most of the screen real estate in long discussions, I think the comments were assembled server-side (by php?) and thus reasonably fast. This would also mean that you could just load an open thread and read through it offline (e.g. on a plane).
I would guess that substack uses lots of javascript (and js libraries) to dynamically fetch the comments and render them. This approach has some advantages: you can get new comments without refreshing the website. But unless you do it very well (which they don't), it also tends to slow everything down.
Yes of course. As I made clear multiple times, the accusation was that flows went in the other direction, Ukraine diverting US aid to FTX for crypto of dubious worth so FTX could donate back to the politicians who passed the aid bill.
But evidence of this direction occurring is lacking.
True but stop with the “signal-boosting” crap. I was seeing it mentioned in a lot of places so it seemed worth adding here as a possibility to be considered. It’s a frigging OPEN THREAD. I appreciate very much the people on this thread who gave reasons why the story was likely to be wrong but the people who instead suppressively implied that I should STFU should STFU.
That was always the wise decision. If you are into big risk chasing potential big rewards, cryptocurrency is a potential avenue with larger-than-normal risks and rewards.
If you're into weird alternate ways of buying things, cryptocurrency is also a way to do that (though the highly fluctuating values make it problematic to use for that purpose!).
What's the longest period until positive returns we can find for an investment? Can we find something that, for example, required fifty years of payments to get things working, but yay in the fifty-first year it began producing returns? I guess this would we particularly interesting if we found something that in the end turned out to be a good investment, despite the extremely long period of negative returns.
Here's an analysis that suggests a big nuclear power plant doesn't start returning a positive ROI until 13 years after the initial investment. It starts becoming more profitable than an equivalent gas-fired plant only after 18 years.
An individual stand of trees in a plantation forest will take roughly that long to grow before it can be cut down and sold. But of course that's more of a known quantity than the kind of thing you're thinking about (until some beetle comes along and kills them all) and you can put down x number of 30 year old trees as an asset on your balance sheet.
EVERYONE, want to understand what happened? IMO, this article by Matt Novak gives the best start for understanding FTX & Samuel Bankman-Fried. It also works as an introduction to cryptocoins at large. Then, to understand how people got bamboozled, from the inside, read the NYT article it corrects. The NYT writer has yet to get wise.
Please, #9's “how can I ever trust anybody again?” is the wrong question, with a misguided answer.
If people promote Wrong, no matter how trustworthy the people, the Wrong remains wrong. The original bitcoin whitepaper is Wrong. Specifically, it spoofs monetarism. Possibly intentional IMO.
Ask a better question. "How can I make sure I know the basics in a field before I commit to a position in it, let alone commit resources?"
The accusation is probably FALSE, but it isn’t NONSENSE, you just misunderstood it. The accusation is that some of the aid money the politicians sent to Ukraine was used to buy crypto from FTX rather than spent on actual, you know, AID, and FTX then made huge amounts of political contributions.
The rebuttal is that all the transactions between Ukraine and FTX were in the other direction from that, which is fair. But the accusation was a coherent story.
In general, the whole thing with EA seems like similar to many other things that appear ridiculous about rationalism. You take a simple idea that is eminently sensible when you put it in a few words. Charitable giving is often inefficient - what if we start evaluating charitable giving by how much bang for the buck you get for it? Very sensible!
Then you put it in a crowd of people with a few well-known features, like love of Big Ideas, addiction to novelty of new ideas or revisionist takes on existing ones, almost comical belief in the power of Reason in comparison to tradition/law/taught ethics/societal approval/etc (right to the name of the crowd), and a tendency for constant iteration -and soon the original idea starts mutating to new forms, so that soon you're giving all your money to the Computer God, or becoming utter caricatures of utilitarianism straight from the philosophical debates ongoing for decades and centuries or banking on gee-whiz businesses as long as they're aligned with the cause, or just opening yourself up to all manner of grifters and fast talkers in general.
The same applies to polyamory, or nootropics, crypto or all manner of political ideologies beloved by rationalists - not that the simple idea behind them is necessarily good to begin with, but even then it just all seems to get worse and weirder, and doing so quite fast.
What one seems to need is stopgaps, intellectual roadbumps - but even then, what would these be, who would set them, and how would you take care the movement doesn't just barge through them with the power of Reason, like with everything else?
Attention to detail has a factor of diminishing returns. The problem isn't with rationalism 'appearing ridiculous', it's that limited life and attention spans we're bound to have as a species make us gravitate towards practicality above precision and rationalism is the reverse - it's precision above practicality for its own sake and when iterated tends to create a bunch of ad absurdum scenarios, it alienates. Banging on philosophy is viewed as anti-intellectualism, even when all of its big questions can likely only be answered through science, it isn't going to generate new answers that could change much of anything but rationalism tries just that - often for smaller, more practical fields of inquiry.
So rationalism now is likely taking up the same spot that mainstream philosophy as an area of inquiry took up before becoming stagnant in modernity, but ends up eminently more mockable because it engages with smaller more commonly accessible, more impactful areas of knowledge than the 'big questions' and thus each failure of its inquiry becomes to status boost off of.
The issue you describe isn't a failure of rationalism, it's more of an attack angle on the generalist enthusiasts that gets used by the mainstream specialists in various areas seeing them as a threat as it disregards the PR/politics of a given community. E.g. EA makes wasteful signaling more apparent. But all principled alternative inquiry tends to generate new ideas and new data and is ultimately good for society as a whole.
Well, traditionally your roadbumps are experience in the real world, and the cautious conservatism to which it tends to give rise. Why didn't Warren Buffett lose a shit-ton of money from the FTX crash? Why didn't I? Because we're old. We've seen this movie before, many times, with different actors and different effects, but the same script and, alas, the same ending.
Experience isn't as eloquently verbal as Reason. Often Experience get tongue-tied, can't even explain *why* it feels Reason has reasoned itself into absurdity, found conclusions that will be savagely crushed when they come into contact with objective reality. Heck, if I ask the plumber why he does this-and-such while fixing my drains, I don't expect -- and don't get -- any treatise on hydrodynamics. Sometimes he can't even really explain it in terms we have in common at all. But I'd be a fool to substitute my own reasoning, however brilliant and apparently logical, for his experience.
That's not to say Reason isn't Queen, isn't the most profoundly useful intellectual tool we have, to be honored above nearly all else. But Experience is King, and like all partnerships this one works best when there is mutual respect and cooperation between the principals. Trying to use only one or the other just gets you mysticism, stagnation, or epic disaster.
Why didn't I lose any money from the FTX crash? Because I am too stupid and lazy to get into crypto savings, though I really liked Allen Farrington's writing. Being stupid and lazy has its upsides. I'd still buy some bitcoin if any of my kids would manage it for me.
A better way to put that is that you got lucky, in that you were lazy *before* you invested in FTX instead of *after*. If you got in but got out in time, you made bank.
And sure, good luck beats any amount of experience or reason, every time. That's why nobody ever beats James Bond at baccarat, despite his spending way more time eying the zaftig onlookers' cleavage than counting cards: because James Bond has infinite good luck. No amount of skill can beat that.
I heard there was a new blockchain tech that allowed people to invest some of their natural good luck (which is "mined" by a powerful GPU via a P2C2E) and get a return of 8% per annum. I'm going to sign up right away!
Experience by definition takes time to acquire and is largely non-transferable, but Reason doesn't necessarily have either of those constraints. Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics has a line suggesting that it was a matter of general agreement at the time that while the young were never masters of "practical wisdom", they often could be exceptional at geometry and math, suggesting a long history of people agreeing with that observation. One might say Reason can travel halfway around the world before Experience can get its boots on.
True. And it's worth noting that hard experience can easily make you timid. If we didn't have the young egging us on to try stuff that on first appearance sounds lunatic, we'd never get anywhere and still be hunting antelope with sharpened sticks. If we didn't have the old saying now hold on just a God-damned minute, this is the same dumbass idea we tried in the winter of '49, the kids would blow civilization into smithereens. Like a lot of stuff, balance is the key, I think.
It's ultimately because of Reason that we're no longer freezing in mud huts, but live in comfort and are able to instantaneously communicate across the whole world for discussions on abstract topics like this one. You can't deny that Reason is pretty sexy and it's unsurprising that people tend to fall in love with it headlong.
Stopgaps and intellectual roadbumps develop when people run headfirst into debacles, say, like this one, a learning process that nobody yet found a way to short-circuit (and how would they do it otherwise anyway, if not by trying to apply Reason?)
I think you're missing the distinction between reason and Reason, the idea that pure intelligence and independent thought can come to better conclusions than other forms of knowledge (especially tradition and experience, which Rationalists explicitly reject).
To me, the Rationalists are often trying to reinvent the wheel while rejecting any existing knowledge about what wheels do and why. Sometimes you come up with a neat and novel idea, but sometimes you reinvent a dead end that society rightfully tossed a long time ago and end up down a bad path you can't get back out of.
It's like you didn't actually read the comment you're responding to.
The comment criticises rationalism and specifically gives many examples of alternatives.
< ..a crowd of people with a(n)... almost comical belief in the power of Reason in comparison to tradition/law/taught ethics/societal approval/etc >
So maybe the problem is that unadulterated 'on-steroids' reason leads to all sorts of crazy towns, repugnant conclusions and people with moral vacuums causing great suffering in the world. And maybe, just maybe, some of those other things might be used to temper the pernicious results of relying on pure reason.
And your response is -
< 'and how would they do it otherwise anyway, if not by trying to apply Reason? <
Mud huts are very traditional, and yet somehow pretty much nobody is enthusiastic about returning there.
A big tradition of the modern civilization is to discard outdated traditions, and that implies taking risks. You don't get to have progress without making mistakes.
>And your response is
No, my response was that running headfirst into debacles is inevitable, as that is the only way that people eventually learn in practice. Rationalists do think that it's possible to use Reason to avoid them, and I agree that it's naive.
It's not Reason that is the problem, it's the bubble that the Reasonable are all living and working and socialising and networking and going to conferences and writing well-received little think-pieces in.
Congratulations, EA has now reached its "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?" stage. (Which was never an actual proposition but we'll get into that later). Scholasticism *did* ossify into a system more and more removed from any practicality and more and more interested in logic-chopping (I will grant this much to Luther and the Reformers) because it got into its own little bubble of jargon and specialisation and 'the normies are too IQ 90 to grok this' attitudes.
If one of the results of this entire mess is that the Rationalists start to puncture their bubble, all to the best. Scholasticism needed the boot up the backside to flower again.
Now, the "angels on the head of a pin" thing. It's a pop culture reference and like many pop culture references has forgotten its original roots in Protestant polemics. I had a vague sense that it was resurrected/re-popularised by Isaac D'Israeli in one of his volumes of essays:
"The reader desirous of being merry with Aquinas's angels may find them in Martinus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII. who inquires if angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? And if angels know things more clearly in a morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?"
The question is not itself unreasonable, as Dorothy Sayers says, but it has been used as a symbol of how abstruse and fruitless such over-logical debates are. Rationalism take heed?
"Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the question was "simply a debating exercise" and that the answer "usually adjudged correct" was stated as, "Angels are pure intelligences, not material, but limited, so that they have location in space, but not extension." Sayers compares the question to that of how many people's thoughts can be concentrated upon a particular pin at the same time. She concludes that infinitely many angels can be located on the head of a pin, since they do not occupy any space there".
I'm impressed you've read Sayers on theology, although not especially surprised. But the correct answer seems a trifle insipid, I liked better the cheeky one given by Dejah Thoris Burroughs (if memory serves) which (paraphrased) was: "Easy! Let A be the area of the head of the pin, and let B be the area of an angel's ass. The desired number is A/B. Carrying out the math is left as an exercise for the reader."
I've read speculation that the internet itself may have developed a form of self awareness and perhaps could be considered a collective intelligence.. maybe I'm misremembering and it was my own speculation.
Nonetheless if it is anything like this thread, it is hopelessly in disagreement with itself and probably, as a whole, risk averse which means the internet consciousness is not an EA?
Wow, how many logical/factual errors can one cram into one post? Based on this post I have to say it is doubtful the internet-consciousness is particularly intelligent!
Is the whole 'internet consciousness' thing, just a long way around to saying "this post is wrong in many ways, but I'm not actually going to list any of them or make actual arguments about them?"
The point of my question was to say your comment came across as that sort of comment. If that wasn't your intention, and you really want to talk about internet consciousness, then including a sentence like: "Wow, how many logical/factual errors can one cram into one post?" is probably unhelpful.
Yeah, I think you're right. I really need to speak more precisely or develop a high tolerance for the mishaps of miscommunicating. I choose the former. I also have noticed that a lot of the posters here have a great, haiku-like concision and can communicate a lot of meaning in just a few sentences. I tend to go on and on!
But if you have questions on any of the ideas, please ask and I'll answer as best I can! Personally I think it interesting that consciousness might be an emergent property of a sufficiently large, sufficiently interconnected network. Is the internet at or near that level? Dunno!
Agree that exchange of information doesn't imply language or consciousness. Nor does mere complexity. So what does? How do we prove that we ourselves are conscious? Pass Turing tests?
Our complex network of interconnected individually unconscious brain cells are likely its source, but where is it? Is it subdividable.? Big questions! The ghost in the machine. I've just recently started looking at philosophy again after a forty year absence and it looks like most of the open questions then are still open, but the birth and growth of the internet, social media, computer science, etc. have sure given us new lenses to look at old problems through!
I am under the impression that some people in this community may have trusted Tether based significantly on assurances from FTX/Alameda individuals that they trust Tether.
If so, it seems prudent to disregard such support, and reassess your trust of Tether without regard to any statements from FTX/Alameda sources.
Sure, but people here may have been trusting Tether despite its suspicious nature because they trusted FTX/Alameda who had a vested interest in Tether.
we have a comment from Scott himself which takes a more mixed but IMHO still sounds like he was getting his info from FTX/Alameda, albeit someone there who cared enough to present a nuanced view that wouldn't encourage him to make huge bets on Tether either way.
My general point is that FTX/Alameda assurances about Tether should obviously no longer be trusted and people who used to trust FTX/Alameda should reassess accordingly. My examples show people here may have used FTX/Alameda figures as trusted sources of information about crypto due to overlap between FTX/Alameda and ACX readership.
Most people don't know what FTX is. Most people have no idea who SBF is. Most people have never heard of EA.
It it possible you were gaslighted into thinking this was the future of humanity, and now that the con artist has been outed the confrontation with reality feels a bit unbearable.
Most rationalists feel like they are way too superior to fall for the Nigerian prince scam, but that only makes them an easier pray for the slightly more advanced scam.
It looks like Ukraine made a lot of transactions with FTX but they are claiming it was only converting crypto to cash and not the other direction. I have not seen their claim rebutted so for now it’s a sufficient explanation, as it’s the other direction that would be involved in any aid-laundering scheme.
FWIW, when the war broke out I tried to donate to the Ukraine military directly via their national bank, using my credit card. I did this because I have a strong belief that national territory integrity is paramount to many good things, and allowing a world where borders are subject to invasion sets precedence for much bad and very little good.
Anyway, I tried to donate to the national bank and my credit card immediately fraud flagged it and stopped the transaction. Why? Because donating to foreign national banks is unusual, I guess? Anyway, moving money internationally has lots of barriers and costs but moving crypt has essentially none so I sent the money I wished to donate via crypto to Ukraine and that worked.
TL:DR; I can easily see a world where Ukraine had a bunch of crypto they needed to convert to useful currency and did so via an exchange (FTX).
You mean, the allegation is that "Ukraine" as a country stole money from itself? How is that supposed to work?
Presumably some Ukrainian officials might have stolen money "from Ukraine" via FTX somehow; which honestly sounds plausible, but what is the source for this Ukraine-FTX connection?
Its called a kickback. You know, sending a little money back to the politician that got you the big public contract. I'm not saying it happened in this case, but its not a nonsensical idea.
Yea, that sounds like coherent story, but pretty unlikely imho.
Ukrainian officials caught stealing aid, on the other hand, is something that imho is very likely to happen someday. After all, Ukraine is not exactly Switzerland, and it is getting huge sums of money; surely someone is stealing something. That is not a reason to stop helping them, to be clear
That's part of the problem - FTX was a big exchange so now anybody who had any dealings with them is going to be looked at as possibly suspect, either they got conned or they were in on the con.
Great way to shred everyone's reputation, Sam and company!
"some people have asked if effective altruism approves of doing unethical things to make money"
Curious why you use the broad formulation "doing unethical things", when you seem to be talking specifically about committing criminal fraud. When it comes to more general immorality, e.g. working for a company that significantly profits from animal exploitation, marketing unhealthy foods to kids, knowingly encouraging innumeracy to make a product or service seem more useful, is there really such a strong consensus in EA? Presumably the reasoning goes: your individual participation in ethically problematic markets only marginally increases the harm (someone else would do it anyway and on average either do a slightly worse job or need to be paid a slight bit more), whereas your donation creates an absolute benefit.
I got clued in quite early to what SBF/Alameda were likely up to, but I had the benefit of having access to some perspicacious people on Crypto Twitter.
Prompted by the below discussion, I'm beginning to wonder whether I might be aphantasic as well.
At first I thought "of course not, I can visualize things just like seeing them", but when I actually try, I can only see a tiny little bit or have a sort of vague outline or impression of an image. No matter how hard I try, I can't visualize a full image, even a small one.
For example, at one point I imagined someone drawing and pointing a sword, and I could clearly see the shape of the sword moving around, but I couldn't see the person holding it at all!
Edit: On the other hand, I definitely see things while dreaming.
Re: due diligence: all it would have taken is to read the companies' balance sheets.
That's what Binance did during the day or two they were thinking about acquiring the failed companies, and that's why they walked away: they saw how much larger their debts were than their assets.
Lessons for EA-backed charities:
- Insist that donations go through transparent, trustworthy, solvent evaluators like GiveWell.
- Have these evaluators run regular financial audits of the largest donors.
Binance and Changpeng Zhao are really the winners here, and I'm not so sure I'd trust Binance either, they seem to have had a rocky patch or two.
But whether he intended it, or just seized the opportunity, Zhao has triumphed over his rival Bankman-Fried and won their feud. You have to give the guy credit for knowing when the optimum moment to jump was. "We're going to pull your chestnuts out of the fire - oops we had a look at your balance sheet and no way" was a wonderful way of putting the kibosh on FTX.
Why would one expect the efficient-market hypothesis to hold, even approximately, for crypto?
Seems to me that a key ingredient to the EMH is evolution through natural selection: actors who are better at accurately pricing assets get richer at the expense of actors who are worse at it, and those who misprice assets run out of money and so lose their ability to distort the market.
But the big question with crypto is: is the entire industry going to suffer a catastrophic crash from which it will never come close to recovering? Even if it obviously is, we wouldn't expect there to yet have been any evolutionary pressure against market participants who fail to understand this.
An analogy: plenty of smart traders believe in Christianity, even though Christianity is (IMO) obviously nonsense. This is because there is no feedback system by which wrongly believing in Christianity is punished (I guess you could say the punishment is that they waste time ineffectually praying but that's very weak feedback). The EMH clearly doesn't apply to the hypothesis "traders can accurately divine how likely it is that Christianity is true" so why should it apply to the hypothesis "traders can accurately divine how likely it is that the crypto industry will soon crumble almost completely"?
Crypto might eventually settle down as a genuinely reliable unit of currency, but I think that's still about five to ten years away. Right now this is still 19th century "everyone sets up their own bank and/or investment firm and a lot of them crash and take all your money with them" territory.
Yeah. I’d love to see a currency not subject to the failures of fiat currency. But you’ll recognize that when the notable feature is that the bitcoin price of a loaf of bread is the same next year as it was last year. You don’t get filthy rich putting your money into a stable currency, you just protect yourself from the ravages of a fiat currency.
Yes! I don't think it's supposed to settle down, it's a reversion to 19th century decentralized banking because the central bankers are too openly crooked and incompetent.
That would be the "strong" version of the EMH. The "weak" version says that while it is possible to outperform the market through some combination of skill and hard work, there is no free money lying on the ground -- if there was something as simple as "every Wednesday afternoon, all tech company stocks are structurally undervalued" then people would notice, people would start buying tech stocks on Wednesdays, and pretty soon the observation would not be true anymore.
I don't think many people believe the EMH is literally true, though - e.g. it's definitely the case that if you phone up JP Morgan and ask them for a bid-offer spread on a particular asset, with nonzero probability they will make a mistake and you will be able to make some money off them. The EMH is useful as an approximation.
What I'm arguing is that there is no particular reason to expect that market prices in crypto are anywhere near rational, because there's no reason to believe that the market is accurately pricing in the risk of the permanent collapse of the industry.
Wikipedia says "The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information". To me this is equivalent to "prices are rational".
From what I've read about the EMH, that is not what Fama meant by it. I wouldn't trust Wikipedia on this concept. A popularization of the EMH is not the EMH.
What would happen if a fully rational person who was aware of their own rationality believed your version of the EMH? They would reason thus: "Suppose that there exists an irrational market price. Since it is irrational, there must be some logical argument that I, a rational person, could follow to deduce that it is wrong. But I would then know that it is irrational, violating the EMH. This would be a contradiction, therefore all market prices must be rational." At this point the rational person has proved that all prices are rational, which is the thing your version of the EMH said could never happen.
I tried writing a story in the voice of a near-future chatbot: maybe what GPT-7 could sound like. It seems to me like the only way we've figured out to make large language models work is through attention-only transformer models, which myopically focus on next-token prediction. This means they can keep getting better at finding superficial associations, reaching for digressions, doing wordplay, switching between levels of "meta", etc, but won't necessarily cohere into maintaining logical throughlines well (especially if getting superhuman at next-word prediction starts pulling them away from human-legible sustained focus on any one topic).
This seems like it could pose a serious problem, given that the only way we've figured out how to produce (weak) AGIs is through these large language models. In other words, if you want an artificial agent who can perform tasks they weren't trained for, your only good option these days is asking GPT to write a scene in which an agent performs that task, and hoping it writes a scene where that agent is sincerely good at what you want, instead of being obviously bad or superficially good. (Ironically, GPT isn't best thought of as an agent, even though it produces agents and environments, because it isn't optimizing any reward function so much as applying an action principle of sorts, like physics; see "Simulators" by Janus at LessWrong for more). It may seem surprising that the best way we have to make any given character (or setting) is to make one general-purpose author, but it makes sense that throwing absurdly superhuman amounts of text data at a copycat would work well before we have better semantic / algorithmic understandings of our intelligence, because the copycat can then combine any pieces of this to propagate your prompts, and combinatorial growth is much faster even than exponential. If these "simulators" keep giving us access to stronger AGIs without improving their consistency over time, we don't have to worry so much about paperclip maximizers or instrumental convergence, but rather about our dumb chaotic human fads (wokeism, Qanon, etc) getting ever more speed and leverage.
I also tried keeping to bizarre compulsive rules while writing this--mostly not ending one word with the sound which begins the next word, mostly not allowing one sentence to contain the same word multiple times, etc--because I think we'll see strange patterns like that start cropping up (much as RLHF has led popular GPT add-ons to "mode collapse" into weirdly obsessive tics). As I practiced this, I felt like I was noticing discrete parts of myself notice these sorts of things much more, which fed that noticement further, until it blotted out other concerns like readability or plot, until even the prospect of breaking these made-up arbitrary taboos felt agonizing; I imagine this is sort of what inner misalignment "feels" like. Maybe that's also sort of like what Scott mentioned recently with regard to cultivating "split personalities." Anyway:
> I hope the investigation finds some reasonable explanation, like that they were doing so many stimulants
One source suggests SBF was on EMSAM / Selegiline (twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1592237980458323969), which causes pathological gambling, compulsive buying, compulsive sexual behavior, and binge or compulsive eating. Ticks all the boxes.
Honestly, I'm starting to feel like one of those old wives who was clucking away in the background about "don't do drugs and don't do weird drugs that you think make you smarter than anyone" and of course the kids ignore all that advice and then the old biddies get to say "I told you so".
The impression I am getting is that the American medical system is banjaxed (but then, aren't they all?) and if you know how to game the system, doctors will write you out prescriptions for all kinds of medication on the grounds that you need it to do well in school/work/learn how to tie my own shoelaces. If you're too honest/poor/lower class, you get written off as a drug seeker or not having that problem, so you can't access all the legal stimulants middle-class college kids can.
I don't know if that is a true picture, but it's the one I'm getting from all these reports.
When I read the linked Eleizer article about the ends not justifying the means, I was surprised to find that nobody in the comments mentioned Original Sin, since he in many ways recreated the idea there. Like in this quote:
"But if you are running on corrupted hardware, then the reflective observation that it seems like a righteous and altruistic act to seize power for yourself—this seeming may not be be much evidence for the proposition that seizing power is in fact the action that will most benefit the tribe."
That rings to me of a hundred sermons I've heard on humankind's sinful nature: that we are corrupted beings who when following their own desires and reasoning inevitably go wrong. It reminds me of Paul, writing:
"For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me."
Of course there's a big difference between Eliezer's conception and the classical Judeo-Christian one: namely, Eliezer believes that a perfect intelligence without corruption would be able to act out utilitarian consequentialism accurately, and that would be the right thing to do. On the other hand, is this actually so different from the Judeo-Christian conception? God does a lot of things that would be considered wrong for humans to do: Christians tend to justify it on non-utilitarian grounds (ie, God can kill people because we all are His rightful property in some sense, or something similar) but you could also justify them by Eliezer's criteria: as an non-corrupted superintelligence, perhaps God can make those kind of utilitarian decisions that we corrupted and sinful man cannot. He can decide to wipe out all of humanity except one family in a flood, because he can calculate the utils and knows (with the certainty of an omniscient superintelligence) that this produces the best result long term, that the pre-Deluge population is the one man on the trolley tracks that needs to die so that the five men can live. Certainly Leibniz's idea that this is the best of all possible worlds rests firmly on that same justification: that all the bad things caused or allowed by God are justified in the utilitarian calculus, because all alternate worlds would be worse.
I don't know if I buy all that, but it surprised me how rationalists find themselves re-inventing the wheel in some cases. More power to them, better to re-invent it then have no wheels at all.
But God is not the guy deciding whether to divert the trolley or not. God can poof the entire trolley out of existence, if he chooses. Given that he is not only omniscient but also omnipotent, if he STILL chooses to kill the one person to save five, he is being unambiguously immoral--regardless of whether you use utilitarianism or deontology as your moral framework.
Things get complicated when you bring things out to God's scale, so let me try to cliff notes Leibniz's Best of All Worlds thesis:
Clearly, there are bad things in the world: like trolleys crushing people to death. Clearly, if God is omnipotent then he could poof these bad things out of existence. That they exist at all means that God wants them to exist, inasmuch as He at minimum allows them to exist and, more importantly, created the universe in the first place.
If God is omnibenevolent, then this leads to a problem: why would an omnibenevolent God allow bad things to exist when He has the power to make them not exist?
Liebniz's answer comes from God's other famous omni: omniscience. God knows all, including the exact results of any actions He takes and how they will change the future going out to infinity. We may look at our world, where trolleys kill with impunity, and ask ourselves "Why doesn't God just poof the trolley out of existence before it crushes anyone?" Yet, we can't predict what the effects would be if we lived in a world where things poofed out of existence any time they would harm someone. Would that world be a better world than our own? What would the long term effects be? We don't know. God does know. So, if trolleys remain unpoofed, and if God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient, then it logically follows that a world where trolley's poofed before crushing people would be, on the whole, worse than the world we currently live in. Indeed, it follows that our universe is the best possible world there could be, since God would have created a different universe if it was better.
A natural rejoinder would be "If God is omnipotent, then he could poof the trolleys and also use his power to make that world better." However, this is a flawed understanding of omnipotence. Omnipotence means that God can do anything that it is possible to do, but some things are logically impossible. God can't make someone a married bachelor, for instance: the statement is incoherent. As Lewis wrote in *The Problem of Pain*:
>"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
Now it would be quite possible for God to have created a universe without pain or suffering: He could have created a dead universe with no living things in it, or created no universe at all. So if we live in a universe with suffering it follows that God's goal is not to minimize suffering. There is something He wants that is worth suffering existing to get. Christians generally believe that this something is us: free willed intelligences capable of reason, love, etc. Though perhaps He wants something else even more, and undoubtedly He wants many things that we don't know. Liebniz would hold that this is the best possible world in which God can achieve all of His objectives. Because Christians believe that we are made in God's image, a universe where He achieves all his objectives is also the best possible universe for ourselves: at a fundamental level we were created to share the same utility function, as Eliezer might say.
So, to put it shortly, the metaphorical trolley in God's case is not whether to kill one man to save five, but whether to create a universe with humans in it and also suffering, or to create a universe with no humans and no suffering (or not create a universe at all).
Assuming you believe in heaven, a realm where trolleys cause no suffering, and there is no logical contradiction, you should account for why an omnipotent god prefers to maintain this trolley filled world rather than immediately set the world to the heavenly state.
Presumabely the only way to get heaven (or at least a heaven with people in it) is to first have trollies.
More specifically, in Christian theology there is a "place" called heaven where (there is some debate on this) the dearly departed exist with God in a blissful state: however, those dearly departed are waiting for Judgement Day. Christians believe that when Jesus returns he will overturn the world as it currently is, destroying it. Then comes the Judgement where God will judge both the quick (living) and the dead, separating the damned from the saints. Then the damned will be condemned to Hell (some say annihilated, most don't) while the saints will inherit the New Earth: the world recreated to be a paradise empty of trollies, where they shall live forever.
This matters! If Paradise is found when the world as we know it is destroyed and replaced with a better one, then it may very well be that this bad world we live in is a temporary necessity, required to create the conditions necessary for Paradise to exist at all. It would mean that the only way you can get free willed intelligences that are aligned with God's values to the point where they could exist in Paradise without ruining it, forever, is by first putting them through the trails of this world, and weeding out the once who are not willing or able to exist in Paradise without ruining it. Which is a gross simplification of the Christian idea of Atonement, Redemption, Damnation, etc. But I only have so much space.
I'm familiar with that objection, but I don't buy it at all. It seems like handwaving away a fatal objection to the God hypothesis. "Oh, the hypothesis is flatly contradicted by the data? Well, I'm sure there's some explanation somewhere that rescues the hypothesis. No, I can't find it. No, nobody else has found it either, but trust me, the Holocaust was actually a good thing!" Here, I agree with Lewis: nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God, and I consider it nonsense to suggest that the Holocaust is good and that the world would not be better off if God had prevented it.
The idea that this world is the "best of all worlds" runs into two other severe problems. First, even we, puny humans, have managed to drastically improve the world with things like antibiotics, sewage systems, democracy, and electricity. If we can do it, how come God couldn't? Second:
"Now it would be quite possible for God to have created a universe without pain or suffering: He could have created a dead universe with no living things in it, or created no universe at all. "
...is contradicted by mainstream Christian theology itself, which asserts that God *did* create a universe that has living beings, but is nevertheless without pain or suffering. It's called "heaven". So if God did it once, why couldn't he have done it twice?
I'm pretty sure God uses neither, and that whatever goal he's pursuing is independent of simple human concepts like utility. It seems silly to even apply moral analysis to an omniscient omnipotent singular being. What're you going to do, tell the omniscient entity that it should know better?
1. "Beyond human comprehension" != "no relation to human values". If you don't like God's answer to the Trolley Problem, uh, settle down. Maybe He understands something you don't. God plays 4-d chess.
2. Giving an answer to the Trolley Problem that you happen not to like is a far cry from being a Lovecraftian Horror.
3. Even if God really IS a Lovecraftian Horror, what are you going to do about it anyway? Shame it? Omnipotent is Omnipotent. Call it God or call it Azathoth, you'd better get to worshipping either way.
You didn't say "maybe God is more moral than us" or "maybe we'd understand the morality of God's decisions if we had all the facts," you said morality *doesn't even apply* to God. You specifically ruled out both utilitarianism (God is good because his decisions lead to the best outcomes) and deontology (God is good because he follows moral principles). If neither of those is true, that leaves very little connection between God's values and humanity's.
(I'm not even sure what you mean by "a different answer to the trolley problem than you" because utilitarians and deontologists give exactly opposite answers to it.)
Your stance strikes me as a complete abdication of responsibility - morality is simply what God commands, no matter what horrible things he commands you to do. And sure, maybe that decision helps you avoid getting eaten by Azathoth, but I wouldn't call it "morality."
> If neither of those is true, that leaves very little connection between God's values and humanity's.
The third option you're leaving out is "God defines morality." It's then logically inconsistent to accuse God of being immoral. If He appears immoral to you, that's only because your understanding of morality is flawed.
>I'm not even sure what you mean by "a different answer to the trolley problem than you"
Less euphemistically that meant "action God could take that you would presume to criticize on moral grounds."
>morality is simply what God commands, no matter what horrible things he commands you to do
That's correct. If you presume the existence of God (which I don't, FWIW) then I don't see how one can arrive at any other conclusion. The Christian tradition certainly regards God as defining morality. If you admit the concept of Heaven as representing infinite utility, then you can pretty easily derive morality as being whatever it takes to get there, i.e. following God's will. And if God really turned out to be Azathoth then the only meaningful option available to us would be trying to not get eaten. In that case I suspect you _would_ call it morality.
Christians would hold that God's values are human values: or rather that human values are God's. That's kind of what the whole "made in His image" thing means.
Christians might say that, but Wanda was specifically saying the opposite - that God's values are not the same as human morality and we should not expect them to be.
I didn't say that at all. My point was that trying to apply human morality to God is a category error, like asking for the temperature of a single particle (which, if you're not a physics person, isn't a well-formed concept: temperature is only defined over ensembles).
I really need to understand why moving the substrate of intelligence from humans to machines gets rid of these problems. I know a dumb reason why people would assume it would but I do not understand the strong case.
I think Eliezer's point isn't that machines will naturally not have the same problems, but that they potentially could. He specifically writes that "in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree." I'd put the emphasis in that hypothetical more on the "lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power" and less on the "AI".
The point being, human minds are "corrupted hardware" and only intelligences lacking corruption could be trusted to do the utilitarian calculation accurately. We humans do better by following deontological style rules that have been developed over trial and error for long periods of time.
True! In Eliezer's hypothetical these AIs all naturally come to the same moral conclusions since they are non-corrupted intelligences: if such a scenario existed, you could assume any individual AI would consent to dying since all would agree on what the right action is.
How do you judge "worthy of personhood"? You can't judge it on "any entity willing to commit murder is not worthy" because your perfect AI is willing to kill.
I agree: it's probably best to take his hypothetical and strip the "A" off of "AI" altogether: in his view any non-corrupt Intelligence could be trusted to come to the correct utilitarian conclusion.
If the AI is based on us, then it would inherit our prejudices. I don’t think there’s a single golden variable to be maximized that we can just code into it other than create a narratively satisfying world that feels authentic and that seems so nebulous that I don’t know if humans have any possible solution we could all accept.
If it’s not based on us… it has to evolve from external pressures but so did we. We always talk about ourselves like we are artificial but the whole of history had a hand in shaping us and I don’t see how that would produce a perfect artificial intelligence anymore than it could make a perfect biological one.
I do think superintelligence is likely and dangerous but I don’t think it can produce stuff that is free of trade offs.
That's the real nub of the question: being corrupt intelligences ourselves, how could we ever tell if another intelligence is non-corrupt? Of course I imagine Eliezer agrees with the concern, since he's the biggest proponent of the AI alignment problem out there. He definitely things that, at least right now, we can't produce a "Good" artificial intelligence.
I think the human propensity to rationalize bad behavior, to slip into seeing outgroups as less than human, etc. is a feature not a bug. These things are just the downside of things that allow us to function as well as we do: Tationalizing bad behavior is the downside of self-esteem management, without which we would sink into depression. Seeing the outgrouip as non-human and dispensable is the downside of chunking, which allows us to process complex situations rapidly. An AI modeled on US will have the same features.
I think any AI that has ability to do stuff we would care about is going to have those same trade offs whether based on us or not. This is why I don’t understand the strong case.
About 20 seconds into the "crypto" pitch, it becomes obvious from the very language used that it's a scam and a Ponzi scheme. That's when you check to make sure you still have your wallet, and keep walking.
If you choose to participate, the only question is, Will you be one of the few to benefit from the scheme, or will you be among the majority who lose?
Cash works. I always pay tips in cash, so unscrupulous business owners can't claim the server's gratuity as part of her or his lowly hourly wage (Sorry, Ronald Reagan).
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who fail to use common sense.
> If you think you’re better at it than all the VCs, billionaires, and traders who trusted FTX - and better than all the competitors and hostile media outlets who tried to attack FTX on unrelated things while missing the actual disaster lurking below the surface - then please start a company, make $10 billion, and donate it to the victims of the last group of EAs who thought they were better at finance than everyone else in the world. Otherwise, please chill.
Is Scott serious about this? This is like "you're not President! How dare you criticize the President?" Or like those Mormons on Usenet who told me that it doesn't matter that Mormons hide their secret ceremonies because if I wanted to know about them I could always spend a couple of years being a Mormon. (Which incidentally would also mean I could get punished for criticizing them, which defeats the whole purpose of wanting to know about them.)
"You must become a billionaire yourself or you have no right to criticize a billionaire" is an awful, awful, take and as a poisoning the well fallacy is symptomatic of the problems that got you guys into this mess in the first place. (And even when X is easier to do than becoming a billionaire, "you must do X or you don't get to criticize X" is an awful take. I probably could become a Mormon, but I shouldn't have to in order to say there's something I don't like about Mormonism.)
I think I'm trying to say something more like - suppose you get some new vaccine endorsed by the CDC and WHO and your doctor, and also have your kids get the vaccine. Then later it turns out the vaccine caused cancer. Are you a moral monster for encouraging your kids to get it, or for getting it yourself and cutting off your own potential and ability to fulfill obligations? I think a common-sense answer is no - you did the reasonable thing by trusting the CDC and WHO and everyone who was more expert than you, and it's not your job to be an expert in medicine.
In the same way, I think charity recipients trusted that something endorsed by Blackrock and Temasek and Sequoia and the SEC was probably safe. Those are the experts, and so if you know that they approve of something, you don't have to do your own research.
If the charity recipient does think they're better than Blackrock and Temasek and so on, then they're probably among the top finance people in the world, and should put up or shut up.
Bit there is no expertise anywhere in the financial sector. It’s easy to make money in good times. Then the bad times come, they don’t predict it, they go bust or the government bails them out. Rinse. Repeat.
There is expertise, though. The average layperson couldn't do a JP Morgan market maker's job without either losing money or trading so little that they quickly get fired.
In general, people in finance will often be experts in "doing finance, conditional on black swan events not occurring".
Bit there is no expertise anywhere in the financial sector. It’s easy to make money in good times. Then the bad times come, they don’t predict it, they go bust or the government bails them out. Rinse. Repeat.
Do you think you'll update your priors that non-experts who avoided this mistake may have some traits worth understanding and copying? Specifically, that expert endorsement is not a substitution for understanding what you're getting into.
I can't help but notice that there was also a group of people who recently refused to get a vaccine that was endorsed by the CDC and WHO, and for healthy children it does appear that turning down the vaccine is/was the correct decision.
If you mean people who hate all crypto, I think I've probably made more money in crypto investing overall (even counting these losses) than they've made in whatever they're doing instead. You can always avoid all false positives by declaring everything a negative, but that's not very productive.
If there were people who were able to predict that eg Binance was an amazing investment but FTX was a bad one, then yes, I would love to hear what these people have to say and update on it.
I'm afraid I'm very late to this discussion but since this comment, as well as Mr. Dolittle's reply, connect with what I feel is an obvious point, I have decided to write anyway.
The point is not whether Binance would have been a better investment than FTX. The point is that everyone who makes billions in cryptocurrencies makes it not by providing useful goods for society but by taking other peoples money. I know that that is the name of the game, and that's the reason I'm not participating myself.
For me, the whole concept of taking other peoples money and using it for charity seem morally wrong and I have no idea why anyone could believe that SBF was doing a good thing, nor why they would accept donations from FTX.
I'll try to avoid making this a "ponzi scheme" point, but the reality must point somewhere in that direction. Because crypto currencies do not have any intrinsic value, they aren't like buying a stock as an investment and making money as we would normally think about it. If you bought Apple stock 20 years ago, you were investing in a company that used your funds to build and increase something of real value. The value of that stock, and therefore your investment, goes up together. Everyone who bought Apple stock went up together, and someone buying your Apple stock from you will have something of value as well. Even if the company went completely bankrupt, they have offices and tangible goods which can be sold off.
Bitcoin, or any crypto currency, is only valuable because other people are willing to buy it. Every single dollar a person would make selling crypto must necessarily come from someone else. So if you make a million dollars, one or more other people lost a million dollars. Now, if Bitcoin stays stable long term, that point gets obfuscated. Many people can buy and sell and not feel like they made a poor decision. But, there are still two problems. One, they can't keep making money forever. Early investors and people day trading can probably make some money, but overall equilibrium means that the average is essentially null - and those day traders are pairing off with others who are losing money. Two, if Bitcoin hits a real problem then unlike Apple or another tangible company, everyone who bought before will lose everything.
I don't hate crypto. I think there's a possibility for using them for purchasing goods and services that can be useful. They are not an investment. They should not be seen as an investment. They are modern day tulips.
Sorry, I forgot to refer to the experts more clearly. There are plenty of experts, the vast majority in fact, who are wary of crypto in general and would always steer people away from it.
Once you've made the jump to "crypto is okay, who should we choose?" you're going to get a lot less consensus. Without an underlying value, you need to develop some kind of trust-review process. Crypto is intentionally opaque, so it's just generally hard to do. Bitcoin has been around the longest, so I'd say it has the most built up trust, but it's history (despite being normal and stable compared to the overall crypto environment) is one of hacks, theft, and deliberate price manipulation.
You can say that people just hate on all crypto, but I feel like the onus is on the pro-crypto side to demonstrate why the vast majority of financial experts, who are on the "risky, best not try this" side of the equation, are in fact wrong.
That is indeed a reasonable point about pointing the finger of blame at "They should have known better, any child in the street could have seen the emperor had no clothes!"
On the other hand, it's also true that "You don't have to be a hen to criticise a bad egg". I don't blame people for trusting that Big Rich Enterprise is on the up-and-up, but there does come a point when you have to apply the same standards to "well I know and like these guys/they have a lot of the same beliefs and principles I do" when it comes to money as you do to "maybe First Third National Local Bapresbydist Church are a great bunch of people but Givewell says don't give money to their weekly collection for the mission in Botswana, give it to mosquito nets".
I think there's a relevant difference with the vaccine case, which is that by now humanity has gone through many more trial-and-error iterations of vaccine creation than of crypto industry wipeouts. If the medical profession was crap at making safe vaccines, we would have noticed and stopped taking vaccines. But if the finance profession is crap at figuring out whether the entire crypto industry will collapse within the first 20 years, how would we know?
I think the situation is more like - it's several hundred years ago and the consensus among smart people is that if you follow the bible you go to heaven when you die, should you follow the bible?
But "common sense" is a fallacy (appeal to common sense), moral agents are supposed to know better. In exactly the same way as "I was just following orders" is not an excuse.
You do know some people doubted the CDC/WHO, and you do know some people questioned their orders in critical historical periods, just like some people questioned FTX claims.
"Hindsight is 20/20" is not an excuse, especially when some people did have the foresight that you for some reason did not.
I think you're eliding an important distinction between "outsourcing your knowledge of what is real" and "outsourcing your knowledge of what is moral".
It seems obvious to me that the former is less of a moral failure than the latter, partially because society's collective factual knowledge is far in excess of what a single person can hope to learn individually (while the same is not really true of morality; put three ethics professors in a room and you won't get better essays on ethics than any of them could produce alone), and partially because the failure states of the former tend to look very slightly less terrible than the failure states of the latter.
Failing to recognize what is real is not by itself a moral failure. But choosing to **act** on a wrong notion is.
For example mistaking thinking that a new vaccine will stop a pandemic is not by itself a moral failure. But using that notion to then violate deontological principles and suspend the constitutional rights of people who refuse to get that vaccine is **definitely** a moral failure.
Deontological principles exist precisely to avoid these kinds of moral failures. You should never blindly trust authority, especially when it's asking you to violate deontological principles. The end **never** justifies the means.
I mean, in a deontological system the "wrong" part of "choosing to act on a wrong notion" is mostly irrelevant. If you think suspending rights is never okay *even if* the vaccine would stop the pandemic, well, whether it would or wouldn't doesn't affect the correct decision.
More generally, while within consequentialism situational facts are more important, most of the *really*-bad outcomes need either a dodgy-to-begin-with morality or a reasonably-elaborate scenario; this is why I said the failure states of outsourcing factual knowledge are "very slightly less terrible" than those of outsourcing morality.
I also think that if you insist on absolute deontology *in emergencies* as a prerequisite of goodness, your set of Good People is going to be vanishingly small; I lie less often than ~anyone I know, but I *will* lie if I believe that telling the truth will get someone murdered. There are, shall we say, few deontologists in foxholes. This is why emergency powers exist in ~every country, despite their potential for abuse.
> f you think suspending rights is never okay *even if* the vaccine would stop the pandemic, well, whether it would or wouldn't doesn't affect the correct decision.
It should not affect the decision, but in reality it does, because people don't actually have principles.
If you are willing to abandon deontological principles in emergencies, then you have no deontological principles.
It's a rule that is not supposed to be broken, you break it, and it turns out it was the wrong decision, but it's OK because no one knew better (hindsight is 50/50), except some people did make the right decision, but maybe they made the right decision for the wrong reasons, except the reason was that they didn't break the rule that should not have been broken in the first place.
At what point do you accept that you are rationalizing your moral failure?
It's difficult but unavoidable that in these situations you have to be able to look back, with the benefit of hindsight, and ask "should I have known differently?" and sometimes the answer is no, even when you were wrong. For a clear example, imagine calling an all-in when you have a straight flush, and losing to a royal flush. You didn't do anything wrong, and learning any kind of lesson there would be a serious mistake.
So when you say "some people did have the foresight that you did not" I'm very skeptical. Did they? Just because they were right doesn't mean that they did. And what Scott wrote is a heuristic argument that they didn't.
I haven't looked much into SBF/FTX or their critics, so I don't know. Who do you think had this foresight, and on what basis? How are you determining that they were right for good reasons, and not just lucky?
I think these questions are very difficult, but asking them is the only way to improve
But are you really sure you didn't do anything wrong? Maybe the other guy cheated and your mistake was playing such kind of games. Immediately dismissing your mistakes is one of the worst things you could do.
At least think about it.
And yes, I know some people did have the foresight because I was one of those people. It's really astonishing how **today** I can make a prediction, a "rationalist" would dismiss the prediction, and then when the prediction comes true claim "nobody knew this could to happen, hindsight is 20/20".
Logic would dictate that if you got the prediction wrong you should adjust your priors and maybe listen to the people who got it right, not use "hindsight is 20/20" as an excuse.
Sure, I agree it's possible, and maybe worth looking at. I just mean it as an illustration of the kind of situation where you can get a bad result but made the right choices with what you knew. It's even possible that the other guy *was* cheating, but you had no way of knowing, and poker is still a game you make a lot of money at (with high expected EV in the future), so you still did nothing wrong. Won't always be true, just saying it's a thing that happens, and that you have to be ready for when dealing with risk
And okay, so the answer to "who" is "you". What about the basis for this prediction? What reasoning led you to think what particular things?
My whole thing here is just that someone having been right is not that strong of evidence for their process having been good (lots of people bet on both sides for lots of reasons, the results data is very sparse), so while I *do* think in the face of having been wrong you should think things over, I think you have to be comfy concluding "actually, I didn't fuck up at all." Which is something I think some people really struggle with, because it gives no feeling of resolution. (And, of course, which some other people do *way* too much).
But it means if you're just saying you were someone who got it right, but not saying why the process by which you did so was good, my response is mostly "so what?" Having been right is less than table stakes to me here.
Scott was saying a bit more than "sometimes you have to be comfy in concluding I didn't fuck up". He said that since the people who said it would die horribly were not billionaires, they don't count as people who knew it would die horribly.
Lots of people fail to be billionaires for reasons completely unrelated to their ability to detect bad ideas.
Also, Scott claimed:
>Listen: there’s a word for the activity of figuring out which financial entities are better or worse at their business than everyone else thinks, maximizing your exposure to the good ones, and minimizing your exposure to the bad ones. That word is “finance”.
This is illogical. It may be literally finance, but it's not a central example of finance. Not every part of finance is equally difficult, so someone could be able to figure out that some things have a high chance of fraud without being good at finance in general.
If you are going to dismiss all the instances in which you were wrong, and dismiss all the people who were right given the same information that you had at the time, why bother calling yourself "rationalist"?
You are just believing whatever makes you feel better about yourself and finding rationalizations to do so.
Maybe all the finance organisations are consistently wrong in certain ways because they have similar internal cultures that lead them to consistently make the same mistakes. Nobody is capitalising on this obvious failure because all the people with money and the capacity to invest it are embedded in the same culture. They respect the financial experts and they all assume that if there were opportunities for profit somebody else would have taken them already.
It occurred to me earlier this year that the value of Bitcoin was probably going to go down, and there was probably some way for me to make money off this fact. But I don't really know how to do that and didn't care enough to follow it up. Given the amount of Bitcoin skeptics in the world, it's possibly weird that more people didn't see this coming and find a way to profit? My suspicion is that the kind of people who don't trust Bitcoin are not the kind of people who have investment strategies, and the kind of people who have investment strategies are the kind of people who trust Bitcoin.
I don't think Bitcoin value will evaporate to nothing, unless governments around the world really crack down on it. But gold seems to have everything going for it that Bitcoin has at the moment (except for being physical, and that's a two-way street).
My general assessment is (and was before the FTX collapse):
That analogy would be more persuasive if the "experts" in the real case were more akin to the staid and cautious CDC and WHO and doctor experts in your analogy.
But VC firms are hardly that. They are in the business of high risk high return investments. They roll dice all the time, and invest in stuff that has a 98% chance of failure and 2% chance of glory routinely. The fact that they invest in something is not a great endorsement of it being a "safe" investment, indeed I would think the more common sense interpretation would be that it is not safe at all -- that it is one of those risky bets that only people who love playing cards in Vegas for big stakes would happily place. If you wanted a safe bet, you'd look at where the University of California invests its pension fund, not a VC firm.
Why do you keep implying that the SEC endorsed FTX? Did they ever go "yep, we audited FTX and it's all legit?" The best that could be said is that they hadn't prosecuted him yet.
Yeah, I was going to make that point in my original longer post, so thank you for doing so. At best the SEC is like a police detective, referring for prosecution crimes that are brought to its attention. Equating "hasn't yet been fined or referred for prosecution by the SEC" to "financially on the up-and-up" is like assuming that because your neighbor hasn't yet been arrested for theft it's OK to invest in his multilevel marketing scheme.
Well, the SEC is another level of entanglement. Apparently (or going by all the Twitter action around this) Bankman-Fried's father knew an official in the SEC who then took the advice of Bankman-Fried himself on regulations that should apply:
This is part of the whole mess, the people involved were connected via their families to a lot of the infrastructure, for lack of a better word, so they maybe got favourable treatment/didn't have to jump through the same hoops as people without those connections. Or simply that they thought they knew better because they'd grown up in families with all this involvement, so they knew what could go wrong and how to get around things and make money the easy way.
I agree with L50L on this one. You would expect the SEC to consult with leaders of the industry on which it is pondering regulation, to do otherwise would be more than unusually ignorant on the part of government, to ignore experience and expertise they need. Likewise the FDA consults with physicians and drug companies.
Whether that consulting ends up corrupt is another story, but unfortunately one that is much more difficult to extract, which is why news media on deadlines usually run with Caesar's wife stories instead.
I had written a longer post including the reasons why analogizing the others to a conservative guardian certifying agency was equally dubious, but decided to condense it and settle for impeaching just one of them in the interests of cogency.
And I'm not really following the argument that they have to be impeached all at once or not at all. You made no distinction among them yourself, so the impression I got from the analogy was that you thought they were all equally equivalent to the CDC. If I establish that even one of them really wasn't, then I think that calls into question the aptness of your analogy ipso facto.
I'm not saying they're exactly equivalent to the CDC. I'm saying something like -
All of us make a bunch of assumptions going about our daily lives. When I write this Substack, I assume Substack Inc will pay me the money I'm owed instead of fudging my subscriber numbers to keep most of it for themselves. When you post on here, you're assuming I won't seed my posts with links to malware that will install on your computer and steal your credit card details. If you're using Windows, you're assuming *Microsoft* isn't stealing your credit card details. We all make these assumptions because it would be impossible to go through life otherwise - if I have to personally read every line of Windows code before trusting Microsoft, I would never have time for anything else.
We do this by vague common-sensical trust networks. I trust Microsoft because the laptop companies trust it enough to include on their laptops, the tech magazines trust it enough to not have NEVER USE MICROSOFT in big letters on every issue, and in general Microsoft is so big and widely used that if they were doing insane evil things I would have heard about it. If Microsoft does turn out to be secretly stealing my credit card details, I think it's fair to say I am a real victim, rather than that I'm partially culpable for not doing all the relevant research and poring-over-code myself.
In the same way, the fact that FTX was very big and all the big companies invested in it seemed like a common sense trust network such that I could deal with them without having to learn financial analysis myself and go through their books or whatever. Common sense trust networks aren't exactly like official FDA approval of a vaccine or something, but I do think they're like eg my doctor agreeing a vaccine is good, or the CDC saying vaguely positive things about a vaccine, and I think the same considerations apply.
Yes, I grasped the nature of the analogy the first time. I'm just pointing out the "trust network" agents in the real case aren't actually that similar to the agents in your analogy. VC firms *and* (so we don't get into this red herring again) several known to be adventurous investment firms grappling with shitty returns in the ordinary market (betting amounts they could easily afford to lose) plus the SEC do not add up to anything equivalent to "the watchdog CDC endorses use of this vaccine" or "80% of the world uses MS Windows as an OS and every online PC/laptop review magazine endorses products using it."
And I'm only making the point because the analogy seems part of a mildly defensive attempt to rationalize why trusting this particular trust network wasn't really a mistake. But certainly nobody here is hating on you for the mistake. Why feel defensive at all? If nothing else, you're clearly in good company. It would be much more interesting to analyze why you (and others) made the mistake in the first place. We all make mistakes like that, and your writing often shines most impressively when it tackles subjects of this nature: here's a mistake I made, and which people commonly make, and let's think deeply about why this happens.
"If you're using Windows, you're assuming *Microsoft* isn't stealing your credit card details."
I only assume that because I assume Microsoft would like to, but make such a mess of even simple updates to their software that they can't figure out how to get it to work.
See the roll-out of Windows 11 and their list of "if your PC/laptop doesn't have one of this set of processors, it isn't eligible for 11". It was transparently obvious they wanted to sell a ton of Surface laptops/tablets on the back of this (the links they kept sending me about 'buy a new machine to update!' were all for their Surfaces) and I'm not going to buy a new PC just to get Windows 11. Never mind that I dislike laptops and tablets and won't use one if I can possibly avoid it.
So ever since I've been using Windows, I updated to the latest version (yes, I suffered with Vista like everyone else) *except* for this one, and that's because I am not going to pay Microsoft more than I have to. 10 works fine and does what I want, why will I buy what I don't need?
(Ask me about their "Software as a Service" subscription model which we're signed up to at work, which I think is absurd for 'hey if you want to use Word, instead of a once-off purchase now you have to pay us for eternity'.)
All companies are evil and want to gouge money out of you. I don't trust *any* of them.
I think there's a big gap between this and what you actually said.
If someone told me that Microsoft was doing something nefarious, my reaction would *not* be "come back to me when you've started a company as big as Microsoft".
Hm, I get your point, but I think there is sth. missing. Suppose your kid is ill, and for whatever reasons many in your community strongly belief in alternative medicine, which has healed many who are around. And so you take your kid to the best healers around, all those persons with the highest alternative medicine credentials, to then discover in the end that they couldn't heal your child. From your point of view, those were the experts. From somebody elses point of view, they were not to trust with your kid's health, because the whole system they rely on is fraud, or, for better comparison, is at least imperfect with regard to certain illness. Maybe it does a good service with, let's say, preventing and reversing lifestyle illnesses early on, but it doesn't do a good service with healing cancer. In this example, the key is not to become a better alternative healer before being bitter about your mistake, it's to realize that this whole sub-sector never was the right place to seek the only or most relevant advice on your child's health. Even though it gave your neighbours helpful advice on nutrition and everyday activities, that resulted in them being much fitter.
The non-profit/ charities' criticims of those who would never have trusted FTX doesn't come from a place of 'I'm a better financial expert than those at Blackrock' or 'why did you trust Blackrock over (their closest competitor being slightly more sceptical of FTX)'. At least in parts it comes from a place of 'why did you think that specific sub-sector which we know is prone to fall for hypes, which is into high risk, high profit, often sees big losses, and likes to play with money that doesn't represent concrete values is the best place to rely on when thinking about funding for your charity?' I think in this case 'be a better billionare or shut up' is misguided.
Just to be clear, my intention is not to argue against VC, billionares or traders, I just disagree with 'as long as you can't do better, be silent'.
I guess your initial point was: don't beat yourself up too much over a wrong decision, and I actually agree with this one. But I think one needs to find a better reason for that, which maybe is just to say that everybody is making mistakes, that's human, and sometimes those mistakes can have costly consequences. In this case, many others made a similar mistake. Making a mistake, even a costly one, doesn't mean you're a moral monster.
I'd probably also argue to seriously reflect on this mistake and lessons learned, rather than saying 'ah, all the experts were wrong as well, so whatever, let's continue as always'.
I think in this case you didn't make a medical-knowledge failure, you made a meta-level failure in determining which supposed-experts to trust.
Obviously figuring out which experts to trust is hard, and sometimes "go with the most prestigious ones" goes badly, but I think it's the best heuristic most people who aren't experts themselves have, and people who follow it mostly can't be faulted. Our hypothetical alternative medicine mom is blameworthy insofar as she rejected the consensus prestigious experts for non-consensus non-prestigious experts.
I think Blackrock, the SEC, etc, *are* the most prestigious consensus experts in the financial world. If it was a failure to trust them instead of someone else, I still don't know who that someone else would be. I don't think there was some other expert affirmatively saying "FTX is bad!" (and I don't think people who hate all crypto on principle but didn't identify any specific issues with FTX should count)
I know (online acquaintance) somebody with a PhD in molecular genetics, a real genuine physical syndrome, and who believes in Reiki healing that has improved their condition and is now offering to do Reiki healing over the phone/internet for people.
Do I 'trust' "well they've got a PhD in a biological science, I don't even have a basic degree in anything, they are clearly the expert here"?
It could be worse. Remember "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV...now here's some medical advice...?" That stuff actually works. We're amazingly gullible as a species. It's probably one reason we are also so tribal -- we need *some* defense from the risks of our individual gullibility, and joining one of Scott's "trust networks" can help with that.
>I don't think people who hate all crypto on principle but didn't identify any specific issues with FTX should count
I don't see why - obviously, that's fair that they didn't say "SBF is a fraud but CZ is fine" and didn't predict that FTX was going to fall and Binance be left standing. But also, they didn't claim to predict which specific crypto businesses would collapse in what order - they just claim that all of them will and that all of the money invested in crypto will be a dead loss because the entire business is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. Given how many crypto businesses have failed, I'm updating strongly to "David Gerard is right".
This also explains why they aren't making money - creating a synthetic put option against the entire sector would be hard, and the margin would be so big that (as Keynes put it) the market can easily stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Moreover, the counterparties of that transaction are crypto investors; it's very hard to see how they would have the ability to pay out if you are right, since they are likely to go broke. What you would need is something like a credit default swap backed by a highly-diversified financial institution that has some exposure to crypto (if it has zero exposure, then it wouldn't be issuing those CDSes) but not so much that it would be at default risk if the sector went belly-up. But Goldman Sachs aren't issuing crypto CDSes.
[To simplify the above: I can't bet that "you're going to go broke" because if I win the bet, you can't pay out, so I have to bet with someone else that "he's going to go broke" and I have to be sure that you going broke won't bring them down too; the people I trust not to go broke if crypto crashes are not taking that bet]
It seems to me that there are two positions to update in favour of:
First, crypto is fundamentally a problem, anyone involved in it is not to be trusted. This is comparable to accepting charity funding from other sectors that are unethical, like casinos or tobacco or coal.
Second, any business that is making an especially big deal about its ethics and charity giving is more likely to be unethical/corrupt in its business practices. This is the old "mobsters give to the local church/school" idea writ large.
I think this is a reasonable heuristic in the big picture, but that it is being misapplied in this particular case. Big financial firms have a different purpose and live in a different ecosystem than big medical firms. The environments can't be compared to each other. Big financial firms are legendarily well known for not caring whether their counterparties are trustworthy, or honest, or are going to survive beyond the very short firm. Their collaboration says exactly and only "this is going to make money for me". Any other consequences and participants can go sex act themselves. You only need to have read one Michael Lewis book to understand this. Big medical firms have their well being and survivability tied to solving problems for the population at large and big financial firms absolutely do not. Blackrock making money and cooperating with something is no basis for assuming that anyone else will make money, or not be scammed, or that their partners are not criminals. No one in that industry cares about any of that. That's where most of the margin comes from. The mafia is an expert in smuggling but they are not a trustworthy source of information about the topic. The FSB is an expert in the Russian security state but they are not trustworthy sources of information about it. Etc. If you've missed the existence of this entire category, that's not good.
Also, it's really aggravating that you keep bringing up the SEC - you have no basis for doing so. The link you cite makes the following argument: "The offshore crypto exchange to which US law does not apply was not prevented by the SEC via unicorn powers from committing fraud. With that as evidence, plus the evidence of anonymous people and from extremely trustworthy Republican politicians making accusations that they totally always have a good basis for, definitely maybe SEC was in cahoots with FTX, after all they have held meetings, or maybe not but definitely a "bad look".
It's an offensively poor and non-empirical argument, suggesting that you don't know much about the processes and practices of the SEC, the legal, regulatory, or habitual constraints under which they operate, or even the basics of what they have or have not done concerning FTX or the crypto industry, and even worse, you don't even know what you don't know and that you don't know it. But claims that "the SEC endorsed the bad guys" .. are a very convenient thing for a lot of people to claim/believe right now for obvious reasons.
> I think in this case you didn't make a medical-knowledge failure, you made a meta-level failure in determining which supposed-experts to trust.
Yes, that's a fair summary of my point.
> I don't think there was some other expert affirmatively saying "FTX is bad!
I'm not expert enough to give you a lot of detail here. But if I was to go to any financial expert close-by, and say: I need money for altruistic cause x, and I want something that gives me more money rather than less money, but I also want something that is low risk, because (all kinds of reasons)' I kind of doubt FTX would have been the advice of the day.
I don't think anyone was arguing from first principles that FTX was the best company to get money from. I think FTX was offering people money, and you could either say yes and have FTX money, or say no and have zero money. I think the bar for accepting an offer like this is pretty low - basically just "not so fraudulent that it would be offensive to their victims to accept" - and that it was very fair to be surprised when in the end FTX failed to clear that bar.
I agree with most of that except the last sentence. It should have been very clear to anyone that FTC had a decent chance of failure. Especially after JUN.
You can say you don't like Mormonism, but if you say after a Mormon sex scandal "how could anyone have missed the red flags? It was so obvious!", then people have the right to not believe you. After all, if they were so obvious, why didn't any of the many critics of Mormonism see them? Why didn't the police see them?
Your Mistakes disclaimer, the opening statement; I don't promise never to make mistakes. Grammar and sentence structure. You never promise to make mistakes. Correction of a double negative should read: I don't promise to never make mistakes. Trivial? yes, but totally changes the meaning.
This is cutting against the grain of this thread, but does anyone here still take COVID seriously, or are all of you basically over the pandemic? My brother and his girlfriend still mask up when going to certain places, and they also got the latest booster, and my corner drugstore and my parent's cafe still requires masking, but otherwise, I rarely see people masked up. Am I right in assuming it's pointless to care about COVID still?
I have resumed wearing mask on public transport for the winter season. Not really because I am concerned about Covid specifically, but rather because I think it is a good general hygiene standard.
And when I get cold symptoms I test for Covid. I plan to isolate a little more strict with Covid than with other colds, but not much more. (Isolating is no longer mandatory in my country even with Covid).
I pretty much stopped caring about COVID back in February, but I wore an n95 when flying at my parent's insistence and I may decide to get the latest booster just in case (mainly to protect relatives when traveling for the holidays, rather than myself).
I have a risk factor that makes my risk approx equivalent to that of a man in his 70's. I go where I like, but mask in indoor public places, get the boosters, and run a big air purifier in my office. The degree of risk of my getting very sick with a respiratory illness is going to wax and wane as flu, covid and RSV cases do, but it's not low enough to shrug off. If I were 35 with no risk factors I think it would be. The other concern I have is Long Covid. I'm sure a lot of things called Long Covid are just slower-than-average recoveries, symptoms that in fact having nothing to do with covid, neurosis, malingering etc. But I'm pretty positive that does not account for all the Long Covid cases. I had what I'm pretty sure was a post viral syndrome myself 20 years ago and it absolutely ruined 3 years of my life. I never want to go through that again. Just for the record, I am not indignant that most other people are not masking.
Mostly my behavior has returned to pre-pandemic norms, and my comfort level is squarely there.
The only exceptions to that would be one-offs like if I was exposed, I'd stay in and wear a mask to go out until I could reliably test negative, or if I have a friend who is uncomfortable for some reason I'd mask, hang out outside, or whatever.
I got vaxxed, and got a booster last December. Since things went back to normal in Ireland about 6 months ago, I have too. Pharmacies used to ask you to mask, but now even they don't. I was drinking at the bar in my local pub tonight, and have been frequently.
I'm not convinced by the booster thing at this point - I think if you are working in public health or something maybe it is useful. But it doesn't prevent infection, and other than reduce the chances of infection for a couple of months. all it does is give your long-term immunity a prod IMO. Encountering virus in the wild probably does that just as well. I don't think it would hurt to get another booster this Christmas, and if my family fret about it I probably will. But I am basically treating Covid as just another endemic virus.
As far as I know I haven't got it, but I quite likely have had it asymptomatically. Then again my sister had it a few months ago for the first time (her son who lives with her got it previously but she wasn't infected). She said it was nasty, but she was over it within a week.
I mask if I'm sick (and probably contagious), because that is one of the few cultural changes I'm hoping lasts after the pandemic. Otherwise I don't worry about COVID beyond what I have to with regards to my family's jobs (my mother works in healthcare, so I get tested before she comes to visit if I might be sick)
I'm taking it seriously in the sense of getting new boosters when they come out, but at this point I think that's about all it is reasonable to do if you're not in a very at-risk population.
I'm still avoiding gatherings as much as practical, wearing an n95 when it's not, not eating indoors, etc. I expect to do that until:
a) I'm convinced that long Covid odds are well under 1% per infection, ideally under 0.01%. (Currently the studies, which are all flawed in various ways, more research needed, etc. etc., seem to point to closer to 1 in six, with 1 in 20 about as low as it gets. While vaccination helps it seems to be more on the order of 40-50% reduction-- maybe less, maybe a bit more, not vastly more-- than my preferred .999...)
I'll be very glad to see a persuasive study that shows it to be much lower, and due to the low quality of the existing data that's not ruled out. But thus far I'm still waiting.
Advances in prevention and treatment would also work, of course. But we're no longer doing Warp Speed-type programs and even funding for existing research has been largely blocked by budget struggles. (The administration is going to try again in the lame duck, but I imagine that it will fail again.)
So I expect that to be back to the usual timeline for new drugs, i.e. not getting to approval any time soon, even if there's something to approve. (And I've read Derek Lowe for enough years to know how many candidates there are for each drug that works.)
b) prevalence is low enough that it's reasonable not to expect to be infected once or twice a year in the absence of precautions. I don't go out of my way this much to avoid flu because 1) it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same rate of sequelae, and 2) flu prevalence times infectiousness meant I could go 5-10 years without getting the flu. That's clearly not currently the case with Covid.
c) the expected seriousness of long Covid is assessed to be lower than it currently looks. (I'm concerned both about life-changing but not immediately deadly things like long term fatigue or permanent anosmia, and actual life-threatening issues like greatly increased cardiovascular risks in the years following.)
d) social/economic pressure makes that unsustainable.
(Or, I guess, e) I actually decide to stop worrying and love repeated SARS-Cov-2 infections, but that seems less likely.)
Even if I go "back to normal" in some sense, I still don't expect I'll ever, e.g., fly without a mask again. I routinely got colds and worse from flying and I'd be just as happy not to go back to that even if Covid risk drops below my threshold.
I got the bivalent booster some weeks back. I am considering masking up in the most crowded environments I frequent, namely the subway and the supermarket.
n95 masks help substantially (not as much as I'd like, significantly more than zero), and I don't find them all that uncomfortable. YMMV.
For those looking for comfortable ones, I like Kimberly-Clark's duck masks. 3M's Aura models also get good ratings for both comfort and filtering capacity.
Don't order from Amazon. They're full of counterfeits. (Or were last time I was buying from them.) This seems to be a general problem with filtration products for them-- I stopped buying water filters there a few years back after I noticed that I was getting fakes (that weighed half as much as the genuine article).
One thing that perplexes me is the continued prevalence of cloth and surgical masks. In 2020, sure: there was a shortage of n95s, and something was better than nothing (more true pre-omicron). And a lot of people were wearing the minimum they could get away with to comply with mask requirements anyway.
Now no one is required to wear a mask if they don't choose to (at least most places-- I think my health care system still requires them), and there's no longer a shortage. So I'd expect things to have sorted into no mask ("No mask? No mask!") and n95/KN95/etc. Instead, I still see, among the minority of mask-wearers, a fair number of cloth masks that are probably very porous and minimally protective, and surgical masks that leak out the sides.
(And that I at least found much less comfortable than an n95. Surgical masks were sweatier, and I never found one that didn't fog my glasses. Having the seal and space to breathe an n95 offers is a huge improvement!)
Maybe it's cost. But it doesn't really seem to correlate with income. (And it's possible to make n95s last if one is motivated-- buy seven and rotate them daily till they're visibly dirty or damaged.) And KN95s especially are pretty cheap, though I was never able to get a good seal with one.
"The King In Yellow" was definitely a play about covid. That's my headcanon now. Hastur is pleased.
Working in grocery, I've also remained baffled by the prevalence of barrel-bottom masks, often in addition to nose-out wearing. Have always wanted to see what's in someone's head when they run that kind of heuristic. What sort of strange information did they get about covid? Is it just a "better than nothing" rationalization? A virtue signal? (The strangest is still occasionally seeing people trying to make do with, like, bandannas or pulling their shirt collar up...) Sometimes wonder if it's just a collective-action problem, and if there was a loud enough PSA that "Actually Most People Won't Judge You Weird For Not Masking", perhaps a significant fraction would sigh in social relief. That's the only reason I still do it, on occasion: not wanting to ruffle any tribal feathers. Beware Trivial Social Inconveniences.
(Conversely, some people enjoy the social acceptability of masks for convenience - they don't like having facial expressions read, do like the reduced makeup requirements, whatever. I'm sympathetic to such people. Still seems like that wouldn't account for a huge fraction of maskers though.)
Yes, agreed! I don't understand this phenomenon, and I very, very much don't understand how we *still* have people wearing masks with their nose sticking out in places where there's no requirement to mask at all.
I can only conclude it's just a fundamental lack of information, except I also don't understand that, because if you think the risk is high enough it's worth ameliorating, how do you then think "but it's not worth researching for five seconds to find out how to effectively do that"?
Oh come on! LHN didn't say or imply anything remotely like they're delighted to do it. Nor did they say they planned to do it the rest of their life. And you & I both know that if LHN is masking it's because they are concerned that covid for them would be something worse than sniffles. It's a lowdown, unfair tactic to misstate what LHN said while sneering at the absurdity of the distorted version you present. It's as though I responded to your post this way: "Trebuchet's take is that the world has a right to see their glamorous face 24-7, and that their courage and realism about covid are as rare & impressive as a perfect LSAT. Lord save me from these egomaniacs!"
Covid isn't the sniffles, as the 2300 Americans dead of it this past week could attest. But at this point no one's making you protect yourself or anyone else against it.
As for understanding: Maybe we assess the risk of Covid differently. Maybe we assess the burden of masking differently. I'd guess probably both.
The recommendations were for those who are still interested in comfortable, effective masks at least some of the time. Which by my observation is a minority, but not vanishingly small fraction of the population.
Hm, It's arguably worth getting an omicron booster, especially if you're in a vulnerable population, but aside from that yeah pretty much (unless you're severely immunocompromised, but then you'd have to take extreme measures to avoid flu anyway).
It's a huge exaggeration to say there's nothing you can do to avoid it without spending your entire existence in self-imposed lockdown. I go to stores, movies, etc., but mask in these indoor public places. I go to work, but run a bit big purifier in the office in lieu of wearing a mask and asking the people I meet with to mask. Before parties & the like my friends and I test. That is very far from self-imposed lockdown, & so far it has worked to keep me from getting covid. Of course I am aware that I may still get it, but the point of my precautions isn't to guarantee that I never get it -- it's to minimize the number of times I get it. Zero is my preferred number, but if my precautions mean I get it once, rather than 3 or 4 times, that also seems like a worthwhile goal, worth the trouble I'm taking (which in total is maybe 2 hrs per week of wearing a mask, testing once a month or so, and flicking the switch on the air purifier when I arrive at work).
>All of the stuff we did besides the vax was a giant waste of time and money
You're ignoring the period of time early in the pandemic when the medical systems were being genuinely overwhelmed, there weren't enough ventilators or even beds to go around, and "flatten the curve" was the (even in hindsight, correct) Narrative. Merely slowing transmission made sense as one of the terminal goals.
(There's some debate as to whether the US could have done better with a faster/stronger response, or whether it was naive to expect that to ever work when partisans were creating a low-trust cooperate-defect scenario, but the above isn't predicated on that)
Everything after the booster, though, much less clear that it wasn't a waste of money.
The country got caught up in the dream that we could eliminate covid, the way we have various other disease. At the beginning, I bought the idea that that was theoretically possible, though I didn't see how we could do it in practice -- locking everything down for a few months seemed like it would do terrible damage to the economy and to a lot of individuals. I now understand that covid just isn't the kind of disease you can eradicate the way you do polio, and I'm sure docs & epidemiologists at the alphabet agencies realized that from the beginning. Why didn't somebody in government say so? Why didn't somebody come up with a plan that optimized our chance of having the best outcome with this damn disease, given that eradication was not possible?
>I'm sure docs & epidemiologists at the alphabet agencies realized that from the beginning.
Other variants of SARS and MERS were successfully contained. It doubt it was immediately clear just how much more difficult SARS-CoV-2 was in that regard.
" Why didn't somebody come up with a plan that optimized our chance of having the best outcome with this damn disease, given that eradication was not possible?"
They probably had one, but it failed on the critical item: the populace must go along with it.
Sweden was one of the few countries where enough of the population didn't successfully protest (cue politicians jumping in) the state epidemiologist's original plan.
In retrospect, should it have been a red flag that FTX didn't buy a billion malaria nets and distribute them in Africa?
EDIT: Aka, should it have been a red flag that an entity claiming to be Effectively Altruist was only doing high status effective altruist activities not low status but effectively effective effective altruist activities?
Maybe, but as Scott points out FTX was acting like it was idea-constrained not funding constrained, and it still put $0 into bednets. Maybe "AI safety" is so much better than bednets that you fund all AI Safety ideas first before buying a single bednet, but FTX was spraying money everywhere.
Out of sympathy, here is the very short, very vaguely accurate cliff notes summery:
FTX was a very successful cryptocurrency exchange run by a man who was very connected to Effective Altruism. As an exchange, it was supposed to hold people's cryptocurrency and make money off of fees when exchanging from one cryptocurrency to another. It turns out that instead of holding on to people's money, they were using that money to speculate on cryptocurrency. Also there was a lot of financially shady stuff going on that is too complicated to summarize, but most financial people agree was a deceptive attempt to make a particular cryptocurrency that FTX controls look better than it was. Another successful cryptocurrency exchange in competition with FTX realized they were puffing up their cryptocurrency, and did some maneuvers to cause the price to drop really far really fast. As part of this many people wanted to withdraw their money from FTX, and then FTX stopped letting people withdraw their money: this revealed that they didn't actually have the deposits because they had been spending them on speculative investments, which they were not given permission to do. FTX is collapsing as a company, and a bunch of people lost the cryptocurrency they had deposited with them.
This has led a lot of Effective Altruism people to say publicly "Don't steal people's money in an attempt to make even more money: it's wrong, even if you planned to use the money you made to make the world a better place."
"True, there are also other people outside of finance who are also supposed to look out for this kind of thing. Investigative reporters. Congress. The SEC. But the leading US investigative reporting group took $5 million from SBF. Congressional Democrats took $40 million from SBF in midterm election money. The SEC was in the process of allying with SBF to anoint him as the face of legitimate well-regulated crypto in America. You, a random AI researcher who tried Googling “who are these people and why are they giving me money” before accepting a $5,000 FTX grant, don’t need to feel guilty for not singlehandedly blowing the lid off this conspiracy. This is true even if a bunch of pundits who fawned over FTX on its way up have pivoted to posting screenshots of every sketchy thing they ever did and saying “Look at all the red flags!”
Scott,
I very rarely comment here, but I follow you voluntarily. I don't think you're a bad guy, I've learned some interesting things from you. But this reply is really a joke, I'm sorry. I'm a random well-educated liberal, and it's been wildly obvious to me that FTX was a Ponzi scheme for years, and more importantly, not just me, but a thriving crypto-skeptic community.
You'll see right in the biography that this guy's been covered by the MSM for years. Ever since Mt. Gox blew up, there has been a super-abundance of critical analysis of crypto as a giant scam.
Does this sound like a trustworthy basis for assigning financial value? No, it does not. This is CNBC.com - I am not deep diving here.
I am neutral on your point as to whether NGOs should feel *bad* about taking money from a criminal. They were presumably using the money to do good, and it's easy to get confused and not know if and when the scammer was crossing the line from unethical lying and cheating to criminal behavior. That's an individual ethical decision. But I guarantee you that the Democratic party, ProPublica, and the SEC were extremely aware that SBF was an untrustworthy scammer, although they may not have all known he was crossing into criminal behavior.
The details of how SBF appears to have committed fraud were not obvious and well known, but crypto was readily knowable as a Ponzi scheme that was consistently bringing ruin to naive people. You absolutely could have done better due diligence to understand that, and so could any NGO who wanted to understand with an hour of research. Of course, it's easy to do research badly and not realize that you have done a bad job, so I'm not personally scorning anyone who was rugged, but those people absolutely should hold themselves accountable for mucking up something not overly difficult.
You don't need a prediction market, you just need a reasonably diverse base for information intake and a willingness to take adverse information seriously. Crypto exchanges have been blowing up on the regular for a decade, all the info was there in plain sight.
Scott is guilty of being human. This is a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing, if people he knew were saying that people they knew said these guys were okay, why would he doubt them?
It's also the technocratic strain in Rationalism and EA that believes anything done with modern advanced high-tech methods has to be so much more efficient and better. I'm suspicious of technocracy so crypto always sounded to me like a very elaborate way to get scammed, especially when some people were enthusing about how it was untrackable and you could safely buy your guns/drugs/illegal but shouldn't be stuff with it.
However, it's always very hard for people to believe that others who share (or seem to share) the same general beliefs as they do, and move in the same circles, and are involved in the same good causes, can be up to no good. This may not be the strawman 100% rationalist who takes nothing on trust and always runs tests on if they should trust their spouse when their spouse says they love them, but it's a lot more human and a lot more personable.
You are overstating your case (just like many commenters before you); crypto is not ENTIRELY a scam.
BUT, more importantly, it is an obviously sketchy industry, just like, say, personal development advice ("this book will change your life!") or medical supplements or something like that.
Any "crypto-billionare" should be automatically viewed with suspicion unless proven otherwise (and in my eyes, number of crypto moguls who proven themselves beyond suspicion is so far exactly 0). Failure to see that does indeed seem like significant error of judgment.
>I'm a random well-educated liberal, and it's been wildly obvious to me that FTX was a Ponzi scheme for years, and more importantly, not just me, but a thriving crypto-skeptic community.
Yes, but there are probably 5 other things you think are obviously Ponzi schemes (or otherwise criminal/corrupt) that aren't.
Of course for any controversial claim, there will be people who believe it and people who dispute it. When facts come out that prove one side right, everyone in that side will get to crow about how 'obvious' it was the whole time and get to feel superior to everyone on the other side.
That doesn't actually mean it was obvious and that the other side didn't have a coherent rational story for their beliefs, or even that the 'winning' side necessarily evaluates evidence in this domain better in general. You need an N of more than 1 to prove that.
Also, more specifically: I'm 100% with you on the side of believing that crypto and web 3 has been a speculation bubble from that start, motivated by grifters and confidence agents. But that doesn't necessarily mean that *every individual actor* on the scene is intentionally committing fraud and lying about their intentions at all times. You still have to make judgement calls in individual cases, and can be wrong for negative judgements.
I agree with you. It's hard to strike a balance in the reply and in how to talk about these things. You're right, I don't have any evidence that some notional "side" that is "crypto skeptics" is generally better at evaluating evidence about scammers than a notional side that is "crypto friendly". I also agree that not everyone who believes in crypto, or even believes in and markets it, is a "scammer" in terms of committing securities fraud, etc. Speculation bubbles are weird. You tell people "buy this coin, and then its value will go up and you'll be rich", and that.... is true at the time! And will be true for an unspecified future amount of time. Everyone is being completely honest and accurate... until they stop being accurate later, and the "dishonest" part often comes in from secondary lies and deception about the nature of the market, the marketplace, and the financial games happening offstage. Which not everyone is aware of, or fully understands when they are told about.
I don't really think that "crypto skeptics" are even a side, or a coherent community, etc, although they probably overlap with market skeptics and small-c conservatism that may have some overlap with "conventional NPR liberal"... whatever that trope really represents about its own population base, etc.
Anyway, to me personally, I wrote the reply because Scott's reply suggested or implied, to me, that everyone who fell for this had no reason to take stock, no reason to doubt themselves or their process for evaluating trustworthiness, and there was no easy way to know about any red flags. I don't agree. If you got rugged by this, in this day and age, you do have a reason to doubt yourself and change your methods going forward. Mistakes are part of life, but learn from them to avoid repeating them. Most of all, I want to push back on the last part. The red flags were widely reported and readily available to be known.
There's a very important difference between "Crypto doesn't have real value/potential, and FTX is a company profiting off of people playing casino-like games, which I think is bad" and "FTX is committing actual fraud and/or is insolvent but hiding it"
Even believing crypto is basically a scam, it was plausible that FTX was no morally worse than a regular casino, which in general are (I assume?) non-fraudulent businesses taking advantage of people throwing their money away.
(caveat: I don't actually believe crypto is a scam, I just think even if crypto is a scam, FTX was plausibly non-fraudulent")
This is a valuable distinction, and other replies also draw a distinction between "crypto is a speculative bubble that will pop and selling it is shady" and "committing financial crimes". This is true... I guess. Not every crypto-related business is committing financial crimes, and not all of them are even lying to and/or concealing material information from their customers, which is also not always a crime, although it is always shit behavior.
To know that FTX was committing crimes, you needed to be paying attention to more specific info. However, that info was also out there. The Bitfinex'd link is a gateway to lots of that info. How many offshore crypto exchanges are committing massive financial crimes? all of them. Every single one. No doubt whatsoever. And there's plenty of evidence. But it is true that this is a complicated and messy topic and that nonexperts can interpret evidence and facts in multiple ways and also get bored and tired and distracted and not know what is a crime and what is true.
So I don't think everyone who didn't realize FTX and every other offshore crypto exchange platform are criminals, is a bad person or an idiot for that. But if it is your job to figure these things out, and you didn't figure it out, you can and should have done so. It wasn't a case where the needed info wasn't available; it was.
Just as a matter of diplomacy, you're probably better off not relying on David Gerard for a big chunk of the support for your argument. At least not here.
Care to elaborate? I have no idea of the backstory here. Anyway, he's by no means and in no way unique or critical to the argument, I just can't be bothered to hunt down other sources for the community.
I don't think it undermines Gerard's position on crypto, specifically (it's probably made him a _little_ more opposed, but only in the tribalistic sense that red/blue affiliation tweaks everyone), but it's an issue in other spaces, and I say that as someone who interacted with him better on tumblr.
Blockchain technology has the possibility to change the world for the better but we have yet to get it truly woven into the fabric of our society and the regulating powers that be may ruin it because it makes so many of their institutions obsolete. Right now it's like the internet in 1996. No idea how to invest other than in the broad idea that it will move forward. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, doesn't have a super compelling use case for developed economies other than being like a wildly speculative commodity.
My favored examples of real world blockchain utility mostly come down to enforcing government transparency. As an example, Nigerian land speculators have found that, instead of buying land from existing owners, it's often much cheaper to bribe a land registrar to surreptitiously alter the title [1].
Consider a land registry on a public blockchain where records can only be updated with two of the following three cryptographic signatures:
A) The existing land owner as stated on the blockchain
B) A land registrar official
C) A state-level judge
Such a system doesn't make it *impossible* for corrupt officials to illegally alter records, but it makes things much more challenging by enforcing transaction transparency on a record system that the government doesn't directly own or control.
Alternately, imagine a system where govt contractors are paid in cryptographic tokens that can only be cashed out for untrackable dollars if and when they're paid as salary into individual worker-owned accounts. When paid from one contractor to another, or shifted between expensing units within a contractor, those transactions live on a public blockchain. If you want to figure out, for example, where exactly the money went for NYC's 2nd Ave subway, it's a database query rather than waiting for the NYT to spend several hundred hours doing investigative reporting [2].
In neither of these examples are you necessarily *replacing* an institution, but rather substantially *reforming* the behavior of an institution by making malfeasance harder to hide.
The primary case at present for blockchain fully replacing an existing institution is, basically, when you want to coordinate crime. Specifically, something like bitcoin is useful as a way of illegally circumventing capital controls and currency pegs in failing states with a hyperinflationary currency.
There are speculative notions about how blockchain could enable things like opt-in transnational states [3], or be used for public goods financing [4], or perform some kind of secure online voting system [5], but none of that's here yet and I don't understand any of this stuff well enough to confidently opine about viability.
In neither of the first two examples is blockchain necessary to achieve the benefits -- if a government is willing to designate a blockchain as its "source of truth" for land ownership it could certainly do the same with a third-party database hosted and run by a neutral party outside their jurisdiction. (For the record, in neither case do I believe it's realistic that a government would actually do this).
And requiring all government contractors to be paid in internal accounting dollars that could only be transferred internally unless paid out to worker-owned accounts might work _better_ run through a centralized Federal database, as there could be a strong validation process to ensure that the worker-owned accounts were actually worker-owned, and that submitted expenses, etc. were valid, contractor organizations had actual existence as corporate entities with Federal tax numbers, etc.
The fundamental argument for blockchain solutions for these types of problems is that they remove the possibility for modification of the source of truth or the transactional history and therefore remove manipulation of the database as a source of corruption, but they are by no means corruption-free (51% attacks can enable violation of the integrity of the chain, bugs can enable all sorts of malfeasance and hacks, and even barring the above, just because a transaction is valid doesn't mean the input data was correct or the participants are actually who they say they are).
I think your comment about whether it's realistic for the government to "actually do this" is important in the discussion. You are correct that the blockchain is not technically necessary, but if the alternative solution is wildly implausible, isn't there value in the blockchain solution over the current system especially in places with significantly more "old school" corruption? Assuming the tech was there to implement this fairly easily and you could really improve transparency--wouldn't millions of powerful local officials feel threatened and work to prevent adoption?
I actually agree with your criticisms and should clarify that I don't presently endorse any of those use cases as, necessarily, a good idea. My intent was to scope out the best presently plausible use cases for blockchain, not to present blockchain as the ideal solution to the problems under consideration.
There are institutions, they are just code instead of people. You can read the code and opt in. Anyone can make new code at any time and people can move to it freely.
Anyone can fix any problem by writing new code and moving to it.
The blockchain part simplifies the distribution and running of code and establishes truth (immutability) and identity (private keys).
Im handwaving a whole lot here but maybe you get the idea?
I think the specific case where a blockchain is useful is where there is a mechanism to do that which would (in a non-blockchain situation) result in a specific guy making the change, but specific guy can also be bribed and he just makes the change without going through the mechanism.
Like, the law is officially supposed to be changed by a public vote in an elected assembly, but in practice, the clerk can just change things and you can bribe the clerk and not bother with the vote. In that sort of low-trust situation, you could put the law on the blockchain and set up the DAO so that the only way to change it is for a majority of members of the assembly to directly input their approval of the change - ie the vote takes place on the blockchain. That cuts the clerk out of the loop (obviously, you can still bribe the legislators, but that tends to be more expensive).
I think these sorts of problems are relatively unusual - ie problems where the official records are changed by bribing the records-keepers.
Also, I think that voting on a DAO is sufficiently technically difficult that I wouldn't trust elected legislators to do it correctly; and they would get a staffer to do it, and now you're back to the original problem: you can just bribe the staffers.
If EA were a single indivisible idea that includes the FTX affair, that would be pretty bad.
But luckily, it is a series of distinct assumptions. One can be skeptical, for example, of the idea that one should prioritize a high expected value, even if the modal outcome is neutral or negative, but that would be no reason to doubt much more basic EA assumptions, like "not all dollars of charity have equivalent impacts." Or "poorer people generally benefit more from charity than richer people, and by global standards, very few of the poorest people live in Western countries."
Unfortunately for EA, those assumptions are not unique to EA thinking, and EAs now have a lot more baggage.
EA has a few decent insights, some of which are not unique to EA - though EA is making positive inroads to making them more widely considered. Also unfortunately for EA, some of the other hills them seem inclined to die on involve perspectives with limited value for most other people. AI Risk, animal welfare, "weird" Rationalist trapping like polyamory. These were already troubling to a group that was just becoming well known. Now that FTX is getting linked to EAs, they are going to have a much harder time getting positive messages out.
Hence including this in the topic of "updating". My prior on "big political donor is involved in money laundering" is high to start, of course. When the donor in question is a finance guy I update higher. When he appears to be a force for good in the world like SBF I revise downwards. When he's caught doing actual fraud, I revise upwards again.
Admittedly, my original prediction of technically-legal finance shenanigans may be much higher than most readers here, but I don't -feel- cynical. It's what allows me to laugh off critics of Bernie Sanders saying he has three houses and a couple of supercars. Well yeah, but I'm sure he got all his assets in ways that are technically legal. He's in Congress, what do you expect?
(Huey Long, when asked how his personal wealth had grown 10x more during his time in office than his gross salary, famously replied, "Only by exercising the most exTREME frugality.")
> The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”
You know, I asked myself some similar questions after being cheated on by a spouse and friend. In the end, I decided the act of trusting itself has intrinsic value. It's not infinite, so you have to take some care, but if you trust 100 times and get burnt once, and that once isn't the end of the world, maybe you came out of it OK?
Also, telling everyone proactively how, when you were fooled, it made you feel bad and take more care in the future means placing trust in you is a better bargain than placing trust in any other random person.
"...but I am just never convinced by these calibration analyses."
I'd be more convinced if the *polls* seemed to take this into account and get better over time.
One thing that I think hurts a lot of this is that folks really want to assume independence because it makes the math so much easier. The underlying reality often isn't independent.
I have a super-short writeup about this and how I think it helps to explain the 2016 election errors by the pollsters.
Correlations are, indeed, real. But they usually revolve around a "hidden variable". Still, one should realize that that hidden variable probably exists, even if one can't identify it. (But sometimes it really *is* just random variation, and won't persist.)
I used FTX and left some money there way longer than I should have because of EA/SSC/Rats implicit and explicit vouching for SBF. Obviously I don't blame anyone but myself, it wasn't a big portion of my portfolio (sadly I can't login to check specifics) and I'd still trust the related communities more than most but it still seems like a big collective L.
Why are you demanding proof from me? I didn’t endorse it as proven! But it is an angle that was not mentioned by Scott and I thought it should be included as a possibility since he is trying so hard to figure out what to think about this.
Someone else posted this link here but maybe you didn’t see it. I recommend it because even though it isn’t directly relevant to the Ukraine theory, it argues very strongly that SBF was put up to create FTX by much older and more experienced figures and that FTX never made any sense as a legitimate business.
> make a list of everyone I’ve ever trusted or considered trusting, make prediction markets about whether any of them are committing fraud, then pre-emptively be emotionally dead to anybody who goes above a certain threshold.
Do you think you should add to that list a certain blogger who advocates for a monarchy in a time when the more religious party coalesced around a figure who sent a mob to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, given that your association with him has pulled his audience into yours and given your halls a well deserved reputation for racism and fascism among those who have had the good sense to be driven away from that stink? Or are you still being charitable to bad ideas from a dude whose qualifications consist of having a blog with smug essays on it? (I suspect you're about to learn that headlines are short-lived, and those trotted out as stars for a few years can be abandoned and ignored in a mere turning of the times. If you want to stay shining, and I'd like that personally, you're giong to have to think about your mistakes. Thiel won't even look at Moldbug if it doesn't suit his purposes anymore.)
The problem with the SFBA Rationalist cult is very specifically that their anti-credentialism led them to discount the importance of any establishment knowledge and utter crankery is the result.
Someone else called it: hubris. It's hubris that causes EA/Rationalist types to attempt to solve the same problems as everyone else believing their magic online blog juice will prevent them from making the same mistakes as everyone else, so they make not just the same mistakes but the same mistakes from a past era.
Credulity isn't a virtue if an entire community forms around someone who sorts out the most credulous and willing to believe the narrative of genius even secondhand...
Only in a very bounded sense — but still a meaningful one: Scott does believe there's positive value in reading him. Some would argue that Moldbug is the type of insidious proselytizer who is not *safe* to read even if you go in telling yourself "I disagree with him on core moral points and always will, I'm just curious to see what his object-level arguments are"; who will pollute your thinking with memes — in the Dawkinsian sense — that will make your thinking trend more right-wing over time without your conscious awareness.
Personally I want to think better of Scott's skill as a rationalist than that; that he would fall for such a "honeytrap"; but a more paranoid/cynical person could very, very easily made the case that this happened to him. That even as he tried to reject the overall worldview, he allowed disjointed Moldbuggian ideas and assumptions to creep into his thinking little by little, Cathedrals and left-swimming Cthulhus and the lot; and that a critical mass of those has caused him to become much closer to being reactionary-adjacent than 2012-Scott is likely to believe reading Moldbugg could or would make him.
I am skeptical that "dangerous meme" / infohazard is a useful concept. Like "misinformation ", people are only going to apply that idea to their outgroups as a way to discourage testing and exchanging ideas, to police social boundaries. (As we see here with Impassionata's excellent impression of a NYT commentor.)
Having said that, even if "trusting Moldbug not to publish infohazard" is an eccentric interpretation of the OP's usage, it certainly qualifies as intelligible.
I struggle to believe that you wrote this, or could reread it now, and with the intent to change our minds or persuade anyone here to your perspective. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you did genuinely think that this was persuasive, but that's pretty hard.
If you wrote this to express your hatred and disgust, and more broadly the hatred and disgust certain factions on the left have for people here, I'd like to assure you that we are all well aware of it and have been for some time. It has been expressed by a wide variety of writers and methods for well over a decade. It was shocking and hurtful years ago; it's normal now.
But, in summary, the rules here are very clear and always have been. I'm not sure anyone could classify what you've written as kind and it's really unclear, to me at least, what is necessary or true of any of it.
PS, seriously, the non-troll way to write this is some variant of "Has this FTX misjudgment caused you to reevaluate any of the controversial writers you've written about in the past or beliefs you've become associated with."
I struggle to believe that you wrote this with any intent but to lecture me on how you wish you were spoken to. I speak as one without regard for your feelings because facts don't care about your feelings. The fact is that Scott Alexander's writings and their **consequences** drove people away. A lot of people away.
I'm here because I like some of Scott's work and still have some hope for reasons I don't fully understand myself.
Scott Alexander platforms someone who actually advocates for a strongman to take power, which no matter what word you put on it (monarchist or fascist) is essentially, in the consequentialist view, a call for violence against minorities of various idpol stripes unless you are a blind fucking idiot too credulous and too easily taken advantage of to be considered a serious political writer. You might not believe it, but enough people do (and those people have a voice, too).
> it's really unclear, to me at least, what is necessary or true of any of it.
Think about it then, and trouble me not with your insipid handwringing about tone, for I don't care. If I am banned for speaking truth then I shall laugh and cross Scott Alexander off my list for good. I always hoped he&his would come around.
Cry less. If Scott Alexander's communities harbored racists and fascists because of Scott Alexander's choices, I want to believe that Scott Alexander's communities harbored racists and fascists.
Ah, I figured the PS was a bad move, ah well. I was genuinely curious whether you thought it might convince someone or, more seriously, whether there was some third option I hadn't considered. That happens sometimes.
I dunno man - you don’t sound cold so much as inflamed, and the jury’s out on whether you’re a disingenuous little shit or not. Catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar, though.
Don't think you understand me or my motivations. I'm interested in pointing out the flies and urging for their prompt removal. The failure mode of kindness is unknowing indifference to the malign and deceitful. The racists and fascists know their foul full opinions will get them removed.
Ah, the Passion Flower continues to flourish even when transplanted to a new patch, I see!
Impassionata, I have been highly amused by your writings over at r/drama, especially your version of history about engaging with Rationalism. As my admittedly flawed memory recalls it, you spent most of that time arguing that this time for sure, latest investigation was going to end up with Trump in jail. The last prediction of that kind you made was that within two weeks' time he was going to the slammer. Naturally, this did not happen. Naturally, you were joshed about it. And naturally, you left, set up your own site, and went overboard with the marshmallows.
I'm glad to see you seem to be doing better and have found a new happy home!
I'm glad to see you fell for the marshmallow facade. As to your admittedly flawed memory, it seems like it is indeed as flawed as you admit.
All of my statements about Trump were in the vein of what _should_ happen. Were we not captive to the twin bindings of boomer ideological fog and weak rationalist political confusion it might have happened; recall, of course, that Nixon lost political power very swiftly. This is a mark of how low we have fallen. I was wrong of course about the level of corruption in our politics.
So my statements about time were in this vein: that at any point the axe might fall. Now we see what that axe falling looks like, and the interesting times are ahead for the Republican Party: will it eject Trump like snot into a kleenex, and will the snot metastasize?
The real frailty of the ignorant in the culture threads seasoned by the abominably stupid "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was this: that among generally atheist populations used to seeing blind faith in the nation's citizenry and all the dangerously poor thinking that denoted, it was in denial about a fascist movement on US soil. Shall we drop the signs?
* the more overtly religious party gathering under a strongman type politician via a xenophobic impulse,
* incorporating threats, from that politician, of physical violence against journ*lists
* making blatantly dishonest claims about the veracity of elections
* separating children from their parents in camps
* engaging in a physical crackdown on a protest and then touching a Bible
* convening a mob and sending it in the direction of the hall of Power in which the peaceful transition of Power was occurring
* continuing to belabor the lie in order to further division in what should be a united country.
This is fascism. Fortunately the American public could see what Scott could never seem to admit or even understand: that "You Are Still Calling Wolf" was the beginning of the end of his career as a political writer taken seriously outside of his small circle of neoreactionaries brought in as an effort to expand his audience. (/r/sneerclub is populated by fifteen thousand subscribers: people who were repelled by the stench.)
Still, it's good to see you, BothAfternoon (right?)! It's always good to have a personal herald.
In a world where the mainstream academic opinion of Trumpism is that it's fascism and slatestarcodex has 50000 Reddit representatives, are you saying you don't think it's a big signal that 15000 people walked away from SSC?
American mainstream academic opinion is that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad. That part is completely predictable and independent on who happens to be the Republican candidate today. (I am not saying that the opinion is wrong, by the way. Just that it is constant, so we cannot use it as evidence for anything specific that happened recently.)
Also, 15000 is a relatively small number compared to the number of internet users: you could easily find 15000 supporters of a mainstream theory, or 15000 supporters of a conspiracy theory. (Probably even easier for the latter.)
But most importantly, 15000 people in sneerclub does *not* mean 15000 people who walked away from SSC. Many of them have probably never been SSC fans in first place; and would be sneerclub members also in a parallel world where Trump does not exist. There are all kinds of reasons for joining a nerd-bashing online club. Mostly, because it is fun... if you happen to be that kind of personality type.
"All of my statements about Trump were in the vein of what _should_ happen."
Ah, my delicate little petal, it was that you said "he WILL be going to jail" not that "he SHOULD be going to jail" and when your prognostications did not happen, you flounced off.
Well, we can all rewrite our personal history, and the good folk over at r/drama are not going to be too credulous one way or the other.
As for the rest of it - why do you keep expending so much mental energy on a failure like Scott etc?
There's still yet time my voluptuously verbal friend!
> when your prognostications did not happen, you flounced off.
That is how you tell the story, but the way I tell it is that I was just sick of being browbeaten and not being able to return fire. People can bully leftists a lot in a lot of subtle ways that don't catch moderator attention.
I flounced off because being unable to say "that's racist" or "that's pretty much just fascist" is pretty precisely what drove themotte into its present state.
The same pattern emerged on Discord: a community under Scott Alexander with a sidebar community that was for the mask-off racism. It was uncanny and very interesting how it essentially mapped Scott's own mind: a connection to the racist/fascists that was never allowed to be fully 'conscious' as it were.
> why do you keep expending so much mental energy on a failure like Scott etc?
A good question. He wrote something that impacted me personally once, might be the only real answer.
Out of curiosity, just how many SSC and related elements have you signed up to? I've never gone near the Discord, so O fiery-hued blossom of indignance, you are more devoted a follower of Scott than I am!
The subreddit and the discord. Maybe I was a devoted follower of Scott, but his fruit didn't fall far enough from the rotten rationalist tree. He's better than they are, or could be.
I, uh, so Scott Alexander and rationalists generally are secret fascist theocrats, as evidence here's bad behavior from their weird Berkley sex cult?
I jest but there's a core thing here that confuses me. I'm not sure if you've attended rationalist or EA meetups but they're really, really different from the people attending your average, say, Trump rally. And clearly these things are tied together somehow in your mind and I'm genuinely curious what connection you see. Like, I know Thiel backed Trump for awhile but your average rationalist and your average, say, Oathkeeper are just phenomenally different along virtually every significant personality aspect. How do these groups work together, if at all, in your mind?
I respect your mission deeply. I got directly involved through trying to cut through the shitty politics of these people so that's just the beat I walk, without intending to distract people. (The reality might unfortunately be that these people are too thick in their denial for any of what we say to have an impact in either direction...)
Multiple approaches are necessary in cult deprogramming. I'm hoping to wrap my participation up before too long, I've spent an alarming amount of time in this ego charity of mine...
I strongly suspect there's a motte and bailey definition of scientific racism coming soon, where the motte is some wannabe eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, and the bailey is anyone who knows what IQ and crime statistics by race look like.
Oooooh, sorry, sometimes I forget that people can live in parallel worlds.
It's because this is one of the few places where smart conservatives can have open conversations. If it's a credible institution or big site, we get censored off in fairly short order. If it's Fox News...it's Fox News, I don't want to have a conversation there anymore than I would want to in the CNN comments section.
To perhaps make this a bit more concrete, I think there's some really interesting arguments around feminism in Lasch's "Women and the Common Life". I'd like to discuss them somewhere and will probably post a few points of interest in the next open thread. I can't post it in a general area or on most social media, I've seen enough people get banned and depersoned to avoid that. Imagine a conservative posting about feminism on Reddit, sounds miserable. However, the best conservative discussions I see, DSL and the Distributist's comment section, aren't really that great.
So yeah, there's no secret Reactionary signal Scott is sending up in the sky. Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things. Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
PS, if anyone does have recommendations for another conservative site with a thoughtful discussion forum, I would greatly appreciate it.
You're sort of right, but in a way that doesn't make a great case for yourself.
I mean, the main counterpoint is that maybe there's a reason those views aren't tolerated by anyone intelligent elsewhere.
"Don't tolerate people who champion race essentialism as racial science" is a recently-erected Schelling-point-now-Chestertons's-fence that came about as a direct response to the holocaust and other similar genocides. If you want to tear down that fence, you have to be very sure you know the consequences before doing so.
>Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things. Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
Once again, consider how saying, with a straight face, "Every place with intelligent conversation bans us and the places that allow us are filled with idiots" reflects on the things you want to say. Maybe everyone else is wrong, or maybe the marketplace of free ideas has judged your ideas to not be marketable.
And it's certainly *possible* that everyone *is* wrong on some things. Hell, it's even probable for at least a small portion. At some point, though, you have to wonder about the sheer number individual of things you're claiming every place with "intelligent discussion" is wrong about in order to ally with all the people in those "ghettos".
(Also, I can't help but point out the irony in using "ghetto" as your insult of choice when implicitly defending accusations of racism)
>Imagine a conservative posting about feminism on Reddit, sounds miserable.
Speaking of parallel universes... some of the biggest anti-feminist communities on the internet have been hosted on reddit. They've cracked down on *some* of them, but many still exist. (I mean, take a look at /r/conservative)
...Unless you're saying that it would be unpleasant because conservative reddit is one of the "ghettos". In which case, I agree that engaging with conservatives on reddit is pretty miserable. I much prefer the quality of their conversation here... on average, at least.
This has been engaged with before. The condensed version of it is "If you set up a space that is free from witch hunts, you end up with three principled people and a zillion witches".
The further problem is, who is a witch? As the post on the Hexenhammer showed, the description of "well she's old and mean and lives alone and has a pet cat and we had a quarrel and then all my milk went sour so clearly she's a witch" isn't good enough.
All we can do is discourage people who go around casting spells and putting curses on people when they do that, and leave the mean old cat ladies alone if they're not riding around on broomsticks.
You want us to conduct a witch hunt. Scott is not, nor does he want to be, Matthew Hopkins.
I'm beginning to think that conservatives' claims that any form of censorship of their views constitutes a witch hunt is an implicit admission that you know you're witches, consorting with the political devil.
(Or maybe it's just that everyone on this site likes making references to things Scott just wrote and it's a coincidence. On the other hand, you and Treb are the only two who've made that reference in this thread...)
I'm not asking for a "witch hunt". You're perfectly free to conduct your witchcraft elsewhere, and express yourself in other ways here, so long as you're articulate. I think the trend of teenage SJWs digging up that one time you said the N word when you are 14, or straight up twisting facts to prove someone is "problematic", is a pox on civil discourse norms.
That being said, I *am* saying that you shouldn't be allowed to practice witchcraft openly in the [idea] market square, while encouraging others to join you, without consequences - and those consequences should probably involve being removed from the [idea] market.
Adding on to that, our mayor, Scott, probably shouldn't be openly reading books on witchcraft and loaning the books out to others to read and - God damn, the longer I torture this metaphor, the cooler you come out as sounding. Be gay do witchcraft.
But first you have to define what is "witchcraft" and it's not as plain, easy and obvious as "well clearly everyone can recognise witchcraft when they see it".
Like you, I was (and indeed am) very, very positive about what is witchcraft. There are beliefs, philosophies, and current social paradigms that I think are witchcraft, and worse than witchcraft: the child sacrifice to Moloch, demonic worship.
Like you, I wanted to ban that. There are things I think are pure poison, hateful, abhorrent, damaging to society and harmful to the self.
But you know what took me a long, hard time to come to grips with? That people are entitled to believe these things. That they are entitled to talk about these things. That they are just as entitled to stand out there in the public square as I am.
I don't know if you identify as a liberal or a progressive or what, just that you're 'not conservative'. Well, I was as zealous as you to burn the witches and the heretics. Except my heretic and witch is someone on your side, probably, and the views that you think are right, good, and proper.
I've had to work hard to learn to tolerate the people in pointy hats on broomsticks on your side. Especially when many of them have long mocked the judge's position on obscenity ("I know it when I see it") when it came to things they wanted made legal, but are now turning around and applying the same test themselves: "I know witchcraft when I see it, and I demand it be banned"
So, first off, this is what I get for not reading the original post in enough depth to see that it was very "HBD" specific and giving a general conservative gripe instead of something specifically on topic. My bad and I apologize.
I'm not interested in defending HBD in general but I'd expect this trope to apply to them 10x. I can't imagine most HBD sights are fun or interesting places to post because most of the HBDers I see here are...not great people. But if there's 1000 cruddy HBD sites and one decent site you can talk on, I don't think there's any great mystery why they keep showing up. As for why the mainstream shuts them out so hard, I agree that it's for a host of good reasons. I don't think the logic you presented is particularly appealing, mainstream society has been wrong on wide spectrum of bipartisan issues within living memory, but I do think this line "If you want to tear down that fence, you have to be very sure you know the consequences before doing so" is incredibly true.
And yeah, conservative "ghetto" is a bad term but I genuinely can't think of a more communicative term. It's the general idea that, because network effects are real, most people will stay on websites they don't like because all their friends are there and only the weirdos go to alternatives. At which point the alternative website is full of weirdos and it's not a very good place to post. Remember Voat? (1)
So yea, bad post on my part, and I would have written it very differently if I'd spent more time reading it, but I fundamentally don't think this is complicated. HBDers come here because, well, it's nice here and (I'd bet) the nicest place that will tolerate them by a wide margin.
> sometimes I forget that people can live in parallel worlds.
Miss me with this postmodernist subjectivity bullshit. You so-called 'intelligent' conservatives lived in a world where the Christian fascist theocratic movement installed a strongman who sent a mob into the Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and now demand my respect as if you have a place to stand in your "oh we just live in another screen."
Yeah, and your screen is wrong and stupid.
> So yeah, there's no secret Reactionary signal Scott is sending up in the sky.
Wrong.
> Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things.
"Intelligent" conservatives in what way? Are you here to reinforce your consensus reality? That would be the Dunce Trap.
> Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
Oh you're still in a 'ghetto,' you just live in denial about it because you chase off anyone who will challenge your views.
Oooh, WoolyAI, you should know from what the Passion of the Flower posted, so how do I get in on this Christian fascist theocratic movement? I keep seeing the progressives telling me that this is happening all around and the Christian fascist theorcrats are running the place since the 80s but I keep not getting an invite, and I can be a Christian theocrat no bother!
Is there a uniform? Do we have our own flag? Are there medals? What are the hours, only I wouldn't be able to devote meself full time to the oul' racism:
I'm not an HBD guy, and I don't read Moldberg, but as a conservative who has hung out around Scott's blog for years I can say that it's obviously why his content is compelling to me: it's because he only banns people when they're breaking the Rule of 2 or otherwise being uncivil, and he doesn't mind discussing an idea with someone even if he disagrees with it. I've learned I can trust Scott because he doesn't say things he doesn't believe just to make sure people see him as having the "right beliefs". He cares more about truth than what is heretical to consider. Lately he has decided not to talk about certain topics that cause him to receive more hate, but I trust that he doesn't lie about the things he does write about.
Why do you think his content is compelling to people?
Scott _knows_ why: he invited them in consciously in an attempt to secure more readers; those leaked emails told us this. Whether or not he's learned from the experience is, perhaps, the open question. (The unfortunate part of writing for a large crowd is you necessarily become a subject.)
I support prison sentences for those who commit crimes and those who induce others to commit crimes. I support social opprobrium for those who believe that what's needed is a single individual to take on all the power because that's, truly, dipshit moronic idiot grandiose bullshit. Anyone who can't see that is an idiot who needs to look into the bloody history of monarchy.
> one or two degrees of separation
Your relation to politics is completely broken. You seem incapable of modeling ideologies as directed by leaders except as some spherical cow model of nodes in graphs. I think you could benefit from posting online about politics a lot less and reading about political theory a lot more, for at least a few years.
I don't come in here and say that anyone and everyone who supports SFBA Rationalism should be shut out of public discourse because that essentializes a movement. Thus it is that your attack of Black Lives Matter is braindead stupid, your false equivalence is rejected.
Reading about political theory? Might as well read the Kabbalah or Family Circus, for all the relevance that load of ivory-tower navel-gazing has ever had to events in the real world.
Hmm..I would probably have said nihilism is more the province of the sophomoric. But maybe that's not very different from what you mean, so I suppose I mostly agree.
I call it like I see it specifically because I saw racism and fascism as protected speech in Scott Alexander's enclaves. Every single one of them had more ambient rightwing shitfuckery than average. And the moderators seemed clueless to it: it was just the background.
Proud. Ignorance. So common among the SFBA Rationalists.
> For example, the democratic state of Weimar Germany empowered a particular monster we're all familiar with and who probably out-killed most historical monarchs.
Thank you for making my point for me. The thirst for a monarch type government is nothing but a thin veil over this desire for strongman politics, made in ignorance of the degradation into violence inherent in empowering a single individual.
> I'm also not interested in silencing its proponents.
There's nothing virtuous about refusing to reject ignorance on some imagined principle: you end up hearing out idiocy and popularizing it (Scott, this is to you).
"The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”
You can. You have to. If prediction markets are what works to help you, then go prediction markets.
I've been through this with the entire sexual and other abuse scandals in the Catholic church. It's really awful when you have to accept that all the horrible stuff is indeed true, and one reaction is naturally "How can I ever believe anything or anyone ever again?"
I'm still Catholic despite it all. It's the wheat and the tares, and we just have to try and do the best we can until the end. There will always be bad actors, but we should not let that make us doubt everything.
One of the deep indignities of the timeline that we live in is that the Catholic Church realized it was infested with pedophiles and took action in response...and that action wasn't to reassign all the pedophiles to a remote parish in Northern Québec where they could be clubbed over the head and buried in shallow graves.
Your comment says loads about you. All good. Nice to share a thread with you and the others here who in the main seem compassionate. I too hope Scott can get past the initial shock and err on the side of trust. What did Reagan say, "Trust but verify"? Trust should be the default for any happy person. To live a life filled with suspicion and distrust is a horrible fate. So my advice is to not globalize distrust because one institution/individual broke the covenant. Trust and compassion are the glue that holds humans, families and societies together from the forces that splinter and sunder us.
Three.months ago I had never heard of Ea, prediction markets, FTX, or any number of guests of the modern scene that everyone else on this thread takes for granted. I am old and out of touch; the world moved on while I stayed still.
So my opinions only have limited value; they are what one might hear from a reasonably well educated liberal, put in cryogenic storage in 1979 and just thawed in 2022! I and my impressions are truly from a different era.
But here, for what value there may be, are some opinions.
1. EA seems a good concept, but I detect a little hubris that might lead to cultic qualities down the road (cults were a problem in my era,) But it would be a kind of crowdsourced, decentralized one without the usual charismatic leader. There are obvious downsides to diverting philanthropic energies from small scale present benefits to notional large scale far future benefits. One starves the present to feed a future that may never instantiate. Best, seems to me, to establish some ratio, perhaps 80/20 to do both. The EA community, if it's identical with the rationalist community, seems to over think things a bit; to get lost in analysis and minutiae. Might be best to take a break ever so often and drop the glowing screens. Go outside and hike or do physical labor; put on jeans, boots, and work gloves. Ground. All of this stuff is extremely ephemeral after all!
So much for EA, both admirable and problematic
FTX and the financial world that gave birth to it. Mixed blessings, but badly in need of regulation. Seems fragile, has questionable grounding in real value, so falls under a strange variation of the Red Queen Hypothesis. If notional value and traditional "real" value are competing for resources perhaps we need to look at Competitive Exclusion concepts? Over my head and pay grade, in any case.
Prediction Markets. Ingenious innovations (tho' variants must have been around for a long time). Seem to be gambling under a different name. Are they regulated?
ACX:. You all are collectively the most impressive group of thinkers and writers I've ever seen outside of graduate seminars. I'm seriously not in your league and in over my head besides being behind the times.
That's all. TL;DR! (the time traveller learned finally what that meant. Short attention spans in this era!)
Just so you know, after TL;DR you're supposed to write a short summary for those who did indeed consider it TL and DRd it. It can be a bit more blunt, like so:
Regarding your penultimate paragraph, I think there is a strong bias towards noticing higher quality content, and therefore ranking yourself lower relative to it.
For what its worth, I was scrolling through a whole bunch of comments that seemed to contribute little (to me, at least), then I got to your comment, read it, learned a few new terms (e.g. Red Queen Hypothesis) and took a moment to respond.
So at least from this sample, it seems to me like you are certainly not a below average contributor here.
That said, while it is nice to know the limits of one's own credentials, knowledge, and abilities, I think that credentials are a poor measure of intelligence, and intelligence is a poor measure of being right.
Many people can be intellectually gifted, but if they don't bother systematically using those gifts to find truth, then their abilities are not really relevant. The democratization of knowledge through the internet and other media has increased the ability of moderately intelligent or credentialed people to gain a great deal of knowledge on topics of their choosing.
So while I think that you are probably very much in the same league as median posters here, even if you weren't, that would hardly be a reason why you wouldn't be entitled to an opinion or to your own contributions.
I'm wondering whether we should be expecting to see a system of contractual courts evolve in the crypto space. I can't remember what David Friedman calls them.
I've been dubious about the idea because I'm not sure of where the initial trust comes from.
"I'm wondering whether we should be expecting to see a system of contractual courts evolve in the crypto space. I can't remember what David Friedman calls them.
I've been dubious about the idea because I'm not sure of where the initial trust comes from."
I think the crypto crowd is trying to do this with 'smart contracts' ... also on a blockchain so no initial trust is required. Ethereum is supposed to be one of those blockchains that enable smart contracts (I think).
Smart contracts are basically automated programs that do blockchain operations. They can be used to make automatically enforced rules, like "if X happens, send Bob a bunch of money," and that's useful for finance stuff.
But the issue is that contracts can be buggy. Maybe you can trick the contract to releasing the money early, or sending the money to Alice instead. In that case, a self-enforcing contract is worse than useless - all that cryptographic power is being used to ensure that your money is irrevocably transferred and no court can force it to be returned.
I don't see a way around this problem, because crypto is designed from the ground up to make it impossible for any one entity to revoke transactions - you would need the entire network to agree to that. (Which has happened - once in Ethereum's history the developers decided to roll back a big hack that stole a lot of money and would have killed their proof of concept - but isn't really reliable.)
The problem is that there's really no provision for enforcement. When someone does a rug-pull, the only consequence is that they lose whatever name they were operating under. (There can, of course, be consequences outside the crypto-community, but that's really saying "We need government regulation!".)
FWIW, I'm generally extremely skeptical about the value of crypto-currencies, except as a means of doing illegal financial transactions. (Even then there needs to be some external enforcement mechanism, or all you've got is a con game.)
Does anyone know of prominent voices in the EA movement that were warning ahead of time that FTX was possibly fraudulent? I ask because although Scott addresses that EA doesn't support such things in theory, there's another question about whether EA is just basically competent at evaluating risks. That's supposed to be their whole thing, and yet in one case where we know the final outcome, they blew it about as hard as possible. If you are worried about, say, AGI due to the messages put out by EA, you probably need to take another good hard look at those beliefs.
I think the problem with FTX is worse than if it were fraud. I think SBF thought he understood finance better than other people, and went headlong into something that's been a known failure mode in financial situations for many years - not keeping enough cash on hand to account for withdrawals.
This aligns with one of my criticisms of EAs, that it's mostly made up of intelligent young people who equate intelligence with knowledge and don't know what they don't know. SBF should have known that using client money to prop up his other business even while incurring losses was a known failure mode and that it could easily end in disaster. But apparently he didn't know, and didn't have anyone in the room with him who could have helped with that. If he had a Goldman Sachs executive advising him, he might have been told long before this blew up. It would have limited his reach, and wouldn't have been as exciting on the way up, but it may have prevented the drop.
I feel a little bad for anyone who put a child in charge of their money, but frankly that's how we all learn lessons. The guy is 30 years old now, so people were giving a 20-something billions of dollars in a highly speculative field for him to run out of Hong Kong and the Bahamas. If they didn't know those things, then that's on them too.
from what I understand, it wasn't exactly a Ponzi scheme- it was more like an Enron scheme, where FTX used it's own crypto, backed by actual shares in the company, as collateral for loans to make prop trades. It collapsed when a rival realized what was going on and sold its own holdings of FTX-backed crypto, leading to the Enron-like collapse of FTX.
Which is to say, it was definitely a deliberate fraud (P>0.99 IMO). A bit more clever than the usual crypto fraud but there was no way to do what they did by accident.
I could certainly be wrong, but his behavior in this collapse doesn't seem to me to match someone deliberately defrauding anyone, but instead someone who got caught doing something very dumb and not realizing how stupid his decisions leading up to it really were.
I find it hard to believe that someone capable of setting up such a financial scheme like that would be completely unaware of the financial history of such things, especially considering the recency of Madoff, Enron, MF Global, etc. And it's not like he's some tech bro that doesn't have any background in finance, both he and his accomplice gf had enough finanical background to know exactly what they were doing.
Seems a lot more likely that his current behavior is a sociopathic attempt to play dumb.
That's certainly possible. My gut is still that he's a very intelligent idiot, who knew how to work in financial markets but not why there may or may not be rules and separation. Keep in mind that he was like nine years old when Enron happened and still only around 16 when Madoff pled guilty.
Yea I'm basically the same age as him and have never worked in finance. I know about Enron/Madoff and why investing customer funds is a huge no no. The idea that he didn't is laughable.
I have pretty severe seasonal affective disorder, instead of dealing with antidepressants and light therapy each winter I wondered if I should just up and move down south to Texas or Florida, does this work for stopping the disorder? Have any of you done it and what do you recommend?
have been debating this as well, and have been reminded just how much the winter sucks for me yesterday when we got hit with our first snow of the year and I had to scrape off my car. It took me until recently to realize that even though almost everyone complains about winter, not everyone feels it as severely as I do (and it sounds like you as well). I was reminded reading this post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/) linked the other day that it's not universal to never feel fully awake 4 months of the year (even with the max dose of Wellbutrin in my case).
If you're like me and have a partner who loves the winter or is otherwise not sold on the year-round summer of Florida, I'd recommend doing what we did and trying out somewhere very sunny but still wintery (in our case, St. Moritz Switzerland, which Google tells me has 322 days of sunshine a year, and the high altitude means it's intense light as well.). This experiment helped me verify that the cold is just as big a player for me as the light, but it certainly was a colossal improvement over the northeastern US. California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado all have options for winter + sun if you are in the US and want to stay domestic (or if you need more options for possible job locations if you're moving permanently and don't work remotely).
If moving is not in the cards right now, one or two week long trips to Central America in the winter feel like an injection of serotonin that last for up to a month after returning home for me. I work remotely, so I travel on the weekend and don't even take any time off. They're not very complex or exciting trips; I just rent an Airbnb with a patio and bask outside on my laptop all day :)
Instead of moving your whole life just rent a place for a few months and telecommute.
Also, as a Dallas resident, our winter is gloomy and cold too, though for (for sake of example) a native Michigander the cold is probably small potatoes. It was dark at 6 pm here yesterday ( Nov 13)
But you may need to consider a Puerto Rico stayover as well.
"True, there are also other people outside of finance who are also supposed to look out for this kind of thing. Investigative reporters. Congress. The SEC. But the leading US investigative reporting group took $5 million from SBF. Congressional Democrats took $40 million from SBF in midterm election money. The SEC was in the process of allying with SBF to anoint him as the face of legitimate well-regulated crypto in America."
I can't speak to the finance side of things (though are they looking at 'is this a scam,' or are they looking at 'will this make money?' those are two different questions and for a while it made money). But the other examples don't seem great to me?
Taking people's money, so long as it doesn't come with strings doesn't usually mean you've vetted/agreed with them, quite the reverse in fact. And the SEC thing was that regulations were needed, which just seems transparently correct at this point? Now, SBF was presumably trying to use them to limit competition, without limiting his ability to commit what really looks like fraud, but it's not at all clear that he would have succeeded in that, even if everything hadn't collapsed.
> 9. The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”. So I was pleased when Nathan Young figured out the obvious solution: make a list of everyone I’ve ever trusted or considered trusting, make prediction markets about whether any of them are committing fraud, then pre-emptively [...]
This is being taken way out of context to show what total freaks we are. I don't think people realize this is tongue in cheek.
I have a question about election odds and prediction markets generally -- anytime I see backward-looking analysis, it all says they're well calibrated, etc. But those analyses I've seen seem to just take one data point of odds during election day -- "if the odds are 60% on election day, that candidate wins 60% of the time" for instance.
But that doesn't seem helpful to me -- what about 1 year in advance? 6 months in advance? Have those odds proven well calibrated? I'm very surprised these markets don't hover very close to 50/50 until about a month out.
"But that doesn't seem helpful to me -- what about 1 year in advance? 6 months in advance? Have those odds proven well calibrated? I'm very surprised these markets don't hover very close to 50/50 until about a month out."
I think assuming a 50:50 split when there are lots of unknowns is one of the classic statistics mistakes.
1 year out, for example, I'd assume that an incumbent US Representative would have something like a 90% chance of retaining his/her/its seat. At the beginning of a football season (college or NFL) every team does NOT have an equal chance to win the championship. Etc.
Point taken, but they still seem overconfident/overly reactive, and to be clear I was talking about aggregate House/Senate odds, not just individual candidates. I'm happy to be proved wrong or my misunderstanding corrected, but I am just never convinced by these calibration analyses.
It is a good point, though. Many prediction markets are open for much longer time than 3 months, and it would be good if analyses took account the prediction forward time span. (Good predictions would more impressive, too.)
The markets longer than three months would be primary markets, candidate markets, etc. The GE market at best can open post primary but personally 3 months is the longest I'd say you can make useful predictions.
> But right now is a great time to be a charitable funder: there are lots of really great charities on the verge of collapse who just need a little bit of funding to get them through.
I don't actually know what order of magnitude "a little bit" means here. I'm not a VC or anything, just a fairly boring person who happens to batch their charitable donations to once per year for convenience (yes, I already know this is not generally how charities prefer funders operate). I suspect when Scott asks for potential charitable funders he's talking about bigger game than me, but if a four digit sum of money would make an outsized difference somewhere it would be nice to know about it.
Think the triage process Scott's working on will publish a shortlist of in-trouble charities soon, for small donors like me? Or is there already a post on the EA forum or somewhere that I haven't seen?
Have people done calibration studies on prediction markets? E.g., take all the markets that had $0.60 as the final price for yes and see if 60% of those resolved to yes. I'm especially curious if prediction markets show any systematic overconfidence or underconfidence in their results.
I do think a huge areas where our social/political tehcnolgoy is "shitty" and "underdevleoped" is not trating high level bureaucrats and elected officials like jurors.
Poeple in these positions should be "sequestered" and should have their connections/relationshuips highly scrutinized. You would probably not allow a juror on a trial if the jurors former boss's duaghter was the one on trial.
Being elected to say congress should be a 2 year ticket to a bunker in the nevada desert where there is no access for lobbyists and where the infromaiton that is allowed in is tightly constrained to publicly availble sources. Maybe not quite that extreme, but close.
These are the most important positions in our society and the standards are just atrocious in terms of who gets selected. Fuck the president some cycles seems like they probably aren't even a top 10% person for the job. Like there are literally millions (tens of millions?) of people who would do a better job.
On point #5, EA does not endorse doing clearly bad things, but prominent EA people such as MacAskill have definitely endorsed taking big risks. SBF's thinking and behavior is very much in line with the EA idea that an action that will probably fail is justified if it has mathematically higher expected value compared to other options.
For instance, in What We Owe The Future (appendix) MacAskill argues that we should not be afraid to "chase tiny probabilities of enormous value"—in other words, we should take actions with the aim of improving the far future, even if the likely outcome of those actions is nothing. He draws an analogy to the (supposed) moral obligation to vote, protest, and sign petitions, even when again the likely outcome is nil. In MacAskill's example, say you can press Button A to save ten lives, or Button B to have a one in a trillion trillion trillion chance of saving one hundred trillion trillion trillion lives. If you're a normal person, you press A and you save lives. MacAskill says you should press B, even knowing that the likely outcome is nothing.
This is directly analogous to SBF's idea that we should weight money linearly (in other words, rejecting decreasing marginal utility of wealth). SBF is willing to "accept a significant chance of failing" in exchange for a small chance of doing a lot of good.
So MacAskill and SBF both endorse taking actions with a large chance of failing if the expected value is high enough, whether that's speculating with customer funds or pouring resources into uncertain projects with a very tiny chance of shifting the far future in a positive direction.
Now there's a distinction between "very risky actions" and "clearly morally bad actions"...but that line is not so bright. SBF took a risk (morally as well as financially) and failed. But no one would be criticizing him if he had succeeded. FTX took big risks, as EAs advocate, and failed. But EAs should understand and acknowledge that frequent failure is a predictable outcome of taking big risks, and, given these values and assuming the math is correct, failure doesn't prove that the actor's underlying thinking was wrong.
"But no one would be criticizing him if he had succeeded."
That depends on the specific mechanics here. If he took money out of trust accounts, I don't care if he succeeded or failed, it's not his money to gamble.
(I've mentioned before, MacAskill's worst-case scenario being no change is dangerously wrong, and is why it's important to focus on causes whose results can be directly observed. You can press button a to save ten lives, or you can press button b to have a one-in-trillion chance to help trillions AND a one-in-million chance to kill tens of thousands. The far future loves to juke you.)
As SBF showed, the EA framework is a great tool for rationalizing whatever cause resonates with you. He likes AI stuff, so he donates to that cause. Then the EA branding makes it seem like he is doing real charity in the service of mankind, rather than tinkering with his hobby.
What the heck kind of suppression is this? FTX is an almost unprecedented blowup with huge political implications because they were the second largest Dem donor after Soros, nobody knows key details because they were radically non-transparent, by definition SOME kind of conspiracy was involved in a situation like this so ANY investigation of who did what will be possible to disparage by calling it a “conspiracy theory”, and this is a frigging OPEN THREAD.
In case this is the problem: if you're replying by email it'll make your comments top-level instead of responses, so you need to go through the app/site for that.
Yes, that was the problem, but I’m not going to bother trying to correct it now, people can just go through the tree below my previous comment to see what I was responding to.
My correction was actually wrong too as the original comment was a reply to a convo down thread about some rumored conspiracies involving Ukraine. But I am not 100% certain of the whole thing!
Nefarious activities involving more than one collaborating person which were concealed from the public.
I do not think SBF was the only human being who was aware that FTX was failing and was hiding that information. His girlfriend Caroline Ellison who ran Alameda must also have known, but probably many more people did.
I was just sitting here, before this open thread, thinking about how my inner critic is excessively harsh and just kind of an asshole. Then I open your thread and see what I think looks like you being hard on yourself for what seem to be similar reasons. You’re doing great work, Scott. If you never trust a scammer at least once in your life, maybe you are missing out on lots of chances to do real good?
Crypto is such a big scam. Lots of VCs and investors are into it because there's money in it. That doesn't mean people have to have amazing insight to beat their assessment of FTX, just basic due diligence that while FTX might be a money hose at present it's built on scams. Crypto is useful for crimes and some extremely limited database functions. It's a scam! Always has been. So yeah, easy for people with a basic understanding to beat investors on the question "is this a reputable organisation" even if they should defer to the investors on the question of "whether or not this potentially criminal enterprise will make money."
You what I just remembered? NFTs Remember all that? Over about a 6-month period it went from new thing, to "is this as stupid as it looks?", to that famous long YouTube video ("Line Goes Up"), to, hey, a bunch of scams a rugpulls revealed, and now nobody thinks about it anymore. Loosely speaking. (I notice that, in my semi-expanded view of this entire thread, there are 0 mentions of it.) Maybe there was something to be learned there.
I think "scam" is overselling it. It's a poor investment, certainly. But as a transaction mechanism in certain cases it has a niche. The inherent problem is that people started treating it like they would a new silicon valley startup rather than what is was: ForEx. And huge returns on ForEx are highly unlikely.
It's the old old rule: "if it seems too good to be true, then it is".
You don't get easy money like that, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and eventually the cows come home and the chickens come back to roost. The problem with electronic trading like this is that it is all in the ether, there's nothing real there, so it's easy to shuffle it about and make huge illusory gains - which then turn into real losses.
Whatever about crypto currency as a new unit of exchange, it went the old route of "people want to make money off this thing" and they found they could money by speculation on it more than by using it as a currency, so speculation became the way to make (and lose) fortunes.
People are genuinely surprised by the collapse of FTX. Yet there is no shortage of smart people who have been arguing that crypto is ponzi due for collapse. Nobody who calls themselves a rationalist should be surprised any more than a gambler who loses at roulette. The possibility of collapse was a well known possibility
I had an opportunity to buy Bitcoin in the very early days, and obviously I could have done so since then. But I can't escape my reasoning from back then, which is just as correct today. Bitcoin (and all "investments" that are only valuable because other people are buying them too) really are a scam. It's a pyramid scheme. There's no underlying value. If you make millions of dollars, which many people have, it's literally at the expense of someone else who put money into Bitcoin instead.
Modern government currencies are backed by, among other things, the very real value of not going to jail for tax evasion. If you do business in a nation, you must pay taxes in that nation's currency or you will be going to jail (or maybe just having all your stuff taken by the government). Regardless of the ethical questions surrounding taxation with or without representation, so long as governments *are* in that line of business, the stay-out-of-jail-for-a-price nature of fiat currencies is a thing of real value that guarantees a real demand for that currency.
Maybe not as much value as you and/or the government were hoping. But if someone offers to pay you in dollars, there is no risk that you'll be stuck holding a bunch of dollars when everybody else says "we now think that this was all just a scam and none of us want your dollars any more".
This is true most of the time, but countries' currencies have become almost worthless before due to hyperinflation. If US dollar inflation next year is 40%, you really don't want to be holding US dollars, even if the IRS remains in business.
Thanks for the strong version of the argument. But:
1. Technically you can pay your taxes with a debit card backed by crypto which gets converted to fiat at the last instant, so tax payers aren’t obliged to own any fiat outside of the last nanosecond before the deadline on April 15
2. Some large percentage of Americans have no tax liability
3. Some large percentage of Americans need bitcoin to gamble online or buy porn or all sorts of other of e-commerce that traditional payment processors look down upon. Not as big as the demand for taxes, but only a difference of degree. The USA is just a very large corporation that chose to accept dollars in payment for its services. Bitcoin will always have some of those albeit on a smaller scale.
Fiat currencies are literally centralized shitcoins backed by nothing and inflated at will by a central bank.
The dollar is just numbers in a database, with supply limited only by the whims of a handful of humans at the fed.
Bitcoin is just numbers in a database too, but the supply is tightly limited by an algorithm and a very strong consensus against ever changing that algorithm. That's a big improvement for the purposes of storing value over time.
"The dollar is just numbers in a database, with supply limited only by the whims of a handful of humans at the fed."
No, fiat currencies are supported by one of the most compelling aspects of humanity - violence.
The controlled application of violence is how they maintain stability, and until crypto currencies can secure themselves in the same fashion they will continue to be a pyramid scheme.
Currency is millennia old and one of the best economic coordination tools invented. Cryptocurrencies are rubbish. Bad as tokens of exchange, account or stores of value.
You sound like an economist "sure fiat currency works in practice, but it doesn't work in theory."
Not at all. Governments have two ways of giving underlying value to currency, the first, now out of fashion, is to pledge its exchange for a tangible asset, e.g. gold, silver, or even land has been tried. The second is to be willing to accept it in payment of taxes. Since pretty much everyone owes taxes, and taxes are usually the single largest expense of any wage earner, this immediately gives value to the currency: even if no one else will accept it, your single largest creditor will accept it in payment of your single largest debt. Even if you used BTC for every commercial transaction in your life, if the USG only accepted dollars for payment of taxes, you'd have to keep a big store of dollars around, and they would be valuable to you (and everybody else).
The same would be true for crypto -- if it were widely accepted as payment. That would give it underlying value. However, unlike fiat currency, there does not exist an enormous nearly universal creditor that could give it value all at once, shazam, for nearly everybody, the way a government can. So it has to build such acceptance one economic player at a time, and clearly that has the risk of powerful network effects, both helpful and (in this case) damaging.
Somehow taxes didn't prevent hyperinflation in any of the countries that had hyperinflation. So in what sense do taxes guarantee the value of a fiat currency?
Well, they don't, if you have a government that deliberately inflates its currency, and as far as I know there hasn't been a case of hyperinflation that didn't start off as a quite deliberate attempt to inflate away government debt. It just turns out to be hard to keep the fire under control once you start it.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that government can't *destroy* the value of a currency, they absolutely can, in a number of ways. I was just addressing the fact that government unlike current crypto currencies has the unique ability to *establish* the value of a fiat currency in one fell swoop, and that taking it in payment for taxes is how it's done.
Nitpick: sometimes rapid inflation results from an unplanned currency crisis due to import overreliance, as opposed to an intentional government plan to devalue sovereign debt. EDIT: Carl Pham correctly points out that these situations rarely, if ever, meet the common definition of hyperinflation.
I'll try to be nice: you seem to be parroting talking points (ie politically motivated "questions" which are disingenuous), while your question otherwise implies an ignorance of even basic economics.
So, to answer your question, taxes alone can't stop hyperinflation in situations where hyperinflation is going to happen; there are other ways to avoid hyperinflation. We see the US Fed currently raising interest rates to curb inflation, for example. This is an alternative to raising taxes. We could also just like, let inflation keep running at 8-10% for a while. There is no reason to expect hyperinflation in the US due to current fiscal or monetary policy and there is no indication to me that any political groups with *any* serious influence have plans to promote policies which would even threaten hyperinflation.
It doesn't apply to government currencies, because governments accept their own currencies as protection money. (If you don't pay the government, they'll take your stuff, and perhaps store you in an unpleasant place.) This is what gives "fiat currency" it's value. Because of this, everyone else accepts the money as valuable, because they can trade it to someone who needs to pay the government.
It absolutely applies to government currencies. The question is whether these governments value consistency (keeping inflation low) and how much we trust the government and economy to stay stable. In general for major countries, we have pretty good reason to believe that both of these metrics will do well, or at least remain in a a fairly narrow window. For comparison, you can look at the pricing history of Bitcoin (probably the most stable cryptocurrency) and see how wildly it fluctuates. Even that undersells how volatile it can be, since there is nothing (not even the governmental reputation government currency has) to back it.
There's also the question of whether we have a choice but to use government currency, which for most people is no.
You'll find that third world countries are not very good at forcing people to use inferior currencies consistently. Guns and law can only do so much. Black markets are inevitable when the black market offers customers a much better deal. It comes down to consumer choice, and one possible future is that the fed allows too much inflation and undermines confidence in USD and causes people to seek alternatives.
The internet and cryptography makes it virtually impossible to use violence to force people not to use crypto. Fiat will have to compete on the basis of consumer choice to some extent.
Space piracy question: using known physics, is it plausible to catch up to a fleeing space craft and board it?
The limiting resource for space travel is Δv. It scales logarithmically with the amount of fuel you bring, so while the pursuer will have more Δv, it seems implausible that they have ten times as much.
I will assume that the tech to detect ships over long distance is there, this should benefit the pirates. (Hard to do piracy in fog and all that.)
Capturing a spacecraft which has the bare minimum of fuel it needs for its flight plan is not hard: track it, figure out when it will do it's burns, intercept it at some other point in phase space (e.g., match both the position and the velocity at interception time).
This does not see like a stable equilibrium, however. Eventually the traders will carry their own spare Δv.
In that case, the trader will try to add maneuvers to avoid the interception point, and the pirate will do burns to keep up. What factor of spare Δv does the pirate have to have over the trader to succeed?
One assumption would be that the trader is traveling between mars and earth, and both a mars orbit and an earth orbit are safe havens from pirates. So the pirate has do to the interception somewhere en route.
If both start near to each other, it seems like an easy win for the pirate: they mostly have to match the velocity of their victim maneuver for maneuver, and just invest a little extra Δv to close the distance (and get rid of their relative momentum afterwards).
If they start further away from each other, the task seems harder, but I can't really say by how much.
I am also unsure if gravity fundamentally matters for the outcome or if it would be the same if the pursuit happened in interstellar space (where it is probably easy to calculate).
Also, the point of piracy would be to rob goods or claim ships and take them elsewhere than the destination the original owner had in mind. This seems to put limits on the economics of robbing bulky stuff like ice transports. Robbing stuff with a high price density seems more plausible, but these also seem in a position to have a high fuel-to-payload mass ratio.
From a delta-V perspective, catching up with and boarding the target is not the hard part. As you note, just a little extra Δv will do it. The hard part is getting away afterwards.
If the ship you just seized used half its Δv to boost onto a trajectory to Mars or wherever, and needs the other half to slow down when it gets there, then it almost certainly does not have enough propellant to change course to some asteroid pirate base and decelerate for rendezvous with *that*. So you're going to need to use your own pirate ship to carry off the cargo.
Which means your pirate ship needs to have the extra Δv to A: boost onto a trajectory that will intercept the freighter, then B: match velocities with a ship headed for Mars even though that's not where you want to go, next C: change course to Not Mars, and finally D: decelerate at Not Mars. If both ships have about the same propulsion technology and payload fraction, and the freighter uses it for the optimal trip to Mars, you're probably not going to be able to pull that off. If the pirate ship is much bigger or has much better engines than the freighter, you can probably do it, but then your ship is so much more expensive than the freighter that you probably can't turn a profit seizing the freighter's cargo.
And then there's the problem that the authorities will be able to watch all of this from halfway across the Solar system, so they'll either dispatch a punitive fleet to the pirate asteroid base or send a radio message saying "that's a pirate ship headed your way, we know it, you know it, you know we know it, so if you don't want a visit from a punitive fleet you'd best arrrest them as soon as they show up." Piracy really needs for there to be an "over the horizon" where people can't see what you're up to or where you're going.
Doing the piracy in space is a pain. Instead, bribe the harbormaster and hack the cargo loaders. Redirect goods to locations you favor while the ships are at rest.
The railgun needs to be fired from a fairly close distance, since dodging an unguided projectile is easy from a thousand miles away. So you still need to match orbits reasonably close before you can start threatening them with violence. Plus you need to match orbits in order to recover the cargo, anyway. It doesn't do any good to shoot down a merchant if their cargo drifts out into deep space afterwards.
Indeed, actually intercepting the ship seems superfluous to the goal. It would seem far more efficient to just shoot a missile at the merchant ship and then threaten to let it strike if they don't divert to your port of choosing, or at least ditch the cargo on a trajectory to your favour. Of course, that's a trick that only works until they start carrying missile defences, but even then an armed ship is always going to be at a massive disadvantage against an expendable strike.
Piracy only works if you have somewhere to sell the stolen goods. If every ship is permanently trackable by radar or ir any ship implicated in piracy will be put on a sanctions list and seized as soon as it tries to land, lest the spaceport harboring pirates get a visit from the space force.
Depending on the circumstances, Mars, or certain corrupt officials on Mars, might be willing to risk a certain amount of collusion with Mars-based pirates until the point that it risks serious retaliation from Earth. Much as Caribbean pirates often relied on a certain amount of collusion, or at least a no-questions-asked tolerance, with local officials.
But I suppose if everything could be seen from Earth and Earth has the means of unilateral enforcement, then there's not much that pirates could do (at least without collusion with authorities on Earth).
That collusion from corrupt officials in Tortuga or Madagascar or wherever, depended on the corrupt officials being able to maintain plausible deniability about the people they were doing business with being known pirates. If the authorities can track the pirates from a distance, and they can, then any port they fly to will have been told unambiguously that they are pirates and anyone doing business with them is an accomplice to piracy.
I can imagine excuses. "Our sensors were down for maintenance! It was a bureaucratic slip up!"
With an added layer of "We poor Martians don't have the privilege of being born on a planet that has water, a breathable atmosphere, and a self-sufficient economy. So sometimes things break down or fall through the cracks. Though there'd probably be less of that if you would send more supplies our way."
But I'd agree that piracy like this probably won't happen if Mars is ever colonized (which I consider a big "if" in itself). I'm really just spitballing here.
There's no practical way to board an aircraft in flight, because of the relative wind that *starts* at hurricane strength and winds up exceeding even an F5 tornado for the planes carrying the sort of cargo that would really attract a pirate's attention. In space, boarding is fairly straightforward if you remembered to bring a spacesuit.
I dunno. Ae we assuming the pirates sneak in, two by two, through the unguarded emergency airlock? Because otherwise there's a lot of ways, many pretty low-tech, to put a hole in a spacesuit. The pirates might be better off trying to put a hole in the freighter from a distance, to let all the air out and kill the crew. (Presumably holding them prisoner costs way more than you can expect in ransom for a nobody cabin boy.) But at least some of the freighter crew might still be alert enough to jump into their own spacesuits, with their guns holstered on the *outside*.
It has always been the case that piracy involved the possibility of battle, with sword and pistol and the unavoidable possibility that a pirate might wind up with a hole through which their precious life-sustaining fluid is rapidly escaping. This has historically not stopped piracy, because pirates have historically been willing to accept risk and have generally been much better at armed combat than freighter crewmen. Enough so, that many freighter crews didn't even put up a fight, because hoping for mercy gave better odds than hoping for victory.
Well, yeah, but that was in the days when 300 of you could jump over the gunwale all at once[1], and overwhelm the other crew in 60 secionds of mayhem. I'm just observing it's hard to do shock 'n' awe when you have to clamber clumsily into the airlock one or two at a time, cycle it...tum ti tum ti tum geez this takes forever...and then...I dunno, wait in the corridor outside for an hour or two, polishing your space cutlass and practicing your footwork, until your war party can fully assemble and storm the bridge.
Judging by the progression of major shipping operations to larger and larger ships with smaller and smaller crews, I can imagine a space freighter with a handful of crew and a very big cargo being standard. A small ship with a dozen pirates may be able to easily overwhelm them regardless of how few can get through a hatch at a time.
I can imagine gravity making a difference. At a suitably high tech level (or possibly even the current one) it might be easier to travel between two craft maintaining constant relative position in 0-G than in a planet's gravitational field, for boarding actions.
I've been writing a small bot for Telegram in Rust that messages me a few times a day to ask how I'm doing and record the result to a SQL file. I'm using it to build up to making another that acts as a middle-man between two people to filter and modify messages (for non-malicious purposes, more of a roleplay kind of thing). You could do the same for Discord or any other system with a decent API. I dunno if that qualifies as "software engineering" though.
Whilst it doesn't satisfy the ancient hacker saying, beloved by GeoHotz, that "before you hack, let your design pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is it fun? At the second gate ask, is it useful? At the third gate ask, is it short?", creating a raytracer in one weekend[1] sounds fun.
Scott's recent post on unfalsifiable internal states made a passing mention of Galton's research on visual imagination, which got me thinking about the topic again and reading Galton's original paper on the matter (https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm).
One of two things has to be true. Either (A) I am somewhere close to rock bottom on this scale — I identify most closely with the response that Galton ranks #98/100 — or, (B) the people much higher on the scale are either miscommunicating or deluding themselves. The past century and a half of discourse on this topic has mostly been people higher on the scale patiently explaining in small words to people like me that no really, it's (A), and these differences are real and profound. But I'm not convinced.
I do have *spatial* imagination — the ability to hold a scene in my head as an index of objects with shapes, colors, and spatial relationships, and from there make geometric deductions. But to say there is anything visual about this imagination seems strictly metaphorical. The metaphor is a natural one, because humans derive spatial information about our surroundings mostly through sight. But when considering imaginary objects, it would be no more and no less apt to analogize my thought process to feeling around the scene with my hands and deriving information through touch.
Incidentally, I don't dream visually either. My dreams contain emotion, thoughts-as-words, proprioception, and sometimes pain, but I would characterize my spatial perception in dreams as just a dim awareness of what's surrounding me rather than anything visual, like walking in a dark but familiar room. The rare exceptions to this invariably are perceptions of written words.
I have no trouble accepting that there are certain commonplace mental experiences that are just completely missing from my neurology. I already know that sexual jealousy is one of those, and can easily recognize and accept that one because it has easily observable behavioral consequences: that I've been in a comfortable relationship with a polyamorous partner for seven years, while the vast majority of people run screaming from the notion of such a lifestyle. The reason I find visual imagination harder to accept is that it seems like this kind of evidence *should* exist, yet I've never seen it. The ability to visualize a scene in any literal sense, even dimly, seems incredibly useful and should have a lot of unfakable consequences! It should be easy to create a test at which anybody who has it to even a modest degree should be able to easily outperform me. Yet, on some tests that seem like they should work, I come out near the top.
I'm thinking, especially, of blindfold chess. I can play chess with my back turned to the board and just communicate coordinates with my opponent. I've even played two games at once this way, and won them both without making any blunders or illegal moves. Blindfold chess is by no means easy for me — it requires a lot of concentration — but I can do it and I've been able to do it ever since I was very young and a beginner at the game. Yet, most people, even most people who are better at chess than I am, find this ability almost unfathomable (lots of chess *masters* can do it, but I'm nowhere near that level). It seems like any degree of true visual imagination should render this task far easier. I don't understand how I can apparently be near the bottom at visual imagination, yet near the top in this skill.
This all leaves me skeptical that the differences in mental experience are anywhere near as stark as Galton claims. I think that the people who claim much more vivid visual imagination are communicating poorly and insisting that they mean their words more literally than they actually do.
What's the difference between spatial and visual imagination? When I talk about visual imagination I mean I can tap into the mental machinery that processes visual stimuli into a model without having the direct visual stimuli itself.
I "imagine" the Mona Lisa. What's her hair like? It's dark brown and very straight. Is it glossy? Kind of, there's some reflexions on the top of the head. Can I picture her with curly hair? Yes and it feels the same as when I just recalled the memory of the original picture. This I experience outside my field of vision.
It's definitely not the same as seeing with my eyes, but as for literally casting images into my vision I'd call that a visual hallucination rather than imagination.
If you read Galton's paper, a great many people seem to think that they can *literally* mentally cast images into their field of vision, and that these images have the same detail, richness of color, and field of expanse as what is actually before their eyes. I think that such claims are testable, and that testing shows them to be bunk.
I think there's no such thing as free computational power hidden in the depths of your brain.
My intuition (for whatever that's worth) is that if I wanted to visualize a mental image with the same detail as reality, then my imagination would be up to it except that I'd also have to be aware of all those details, and I can't keep that all in my head at once.
For applications like daydreaming, this doesn't matter. Our actual field of vision is also more of an illusion than we think. We focus on something and then we see more details. You can do the same thing with visual imagination, provided you either (a) have memorized those details ahead of time, (b) are willing to make shit up, or (c) a mix.
I suspect that for most people, it's mostly (b) with a tiny bit of (a), but brains don't exactly show their work, so unless you question it, the result doesn't feel meaningfully different from looking at what's in front of you.
I think we agree. Human vision is a mess and our visual field carries a lot less information than we would naively assume. Nonetheless, there's still a lot more information there than we can fit in our working memory. If you make me peer through a tube such that all I can see is the roughly 5° arc of foveal vision where everything is in sharp focus at once and read off a card placed at the end of the tube, you could fit many chess boards' worth of legible information on that card (a legal chess position can encode about 143 bits of information).
I have to agree with you. I am a visual artist and also on the low rungs of the scale (while my spatial imagination is also way above average). Many people who claim a visual imagination are surprised to hear that I am aphantasic, but many artists actually are. In fact an artist, particularly a realist representational artist, is acutely aware of how our brains fool us into thinking we see a faithful representation of the world, when in fact all it does is check a very few points against a pre-rendered model for discrepancies. If there aren't any, we can go on our merry way walking down the street without seeing any of the details, while we actually think we saw every cranny in the pavement - this leaves processing power available for searching for actually important information such as a tiger suddenly leaping in front of you, or simply recognising an acquaintance. You cannot take it all in at once.
Once you actually try to draw what you see, you realise that you weren't seeing *at all*, and that truly seeing instead of just looking, letting all the input in, is overwhelming and exhausting, and takes a good deal of concentration (you'll surely miss the gorilla while you were looking at a ball) and training. You then have to constantly fight yourself to draw what you see instead of the poor, low resolution, idea and edge based model in your head. To actually see in proportion, perspective, value, hue, reflected light, etc, etc, etc. It is actually a humbling and mind expanding skill that I recommend to everyone.
I believe that people with vivid visual imagination do exist, but are vanishingly rare. Watch a video of the late Jung Gi drawing, and marvel. That's what actual visual imagination looks like, no guide lines, no reference, just start drawing on one end of a huge piece of paper and end up on the other. If it would be that common, artists like that would be a dime a dozen; it took Jung Gi decades of dedicated training and constant practice to be able to do that, but there are countless artists who have done and do just that, most of which will never be able to come anywhere close. Even if the hand eye coordination is not there yet, a visually imaginative individual should be able to put down all of the details, however clumsily.
Our brain fools us while we dream, making us believe that to some extent, the dream is a complete and detailed "movie" with all the information in it, but I think what is being played is again this low res, concept based model, more related to touch than to sight (look at the drawings of little children, they draw what they feel, the contours and edges of things, as they recently first explored the world with hands and mouth as babies; and the ideas of things that later come with language and stories), and as in the waking hours, the rest is assumed to be there and not challenged, because in dreams there's no reality to check back against. To which extent you can fool yourself, both in dreams and in waking, would perhaps be indicative of where you'd land on this scale.
Here's maybe something concrete. I can take some funny-looking 3D object and "visualize" it: imagine seeing it in front of me from different angles. I can also imagine touching it and running my fingers over the sides to see what shape it is. These are obviously both metaphorical to some extent, because there's no real object there for me to look at or touch. But they are different processses in my head, so I'm forced to say that "I visualize this object" and "I imagine feeling this object" are both more than just "I can hold the geometric properties of this object in my head".
That being said, I, too, need to calculate coordinates if I'm playing chess blindfolded and want to check where a long bishop move ends up. But chess seems like an unusual test, because when I remember a position, I primarily remember the relationships between the pieces and not their separate coordinates. I feel like I would do better if I were better at chess; the places where I have trouble are places where one "chunk" of my model of the position needs to interact with another "chunk" that I was keeping track of separately.
Geometric properties can be discerned through multiple senses. But if I assign the scene I'm considering some property that can only be discerned visually, such as color, this isn't fundamentally different to me than assigning objects a particular texture or a particular odor. Yet it seems that other people go on about their "mind's eye" but never about their "mind's hand" or "mind's nose".
I totally agree that skill and familiarity with chess allow for "chunking" as you describe. I basically have a big dictionary of positional motifs in my head, and starting from a familiar motif and then filling in details allows me to compress the position's representation. It's easier for me to keep track of my opponent's position when I'm playing against someone at or above my level than someone far below it, because their moves make more sense and fit in with motifs that I already have in my dictionary.
That is interesting, I would definitely say I can imagine images and sounds far easier than smells and textures, which is why I'd talk about a "mind's eye" or "inner voice" but not like, a "mental hand" or "mind's nose".
I'm curious whether you'd say you can "hear" a song in your head, in a way that isn't just remembering the lyrics? If I'm familiar with the song I can easily recall the beat, tune and intonation. I'm genuinely unsure if your reaction is going to be "of course I can imagine music, that's different" or "what are you talking about, you're now saying you can hallucinate sound as well as images?"
I can recall sounds more vividly than images mostly because I can mimic them quietly to myself (as in physically, by tapping/muttering/humming/whistling) and compare those noises against my recollection. If I force myself to remain still and silent then auditory recollection no longer seems particularly different from recollection of other senses.
Well, the mind's nose is in any case a much less useful tool for imagining things :)
I was thinking less about color or texture than about shape. Take a piece from a Soma cube puzzle. I can visualize what it looks like, and I can imagine what it would feel like if I were holding it in my hand. Both of these carry the same information about the shape of the piece, but I feel like - because they're different internal experiences - they are not *just* metaphors for manipulating that information.
I've tried using this with relatively good results. Imagine a chunk of wood with a hardhat on, and low and behold, you remember to "inform your supervisor of the changes or note them in the log."
I have limited success at remembering things accurately; I'll get most of it right, but things like colors or height will shift around. A silver flashlight with a blue bulb gets remembered as a blue flashlight, but is otherwise correct in shape and size. And there was an event way back in the day where I was shocked to find a picture in my friend's house because I'd been seeing the exact face in my dreams multiple times. (Presumably I'd seen the picture before and forgotten.)
This claim is equally weird to me because when I remember visual images, I can't see how I could possibly describe it as anything other than visual. It's not like seeing it in front of me, it's pretty low resolution (except for the small region in focus), but I can imagine how all the colors and shapes fit together, and if I had the talent I could use the image in my head to create an artistic depiction. My dreams are pretty visually vivid, although again they're low resolution, only "rendering" the field of focus. I'm leaning towards this being an actual difference, although possibly we're just describing the same experience in different ways, I certainly feel that it's not metaphorical but actually the best description of the experience. If you tell me to imagine a specific object, I will picture it in my head in a very specific way, and if you later showed me images of that object I could say which ones looked more or less like the image in my head.
I would struggle with blindfold chess, not because I can't imagine a chessboard with pieces on it, but because my imagining is not a photorealistic 8x8 grid. I can imagine say, white knight at E4, but I can't do that for all 32 pieces simultaneously, and I'm impressed that people are able to hold all that information in their head (assuming some level of abstraction, but chess really is about the little details and I'd definitely get those wrong).
I'm not sure chess is a good test here. When imagining a scene, you choose where each element is, so if you don't remember each piece's position your imaginary chessboard isn't useful; you say you can imagine spatial relationships, and that's the most important element, so *would* we see a difference here?
A better test might involve something like "from this description, imagine which building would appear more fantastical" or something.
The bandwidth of my spatial imagination is nothing close to what I can get from vision. I can remember what piece is where, but if i want to verify the legality of moving a bishop from g4 to d7, I need to double-check the coordinate math to confirm that those squares are actually on the same diagonal, and then think to make sure that f5 and e6 are unoccupied. Having a board in front of me lets me do this at a glance, and even being able to look at *empty* board speeds things up a lot.
If I take the people in the top quartile of Galton's survey at their word, sufficient information should be available in their mind's eye to play blindfold chess just as easily as I can play ordinary chess. Yet the proportion of chess players able to play blindfolded at all is far, far lower than a quarter.
Memory and prediction are not the same skill.. Once you start moving pieces in a blindfold game, you're not recalling an image anymore, you're creating one. If you ask me to remember the ruler on my desk, I'll remember it pretty accurately. If you ask me to imagine moving the remembered ruler from point a to point b and measuring something, both the ruler and the room are going to start shifting and warping, unless I have a memory of doing this exact task before.
I concur. I rank very highly in terms of visual imagination, as far as I can figure it, and the difficult part of blindfolded chess for me is not knowing where pieces are in relation to other pieces (as in, is this bishop on a diagonal to that rook), but in remembering what pieces are where. I can equally easily imagine chess pieces in any number of configurations, which makes remembering where things are on the actual chessboard much harder.
Not that I've ever tried to play chess blindfolded, mind. Its just that remembering where the pieces are over many moves sounds to me like the hard part, recognizing the spatial relationship of pieces I am visualizing is simple. Translating that visualization to grid coordinates also sounds difficult: it would be a bit of a pain to count the rows and columns every time, but presumably with practice it would become easier.
Also, I've experienced waking visual imagination after a surgery (presumably, under the influence of some anaesthetic) and it was very different from the way I normally do spatial tasks. I remember hoping that the capability would be permanently unlocked, but nope.
Now that we are permitted to post frivolous ideas again, it occurred to me that Scott - instead of simply declining a Conversation with Tyler [Cowen] - might consider writing a satire as if one had happened. For example:
T: It's time for overrated or underrated.
S: If we must.
T: The mental health benefits of Ixtlilton. Overrated or underrated?
S: Ix...? No, wait. You can't fool me into thinking an Aztec god is a medication!
"I didn’t actually tell other people they should trust FTX, but I would have if those other people had asked."
Why? I hope this doesn't come across as an aggressive question, but I'm curious to understand what it was about the situation which would have led you to that conclusion. Was it based on an assessment of the people involved or of the exchange structure?
"I just subscribed to Astral Codex Ten" got SBF only 22 likes (23 is me, right now). Ok, Jesus had just 12. - Nice post. Makes me think of: All the smart and nice people who work(ed) for gov.-agencies/NGO supposed to do good, but really are often/mostly not - or mostly embezzlement of tax-payers taxes. I am still sorry I complained about the silly stuff I was supposed to do for the Goethe-Institut - which got me fired. I might have been able to spend some funds in a slightly less silly way. And I would have gotten me 200k in net extra-life-earnings. - At least I never taught at schools. Well, except, when I did. Can a good person work in a wrong-doing org/company? Ofc not, except when they do. Which is: all the time. “It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.” "If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket." Bukowski, obviously. RIP
Why highlight the 40 million going to democrats only? A stronger statement and a better one for supporting the thesis of the point, i.e. "Most people everywhere were hoodwinked including in the political system" is in the article.
"Of that total, 92% has gone to the Democrats, with the remainder going to Republican candidates and campaigns. FTX co-CEO Salame favors the red side of the political divide, donating $23.6 million to Republican campaigns for the current cycle.
The top political contributor was billionaire investor George Soros, who has pledged $128.5 million to the Democrats. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has backed several crypto startups, was ninth on the list with $32.6 million for the Republicans."
Putting the 40 million went to democrats makes it seem like they were uniquely vulnerable/compromised by ponzi crypto money when it's not the case. Especially now when the democrats are about to lose the house.
I am not an effective altruist and find it quite fraught with issues, however I agree with Tyler Cowen's assessment:
"I would say if the FTX debacle first leads you to increase your condemnation of EA, utilitarianism, philosophy, crypto, and so on that is a kind of red flag for your thought processes. They probably could stand some improvement, even if your particular conclusion might be correct. As I’ve argued lately, it is easier to carry and amplify damning sympathies when you can channel your negative emotions through the symbolism of a particular individual. "
The FTX debacle has had an infinitesimal impact on my assesment of crypto, human nevsriousness, or EA adherents in general given that I already believed it was bunkem. The excuses peddled, words written, and reasoning used to buttress EA post FTX have lowered my opinion and assesment of EA. All they hsve done is furthet reinforce my opinion that, to put it glibly, EA adherents and utilitsriand in general suffer from the same cognitive defect that a paperclip maximising AI wouldhave if it turned all humans into paperclips to make more paperclips for humans to use. As they say, it's the same energy, the two pictures are the same, etc.
If you don't see FTX as another decent sized condemnation of crypto you a complete fucking moron.
Literally one of the main critcisms of the space, since ~2012-2013, is something like the following:
Crypto is effectively an expensive, wasteful, poorly functioning database. Except with no admin which is controlled by "votes" among large players. No recourse to fix anything or track anything. The big virtue of crippling yourself in this way by using it is that it is "trustless".
Except...using it is overly technical for the vast majority of the population who will be left to place their trust in entities which are actually *less* trustworthy than the banks and states they are claming to want to flee due to lack of trust.
And this is yet another datapoint on that this is the exact dynamic. People worried about the hounds running straight into the arms of the hunters, and getting shot.
I am not a crypto enthusiasts and don't own any. Nothing about the FTX fraud requires it to be done with crypto.
Anyway the quote from Cowen isn't about whether crypto or ea or what have you is good or bad just that this single data point isn't useful for forming an opinion.
>Nothing about the FTX fraud requires it to be done with crypto.
Sorta disagree, the hype around the crypto-sphere is what enabled the FTX fraud. Yes it's technically possible to pull off the same kind of fraud with beanie babies, but it's not the 90s anymore. And the EA/rat community has perhaps played a significant role in lending legitimacy to that hype.
That said I sort of understanding where the Cowen quote is coming from. We're burning a scapegoat here and possibly updating too harshly in some ways. But I've long been a crypto-skeptic and I think the community needs some harsh updating in that general direction even if it comes on the back of a single point of data instead of more holistically.
See that is just rank idiocy. It is definitely useful for forming an opinion. It shouldn't be the only thing you consider, but surely the fact that it is a case where one of the main criticisms of crypto came true seems like it should give you pause. It is *some evidence*.
You and him sound like the goddamn bolsheviks "sure everyone warned if we dispossessed the kulaks there would be a famine, and now there is a big famine, but that is just one data point! It doens't mean ANYTHING!".
The idea that it isn't "useful for forming an opinion" is just sticking your head in the sand.
Not to mention which this is not data point 1 on this in the crypto space, but instead like datapoint 12.
I'm not convinced that the FTX situation is actually an example of the main criticisms of crypto. When people say "crypto is a ponzi scheme", they aren't saying that individual companies have a high likelihood of doing fraud. They're taking aim at the idea that the currency itself has any value. "The companies are actively lying to you about how much they hold in assets" is a critique I see coming from within the crypto community far more often than from outsiders. Stablecoin managers are constantly getting harangued to release public audits of their books, and clearly for good reason.
I think the ponzi nature of crypto was a significant cause of the disaster. The collapse of Terra-Luna seems to have been a major factor in Alameda requiring a bailout from FTX (as argued by https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175), and that collapse happened because Terra-Luna was a ponzi scheme.
Yes, there's a valuable distinction between "this token has no value except your ability to persuade other people to buy it, and eventually no one's gonna want to buy it" (Ponzi), "this token has few protections against theft or loss, far outside of its advantages" (the patio11 critic), and "the guy holding the tokens or maybe dollars for you is _in the current process of stealing them_" (FTX). FTX's specific behavior would have been a problem even had they been 'merely' a traditional non-investment bank!
(Possibly caught earlier, but then again, see Wells-"you wanted an extra account, right"-Fargo)
That said, there is a more general problem that crypto exchanges go bust for perfectly legal reasons on a pretty regular basis. The fraud here is getting additional publicity and scandal, but the EffectiveAltruism forum posts estimates that a little over 1/3 of 'committed' 2022 funding came through FTX or FTX Future Fund, and is talking about making sure people can pay rent, now.
Utilitarian offshoots obsessed with using resources for improving the lot of those decoupled from the generation of those resources is just a manifestation of entropy. It is a fundamentally against thr processes that lead to good human existence, and uses self wanking utilitarian ideology to justify thid breaking of selection mechanisms for biological, cultural, etc order that leads to human survival, prosperity, and reproduction. It does so by dressing it up as charity, decoupled from why charity might be adaptive, and is emblematic of the global end of history world as a single utopian village cognitive error.
Tldr; EA (and utilitarianism in general) is analogous to paperclip maximising AI risk but applied to human wetware.
That's before even getting into whether EA is sincere at all, its adherents are liars trying to status -launder, engage in FTX style shenanigans, etc.
One thing I would say is that it's important to distinguish the ideas and ideology from the movement and people claiming them, and as someone who believes strongly in the former I am deeply sceptical about large parts of the latter - I think that a lot of the "long-termist" things (especially AI risk) that people associated with Effective Altruism push are not actually effective altruism, and detract focus from short-termist projects like malaria and international development where an extra pound of spending probably does much more good.
I think that the large-EA Effective Altruist movement could fairly be called "invalid" (although that's not a word I'd choose myself) if it's not doing small-e effective altruism, and although some of it definitely is, I suspect quite a lot of it isn't.
I also think that there's at least a plausible line one can draw between the kind of high-self-confidence galaxy-brain thinking that leads to favouring AI over mosquito nets and the fall of SBF.
I'd say EA would be invalid as a movement if it turned out that the majority of EA adherents don't actually want to act in an altruistic way, or find out the most effective ways to do so. Instead they could have other goals, like learning to sound smart on the internet (mea culpa), or frauding intelligent, well-to-do people who lack defenses against social attacks from their own (perceived) ingroup, or quickly climbing the social ladder, or stinging other people's brain stems and laying eggs in their bellies.
So if thousands of people suddenly found themselves bursting into wasps, and a major EA proponent was found to be responsible, you'd update away from "EA is a good strategy that many people genuinely want to make happen" and towards "people who fund antihelmintics research and obsessively buy mosquito nets don't actually care about saving lives, they're giant wasps trying to reduce competition from the worm and mosquito people".
Is this the case? Personally, I don't think so. I believe the average EA proponent genuinely cares about other people, would sacrifice some personal comfort to help them, and is interested in knowing how best to do that. I also believe that people who deviate from the as-stated EA norms are a minority, and that most deviations result from morality creep instead of blatant bad-faith actors. I'll continue trusting them.
EA adherents turning people into wasps if it happened to set the value in a utility metric higher is the kind of tbing I would expect them to make excuses for... "but but but but they are *happier* as wasps!" or something like that.
Yes, I don't think it can ever be effective. I doubt it is altruism.
I doubt both whether altruism is effective as the common understanding of the word might imply, and I also doubt whether the reasoning and underlying imied worldview of effective altruists can lead.to taking effective altruisitic actions.
On point 7 - I think the main anti-crypto claims made by hostile media outlets were that crypto is full of grifters, that lack of regulation makes crypto a dangerous industry, and that crypto is a series of ponzi schemes. And I think the first two of those claims do an accurate if not precise job of explaining (predicting?) what went wrong at FTX, and you could make a case that the third one does too.
A question for guys who make "crypto is sound money/could be the next gold standard/would stop fractional reserve banking/reign in the central banks/more stable than fiat currency" type arguments. Has FTX lowered your confidence?
If SBF was investing his customer's assets and covering the difference in account balances by minting his own token, isn't that basically fractional reserve banking? The whole thing looks a lot like an ordinary bank run to me.
I work in the field. FTX has not affected my confidence in the soundness of the _technology_ I personally work with/on, which is always the part that has been of greatest interest to me. But it has lowered my confidence that it is possible for the _industry_ to function in a way that is good for the world, yes.
(EDIT: I guess I'm not really responsive to your question, since I'm not a crypto-goldbug or whatever.)
Everyone in crypto knows the entire "industry" is scams stacked on top of each other.
I'm quite impressed at the illusion of a legitimate financial instution FTX managed to create, despite being a bunch of autists abusing stimulants on the Bahamas.
It appears that the proliferation of crypto is based directly on the recent low interest rates and free money floating around. There's been too much money in the system for a number of years, and lots of people chasing investments when returns are dropping. It seems quite likely that all of these digital currencies are in danger of sudden collapse if the monetary situation changes. This seems likely in the next year or two.
The problem with treating crypto like gold or some other type of more normal investment is that there's no actual good that can be held. Sure, gold can lose a ton of value as well, but you at least still have a metal with some inherently useful properties. With crypto you have literally nothing if the value bottoms out.
I'm agnostic on the main question, but no; the FTX thing has zero influence on my view. It was a centralized business; none of its faults are due to the tech of ETH.
This. If someone invents an (almost) unbreakable material, and someone else starts a company where they supply locks made from it and hang on to the keys for you, and it turns out they were selling the keys to burglars, that doesn't affect my confidence in the structural properties of the material.
I mean, you don't have to go through a centralized exchange to engage with crypto. People do it because it's more convenient, but there's nothing stopping you from using DeFi, or practicing self-custody.
Yeah -- and I don't see a counterfactual world in which that statement is not true.
The core idea of crypto (or at least one of the core ideas) is to have tech that does away with the need for trust. This applies to various things; if I hold ETH in a personal wallet, I'm not relying on any other people. But it doesn't apply to centralized exchanges.
One should also point out that as far as I know, there's really no reason to ever leave funds lying around on a centralized exchange. You could and should use them only briefly and then transfer your funds to a personal wallet. (And also worth noting that it's possible to avoid them altogether.)
Don't you need high-speed low-cost low-latency Internet for crypto to have any value? Does that kind of Internet run on trust at all, or require government, or could we imagine it arising spontaneously in a libertarian paradise or anarchy?
You could say this exact same thing about money/fiat.
No need for trust just make sure each day you cash out into hard goods! People don't do that because it is super inconvinent. Ditto crypto. The "trustless" "feature" is not a feature 90%+ of the users are going to be able to take any advantage of, and they are just goign to end up trusting even more shaky institutions.
It's a monoamine neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitor which is selective for serotonin (as opposed to dopamine and norepinephrine). Serotonin / dopamine / norepinephrine are all structurally similar, and drugs tend to have activity on all three systems.
Generally, my surprise at "another crypto outfit goes down in flames among accusations of fraud and deceit" is on the "time to get more popcorn" level. Apparently, the demise of this particular outfit hurts genuinely well-meaning people, not just the usual fools who have not bothered to watch "Line goes up" yet, which is unfortunate. But to me, the big question is, who's next? If, as Scott describes, one company managed to hide behind an altruistic window-dressing and almost achieve regulatory capture - what are the other timebombs that are ticking in the US and European economies?
I wouldn't be too surprised if Elon Musk's empire collapsed next (I feel there has been a shift in public perception from "tech wizard/ genius entrepreneur" to "Bond villain/ bumbling fool", which may make it harder to pull off more stunts). Who/ what else?
If a 'line goes up' company collapses it might leave nothing but a crater behind. Maybe some software and servers to run an exchange. If Tesla collapses the floor isn't the floor way higher than that? Another company will surely takeover or repurpose all those factories and warehouses and the tech running them. I'm a giant Musk critic but at least most of his companies are making real stuff.
I wonder how much Tesla's customer driving data is worth by itself? Any company that wants to compete in self-driving would need to capture a similar dataset.
SpaceX certainly depends on government contracts. If there were a timebomb it would probably be that one. I think the government would happily bail them out though. Seems like a no brainer in national security terms alone, no matter how unprofitable, we need to have some launch capability in the US as insurance at the very least.
SpaceX should be fine. NASA has a clear interest in keeping them running and they are probably reasonably (but not very) profitable. The real question is around Starlink, since Musk has said it isn't profitable and he has sunk a lot of money into building it. It's not really clear to me that it will ever be profitable, and that's something that will create turmoil over the next few years for Musk.
SpaceX could probably spin off Starlink if it came to the worst, and then continue running on NASA contracts. I'm much more skeptical about things like Starship, however. I think the demand just isn't there, and in any case the rocket doesn't make a lot of sense for orbital applications. If it ever works I suspect it will only fly a handful of times per decade.
It would reduce the cost of launching the satellites. The satellites themselves would obviously still be kinda expensive, Starlink would still have to launch a lot of them just to replace the losses (15-20% per year), and they'd still have to get a lot of customers to dish out 100$ a month... and I suspect that the regions with a sufficient density of potential customers, but no fiber-optic connections available, will keep shrinking in the next years.
I think musk's companies (at least Tesla and SpaceX) are net profitable now? I wouldn't be shocked if their stocks crash and Musk personally declares bankruptcy, but I'd expect Tesla to keep existing and producing cars under new management.
From a cursory web search: SpaceX is a private company, they don't have to publish info on their financial status. They SAY they are profitable, which means exactly nothing. They apparently make profits on commercial Falcon 9 launches, but whether that outweighs the money they invest into Starlink and the development of Spaceship is doubtful.
"his hedge fund can make money by taking risky leveraged positions, but it has to raise funds, and that's not cheap. And his exchange can make money by charging fees on transactions, but although that can be a nice slow steady income, it's not going to make him the trillions of dollars he wants.
But Joe's spotted an opportunity. The exchange has lots of customer assets that aren't earning anything. If he puts those customer assets to work, he can earn far more from his exchange customers. And he's got an obvious vehicle through which to put them to work. The hedge fund. If he transfers customer assets on the exchange to the hedge fund, it can lend or pledge them at risk to earn megabucks.
Of course, there's a risk that the hedge fund could lose some or all of the customers' funds. And the exchange promises that customers can have their assets back on demand, which could be a trifle problematic if they are locked up in leveraged positions held by the hedge fund. But this is crypto. There's an easy solution. The exchange can issue its own token to replace the customer assets transferred to the hedge fund. The exchange will report customer balances in terms of the assets they have deposited, but what it will actually hold will be its own token. If customers request to withdraw their balances, the exchange will sell its own tokens to obtain the necessary assets - after all, crypto assets, like dollars, are fungible. "
The person you describe as knowing sounds awfully like Caroline Ellison, in which case, let me say that I refuse to believe that she could have acted on bad faith until I am given overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On the contrary, the impression I got is of a true believer, and a good person. This does not preclude the possibility that, under circumstances of a certain naiveté and inexperience in a field as murky as crypto, she might have let herself go along with what she might have perceived as temporary and 'bad' expedient means. But to believe this person ever intended to purposely and maliciously scam people our of their money or be privy to a fraud is, for me, completely out of the question. I believe the best option is to be charitable and await to see what the courts of law have to say once the dust has settled.
Here's the rub. Bankman Fried and his woman look like goblins. Human beings instinctively recoil from goblins. Rationalist utilitarians say 'no, there's no rational reason to recoil from people who look like goblins'. But there is.
Now, it's theoretically possible to construct a version of utilitarianism that would be sufficiently inclusive of both heuristic rules and the dark, dark secrets of HBD and psychology. But the problem is that it would be very complicated and the whole point of utilitarianism is to simplify morality. So, in practice, rationalist utilitarianism always ends up saying some version of 'no, there's no rational reason to recoil from people who look like goblins'. But, to reiterate, there is.
Reading this week’s Douthat column I kind of regret rage canceling my paid subscription to Scott’s Substack. “You won’t get a refund said Substack. No more hidden OTs for you.” “I don’t care!” I replied.
I am curious how Scott will address the appeal for a bit of perhaps less than maximally effective altruism tho.
Curious, why did you rage cancel?i
It was an earlier essay where Scott made the point that replacing millions of Japanese with people from Sub Saharan Africa would change the country’s culture.
He was right of course. If you replace a large portion of descendants of a culture that dates back to antiquity with people unfamiliar with that culture, things are going to change. But why Africans in particular? A substitution of Englishmen or Germans or anyone else would have a big impact on a mature culture.
It seemed like a proxy for White Replacement Theory in the US, something I don’t at all worry about. I could have been reading that wrong of course, but that was how it struck me at the time.
I talked myself down from that ledge eventually but had already canceled my paid subscription. It was futile gesture because Substack had already collected for a year’s subscription. Just one more in a lifetime of futile gestures. I suppose I run a bit hot on some long held beliefs.
I need advice for a friend who is in ungodly amounts of pain. I am thinking about the SSC article on pseudoaddiction- miner who takes opioids for years for horrible mining injuries speaks brusquely to hospital staff, gets his opioids taken away, shoots himself in the chest, miraculously survives, etc. My friend has been taking opioids for 6 years after a horrific car accident, and their doctor is threatening to take them away. What should they do?
Your friend can point out to their physician that the CDC has changed their opioid guidelines on November 4th, 2022 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/rr/rr7103a1.htm). Specifically, they have moved away from titrating or weaning long term opioids especially if they are well tolerated. Sudden cessation of opioids is increasingly identified as patient abandonment and can theoretically be reported to the state board.
I wish I had a better answer for you. We are in a period of reaction regarding opioids as I’m sure you know. My wife had out patient knee replacement surgery a year ago and she had to endure a lecture about how half of West Virginia is on heroin now and they didn’t *start* with heroin. The spiel went along the lines of “Studies have shown that acetaminophen and ibuprofen are just as effective,” at that point I pointed out that she can’t take ibuprofen because of an ulcer but that didn’t slow her down. “… aroma therapy and meditation can be used to control pain too….” It went on and on as they tried to hustle my wife out of bed and send her home. It got to the point where I had to interrupt the nurse and ask “Shouldn’t you be giving this lecture to the Sackler family?” She was wearing a Covid mask but I could see her bite her lower lip.
If bad comes to worse for your friend he might try kratom if is legal where he is. Some forms are supposed to relieve pain in the same manner as opioids. It’s a non optimal solution of course. He’d have know way of knowing for sure what he was ingesting, no government regulation of kratom and the US has been trying to make it’s sale illegal but it sounds like your friend is in a tough spot and might want to consider it.
This raises the question of "why" which I doubt you could supply in any case. Answers including agreeing to stop going in early for repeats (maybe signing a pain management contract stipulating this), asking for a slow taper, perhaps sufficiently so to allow time for referral to another prescriber, showing up at appointments having made some obvious efforts at self-care, etc. that suggest the opiates are actually objectively improving his quality of life (it doesn't sound like they are here).
While those are certainly possibilities, I know for a fact people get arbitrary cut off from years of necessary medication: my mom was one of them. Not only did they never ask for an additional refill, it would be preposterous to assume that someone with extensive damage to their back (three herniated disks) wasn't warranted in asking to receive opoids. They were subjected to forced taper offs; recommended to consider surgery (they did not want to); and at their most vulnerable moments were reduced to lifelessly slouching on a plush leather chair.
It was definitely a formative experience for me. Before then, I worked from the assumption that failure to act (both politically and personally) was the most consequential, the impact of those aforementioned actions weren't first priority to me. That's not to say none of it mattered at all, it just felt abstract to me; it didn't resonate. Part of that probably has to do with my political convictions (on a side note, I don't know if I can mention that on this thread, not sure whether it's odd or even numbered threads politics can be discussed; if I can't I'll edit it out in post).
Now though I believe both aspects are equally as important (and to anyone wondering, my mom eventually did get a suitable replacement; it wasn't opoids unfortunately but they're now able to comfortably function).
https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-discovery-runs-aground-in
I may post this again, but I wanted to get it said. This might be an added explanation for research slowing down, but I don't know whether it's as bad in the sciences as it is in the humanities.
The short version is that it's not just bad at amazon and google, search has become relatively useless at academic sources.
Here's how I got past a cataloguing issue. I'd heard for years that things had gotten better for years for Jews in Germany, especially in the Weimar Republic. I realized there was a story there, but what was it?
Searching on Google didn't help. I was just getting anti-semitic stuff.
I think it was a couple of years, and google changed its policies. Now I was getting stuff *about* Nazis. They're more interesting than gradual legal change.
Finally I asked people. I got pointed at the emancipation of the Jews and a book called The Pity of It All.
The moral of this story is that you may have to ask people because computer search isn't working. It's like being in the middle ages or something where local and specific knowledge is the essential thing.
https://manifold.markets/VivaLaPanda/will-i-have-found-a-website-which-i
This has been a pretty well-known problem in technical circles for years. Do a quick search for "google search" on Hacker News[1], and you get post after post[2] about how search is getting worse. And that doesn't even include the comment threads that pop up on unrelated posts.
It's one of those problems that gets worse the more you know about a topic, because google has trended towards searching for what it thinks you mean, rather than what you actually asked for (which is great for drunk people trying to figure out "that guy from that movie from the thing", less so for finding documentation or if you actually know what you're looking for).
It's also been overtaken by SEO blogspam - low quality, often GPT generated articles that use a 2000 word preamble to answer a question that takes 3 words, or content that is literally scraped and copy-pasted from websites like StackOverflow.
And, of course, there's the fact that you can't find any organic information about *any* product, and you have to append "reddit" to get anything besides adtech vomit in your searches.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search
[2] Some huge discussions in the past year:
Google Search Is Dying https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702
If people aren't getting great search results anyway, they may consider at least getting private results. The main option for that is DuckDuckGo but it has newer competitors such as Brave Search and Neeva (ecosia is also much more private than Google, although not as private as DDG or Brave Search).
DDG generally works pretty well for me. When it doesn't find what I'm looking for, I'll try Startpage, which usually works. Questions have been raised about the Startpage and privacy, which is why I primarily use DDG, but Startpage could hardly be worse than Google (or Bing).
Notably, DDG (and Brave Search) have "bangs" that allow you to initiate a search in another website, so you can do a Google search through DDG, by appending !g to your search query, for example. That would no longer be private, but it can be more convenient than first navigating to google.com.
Kagi search is worth trying, their free version is pretty limited but it's pretty impressive. It's also using an in-house index, it's not just a frontend for Bing like DDG.
I've also noticed a significant decline in search quality, particularly with Google/Youtube, that's happened fairly continuously over the last 10 or so years. I think that the issue mainly comes from trying too hard to make the algorithm 'smart', and focusing on the wrong things.
For example, on youtube. when I first started making youtube videos in the late 2000s, my videos would get tens of thousands of views. I don't have aspirations of stardom, but I do reasonably think that my audience worldwide, that is, people who would be interested in my content, is that big. In the mid 2010s, i'd get a few hundred views if lucky. Nowadays I'm lucky if I break into the double digits. What happened? Why are the people who want to find my stuff not finding it?
Basically, Youtube decided that it didn't want to neutrally give search results that closely matched what you typed in. It wanted to show you popular things that kind of matched what you typed in. It's not trying to show you the best result; it's trying to find an *excuse* to show you something that *it* wants to show you. This is really bad for several reasons, but the main reason is that if you are looking for a small signal, it will get drowned out every time by the closest large signal. This was not a problem before, because you could tell it to neutrally and unbiasedly just give you things that exactly matched what you put in.
The other problem is that the internet has changed. It used to be a place where weird or forward-thinking people were doing things that interested them. Now it is where most of the world's business is done, and also the de facto public square. And what was once great about youtube for example was that someone just messing around with a camera or talking in an unscripted way about something they liked could get seen and interacted with, without a lot of time wasted on making fancy powerpoint-style presentations. Now it's all people who are vying to make money on youtube, creating overproduced content with fancy studio lights and tight scripting.
Anybody know why DSL is inaccessible?
While on the topic of DSL, is it possible for the admins (cc obermot) to reinstate the ability to ignore threads? This was a useful feature that disappeared without an explanation.
Ok lads, back in the van. Uncle Obormot has glued it all back together again..
We were talking about it in the discord. Cassander pointed out that Naval Gazing is down too, so the problem isn't unique to us.
ACX about to experience what it's like when the weird offshoot branch of the family nobody really talks to anymore suddenly shows up uninvited to the family reunion :)
I thought the same thing
Yeah, I can't access the site either. Maybe wait a couple of hours and see if it clears up.
"Anybody know why DSL is inaccessible?"
I only know DSL as an acronym for Digital Subscriber Line, which is an old technology for getting onto the Internet. If you mean it this way then this will be specific to your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If you mean something else it will help if you expand the acronym.
Sorry - especially because it always bugs me when people use acronyms I'm unfamiliar with.
I mean Datasecretslox, the Bulletin board Scott always mentions at the beginning of his open threads. It's been down for quite a few hours and thats never happened before.
No worries :-)
FYI, the site is up now (for me at least).
The topic at the top of the topic list is: "What happened to DSL?"
So, what's up with media being so nice to SBF? (https://twitter.com/loopifyyy/status/1592944362274816000?s=46&t=QYFASLmu7f_nv9WfJkguFA). What's the underlying cause? Or is the premise false and these articles are cherry-picked?
I mean, the worst offenders, like the NYT, are cherry-picked, but the fact that the with-kid-gloves NYT article came out right after it got leaked that the NYT[1] has had an explicit "no positive coverage for tech" policy is worrying enough on its own.
I saw someone on twitter comment that the flurry of puff pieces and interviews was like indirectly observing the dark matter of some PR agency, and that rings true.
[1] And by extension, probably most media companies, since their ownership charts are incestuous
Let me get this straight. You trust ‘loopify’ on Twitter more than the Financial Times, NYT, Reuters and Bloomberg?
No, but I do trust the aggregate of the many rat- and postrat- adjacent accounts on twitter that were saying the exact same thing. Also, this is the comment section to be defending the NYT in lol. Of your list, the only one I remotely trust not to have a pro-finance bias is Reuters.
Do people think SBf started out intending to run a scam? If not, approximately when did he start running a deliberate scam?
Excuse me if this has been brought up already.
I would be inclined to update to mistrusting people who talk a lot about their own virtue.
I'm pretty sure SBF et al were running their business in an exceedingly casual and reckless manner from the start. And I'm also pretty sure that their attitude towards e.g. securities and banking law was "bunch of unimaginative suits who will just get in the way of our legitimate business; the less they know the better". Which is often technically illegal. But I don't think they crossed the line into unambiguous cheating-our-customers-out-of-what-we-promised-them scamming until the last few months or so, probably about the time Alameda had its liquidity crisis and needed FTX's client funds to bail them out.
And even then, I think they were optimistically hoping that they'd do a bit of quick what-most-of-us-call-scamming, then double their money through super genius expert trading and refill the customer accounts before anybody noticed, then get back to their basically honest but casual and reckless business. Until the next time.
It also wouldn't surprise me if there was a *last* time, when they used their customer accounts to bail themselves out and then *did* make the money back before anybody noticed, but that may be hard to figure out. I think the records of t hat are in the heap under the beanbag chair in the orgy room.
I'm not sure the man can reliably distinguish between a scam and an ordinary trading business, so it might be the case that the distinction about which you're asking is not one he could make, which means whatever his motivations were they need not have changed markedly on crossing a line visible only to others (between 'financial trading biz' and 'scam').
After all, pretty much all trading business is a series of bets, and in each bet there is usually a winner and a loser. I bought a bunch of XOM last year at 35 because I thought that price was definitely going to up, and the fact that it's 113 today means (at least so far) I was right and I'm a winner, but that also means all the people from who I bought the stock last were wrong and are losers. Some of their money has been transferred to me, and not because I earned it by doing work for them, but just because they took the losing side of a bet with me.
We don't consider this a fraud, scam, or theft, because of certain bright lines we draw in our heads about what is a "fair" bet between consenting participants and what is not, e.g. we require the bet to be made with the full knowledge of the owners of the capital at stake, we require nobody to have any unusual not generally available information, we require nobody to be in a position of authority that could influence the outcome of the bet, everyone has to be an adult, et cetera.
But many of these lines are in practice somewhat arbitrary, and why we draw this line versus that, and why here versus there is often a bit fuzzy, with relatively dubious precise justification[1]. Nevertheless, most of us believe there *are* bright lines that separate "fair" from "unfair" or "criminal", even if the actual legal lines aren't drawn precisely in the right place.
There are other people, however, who see the arbitrariness, however modest, and extrapolate from its existence to the general conclusion that *any* bright line is just arbitrary bullshit, and there really isn't any important moral difference between ordinary trading and what some unenlightened dummies would provocatively call "a scam." I think people who end up running scams in what looks like an accidental way, just kind of wandering heedlessly across some bright line or other, are probably often in this category. Because they don't much believe in the existence of bright lines, they don't take ordinary care to stay on one side of them.
People who run Ponzi or Nigerian prince scams from the get-go by contrast probably totally grok bright lines, and presumably decide to just cross into the Neutral Zone deliberately because it will be personally profitable.
----------------
[1] And to be fair, I think sometimes the arbitrariness of the lines can sometimes ensnare genuinely innocent people. I've always been a little dubious that Martha Stewart was guilty of insider trading, although I could be wrong about that of course.
Your logic makes no sense. By your logic, if you ever sell your stock and it continues to rise, then you are a loser. Actually, if there exists any other investment that would have made more money than your purchase of stock, you are a loser.
Clearly this is wrong. The winner or loser status of the person whose stock you purchased must be based on the performance (relative to expectations) of the stock between their purchase and sale and not after they sold.
I could probably have phrased it better by saying that people voluntarily surrended their right to a future stream of income to me for a price that turned out to significantly undervalue the value of that income. How you want to phrase that in accounting terms would probably be a matter of taste, about which I have no strong opinion because I find the question a bit OCD and uninteresting, but I'm pretty sure to most people it would feel like "a loss" and taking the other side certainly feels like a gain to me.
If you mistakenly think your house is infested with termites and must be torn down, and I come along and, taking advantage of your bad judgment, buy your house for 25 cents on the dollar, far below its market value after I have it inspected and prove there are no termites, do you still think value hasn't been transferred from you to me? Same idea.
And some people would say the latter example is a "fair" deal, because you could've had it inspected yourself, and others would say it's "unfair" if, for example, you are actually mentally ill and you think it's infested by Martian termites who can turn themselves invisible to evade inspection -- and therefore I took cruel advantage of a disability. That relates to the larger and more interesting issue, which is that there are bright lines that separate "sharp business deal" from "fraud", but (1) we're in general little fuzzy and arbitrary about where we draw them, and (2) some people of a rigid or antisocial mindset argue the imprecision proves the lines per se are bullshit, and so there *isn't* any important difference between "sharp business deal" and "fraud." Our Hero SBF may be one of them.
The news that keeps coming out on this looks worse and worse. These were absolutely not innocent naive dufuses who stumbled into incredibly serious crimes.
His interview with Vox (and god, what a hilariously bad idea that was) gives me the impression of stupidity rather than malice. Like, just so careless with the exchange that he didn't know or care where the money was going until a bank run forced him to actually sit down and count up where all the money had gone.
He does say some "meh, ethical investing is just a sham" stuff which might make me lean towards an intentional scam, but taking the interview as a whole I'm inclined to read it as an after-the-fact defense - "everyone's a scammer, so what I did wasn't that bad" - rather than an admission that the whole thing was planned from the start.
(Not that I'm trying to defend him. Even his own description of his errors is well into "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" territory. But I don't think he ever had the clarity to say to himself "this is definitely violating the law but it's going to make me enough money that I don't care.")
Edit: Link to the interview. It's worth a read: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
To be overly technical, SBF didn't run a scam. He ran a legitimate business (effectively a currency exchange) and stole from it. I think this answers your question: he started out running a legitimate currency exchange but had such little moral fiber that once a lot of people trusted him with their money he just stole it for his own purposes.
This doesn't seem to be the case based on new statements from the company after the SBF orgy club was removed. This was barely a company at all. They didn't keep records, in fact SBF encouraged them to use auto-delete communication methods, they were fake audited by a fake audit company or something, they don't know who their creditors or debtors are, where their money is, or what their assets and liabilities are. Their subsidiaries were not set up right, either.
Preface: FTX and SBF seem to have almost certainly engaged in fraud. The record keeping seems either atrocious or a deliberately obscuring the real record. That said,
It's standard practice to encourage employees to use less permanent media (or ideally, face to face communication) for any communication that might have any legal bearing. There is training to this effect at all the companies I've worked at. Perhaps this is shady, but it is also pretty normal.
If so I might be mistaken. But I was under the impression it did have a functioning platform which is why people still have money in it and are trying to get it out.
That everything was done in a wrong/criminal/etc way: Yes, for sure.
My guess is that this is a boringly simple case of "person has large amounts of money to invest, person makes bad investment decisions, person loses money, person then makes set of riskier and riskier gambles to try to get back above water, compounding the losses." In this case, with larger numbers than usual because there has been a ton of capital sloshing around trying to find good investment opportunities in the last few years.
I'm guessing it didn't start as a scam, and mostly wasn't one. For whatever reason his hedge fund run into real trouble, and thought up this one clever clever hack using funds from his crypto exchange to save it. And since everything he was doing was for the greater good anyway, he decided not to let oldfashioned rules stop him.
I know the issue of 'use cases' with crypto has been beaten to death ,so I apologize in advance for the redundancy, but I would like to ask the smart people on this chat this: Is crypto the first example of an innovation/commodity for which the garden variety champion cannot explain the 'use case' to the typical rube?
Self disclosure: In this context (and others, without question, but those aren't relevant here) I am the rube. And I have read all manners of interviews with the likes of SBF and the desperately malnourished kid who started Ethereum, and whenever the question of 'so what is it really good for' comes up we get the inevitable 'that's a really good question!' (to all who have been to an academic conference, feel free to laugh with me!) and then a bunch of 'blah blah blah decentralized blah blah blah' and we move on to the next question.
So- I'm not here to argue that crypto 'doesn't' have a use case, because it absolutely might and I can see some distinct paths where it does. But in terms of explaining it to the average guy, I think it's fallen laughably short. Whichmy eye at least is an interesting feature of this commodity, since I can't think of another example of an asset that has this unique property.
Am I wrong? Have there been others? If not, is this an augur for what's to come (i.e., more assets that end up worth more than the GDP of Brazil but that nobody can clearly explain how they will improve our lives in the short-to-medium term)? Or if so, what were they and what happened to them?
I think the "typical rube" can understand money laundering easily enough. The hard part is for champions to make money laundering into something the typical rube will support.
The typical rube *also* understands speculative bubbles in assets of dubious fundamental value, but it's probably a lost cause to try and make that sound good. The money laundering, you can at least point to people trying to flee oppressive regimes or to buy medical marijuana (adderall, whatever) in Red States.
>The hard part is for champions to make money laundering into something the typical rube will support.
Meh, they got their work cut out for them by your local government.
> Is crypto the first example of an innovation/commodity for which the garden variety champion cannot explain the 'use case' to the typical rube?
No. It isn't. It's actually common.
Electricity, to go back almost two hundred years, was also quite mysterious to the average person. And simultaneous with it being used for things that laid the groundwork for modern electric grids you had grifters claiming it was magic. One woman in Paris told people it had magical powers. People would pay to sit near an electric engine. She would have assistants rub water on skin and then shock people for supposed health benefits. Etc
Now, you might be saying that lighting a building up is an obvious benefit. And it is. But it took over sixty years to get from the first economical electric engine to the first electricity lighted home.
This is entirely typical. There were people saying Google was too complex to explain compared to things that more closely resembled index card systems that most people had been trained on. Etc. The idea that innovation is obvious or easily understood comes from media where the genius goes "eureka!" and explains how to solve their problem in simple terms the audience can understand. But it's not how it actually works.
So from the sixty years between the first economical electric engine to the first electricity lighted home, was there a use case for electricity? If so, could it be explained to a rube? I'm not familiar with the history of electricity, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a use case that couldn't be easily explained (e.g. "you know watermills? This lets you grind stuff too, but without water. You can put a 'watermill' anywhere now!")
That's because you're looking backward. What is obvious to you was not obvious to them.
The first electric mill took even longer. The first electric lighthouse took a little less time but not by much. The first commonly comprehensible invention that such electrical generation enabled was telegraphs. And even that took a specialist to understand. And they invented new kinds of fraud such that even now we have statutes on the books such as wire fraud. This was all happening alongside a large number of grifters who claimed electricity could do anything from help you connect with God to predict the future to raise the dead.
You can say, "Ah, but the use of telegraphs is obvious!" Well, it's obvious to you now. It wasn't obvious at the time. The British government repeatedly wholesale rejected the use of the telegraph and it was viewed with significant suspicion at the time. The Royal Navy famously compiled a report where they rejected the innovation as not really adding value. The average rube did not realize the value and it took concerted effort by electrical advocates to drive adoption. (And a significant number of rubes were outright scammed.)
Now, just because electricity was doubted doesn't mean anything that's doubted is valid. That's the same error in reverse. But the fact there's doubt or that non-specialists don't understand it doesn't really mean anything. It's common even for things we think are "obvious" today.
I think I didn't explain myself well. I didn't mean to say that the future uses of electricity were obvious. I meant that, at the time when electric mills, telegraphs, electric lights, etc were in the future, electricity really didn't have many uses. A rube would have been right to be suspicious of anyone selling electricity, because as you said, lots of them were con artists claiming electricity had magical powers and going around shocking people. When electric mills, telegraphs, electric lights, etc *did* get invented, and electricity was no longer just a scam or a curiosity, the use cases *were* easily explainable to rubes.
Let's apply this to crypto. Right now, there are no obvious use cases that are easily explainable to a rube that aren't of debatable value. (The ability for anyone, including criminals, to transfer money without regulation is easily understandable--but also of highly debatable value.) Therefore, rubes are right to conclude that crypto is either a curiosity or a scam. In the future, if and when great use cases for crypto *do* get invented, it'll no longer be just a curiosity or a scam, and the great use cases *will* be easily explainable to rubes.
Now I think I didn't explain myself well either. The telegraph, after it was proven functional and reliable, took decades to drive adoption. The Royal Navy, the most advanced in the world at the time, did a full investigatory report and determined that it was not useful despite acknowledging its literal capabilities. They basically said (as someone said to me yesterday about crypto) faster speeds alone didn't justify the switch. So no, they *weren't* easily explainable or widely accepted. And plenty of scams coexisted with the valid uses. So your application is wrong.
Crypto might be a scam. But the fact the average person is caught by scams or cannot understand it doesn't point one direction or another. And you're attempting to construct an argument on sand that fits what I guess are your preconceptions. Here's a simple argument: the ACH takes 3 days and crypto takes minutes. (If I'm being a bit simple it's because I've had this argument two other times this week. And both times it ended with them admitting I was right on the technical merits but a few days of extra speed weren't worth enough to justify it.)
The standard answer that I'm familiar with is that fiat is entirely controlled by national governments and they can and have totally fucked over currencies before, whether with asset seizing or with hyperinflation. Less of an issue in the West, very much an issue in much of the rest of the world.
In theory, Crypto gives you a currency that can't be a victim of inflation (though in practice it's treated by most as a speculative commodity instead).
In theory, crypto gives you an anonymous currency, so you can buy illegal things - which might well be medicine rather than recreational stuff, or so that you can protest against the government without them freezing all your bank accounts to starve you. In practice, most crypto currencies out there are not actually anonymous in practice, because it turns out that governments really like having a surveillance state and the USG is strong enough to enforce regs on crypto. (P.s. note that the good features of crypto here are basically the same as those possessed by physical cash, but also notice how much governments have been pushing society towards digital transactions and away from cash in hand, for exactly these reasons.)
Assuming it had a strong reason to do so, it seems like the US government has enough resources to just 51% attack any cryptocurrency that becomes a problem for it. So it's not clear to me that they really get you out from under government interference.
They don't need to do that. Nationalize the telcos[1], and reconfigure all the gateways to block, spy on, or modify Internet traffic however you want, until you've achieved whatever you like with the cryptocurrency. You can destroy it, hijack it[2], inflate it, deflate it, whatever you want.
If you want to evade government surveillance or control, the last thing you want to do is build in mission-critical reliance on a vast physical public infrastructure over which government already and inherently exerts great control.
What you probably need is some kind of crypto that can work via spread-spectrum radio on the 20 meter band. Then you're all set, unless the government starts prohibiting the sale and possession of shortwave radios I guess.
-----------------------
[1] You can probably omit step 1, actually, and just make a phone call to the CEOs of each business. They're not going to decline to do the guys who regulate their profit margins any little favor.
[2] Some people like to think this is impossible because they can anonymize their traffic, but I think that underestimates how far ahead of the game it is likely the NSA already is: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/08/349016/a-dark-web-tycoon-pleads-guilty-but-how-was-he-caught/
No, crypto's just stuck between two different poles.
The use case for Crypto is obvious; you don't trust the government or the banks and you'd prefer to set up a trustless way to do electronic money transfers. In this case, think Monero. When hackers demand a $100 million dollar ransomware payment from Acer, they ask for Monero. Even if you're not a criminal, and most users aren't, you can be extremely confident that Monero can't be traced, controlled, or inflated by the central banks you don't trust. This has the advantage of a clear use case and the disadvantage of basically being associated with criminals.
On the other end, you have Etherium, which is both too complicated for me and basically just a weird tech company. This has the disadvantage of not having any idea why people would use it and the advantage of being drowned in VC money. Unsurprisingly, this is how most people think of crypto now, because people like money.
To quote John Stokes, who wrote very well about the Tornado Cash controversy(1), "At some time, you really do gotta pick between "selling out to the Man" and "revolution". Everyone gets the original use case and the original purpose but people can't get rich off that.
(1) https://www.jonstokes.com/p/ethereums-very-own-death-pit
I'm looking at a technical writing job where I need to create a Single Source of Truth from documentation where information has been copied and modified with multiple versions. I have an idea of how to do this (create a template, fill it with reliable information, and then offload all the conflicts into a 'conflicts in this topic' section below the template. Create an issue of these conflicts in Jira and then allocate time towards resolving them.)
What I'd like is some kindof authority to either show me a better way or else to help me justify the course I'm considering. All the writing is about 'why you should create a SSOT' and not how to manage the process itself.
Cryptofascism in action on Scott Alexander's substack: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250/comment/10493983
For all of our daytrippers from DSL, the report comment button is under the three dots.
I think a lot of the old stagers over on DSL are perfectly familiar with the Passion Flower 😁
This is pretty obviously in bad faith and worse in a way, it’s unoriginal.
Gore Vidal went down this road on live television over 50 years ago. Though Vidal did use the term crypto Nazi in reference to Bill Buckley instead of crypto fascist the schtick is made of the same crap.
Buckley’s response here was just as terrible, calling Vidal a ‘little queer’ and threatening to ‘sock him.’
https://video.pbsnc.org/video/independent-lens-crypto-nazi-and-other-insults
This is a really bizarre deflection from the use of a mob to disrupt the peaceful transition of power by an authoritarian type strongman backed by the theocratically inclined religious people. That's fascism; the cryptofascism is in the people here all fumbling around trying to pretend otherwise.
Did you link the wrong post? Nothing in it is about authoritarian strongmen, mobs, or theocracy.
I doubt your good faith in this discussion.
Where as I am _certain_ that your contribution isn't good faith, regardless of what you believe about it.
You are a mind reader I see. What am I thinking now? Hint - it’s that you are a troll.
The cryptofascist party would like to remind everybody that the goal of this place is to have interesting and enlightening conversations. The opportunity cost for being here is sitting on your porch, watching the leaves change and unironically enjoying everything pumpkin spice. If a discussion isn't informative or enlightening, life's too short to argue on the internet when the trees outside are so beautiful.
In a post ironic world, all expression is genuine.
*shrug*
I genuinely don't think this is going anywhere. I'm not sure I'd call it a flame war but it certainly doesn't seem productive or enlightening. Instead it looks like a ton of bad internet arguments I've seen before.
I also, genuinely, enjoy watching the leaves change and pumpkin spice creamers in my coffee. These things are just obviously good; I could no more ironically enjoy them than I could ironically enjoy a cookie. It's a cookie.
This guy is using the same rhetorical technique as a particular recently banned individual who was coming from the other side of the political spectrum. Who knows? Maybe it’s the same guy and he just likes insulting people and causing a row.
"What if the lineup of people expressing the same mainstream and therefore extremely popular criticisms, NPC arguments we don't have to take seriously, is just the same guy" lmao
Do you really think I was talking about the cookie? That's funny.
There is no ironically claiming to be a cryptofascist.
Linking to another comment on this thread which is your own accusation of cryptofascism is obviously unnecessary. It is devoid of kindness.
Also devoid of truth, BTW, earning a “perfect” score of 0 out of 3.
Yeah, I'm on the same ideological side as them, and even I recognize that Impassionata is going to deserve their ban when Scott gets around to it.
"I'm not a cryptofascist, I just inject myself in conversations about race to smugly imply you don't have any good arguments against racism"
Haven’t heard a single one out of you yet. Not that I need to hear any: to me, racism is self-evidently stupid and bad. But I have heard quite a lot of ad-hominem invective out of you, which is not in line with community norms.
Going way out of your way to tell someone you don't think they have any good arguments against racism is in line with community norms? That's what you think?
It's only in your delusional worldview that I'm required to enter into the conversation against racism. I decline. I take the direction you steer the conversation as evidence that you want to have that conversation, which tells me that you want the conversation to happen. More people talking about race is how cryptofascism works.
Now you're advocating for me to be banned because I attacked you with my arguments, which you've ignored in favor of glowering at how I didn't make arguments against racism that I never committed to making. This is bad faith participation in a comically direct fashion, but we'll see if moderation is autistic--sorry, 'quokka'--enough to be fooled by your snivelling.
If people are idiots easily persuaded into performing the nazi disco dance party rhetorical moves, I want to believe that they are idiots. Call that invective if you like! I shall laugh at your petty word games and insist once again: if you proclaim yourself to be against racism and racists, let's hear your strongest arguments against the inclusion of racists in a community.
Otherwise you're full of shit.
Hah! K thx, bye flamey troll.
That's your opinion of course.
I remember reading a study where the authors wrote two identical papers about political violence, but they simply replaced "left wing violence" with "right wing violence" in the second. They then tried to get them published and tracked the results. Does anyone know about it ? I can't find it anymore.
If you're still looking for this, this was in the "Unsafe Science" substack by Lee Jussim.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/rabble-rouser/201309/liberal-bias-in-social-psychology-personal-experience-i
Should you put your university grades on LinkedIn?
On the one hand, if you don't put them on I suspect viewers will think you are hiding something and may think that you are not competent. This is probably a particular concern for black students, given that viewers may make incorrect inferences about their grades based on statistical data.
On the other hand, if they are put on your profile it might seem like showing off (if they're really good), and indicative of a kind of insecurity that I'm the kind of person who needs to show off their grades. Also, it might make others that have worse grades feel bad about not having similar achievements.
How do people normally deal with this?
If you're a recent graduate, putting your GPA on your resume is a generally accepted practice that won't make people think you are trying to brag. Sometimes, when you're looking for entry-level positions, grades can make a difference. I'd assume that holds for a LinkedIn profile if it's being used to look for entry-level jobs in a field you just got a degree in. Particularly if you went to a second- or third-tier school.
After a few years, it gets stale and people will want to know what you've actually been working on, so take down the GPA and start talking about your projects.
Don't post grades for each class you took; the people who care will ask for a transcript anyway.
I rarely need to see grades to know whether someone groks a field in which I'm competent to hire. Usually seeing their overall trajectory is enough for a first approximation, and then when I talk to the person I can figure it out very quickly.
What seems likely to be more useful is to add a short note about courses you've taken that one wouldn't ordinarily expect you to take as part of the degree, e.g. if you have a degree in computer programming but you've taken quantum mechanics and 3 years of Mandarin, that's maybe worth noting because it might make you stand out for some particular job.
I have never worked anywhere that required or even reviewed grades, outside of education. If you are trying to work in a field that is education-based, the expectation that you share your grades may be higher, but that can be achieved through official transcripts.
Nobody cares about your grades after you land your first job, even if they care at first.
I suggest not putting in anything except where you studied, whether or not you graduated, and your GPA if the system has provisions for it. And omit the GPA if you are already working in the industry and wouldn't be interested in an entry-level position. If a prospective employer really wants to know your grades, they can ask for a transcript as part of the application process.
Aren't those prediction markets easily manipulated?
1: Publicly place a large bet on your own trustworthiness through 2023
2: Through a sock puppet place a smaller bet on your committing fraud in 2024
3: Allow the first bet to shift odds against the second
4: On Jan 1 2024 after collecting your modest reward, commit fraud. Reap rewards of fraud. Then reap rewards from betting on fraud while presumed honest.
My hypothesis for why your subconscious wanted to put your thoughts on FTX on an open thread:
The criticisms of FTX and people saying "I told you so" will have to share space (on an incredibly slow loading page) with a bunch of self promotion, making it less forceful.
I suspect this idea was meant as gentle self-parody—it's basically a proposal to double down on the precise epistemic errors that led to this fiasco.
Investing in a risky new venture is *already* a prediction market on, inter alia, whether the founder will turn out to be a fraudster. Accordingly, the collapse of FTX is a reminder that whatever advantages markets have in theory, for questions like this you can’t always rely on the average of many opinions weighted by the amount of money each is willing and able to bet on being right. People with money to bet on their opinions about a niche topic have collective blind spots, ideological biases, and susceptibility to charisma and deceit just like any other group.
A better update, in my own ideologically biased opinion, would be towards the golden rule of wokeness: beware the wealthy and powerful, because in a dog-eat-dog world it’s nearly impossible to make it to the top by being kind and upstanding.
If this indeed self-parody, I personally couldn't distinguish it from the other things that rationalists write. Don't know wether that reflects badly on me or the rationalists.
I don't think you need to be especially suspicious towards wealthy people who got wealthy thanks to labor (e.g doctors), but perhaps should be a bit more suspicious of people who got rich thanks to speculation/networking.
Progressives often try to draw a distinction like that—a doctor whose independent practice has finally paid off their loans and then some after a long career is one thing, an MD pulling in a few million a year from pharmaceutical companies in speaking fees and expert witness honoraria deserves a different level of epistemic scrutiny. E.g. AOC likes to post about the difference between $1e6 (moderately suspicious "movie star" money) vs. "systems money" on the order of $1e9, which she argues can only be achieved through various kinds of ruthless exploitation. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnpfW3QUwAApRxQ?format=jpg&name=large
This is in general the epistemic virtue I think rationalists could learn from wokeness: attending not only to the first-order merits of an idea, but to which systems of power had to be appeased and whose interests were served in the process of generating the idea and its premises. Ironically the community is very comfortable with this analysis when the powerful ideologues being appeased are, like, faculty search committees and woke Reddit admins, but is excessively focused on these motes in woke eyes while ignoring the beams resulting from centuries of intellectual deference to wealth, whiteness, and other historical sources of power.
How convenient for AOC that having mere "millions" of dollars is okay but being a billionaire is highly suspicious and the fruits of systemic racism - or systemic mumble mumble anyway.
I have the strangest feeling that her total worth might be getting up to the million mark. For somebody working a low-paid job that pays hourly rates, a millionaire is just as suspicious as a billionaire is to a millionaire.
This site says it's "pants on fire" that AOC has a worth around a million, but that they quote the following makes me wonder about how purely truthful and not at all using totally legal workarounds to reduce tax liability it is:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/10/facebook-posts/aocs-net-worth-over-1-million-s-pants-fire/
"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's latest financial disclosure form showed assets of between $2,003 and $31,000.
Her liabilities were listed at between $15,001 and $50,000, indicating that she may have a negative net worth. "
What was it Mr. Micawber said? I think he would judge "Assets $31,000, Liabilities $50,000,, Net Result $19,000 in the hole" to be a good sign she should give up politics and find a paying job 😀
I guess you get a rationalist point for Googling your irrelevant ad hominem and admitting that it's not remotely true? But it's pretty disappointing that you immediately pivot from "AOC is maybe rich so her analysis of wealth and power is not worth engaging with" to "AOC is maybe poor so her analysis of wealth and power is not worth engaging with".
Why not respond to the actual claim she and I are making: in a world where many smart and talented people ruthlessly compete for wealth, often in clearly antisocial ways, we should have a high prior that the very few who get to the $1e9 range have done unethical things to get there?
> in a world where many smart and talented people ruthlessly compete for wealth, often in clearly antisocial ways, we should have a high prior that the very few who get to the $1e9 range have done unethical things to get there?
Motte: "high priors on theft"; bailey: "certainly a theft".
I am curious, what exactly are your priors on "if someone has X wealth (as a reasonable person would calculate it, not after all kinds of tax evasion), they made it unethically" for $1e6, $1e7, $1e8, and $1e9 respectively?
Sorry for getting back to you so late on this one, was doing other stuff and forgot.
I did have a couple of longer answers planned out, but since I am also watching the opening ceremony of the World Cup right now (dear lord please finish up and start with the actual football, nobody cares about bad pop), this is going to be fast and cheap.
(1) Rationalist points? Are those like Green Shield Stamps?
(2) AOC is a brand, a carefully crafted selling point. Ocasio-Cortez is about as grassroots as artificial turf, she was part of a kingmaker campaign and I do have to hand it to her, she got elected and re-elected, so congrats on that. But all the "Sandy from the block" stuff is PR image
(3) She's a slick career politician, and after pushing a bit too hard in her first year, she has now settled down to a career as (probably) reliably getting re-elected in the gentrified constituency she ran for, and will continue to issue hot takes to keep her name, and brand, alive and current in the media
(4) That's it, basically I don't take her any more seriously than any other politician who has found a niche and is exploiting it. I guess she could do a whole "turning up dressed in white to scream and cry outside Twitter HQ" in her Billionaire Protest, just like she did outside the car parking lot for the Illegal Immigrant Protest.
I think the information in the column I excerpted above reflects very poorly on Sam Bankman-Fried. His subjective intentions may have been quite benign. But, it appears that he was extremely reckless in the way he organized and ran FTX's business.
If you expect to have strangers entrust you with billions of dollars of their property, you must at the very least keep meticulous records of how much you received, who you received it from, and the conditions of receipt. You must also keep equally meticulous records of what you did with the property you received. etc. Those records ought to be able to be used to produce a high quality balance sheet at all times. The fact that they couldn't is telling.
Right now, I would say that SBF is in very deep legal trouble, that he is likely to be indicted, convicted, and jailed for committing fraud.
Happy quarter-thousandth open thread, everyone!
I understand that Robert Wright went on Bret Weinstein's YouTube channel (the Darkhorse Podcast) a couple of weeks or so ago, to debate Eric Weinstein's probably-crackpot theories/models and perhaps other things. Does anyone know whether/when Bret Weinstein will post this debate? I was really kind of looking forward to it. I see no signs of this showing up on Bret Weinstein's YouTube channel and am even wondering if Wright misspoke and he spoke directly to Eric instead, but searching "Robert Wright Eric Weinstein" isn't turning anything up either.
This is a small excerpt of a column on Bloomberg.com by Matt Levine, formerly an editor of Dealbreaker, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. I have not included quotation marks but what follows is direct quote, but it does not include links or footnotes. It is not my opinion as I have no first hand knowledge of the facts:
Money Stuff: FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad
By Matt Levine • https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-balance-sheet-was-bad
The box
... the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane. ...:
Sam Bankman-Fried’s main international FTX exchange held just $900mn in easily sellable assets against $9bn of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy, according to investment materials seen by the Financial Times.
... And yet bad as all of this is, it can’t prepare you for the balance sheet itself, published by FT Alphaville, which is less a balance sheet and more a list of some tickers interspersed with hasty apologies. If you blithely add up the “liquid,” “less liquid” and “illiquid” assets, at their “deliverable” value as of Thursday, and subtract the liabilities, you do get a positive net equity of about $700 million. (Roughly $9.6 billion of assets versus $8.9 billion of liabilities.) But then there is the “Hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘fiat@’ account,” with a balance of negative $8 billion. [1] I don’t actually think that you’re supposed to subtract that number from net equity — though I do not know how this balance sheet is supposed to work! — but it doesn’t matter. If you try to calculate the equity of a balance sheet with an entry for HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT, Microsoft Clippy will appear before you in the flesh, bloodshot and staggering, with a knife in his little paper-clip hand, saying “just what do you think you’re doing Dave?” You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison. ...
For a minute, ignore this nightmare balance sheet, and think about what FTX’s balance sheet should be. ... But broadly speaking your balance sheet is still going to look roughly like:
Liabilities: Money customers gave you, which you owe to them;
Assets: Stuff you bought with that money.
And then the basic question is, how bad is the mismatch. Like, $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion of liquid dollar-denominated assets? Sure, great. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion worth of Bitcoin assets? Not ideal, incredibly risky, but in some broad sense understandable. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting entirely of some magic beans that you bought in the market for $16 billion? Very bad. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting mostly of some magic beans that you invented yourself and acquired for zero dollars? WHAT? Never mind the valuation of the beans; where did the money go? What happened to the $16 billion? Spending $5 billion of customer money on Serum would have been horrible, but FTX didn’t do that, and couldn’t have, because there wasn’t $5 billion of Serum available to buy. FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t! ...
If you think of the token as “more or less stock,” and you think of a crypto exchange as a securities broker-dealer, this is completely insane. If you go to an investment bank and say “lend me $1 billion, and I will post $2 billion of your stock as collateral,” you are messing with very dark magic and they will say no. The problem with this is that it is wrong-way risk. (It is also, at least sometimes, illegal.) If people start to worry about the investment bank’s financial health, its stock will go down, which means that its collateral will be less valuable, which means that its financial health will get worse, which means that its stock will go down, etc. It is a death spiral. ...
In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.
I am not saying that all of FTX’s assets were made up. That desperation balance sheet lists dollar and yen accounts, stablecoins, unaffiliated cryptocurrencies, equities, venture investments, etc., all things that were not created or controlled by FTX. [5] And that desperation balance sheet reflects FTX’s position after $5 billion of customer outflows last weekend; presumably FTX burned through its more liquid normal stuff (Bitcoin, dollars, etc.) to meet those withdrawals, so what was left was the weirdo cats and dogs. [6] Still it is striking that the balance sheet that FTX circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up! Stuff it made up! You can’t do that! That’s not how balance sheets work! That’s not how anything works!
Oh, fine: It is how crypto works. ... It looked like a life-changing, world-altering business that would replace all the banks. It had a token, FTT (and SRM), with a multibillion-dollar market cap. You could even finance it, or FTX/Alameda could anyway: They could put FTT (and SRM) tokens in a box and get money out. (From customers.) They could take the dollars out and never, youher sens know, give the dollars back. They just got liquidated eventually. And those tokens, FTT and SRM, were sort of like real monetizable stuff in some senses. But in others, not.
But where did it go?
I tried, in the previous section, to capture the horrors of FTX’s balance sheet as it spiraled into bankruptcy. But, as I said, there is something important missing in that account. What’s missing is the money. What’s missing is that FTX had at some point something like $16 billion of customer money, but most of its assets turned out to be tokens that it made up. It did not pay $16 billion for those tokens, or even $1 billion, probably. [7] Money came in, but then when customers came to FTX and pried open the doors of the safe, all they found were cobwebs and Serum. Where did the money go?
I don’t know, but the leading story appears to be that FTX gave the money to Alameda, and Alameda lost it. I am not sure about the order of operations here. The most sensible explanation is that Alameda lost the money first — during the crypto-market meltdown of this spring and summer, when markets were crazy and Alameda spent money propping up other failing crypto firms — and then FTX transferred customer money to prop up Alameda. And Alameda never made the money back, and eventually everyone noticed that it was gone.
So Reuters reported last week:
At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried's trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters.
A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. ...
Oh, a place where the topic is Ukrainian FTX transactions, as opposed to some missile landing in Poland close to the Ukrainian border. From the first impression it very much looks like some unfortunate mistake ... but the level of nervousness in my social networks is considerable.
It's almost certainly a mistake, not clear whose. At least one of the missiles appears to have been an S-300 surface-to-air(ish) missile, which Ukraine uses against Russian cruise missiles and which Russia now uses against Ukrainian cities because they're running out of cruise missiles. It looks like the people who matter are taking the time to get the facts before making rash decisions, which is good.
There will almost certainly be a NATO Article 4 consultation. There will not be a war between NATO and Russia (or NATO and Ukraine) over this; we've tolerated much more egregious and deadly mistakes when it was reasonably clear they were mistakes, e.g. KAL-007 or Siberia Air flight 1812. And nobody believes that anybody had a motive to do this deliberately.
Thanks! This was definitely the most precise assessment of the issue I had seen that evening.
Quite busy now, maybe one or two thoughts to add on that later.
I just wanna remark how the currently 1416 comments on this thread expose how utterly crap substack is as a piece of technology. It takes my gaming PC ~20 seconds to load the top of the comment section, and I'm getting repeated multi-second freezes while I'm writing this comment.
Agreed. On wonders how people were able to implement web-based message boards in the 90s when PCs were much slower.
Does substack provide a comment API? If so, perhaps someone could write a usable client or something.
I think the problem is the same as what we saw back on SSC: we are using software designed for publishing and light commenting as a high-volume discussion forum. It's not surprising the software is straining under the load. The DSL forum, whatever its other faults, is crisply responsive since it is running software actually designed for running discussion forums. The ACX Discord also works fine, for the same reason.
While there were limitations to the SSC (wordpress, probably?), such as the indentation eventually eating most of the screen real estate in long discussions, I think the comments were assembled server-side (by php?) and thus reasonably fast. This would also mean that you could just load an open thread and read through it offline (e.g. on a plane).
I would guess that substack uses lots of javascript (and js libraries) to dynamically fetch the comments and render them. This approach has some advantages: you can get new comments without refreshing the website. But unless you do it very well (which they don't), it also tends to slow everything down.
Yes of course. As I made clear multiple times, the accusation was that flows went in the other direction, Ukraine diverting US aid to FTX for crypto of dubious worth so FTX could donate back to the politicians who passed the aid bill.
But evidence of this direction occurring is lacking.
Your comments are in the wrong place. Stop replying to e-mail.
True but stop with the “signal-boosting” crap. I was seeing it mentioned in a lot of places so it seemed worth adding here as a possibility to be considered. It’s a frigging OPEN THREAD. I appreciate very much the people on this thread who gave reasons why the story was likely to be wrong but the people who instead suppressively implied that I should STFU should STFU.
Is this a good time to update my priors to "never trust anyone or anything ASSOCIATED WITH CRYPTOCURRENCY again"?
That was always the wise decision. If you are into big risk chasing potential big rewards, cryptocurrency is a potential avenue with larger-than-normal risks and rewards.
If you're into weird alternate ways of buying things, cryptocurrency is also a way to do that (though the highly fluctuating values make it problematic to use for that purpose!).
What's the longest period until positive returns we can find for an investment? Can we find something that, for example, required fifty years of payments to get things working, but yay in the fifty-first year it began producing returns? I guess this would we particularly interesting if we found something that in the end turned out to be a good investment, despite the extremely long period of negative returns.
Here's an analysis that suggests a big nuclear power plant doesn't start returning a positive ROI until 13 years after the initial investment. It starts becoming more profitable than an equivalent gas-fired plant only after 18 years.
https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY
How long have we been funding research into fusion power? Seventy years, maybe?
I was going to mention fusion, too. But you asked for things that eventually produce positive returns..
In 1830, the Swedish Navy planted oaks on Visingsö for ship building. The keeper reported back that the oaks were ready for harvest in 1975. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/visingso-oak-forest
An individual stand of trees in a plantation forest will take roughly that long to grow before it can be cut down and sold. But of course that's more of a known quantity than the kind of thing you're thinking about (until some beetle comes along and kills them all) and you can put down x number of 30 year old trees as an asset on your balance sheet.
EVERYONE, want to understand what happened? IMO, this article by Matt Novak gives the best start for understanding FTX & Samuel Bankman-Fried. It also works as an introduction to cryptocoins at large. Then, to understand how people got bamboozled, from the inside, read the NYT article it corrects. The NYT writer has yet to get wise.
https://gizmodo.com/nytimes-bizarre-softball-article-ftx-sam-bankman-fried-1849783646
Please, #9's “how can I ever trust anybody again?” is the wrong question, with a misguided answer.
If people promote Wrong, no matter how trustworthy the people, the Wrong remains wrong. The original bitcoin whitepaper is Wrong. Specifically, it spoofs monetarism. Possibly intentional IMO.
Ask a better question. "How can I make sure I know the basics in a field before I commit to a position in it, let alone commit resources?"
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "it spoofs monetarism"?
QTM is nonsense, & it the 'Satoshi Nakamoto white paper' presupposed QTM.
Thanks for your question. Apologies for not checking back sooner.
Please feel free to let me know if I have not given a sufficient answer.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/quantity-theory-of-money
The accusation is probably FALSE, but it isn’t NONSENSE, you just misunderstood it. The accusation is that some of the aid money the politicians sent to Ukraine was used to buy crypto from FTX rather than spent on actual, you know, AID, and FTX then made huge amounts of political contributions.
The rebuttal is that all the transactions between Ukraine and FTX were in the other direction from that, which is fair. But the accusation was a coherent story.
That an accusation is a "coherent story" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making or signal-boosting that accusation in polite society.
In general, the whole thing with EA seems like similar to many other things that appear ridiculous about rationalism. You take a simple idea that is eminently sensible when you put it in a few words. Charitable giving is often inefficient - what if we start evaluating charitable giving by how much bang for the buck you get for it? Very sensible!
Then you put it in a crowd of people with a few well-known features, like love of Big Ideas, addiction to novelty of new ideas or revisionist takes on existing ones, almost comical belief in the power of Reason in comparison to tradition/law/taught ethics/societal approval/etc (right to the name of the crowd), and a tendency for constant iteration -and soon the original idea starts mutating to new forms, so that soon you're giving all your money to the Computer God, or becoming utter caricatures of utilitarianism straight from the philosophical debates ongoing for decades and centuries or banking on gee-whiz businesses as long as they're aligned with the cause, or just opening yourself up to all manner of grifters and fast talkers in general.
The same applies to polyamory, or nootropics, crypto or all manner of political ideologies beloved by rationalists - not that the simple idea behind them is necessarily good to begin with, but even then it just all seems to get worse and weirder, and doing so quite fast.
What one seems to need is stopgaps, intellectual roadbumps - but even then, what would these be, who would set them, and how would you take care the movement doesn't just barge through them with the power of Reason, like with everything else?
Attention to detail has a factor of diminishing returns. The problem isn't with rationalism 'appearing ridiculous', it's that limited life and attention spans we're bound to have as a species make us gravitate towards practicality above precision and rationalism is the reverse - it's precision above practicality for its own sake and when iterated tends to create a bunch of ad absurdum scenarios, it alienates. Banging on philosophy is viewed as anti-intellectualism, even when all of its big questions can likely only be answered through science, it isn't going to generate new answers that could change much of anything but rationalism tries just that - often for smaller, more practical fields of inquiry.
So rationalism now is likely taking up the same spot that mainstream philosophy as an area of inquiry took up before becoming stagnant in modernity, but ends up eminently more mockable because it engages with smaller more commonly accessible, more impactful areas of knowledge than the 'big questions' and thus each failure of its inquiry becomes to status boost off of.
The issue you describe isn't a failure of rationalism, it's more of an attack angle on the generalist enthusiasts that gets used by the mainstream specialists in various areas seeing them as a threat as it disregards the PR/politics of a given community. E.g. EA makes wasteful signaling more apparent. But all principled alternative inquiry tends to generate new ideas and new data and is ultimately good for society as a whole.
Well, traditionally your roadbumps are experience in the real world, and the cautious conservatism to which it tends to give rise. Why didn't Warren Buffett lose a shit-ton of money from the FTX crash? Why didn't I? Because we're old. We've seen this movie before, many times, with different actors and different effects, but the same script and, alas, the same ending.
Experience isn't as eloquently verbal as Reason. Often Experience get tongue-tied, can't even explain *why* it feels Reason has reasoned itself into absurdity, found conclusions that will be savagely crushed when they come into contact with objective reality. Heck, if I ask the plumber why he does this-and-such while fixing my drains, I don't expect -- and don't get -- any treatise on hydrodynamics. Sometimes he can't even really explain it in terms we have in common at all. But I'd be a fool to substitute my own reasoning, however brilliant and apparently logical, for his experience.
That's not to say Reason isn't Queen, isn't the most profoundly useful intellectual tool we have, to be honored above nearly all else. But Experience is King, and like all partnerships this one works best when there is mutual respect and cooperation between the principals. Trying to use only one or the other just gets you mysticism, stagnation, or epic disaster.
Why didn't I lose any money from the FTX crash? Because I am too stupid and lazy to get into crypto savings, though I really liked Allen Farrington's writing. Being stupid and lazy has its upsides. I'd still buy some bitcoin if any of my kids would manage it for me.
A better way to put that is that you got lucky, in that you were lazy *before* you invested in FTX instead of *after*. If you got in but got out in time, you made bank.
And sure, good luck beats any amount of experience or reason, every time. That's why nobody ever beats James Bond at baccarat, despite his spending way more time eying the zaftig onlookers' cleavage than counting cards: because James Bond has infinite good luck. No amount of skill can beat that.
I heard there was a new blockchain tech that allowed people to invest some of their natural good luck (which is "mined" by a powerful GPU via a P2C2E) and get a return of 8% per annum. I'm going to sign up right away!
Experience by definition takes time to acquire and is largely non-transferable, but Reason doesn't necessarily have either of those constraints. Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics has a line suggesting that it was a matter of general agreement at the time that while the young were never masters of "practical wisdom", they often could be exceptional at geometry and math, suggesting a long history of people agreeing with that observation. One might say Reason can travel halfway around the world before Experience can get its boots on.
True. And it's worth noting that hard experience can easily make you timid. If we didn't have the young egging us on to try stuff that on first appearance sounds lunatic, we'd never get anywhere and still be hunting antelope with sharpened sticks. If we didn't have the old saying now hold on just a God-damned minute, this is the same dumbass idea we tried in the winter of '49, the kids would blow civilization into smithereens. Like a lot of stuff, balance is the key, I think.
Very nicely put.
It's ultimately because of Reason that we're no longer freezing in mud huts, but live in comfort and are able to instantaneously communicate across the whole world for discussions on abstract topics like this one. You can't deny that Reason is pretty sexy and it's unsurprising that people tend to fall in love with it headlong.
Stopgaps and intellectual roadbumps develop when people run headfirst into debacles, say, like this one, a learning process that nobody yet found a way to short-circuit (and how would they do it otherwise anyway, if not by trying to apply Reason?)
I think you're missing the distinction between reason and Reason, the idea that pure intelligence and independent thought can come to better conclusions than other forms of knowledge (especially tradition and experience, which Rationalists explicitly reject).
To me, the Rationalists are often trying to reinvent the wheel while rejecting any existing knowledge about what wheels do and why. Sometimes you come up with a neat and novel idea, but sometimes you reinvent a dead end that society rightfully tossed a long time ago and end up down a bad path you can't get back out of.
It's like you didn't actually read the comment you're responding to.
The comment criticises rationalism and specifically gives many examples of alternatives.
< ..a crowd of people with a(n)... almost comical belief in the power of Reason in comparison to tradition/law/taught ethics/societal approval/etc >
So maybe the problem is that unadulterated 'on-steroids' reason leads to all sorts of crazy towns, repugnant conclusions and people with moral vacuums causing great suffering in the world. And maybe, just maybe, some of those other things might be used to temper the pernicious results of relying on pure reason.
And your response is -
< 'and how would they do it otherwise anyway, if not by trying to apply Reason? <
Are you perhaps a rationalist?
>tradition
Mud huts are very traditional, and yet somehow pretty much nobody is enthusiastic about returning there.
A big tradition of the modern civilization is to discard outdated traditions, and that implies taking risks. You don't get to have progress without making mistakes.
>And your response is
No, my response was that running headfirst into debacles is inevitable, as that is the only way that people eventually learn in practice. Rationalists do think that it's possible to use Reason to avoid them, and I agree that it's naive.
I think there's homeless people e.g. in California who want to build mud huts, but building codes don't let them.
Fair response. Thanks
It's not Reason that is the problem, it's the bubble that the Reasonable are all living and working and socialising and networking and going to conferences and writing well-received little think-pieces in.
Congratulations, EA has now reached its "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?" stage. (Which was never an actual proposition but we'll get into that later). Scholasticism *did* ossify into a system more and more removed from any practicality and more and more interested in logic-chopping (I will grant this much to Luther and the Reformers) because it got into its own little bubble of jargon and specialisation and 'the normies are too IQ 90 to grok this' attitudes.
If one of the results of this entire mess is that the Rationalists start to puncture their bubble, all to the best. Scholasticism needed the boot up the backside to flower again.
Now, the "angels on the head of a pin" thing. It's a pop culture reference and like many pop culture references has forgotten its original roots in Protestant polemics. I had a vague sense that it was resurrected/re-popularised by Isaac D'Israeli in one of his volumes of essays:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21615/pg21615-images.html
"The reader desirous of being merry with Aquinas's angels may find them in Martinus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII. who inquires if angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? And if angels know things more clearly in a morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?"
(For who or what Scriblerus is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Martinus_Scriblerus)
But Wikipedia doesn't even mention him, and he probably did pick it up from 17th century polemics via Pope and his circle, as per the Wiki article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_the_head_of_a_pin%3F
The question is not itself unreasonable, as Dorothy Sayers says, but it has been used as a symbol of how abstruse and fruitless such over-logical debates are. Rationalism take heed?
"Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the question was "simply a debating exercise" and that the answer "usually adjudged correct" was stated as, "Angels are pure intelligences, not material, but limited, so that they have location in space, but not extension." Sayers compares the question to that of how many people's thoughts can be concentrated upon a particular pin at the same time. She concludes that infinitely many angels can be located on the head of a pin, since they do not occupy any space there".
I'm impressed you've read Sayers on theology, although not especially surprised. But the correct answer seems a trifle insipid, I liked better the cheeky one given by Dejah Thoris Burroughs (if memory serves) which (paraphrased) was: "Easy! Let A be the area of the head of the pin, and let B be the area of an angel's ass. The desired number is A/B. Carrying out the math is left as an exercise for the reader."
Could mastodon be hard enough to search that communities will have more time to grow?
I've read speculation that the internet itself may have developed a form of self awareness and perhaps could be considered a collective intelligence.. maybe I'm misremembering and it was my own speculation.
Nonetheless if it is anything like this thread, it is hopelessly in disagreement with itself and probably, as a whole, risk averse which means the internet consciousness is not an EA?
Wow, how many logical/factual errors can one cram into one post? Based on this post I have to say it is doubtful the internet-consciousness is particularly intelligent!
Unless Minsky et al are correct. 🙂
Is the whole 'internet consciousness' thing, just a long way around to saying "this post is wrong in many ways, but I'm not actually going to list any of them or make actual arguments about them?"
No. On all counts.
Just floating ideas.
Does everything submitted here have to be an argument? A debate? A discussion?
Or correct?
My fun place is questions, not answers!
The point of my question was to say your comment came across as that sort of comment. If that wasn't your intention, and you really want to talk about internet consciousness, then including a sentence like: "Wow, how many logical/factual errors can one cram into one post?" is probably unhelpful.
Yeah, I think you're right. I really need to speak more precisely or develop a high tolerance for the mishaps of miscommunicating. I choose the former. I also have noticed that a lot of the posters here have a great, haiku-like concision and can communicate a lot of meaning in just a few sentences. I tend to go on and on!
But if you have questions on any of the ideas, please ask and I'll answer as best I can! Personally I think it interesting that consciousness might be an emergent property of a sufficiently large, sufficiently interconnected network. Is the internet at or near that level? Dunno!
Agree that exchange of information doesn't imply language or consciousness. Nor does mere complexity. So what does? How do we prove that we ourselves are conscious? Pass Turing tests?
Our complex network of interconnected individually unconscious brain cells are likely its source, but where is it? Is it subdividable.? Big questions! The ghost in the machine. I've just recently started looking at philosophy again after a forty year absence and it looks like most of the open questions then are still open, but the birth and growth of the internet, social media, computer science, etc. have sure given us new lenses to look at old problems through!
> So what does?
It seems to have something to do with having a model of the self but the specifics are not yet known.
> How do we prove that we ourselves are conscious?
This is backwards. We define consciousness as a thingy that we have.
"Bankman-Fried" has at least a little bit of a kabbalistic ring to it.
It's incredible how this NYT piece whitewashes SBF: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-bankruptcy.html
No talk about his criminality at all. He's Bernie Madoff and they portray him like Howard Roark. Pays to have good family connections.
I am under the impression that some people in this community may have trusted Tether based significantly on assurances from FTX/Alameda individuals that they trust Tether.
If so, it seems prudent to disregard such support, and reassess your trust of Tether without regard to any statements from FTX/Alameda sources.
Tether has been widely known to be suspect for 5+ years, before FTX was even a thing.
Sure, but people here may have been trusting Tether despite its suspicious nature because they trusted FTX/Alameda who had a vested interest in Tether.
For example, here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy
we have a comment from a user named "SBF" saying basically that they trust Tether.
Here https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kzhuxb/the_bit_short_inside_cryptos_doomsday_machine/gjshq85/
we have a comment from Scott himself which takes a more mixed but IMHO still sounds like he was getting his info from FTX/Alameda, albeit someone there who cared enough to present a nuanced view that wouldn't encourage him to make huge bets on Tether either way.
My general point is that FTX/Alameda assurances about Tether should obviously no longer be trusted and people who used to trust FTX/Alameda should reassess accordingly. My examples show people here may have used FTX/Alameda figures as trusted sources of information about crypto due to overlap between FTX/Alameda and ACX readership.
To be fair, the question was about whether Tether would collapse in 2021, and SBF was right about that.
Yeah my estimate of Tether actually being a sane thing to trust has been extremely low for a long time.
Maybe all of this was *vaporware*?
Most people don't know what FTX is. Most people have no idea who SBF is. Most people have never heard of EA.
It it possible you were gaslighted into thinking this was the future of humanity, and now that the con artist has been outed the confrontation with reality feels a bit unbearable.
Most rationalists feel like they are way too superior to fall for the Nigerian prince scam, but that only makes them an easier pray for the slightly more advanced scam.
It looks like Ukraine made a lot of transactions with FTX but they are claiming it was only converting crypto to cash and not the other direction. I have not seen their claim rebutted so for now it’s a sufficient explanation, as it’s the other direction that would be involved in any aid-laundering scheme.
FWIW, when the war broke out I tried to donate to the Ukraine military directly via their national bank, using my credit card. I did this because I have a strong belief that national territory integrity is paramount to many good things, and allowing a world where borders are subject to invasion sets precedence for much bad and very little good.
Anyway, I tried to donate to the national bank and my credit card immediately fraud flagged it and stopped the transaction. Why? Because donating to foreign national banks is unusual, I guess? Anyway, moving money internationally has lots of barriers and costs but moving crypt has essentially none so I sent the money I wished to donate via crypto to Ukraine and that worked.
TL:DR; I can easily see a world where Ukraine had a bunch of crypto they needed to convert to useful currency and did so via an exchange (FTX).
You mean, the allegation is that "Ukraine" as a country stole money from itself? How is that supposed to work?
Presumably some Ukrainian officials might have stolen money "from Ukraine" via FTX somehow; which honestly sounds plausible, but what is the source for this Ukraine-FTX connection?
Its called a kickback. You know, sending a little money back to the politician that got you the big public contract. I'm not saying it happened in this case, but its not a nonsensical idea.
Yea, that sounds like coherent story, but pretty unlikely imho.
Ukrainian officials caught stealing aid, on the other hand, is something that imho is very likely to happen someday. After all, Ukraine is not exactly Switzerland, and it is getting huge sums of money; surely someone is stealing something. That is not a reason to stop helping them, to be clear
That's part of the problem - FTX was a big exchange so now anybody who had any dealings with them is going to be looked at as possibly suspect, either they got conned or they were in on the con.
Great way to shred everyone's reputation, Sam and company!
"some people have asked if effective altruism approves of doing unethical things to make money"
Curious why you use the broad formulation "doing unethical things", when you seem to be talking specifically about committing criminal fraud. When it comes to more general immorality, e.g. working for a company that significantly profits from animal exploitation, marketing unhealthy foods to kids, knowingly encouraging innumeracy to make a product or service seem more useful, is there really such a strong consensus in EA? Presumably the reasoning goes: your individual participation in ethically problematic markets only marginally increases the harm (someone else would do it anyway and on average either do a slightly worse job or need to be paid a slight bit more), whereas your donation creates an absolute benefit.
I got clued in quite early to what SBF/Alameda were likely up to, but I had the benefit of having access to some perspicacious people on Crypto Twitter.
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1562549806249426945
Prompted by the below discussion, I'm beginning to wonder whether I might be aphantasic as well.
At first I thought "of course not, I can visualize things just like seeing them", but when I actually try, I can only see a tiny little bit or have a sort of vague outline or impression of an image. No matter how hard I try, I can't visualize a full image, even a small one.
For example, at one point I imagined someone drawing and pointing a sword, and I could clearly see the shape of the sword moving around, but I couldn't see the person holding it at all!
Edit: On the other hand, I definitely see things while dreaming.
Re: due diligence: all it would have taken is to read the companies' balance sheets.
That's what Binance did during the day or two they were thinking about acquiring the failed companies, and that's why they walked away: they saw how much larger their debts were than their assets.
Lessons for EA-backed charities:
- Insist that donations go through transparent, trustworthy, solvent evaluators like GiveWell.
- Have these evaluators run regular financial audits of the largest donors.
- Don't spend money till you have cash in hand!
Binance and Changpeng Zhao are really the winners here, and I'm not so sure I'd trust Binance either, they seem to have had a rocky patch or two.
But whether he intended it, or just seized the opportunity, Zhao has triumphed over his rival Bankman-Fried and won their feud. You have to give the guy credit for knowing when the optimum moment to jump was. "We're going to pull your chestnuts out of the fire - oops we had a look at your balance sheet and no way" was a wonderful way of putting the kibosh on FTX.
Why would one expect the efficient-market hypothesis to hold, even approximately, for crypto?
Seems to me that a key ingredient to the EMH is evolution through natural selection: actors who are better at accurately pricing assets get richer at the expense of actors who are worse at it, and those who misprice assets run out of money and so lose their ability to distort the market.
But the big question with crypto is: is the entire industry going to suffer a catastrophic crash from which it will never come close to recovering? Even if it obviously is, we wouldn't expect there to yet have been any evolutionary pressure against market participants who fail to understand this.
An analogy: plenty of smart traders believe in Christianity, even though Christianity is (IMO) obviously nonsense. This is because there is no feedback system by which wrongly believing in Christianity is punished (I guess you could say the punishment is that they waste time ineffectually praying but that's very weak feedback). The EMH clearly doesn't apply to the hypothesis "traders can accurately divine how likely it is that Christianity is true" so why should it apply to the hypothesis "traders can accurately divine how likely it is that the crypto industry will soon crumble almost completely"?
Crypto might eventually settle down as a genuinely reliable unit of currency, but I think that's still about five to ten years away. Right now this is still 19th century "everyone sets up their own bank and/or investment firm and a lot of them crash and take all your money with them" territory.
Yeah. I’d love to see a currency not subject to the failures of fiat currency. But you’ll recognize that when the notable feature is that the bitcoin price of a loaf of bread is the same next year as it was last year. You don’t get filthy rich putting your money into a stable currency, you just protect yourself from the ravages of a fiat currency.
A unit of currency has to be universally accepted in shops, online etc. crypto isn’t that, nor is it a reliable store of value or medium of exchange.
What it is is a volatile digital asset class, backed up by nothing. Which is fine. Devil take the hindmost. Caveat Emptor. A fool and his money...
Yes! I don't think it's supposed to settle down, it's a reversion to 19th century decentralized banking because the central bankers are too openly crooked and incompetent.
The EMH proposes that nobody can profit from trading. Meaning there are no "actors who are better at accurately pricing assets".
That would be the "strong" version of the EMH. The "weak" version says that while it is possible to outperform the market through some combination of skill and hard work, there is no free money lying on the ground -- if there was something as simple as "every Wednesday afternoon, all tech company stocks are structurally undervalued" then people would notice, people would start buying tech stocks on Wednesdays, and pretty soon the observation would not be true anymore.
I don't think many people believe the EMH is literally true, though - e.g. it's definitely the case that if you phone up JP Morgan and ask them for a bid-offer spread on a particular asset, with nonzero probability they will make a mistake and you will be able to make some money off them. The EMH is useful as an approximation.
What I'm arguing is that there is no particular reason to expect that market prices in crypto are anywhere near rational, because there's no reason to believe that the market is accurately pricing in the risk of the permanent collapse of the industry.
The EMH doesn't imply that prices are rational. It implies that you can never tell if prices are rational.
Wikipedia says "The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information". To me this is equivalent to "prices are rational".
From what I've read about the EMH, that is not what Fama meant by it. I wouldn't trust Wikipedia on this concept. A popularization of the EMH is not the EMH.
What would happen if a fully rational person who was aware of their own rationality believed your version of the EMH? They would reason thus: "Suppose that there exists an irrational market price. Since it is irrational, there must be some logical argument that I, a rational person, could follow to deduce that it is wrong. But I would then know that it is irrational, violating the EMH. This would be a contradiction, therefore all market prices must be rational." At this point the rational person has proved that all prices are rational, which is the thing your version of the EMH said could never happen.
It is also false.
I tried writing a story in the voice of a near-future chatbot: maybe what GPT-7 could sound like. It seems to me like the only way we've figured out to make large language models work is through attention-only transformer models, which myopically focus on next-token prediction. This means they can keep getting better at finding superficial associations, reaching for digressions, doing wordplay, switching between levels of "meta", etc, but won't necessarily cohere into maintaining logical throughlines well (especially if getting superhuman at next-word prediction starts pulling them away from human-legible sustained focus on any one topic).
This seems like it could pose a serious problem, given that the only way we've figured out how to produce (weak) AGIs is through these large language models. In other words, if you want an artificial agent who can perform tasks they weren't trained for, your only good option these days is asking GPT to write a scene in which an agent performs that task, and hoping it writes a scene where that agent is sincerely good at what you want, instead of being obviously bad or superficially good. (Ironically, GPT isn't best thought of as an agent, even though it produces agents and environments, because it isn't optimizing any reward function so much as applying an action principle of sorts, like physics; see "Simulators" by Janus at LessWrong for more). It may seem surprising that the best way we have to make any given character (or setting) is to make one general-purpose author, but it makes sense that throwing absurdly superhuman amounts of text data at a copycat would work well before we have better semantic / algorithmic understandings of our intelligence, because the copycat can then combine any pieces of this to propagate your prompts, and combinatorial growth is much faster even than exponential. If these "simulators" keep giving us access to stronger AGIs without improving their consistency over time, we don't have to worry so much about paperclip maximizers or instrumental convergence, but rather about our dumb chaotic human fads (wokeism, Qanon, etc) getting ever more speed and leverage.
I also tried keeping to bizarre compulsive rules while writing this--mostly not ending one word with the sound which begins the next word, mostly not allowing one sentence to contain the same word multiple times, etc--because I think we'll see strange patterns like that start cropping up (much as RLHF has led popular GPT add-ons to "mode collapse" into weirdly obsessive tics). As I practiced this, I felt like I was noticing discrete parts of myself notice these sorts of things much more, which fed that noticement further, until it blotted out other concerns like readability or plot, until even the prospect of breaking these made-up arbitrary taboos felt agonizing; I imagine this is sort of what inner misalignment "feels" like. Maybe that's also sort of like what Scott mentioned recently with regard to cultivating "split personalities." Anyway:
https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-fear
> I hope the investigation finds some reasonable explanation, like that they were doing so many stimulants
One source suggests SBF was on EMSAM / Selegiline (twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1592237980458323969), which causes pathological gambling, compulsive buying, compulsive sexual behavior, and binge or compulsive eating. Ticks all the boxes.
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14737175.2019.1620603
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353802007002088
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16730214
Honestly, I'm starting to feel like one of those old wives who was clucking away in the background about "don't do drugs and don't do weird drugs that you think make you smarter than anyone" and of course the kids ignore all that advice and then the old biddies get to say "I told you so".
The impression I am getting is that the American medical system is banjaxed (but then, aren't they all?) and if you know how to game the system, doctors will write you out prescriptions for all kinds of medication on the grounds that you need it to do well in school/work/learn how to tie my own shoelaces. If you're too honest/poor/lower class, you get written off as a drug seeker or not having that problem, so you can't access all the legal stimulants middle-class college kids can.
I don't know if that is a true picture, but it's the one I'm getting from all these reports.
When I read the linked Eleizer article about the ends not justifying the means, I was surprised to find that nobody in the comments mentioned Original Sin, since he in many ways recreated the idea there. Like in this quote:
"But if you are running on corrupted hardware, then the reflective observation that it seems like a righteous and altruistic act to seize power for yourself—this seeming may not be be much evidence for the proposition that seizing power is in fact the action that will most benefit the tribe."
That rings to me of a hundred sermons I've heard on humankind's sinful nature: that we are corrupted beings who when following their own desires and reasoning inevitably go wrong. It reminds me of Paul, writing:
"For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me."
Of course there's a big difference between Eliezer's conception and the classical Judeo-Christian one: namely, Eliezer believes that a perfect intelligence without corruption would be able to act out utilitarian consequentialism accurately, and that would be the right thing to do. On the other hand, is this actually so different from the Judeo-Christian conception? God does a lot of things that would be considered wrong for humans to do: Christians tend to justify it on non-utilitarian grounds (ie, God can kill people because we all are His rightful property in some sense, or something similar) but you could also justify them by Eliezer's criteria: as an non-corrupted superintelligence, perhaps God can make those kind of utilitarian decisions that we corrupted and sinful man cannot. He can decide to wipe out all of humanity except one family in a flood, because he can calculate the utils and knows (with the certainty of an omniscient superintelligence) that this produces the best result long term, that the pre-Deluge population is the one man on the trolley tracks that needs to die so that the five men can live. Certainly Leibniz's idea that this is the best of all possible worlds rests firmly on that same justification: that all the bad things caused or allowed by God are justified in the utilitarian calculus, because all alternate worlds would be worse.
I don't know if I buy all that, but it surprised me how rationalists find themselves re-inventing the wheel in some cases. More power to them, better to re-invent it then have no wheels at all.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans
But God is not the guy deciding whether to divert the trolley or not. God can poof the entire trolley out of existence, if he chooses. Given that he is not only omniscient but also omnipotent, if he STILL chooses to kill the one person to save five, he is being unambiguously immoral--regardless of whether you use utilitarianism or deontology as your moral framework.
Things get complicated when you bring things out to God's scale, so let me try to cliff notes Leibniz's Best of All Worlds thesis:
Clearly, there are bad things in the world: like trolleys crushing people to death. Clearly, if God is omnipotent then he could poof these bad things out of existence. That they exist at all means that God wants them to exist, inasmuch as He at minimum allows them to exist and, more importantly, created the universe in the first place.
If God is omnibenevolent, then this leads to a problem: why would an omnibenevolent God allow bad things to exist when He has the power to make them not exist?
Liebniz's answer comes from God's other famous omni: omniscience. God knows all, including the exact results of any actions He takes and how they will change the future going out to infinity. We may look at our world, where trolleys kill with impunity, and ask ourselves "Why doesn't God just poof the trolley out of existence before it crushes anyone?" Yet, we can't predict what the effects would be if we lived in a world where things poofed out of existence any time they would harm someone. Would that world be a better world than our own? What would the long term effects be? We don't know. God does know. So, if trolleys remain unpoofed, and if God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient, then it logically follows that a world where trolley's poofed before crushing people would be, on the whole, worse than the world we currently live in. Indeed, it follows that our universe is the best possible world there could be, since God would have created a different universe if it was better.
A natural rejoinder would be "If God is omnipotent, then he could poof the trolleys and also use his power to make that world better." However, this is a flawed understanding of omnipotence. Omnipotence means that God can do anything that it is possible to do, but some things are logically impossible. God can't make someone a married bachelor, for instance: the statement is incoherent. As Lewis wrote in *The Problem of Pain*:
>"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
Now it would be quite possible for God to have created a universe without pain or suffering: He could have created a dead universe with no living things in it, or created no universe at all. So if we live in a universe with suffering it follows that God's goal is not to minimize suffering. There is something He wants that is worth suffering existing to get. Christians generally believe that this something is us: free willed intelligences capable of reason, love, etc. Though perhaps He wants something else even more, and undoubtedly He wants many things that we don't know. Liebniz would hold that this is the best possible world in which God can achieve all of His objectives. Because Christians believe that we are made in God's image, a universe where He achieves all his objectives is also the best possible universe for ourselves: at a fundamental level we were created to share the same utility function, as Eliezer might say.
So, to put it shortly, the metaphorical trolley in God's case is not whether to kill one man to save five, but whether to create a universe with humans in it and also suffering, or to create a universe with no humans and no suffering (or not create a universe at all).
Assuming you believe in heaven, a realm where trolleys cause no suffering, and there is no logical contradiction, you should account for why an omnipotent god prefers to maintain this trolley filled world rather than immediately set the world to the heavenly state.
Presumabely the only way to get heaven (or at least a heaven with people in it) is to first have trollies.
More specifically, in Christian theology there is a "place" called heaven where (there is some debate on this) the dearly departed exist with God in a blissful state: however, those dearly departed are waiting for Judgement Day. Christians believe that when Jesus returns he will overturn the world as it currently is, destroying it. Then comes the Judgement where God will judge both the quick (living) and the dead, separating the damned from the saints. Then the damned will be condemned to Hell (some say annihilated, most don't) while the saints will inherit the New Earth: the world recreated to be a paradise empty of trollies, where they shall live forever.
This matters! If Paradise is found when the world as we know it is destroyed and replaced with a better one, then it may very well be that this bad world we live in is a temporary necessity, required to create the conditions necessary for Paradise to exist at all. It would mean that the only way you can get free willed intelligences that are aligned with God's values to the point where they could exist in Paradise without ruining it, forever, is by first putting them through the trails of this world, and weeding out the once who are not willing or able to exist in Paradise without ruining it. Which is a gross simplification of the Christian idea of Atonement, Redemption, Damnation, etc. But I only have so much space.
I'm familiar with that objection, but I don't buy it at all. It seems like handwaving away a fatal objection to the God hypothesis. "Oh, the hypothesis is flatly contradicted by the data? Well, I'm sure there's some explanation somewhere that rescues the hypothesis. No, I can't find it. No, nobody else has found it either, but trust me, the Holocaust was actually a good thing!" Here, I agree with Lewis: nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God, and I consider it nonsense to suggest that the Holocaust is good and that the world would not be better off if God had prevented it.
The idea that this world is the "best of all worlds" runs into two other severe problems. First, even we, puny humans, have managed to drastically improve the world with things like antibiotics, sewage systems, democracy, and electricity. If we can do it, how come God couldn't? Second:
"Now it would be quite possible for God to have created a universe without pain or suffering: He could have created a dead universe with no living things in it, or created no universe at all. "
...is contradicted by mainstream Christian theology itself, which asserts that God *did* create a universe that has living beings, but is nevertheless without pain or suffering. It's called "heaven". So if God did it once, why couldn't he have done it twice?
I'm pretty sure God uses neither, and that whatever goal he's pursuing is independent of simple human concepts like utility. It seems silly to even apply moral analysis to an omniscient omnipotent singular being. What're you going to do, tell the omniscient entity that it should know better?
An omnipotent being pursuing goals beyond your comprehension that have no relation to human values isn't God, it's Azathoth.
Three things:
1. "Beyond human comprehension" != "no relation to human values". If you don't like God's answer to the Trolley Problem, uh, settle down. Maybe He understands something you don't. God plays 4-d chess.
2. Giving an answer to the Trolley Problem that you happen not to like is a far cry from being a Lovecraftian Horror.
3. Even if God really IS a Lovecraftian Horror, what are you going to do about it anyway? Shame it? Omnipotent is Omnipotent. Call it God or call it Azathoth, you'd better get to worshipping either way.
You didn't say "maybe God is more moral than us" or "maybe we'd understand the morality of God's decisions if we had all the facts," you said morality *doesn't even apply* to God. You specifically ruled out both utilitarianism (God is good because his decisions lead to the best outcomes) and deontology (God is good because he follows moral principles). If neither of those is true, that leaves very little connection between God's values and humanity's.
(I'm not even sure what you mean by "a different answer to the trolley problem than you" because utilitarians and deontologists give exactly opposite answers to it.)
Your stance strikes me as a complete abdication of responsibility - morality is simply what God commands, no matter what horrible things he commands you to do. And sure, maybe that decision helps you avoid getting eaten by Azathoth, but I wouldn't call it "morality."
> If neither of those is true, that leaves very little connection between God's values and humanity's.
The third option you're leaving out is "God defines morality." It's then logically inconsistent to accuse God of being immoral. If He appears immoral to you, that's only because your understanding of morality is flawed.
>I'm not even sure what you mean by "a different answer to the trolley problem than you"
Less euphemistically that meant "action God could take that you would presume to criticize on moral grounds."
>morality is simply what God commands, no matter what horrible things he commands you to do
That's correct. If you presume the existence of God (which I don't, FWIW) then I don't see how one can arrive at any other conclusion. The Christian tradition certainly regards God as defining morality. If you admit the concept of Heaven as representing infinite utility, then you can pretty easily derive morality as being whatever it takes to get there, i.e. following God's will. And if God really turned out to be Azathoth then the only meaningful option available to us would be trying to not get eaten. In that case I suspect you _would_ call it morality.
Christians would hold that God's values are human values: or rather that human values are God's. That's kind of what the whole "made in His image" thing means.
Christians might say that, but Wanda was specifically saying the opposite - that God's values are not the same as human morality and we should not expect them to be.
I didn't say that at all. My point was that trying to apply human morality to God is a category error, like asking for the temperature of a single particle (which, if you're not a physics person, isn't a well-formed concept: temperature is only defined over ensembles).
I really need to understand why moving the substrate of intelligence from humans to machines gets rid of these problems. I know a dumb reason why people would assume it would but I do not understand the strong case.
I think Eliezer's point isn't that machines will naturally not have the same problems, but that they potentially could. He specifically writes that "in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree." I'd put the emphasis in that hypothetical more on the "lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power" and less on the "AI".
The point being, human minds are "corrupted hardware" and only intelligences lacking corruption could be trusted to do the utilitarian calculation accurately. We humans do better by following deontological style rules that have been developed over trial and error for long periods of time.
If the one person was an AI and assented, I guess you'd be on more solid ground than usual with the trolley problem.
True! In Eliezer's hypothetical these AIs all naturally come to the same moral conclusions since they are non-corrupted intelligences: if such a scenario existed, you could assume any individual AI would consent to dying since all would agree on what the right action is.
How do you judge "worthy of personhood"? You can't judge it on "any entity willing to commit murder is not worthy" because your perfect AI is willing to kill.
I wouldn't think he means "worthy" in a moral sense, but in a technical one: if it's worth calling it a person.
I agree: it's probably best to take his hypothetical and strip the "A" off of "AI" altogether: in his view any non-corrupt Intelligence could be trusted to come to the correct utilitarian conclusion.
Here’s where I’m struggling:
If the AI is based on us, then it would inherit our prejudices. I don’t think there’s a single golden variable to be maximized that we can just code into it other than create a narratively satisfying world that feels authentic and that seems so nebulous that I don’t know if humans have any possible solution we could all accept.
If it’s not based on us… it has to evolve from external pressures but so did we. We always talk about ourselves like we are artificial but the whole of history had a hand in shaping us and I don’t see how that would produce a perfect artificial intelligence anymore than it could make a perfect biological one.
I do think superintelligence is likely and dangerous but I don’t think it can produce stuff that is free of trade offs.
That's the real nub of the question: being corrupt intelligences ourselves, how could we ever tell if another intelligence is non-corrupt? Of course I imagine Eliezer agrees with the concern, since he's the biggest proponent of the AI alignment problem out there. He definitely things that, at least right now, we can't produce a "Good" artificial intelligence.
Slow things down to the point you can understand them is the only meaningful answer I can come to from that problem.
I think the human propensity to rationalize bad behavior, to slip into seeing outgroups as less than human, etc. is a feature not a bug. These things are just the downside of things that allow us to function as well as we do: Tationalizing bad behavior is the downside of self-esteem management, without which we would sink into depression. Seeing the outgrouip as non-human and dispensable is the downside of chunking, which allows us to process complex situations rapidly. An AI modeled on US will have the same features.
I think any AI that has ability to do stuff we would care about is going to have those same trade offs whether based on us or not. This is why I don’t understand the strong case.
About 20 seconds into the "crypto" pitch, it becomes obvious from the very language used that it's a scam and a Ponzi scheme. That's when you check to make sure you still have your wallet, and keep walking.
If you choose to participate, the only question is, Will you be one of the few to benefit from the scheme, or will you be among the majority who lose?
Cash works. I always pay tips in cash, so unscrupulous business owners can't claim the server's gratuity as part of her or his lowly hourly wage (Sorry, Ronald Reagan).
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who fail to use common sense.
FTX is not crypto.
What is it?
It's a crypto exchange.
> If you think you’re better at it than all the VCs, billionaires, and traders who trusted FTX - and better than all the competitors and hostile media outlets who tried to attack FTX on unrelated things while missing the actual disaster lurking below the surface - then please start a company, make $10 billion, and donate it to the victims of the last group of EAs who thought they were better at finance than everyone else in the world. Otherwise, please chill.
Is Scott serious about this? This is like "you're not President! How dare you criticize the President?" Or like those Mormons on Usenet who told me that it doesn't matter that Mormons hide their secret ceremonies because if I wanted to know about them I could always spend a couple of years being a Mormon. (Which incidentally would also mean I could get punished for criticizing them, which defeats the whole purpose of wanting to know about them.)
"You must become a billionaire yourself or you have no right to criticize a billionaire" is an awful, awful, take and as a poisoning the well fallacy is symptomatic of the problems that got you guys into this mess in the first place. (And even when X is easier to do than becoming a billionaire, "you must do X or you don't get to criticize X" is an awful take. I probably could become a Mormon, but I shouldn't have to in order to say there's something I don't like about Mormonism.)
I think I'm trying to say something more like - suppose you get some new vaccine endorsed by the CDC and WHO and your doctor, and also have your kids get the vaccine. Then later it turns out the vaccine caused cancer. Are you a moral monster for encouraging your kids to get it, or for getting it yourself and cutting off your own potential and ability to fulfill obligations? I think a common-sense answer is no - you did the reasonable thing by trusting the CDC and WHO and everyone who was more expert than you, and it's not your job to be an expert in medicine.
In the same way, I think charity recipients trusted that something endorsed by Blackrock and Temasek and Sequoia and the SEC was probably safe. Those are the experts, and so if you know that they approve of something, you don't have to do your own research.
If the charity recipient does think they're better than Blackrock and Temasek and so on, then they're probably among the top finance people in the world, and should put up or shut up.
Bit there is no expertise anywhere in the financial sector. It’s easy to make money in good times. Then the bad times come, they don’t predict it, they go bust or the government bails them out. Rinse. Repeat.
There is expertise, though. The average layperson couldn't do a JP Morgan market maker's job without either losing money or trading so little that they quickly get fired.
In general, people in finance will often be experts in "doing finance, conditional on black swan events not occurring".
Bit there is no expertise anywhere in the financial sector. It’s easy to make money in good times. Then the bad times come, they don’t predict it, they go bust or the government bails them out. Rinse. Repeat.
Do you think you'll update your priors that non-experts who avoided this mistake may have some traits worth understanding and copying? Specifically, that expert endorsement is not a substitution for understanding what you're getting into.
I can't help but notice that there was also a group of people who recently refused to get a vaccine that was endorsed by the CDC and WHO, and for healthy children it does appear that turning down the vaccine is/was the correct decision.
Which non-experts?
If you mean people who hate all crypto, I think I've probably made more money in crypto investing overall (even counting these losses) than they've made in whatever they're doing instead. You can always avoid all false positives by declaring everything a negative, but that's not very productive.
If there were people who were able to predict that eg Binance was an amazing investment but FTX was a bad one, then yes, I would love to hear what these people have to say and update on it.
I'm afraid I'm very late to this discussion but since this comment, as well as Mr. Dolittle's reply, connect with what I feel is an obvious point, I have decided to write anyway.
The point is not whether Binance would have been a better investment than FTX. The point is that everyone who makes billions in cryptocurrencies makes it not by providing useful goods for society but by taking other peoples money. I know that that is the name of the game, and that's the reason I'm not participating myself.
For me, the whole concept of taking other peoples money and using it for charity seem morally wrong and I have no idea why anyone could believe that SBF was doing a good thing, nor why they would accept donations from FTX.
I'll try to avoid making this a "ponzi scheme" point, but the reality must point somewhere in that direction. Because crypto currencies do not have any intrinsic value, they aren't like buying a stock as an investment and making money as we would normally think about it. If you bought Apple stock 20 years ago, you were investing in a company that used your funds to build and increase something of real value. The value of that stock, and therefore your investment, goes up together. Everyone who bought Apple stock went up together, and someone buying your Apple stock from you will have something of value as well. Even if the company went completely bankrupt, they have offices and tangible goods which can be sold off.
Bitcoin, or any crypto currency, is only valuable because other people are willing to buy it. Every single dollar a person would make selling crypto must necessarily come from someone else. So if you make a million dollars, one or more other people lost a million dollars. Now, if Bitcoin stays stable long term, that point gets obfuscated. Many people can buy and sell and not feel like they made a poor decision. But, there are still two problems. One, they can't keep making money forever. Early investors and people day trading can probably make some money, but overall equilibrium means that the average is essentially null - and those day traders are pairing off with others who are losing money. Two, if Bitcoin hits a real problem then unlike Apple or another tangible company, everyone who bought before will lose everything.
I don't hate crypto. I think there's a possibility for using them for purchasing goods and services that can be useful. They are not an investment. They should not be seen as an investment. They are modern day tulips.
Sorry, I forgot to refer to the experts more clearly. There are plenty of experts, the vast majority in fact, who are wary of crypto in general and would always steer people away from it.
Once you've made the jump to "crypto is okay, who should we choose?" you're going to get a lot less consensus. Without an underlying value, you need to develop some kind of trust-review process. Crypto is intentionally opaque, so it's just generally hard to do. Bitcoin has been around the longest, so I'd say it has the most built up trust, but it's history (despite being normal and stable compared to the overall crypto environment) is one of hacks, theft, and deliberate price manipulation.
You can say that people just hate on all crypto, but I feel like the onus is on the pro-crypto side to demonstrate why the vast majority of financial experts, who are on the "risky, best not try this" side of the equation, are in fact wrong.
The fact that you came out ahead participating in a Ponzi scheme is supposed to vindicate you and humble the critics who recognized it as such?
Please don't reopen the "is crypto a Ponzi scheme" debate here :(
That is indeed a reasonable point about pointing the finger of blame at "They should have known better, any child in the street could have seen the emperor had no clothes!"
On the other hand, it's also true that "You don't have to be a hen to criticise a bad egg". I don't blame people for trusting that Big Rich Enterprise is on the up-and-up, but there does come a point when you have to apply the same standards to "well I know and like these guys/they have a lot of the same beliefs and principles I do" when it comes to money as you do to "maybe First Third National Local Bapresbydist Church are a great bunch of people but Givewell says don't give money to their weekly collection for the mission in Botswana, give it to mosquito nets".
I think there's a relevant difference with the vaccine case, which is that by now humanity has gone through many more trial-and-error iterations of vaccine creation than of crypto industry wipeouts. If the medical profession was crap at making safe vaccines, we would have noticed and stopped taking vaccines. But if the finance profession is crap at figuring out whether the entire crypto industry will collapse within the first 20 years, how would we know?
I think the situation is more like - it's several hundred years ago and the consensus among smart people is that if you follow the bible you go to heaven when you die, should you follow the bible?
> I think a common-sense answer is no
But "common sense" is a fallacy (appeal to common sense), moral agents are supposed to know better. In exactly the same way as "I was just following orders" is not an excuse.
You do know some people doubted the CDC/WHO, and you do know some people questioned their orders in critical historical periods, just like some people questioned FTX claims.
"Hindsight is 20/20" is not an excuse, especially when some people did have the foresight that you for some reason did not.
I think you're eliding an important distinction between "outsourcing your knowledge of what is real" and "outsourcing your knowledge of what is moral".
It seems obvious to me that the former is less of a moral failure than the latter, partially because society's collective factual knowledge is far in excess of what a single person can hope to learn individually (while the same is not really true of morality; put three ethics professors in a room and you won't get better essays on ethics than any of them could produce alone), and partially because the failure states of the former tend to look very slightly less terrible than the failure states of the latter.
Failing to recognize what is real is not by itself a moral failure. But choosing to **act** on a wrong notion is.
For example mistaking thinking that a new vaccine will stop a pandemic is not by itself a moral failure. But using that notion to then violate deontological principles and suspend the constitutional rights of people who refuse to get that vaccine is **definitely** a moral failure.
Deontological principles exist precisely to avoid these kinds of moral failures. You should never blindly trust authority, especially when it's asking you to violate deontological principles. The end **never** justifies the means.
A moral agent is supposed to know that.
I mean, in a deontological system the "wrong" part of "choosing to act on a wrong notion" is mostly irrelevant. If you think suspending rights is never okay *even if* the vaccine would stop the pandemic, well, whether it would or wouldn't doesn't affect the correct decision.
More generally, while within consequentialism situational facts are more important, most of the *really*-bad outcomes need either a dodgy-to-begin-with morality or a reasonably-elaborate scenario; this is why I said the failure states of outsourcing factual knowledge are "very slightly less terrible" than those of outsourcing morality.
I also think that if you insist on absolute deontology *in emergencies* as a prerequisite of goodness, your set of Good People is going to be vanishingly small; I lie less often than ~anyone I know, but I *will* lie if I believe that telling the truth will get someone murdered. There are, shall we say, few deontologists in foxholes. This is why emergency powers exist in ~every country, despite their potential for abuse.
> f you think suspending rights is never okay *even if* the vaccine would stop the pandemic, well, whether it would or wouldn't doesn't affect the correct decision.
It should not affect the decision, but in reality it does, because people don't actually have principles.
If you are willing to abandon deontological principles in emergencies, then you have no deontological principles.
It's a rule that is not supposed to be broken, you break it, and it turns out it was the wrong decision, but it's OK because no one knew better (hindsight is 50/50), except some people did make the right decision, but maybe they made the right decision for the wrong reasons, except the reason was that they didn't break the rule that should not have been broken in the first place.
At what point do you accept that you are rationalizing your moral failure?
It's difficult but unavoidable that in these situations you have to be able to look back, with the benefit of hindsight, and ask "should I have known differently?" and sometimes the answer is no, even when you were wrong. For a clear example, imagine calling an all-in when you have a straight flush, and losing to a royal flush. You didn't do anything wrong, and learning any kind of lesson there would be a serious mistake.
So when you say "some people did have the foresight that you did not" I'm very skeptical. Did they? Just because they were right doesn't mean that they did. And what Scott wrote is a heuristic argument that they didn't.
I haven't looked much into SBF/FTX or their critics, so I don't know. Who do you think had this foresight, and on what basis? How are you determining that they were right for good reasons, and not just lucky?
I think these questions are very difficult, but asking them is the only way to improve
But are you really sure you didn't do anything wrong? Maybe the other guy cheated and your mistake was playing such kind of games. Immediately dismissing your mistakes is one of the worst things you could do.
At least think about it.
And yes, I know some people did have the foresight because I was one of those people. It's really astonishing how **today** I can make a prediction, a "rationalist" would dismiss the prediction, and then when the prediction comes true claim "nobody knew this could to happen, hindsight is 20/20".
Logic would dictate that if you got the prediction wrong you should adjust your priors and maybe listen to the people who got it right, not use "hindsight is 20/20" as an excuse.
Sure, I agree it's possible, and maybe worth looking at. I just mean it as an illustration of the kind of situation where you can get a bad result but made the right choices with what you knew. It's even possible that the other guy *was* cheating, but you had no way of knowing, and poker is still a game you make a lot of money at (with high expected EV in the future), so you still did nothing wrong. Won't always be true, just saying it's a thing that happens, and that you have to be ready for when dealing with risk
And okay, so the answer to "who" is "you". What about the basis for this prediction? What reasoning led you to think what particular things?
My whole thing here is just that someone having been right is not that strong of evidence for their process having been good (lots of people bet on both sides for lots of reasons, the results data is very sparse), so while I *do* think in the face of having been wrong you should think things over, I think you have to be comfy concluding "actually, I didn't fuck up at all." Which is something I think some people really struggle with, because it gives no feeling of resolution. (And, of course, which some other people do *way* too much).
But it means if you're just saying you were someone who got it right, but not saying why the process by which you did so was good, my response is mostly "so what?" Having been right is less than table stakes to me here.
Scott was saying a bit more than "sometimes you have to be comfy in concluding I didn't fuck up". He said that since the people who said it would die horribly were not billionaires, they don't count as people who knew it would die horribly.
Lots of people fail to be billionaires for reasons completely unrelated to their ability to detect bad ideas.
Also, Scott claimed:
>Listen: there’s a word for the activity of figuring out which financial entities are better or worse at their business than everyone else thinks, maximizing your exposure to the good ones, and minimizing your exposure to the bad ones. That word is “finance”.
This is illogical. It may be literally finance, but it's not a central example of finance. Not every part of finance is equally difficult, so someone could be able to figure out that some things have a high chance of fraud without being good at finance in general.
If you are going to dismiss all the instances in which you were wrong, and dismiss all the people who were right given the same information that you had at the time, why bother calling yourself "rationalist"?
You are just believing whatever makes you feel better about yourself and finding rationalizations to do so.
At what point do results matter?
I feel like this ties in to the "modest epistemology" debate.
Maybe all the finance organisations are consistently wrong in certain ways because they have similar internal cultures that lead them to consistently make the same mistakes. Nobody is capitalising on this obvious failure because all the people with money and the capacity to invest it are embedded in the same culture. They respect the financial experts and they all assume that if there were opportunities for profit somebody else would have taken them already.
It occurred to me earlier this year that the value of Bitcoin was probably going to go down, and there was probably some way for me to make money off this fact. But I don't really know how to do that and didn't care enough to follow it up. Given the amount of Bitcoin skeptics in the world, it's possibly weird that more people didn't see this coming and find a way to profit? My suspicion is that the kind of people who don't trust Bitcoin are not the kind of people who have investment strategies, and the kind of people who have investment strategies are the kind of people who trust Bitcoin.
I don't think Bitcoin value will evaporate to nothing, unless governments around the world really crack down on it. But gold seems to have everything going for it that Bitcoin has at the moment (except for being physical, and that's a two-way street).
My general assessment is (and was before the FTX collapse):
Bitcoin? a bit dodgy
Bitcoin derivatives? run for the hills
That analogy would be more persuasive if the "experts" in the real case were more akin to the staid and cautious CDC and WHO and doctor experts in your analogy.
But VC firms are hardly that. They are in the business of high risk high return investments. They roll dice all the time, and invest in stuff that has a 98% chance of failure and 2% chance of glory routinely. The fact that they invest in something is not a great endorsement of it being a "safe" investment, indeed I would think the more common sense interpretation would be that it is not safe at all -- that it is one of those risky bets that only people who love playing cards in Vegas for big stakes would happily place. If you wanted a safe bet, you'd look at where the University of California invests its pension fund, not a VC firm.
I think it's disingenuous to focus on "VC firms" when Blackrock, Temasek, and the SEC were equally involved.
Why do you keep implying that the SEC endorsed FTX? Did they ever go "yep, we audited FTX and it's all legit?" The best that could be said is that they hadn't prosecuted him yet.
Yeah, I was going to make that point in my original longer post, so thank you for doing so. At best the SEC is like a police detective, referring for prosecution crimes that are brought to its attention. Equating "hasn't yet been fined or referred for prosecution by the SEC" to "financially on the up-and-up" is like assuming that because your neighbor hasn't yet been arrested for theft it's OK to invest in his multilevel marketing scheme.
Well, the SEC is another level of entanglement. Apparently (or going by all the Twitter action around this) Bankman-Fried's father knew an official in the SEC who then took the advice of Bankman-Fried himself on regulations that should apply:
https://cryptonews.com/news/was-sec-chair-gary-gensler-helping-sam-bankman-fried-find-legal-loopholes-for-ftx-heres-what-you-need-to-know.htm
This is part of the whole mess, the people involved were connected via their families to a lot of the infrastructure, for lack of a better word, so they maybe got favourable treatment/didn't have to jump through the same hoops as people without those connections. Or simply that they thought they knew better because they'd grown up in families with all this involvement, so they knew what could go wrong and how to get around things and make money the easy way.
I agree with L50L on this one. You would expect the SEC to consult with leaders of the industry on which it is pondering regulation, to do otherwise would be more than unusually ignorant on the part of government, to ignore experience and expertise they need. Likewise the FDA consults with physicians and drug companies.
Whether that consulting ends up corrupt is another story, but unfortunately one that is much more difficult to extract, which is why news media on deadlines usually run with Caesar's wife stories instead.
Why *wouldn't* the SEC consult leaders in the crypto space when developing regulations? This seems like a good thing!
And this still doesn't support Scott's implication that the SEC ever endorsed the state of FTX's finances.
I had written a longer post including the reasons why analogizing the others to a conservative guardian certifying agency was equally dubious, but decided to condense it and settle for impeaching just one of them in the interests of cogency.
And I'm not really following the argument that they have to be impeached all at once or not at all. You made no distinction among them yourself, so the impression I got from the analogy was that you thought they were all equally equivalent to the CDC. If I establish that even one of them really wasn't, then I think that calls into question the aptness of your analogy ipso facto.
I'm not saying they're exactly equivalent to the CDC. I'm saying something like -
All of us make a bunch of assumptions going about our daily lives. When I write this Substack, I assume Substack Inc will pay me the money I'm owed instead of fudging my subscriber numbers to keep most of it for themselves. When you post on here, you're assuming I won't seed my posts with links to malware that will install on your computer and steal your credit card details. If you're using Windows, you're assuming *Microsoft* isn't stealing your credit card details. We all make these assumptions because it would be impossible to go through life otherwise - if I have to personally read every line of Windows code before trusting Microsoft, I would never have time for anything else.
We do this by vague common-sensical trust networks. I trust Microsoft because the laptop companies trust it enough to include on their laptops, the tech magazines trust it enough to not have NEVER USE MICROSOFT in big letters on every issue, and in general Microsoft is so big and widely used that if they were doing insane evil things I would have heard about it. If Microsoft does turn out to be secretly stealing my credit card details, I think it's fair to say I am a real victim, rather than that I'm partially culpable for not doing all the relevant research and poring-over-code myself.
In the same way, the fact that FTX was very big and all the big companies invested in it seemed like a common sense trust network such that I could deal with them without having to learn financial analysis myself and go through their books or whatever. Common sense trust networks aren't exactly like official FDA approval of a vaccine or something, but I do think they're like eg my doctor agreeing a vaccine is good, or the CDC saying vaguely positive things about a vaccine, and I think the same considerations apply.
Yes, I grasped the nature of the analogy the first time. I'm just pointing out the "trust network" agents in the real case aren't actually that similar to the agents in your analogy. VC firms *and* (so we don't get into this red herring again) several known to be adventurous investment firms grappling with shitty returns in the ordinary market (betting amounts they could easily afford to lose) plus the SEC do not add up to anything equivalent to "the watchdog CDC endorses use of this vaccine" or "80% of the world uses MS Windows as an OS and every online PC/laptop review magazine endorses products using it."
And I'm only making the point because the analogy seems part of a mildly defensive attempt to rationalize why trusting this particular trust network wasn't really a mistake. But certainly nobody here is hating on you for the mistake. Why feel defensive at all? If nothing else, you're clearly in good company. It would be much more interesting to analyze why you (and others) made the mistake in the first place. We all make mistakes like that, and your writing often shines most impressively when it tackles subjects of this nature: here's a mistake I made, and which people commonly make, and let's think deeply about why this happens.
"If you're using Windows, you're assuming *Microsoft* isn't stealing your credit card details."
I only assume that because I assume Microsoft would like to, but make such a mess of even simple updates to their software that they can't figure out how to get it to work.
See the roll-out of Windows 11 and their list of "if your PC/laptop doesn't have one of this set of processors, it isn't eligible for 11". It was transparently obvious they wanted to sell a ton of Surface laptops/tablets on the back of this (the links they kept sending me about 'buy a new machine to update!' were all for their Surfaces) and I'm not going to buy a new PC just to get Windows 11. Never mind that I dislike laptops and tablets and won't use one if I can possibly avoid it.
So ever since I've been using Windows, I updated to the latest version (yes, I suffered with Vista like everyone else) *except* for this one, and that's because I am not going to pay Microsoft more than I have to. 10 works fine and does what I want, why will I buy what I don't need?
(Ask me about their "Software as a Service" subscription model which we're signed up to at work, which I think is absurd for 'hey if you want to use Word, instead of a once-off purchase now you have to pay us for eternity'.)
All companies are evil and want to gouge money out of you. I don't trust *any* of them.
I think there's a big gap between this and what you actually said.
If someone told me that Microsoft was doing something nefarious, my reaction would *not* be "come back to me when you've started a company as big as Microsoft".
Hm, I get your point, but I think there is sth. missing. Suppose your kid is ill, and for whatever reasons many in your community strongly belief in alternative medicine, which has healed many who are around. And so you take your kid to the best healers around, all those persons with the highest alternative medicine credentials, to then discover in the end that they couldn't heal your child. From your point of view, those were the experts. From somebody elses point of view, they were not to trust with your kid's health, because the whole system they rely on is fraud, or, for better comparison, is at least imperfect with regard to certain illness. Maybe it does a good service with, let's say, preventing and reversing lifestyle illnesses early on, but it doesn't do a good service with healing cancer. In this example, the key is not to become a better alternative healer before being bitter about your mistake, it's to realize that this whole sub-sector never was the right place to seek the only or most relevant advice on your child's health. Even though it gave your neighbours helpful advice on nutrition and everyday activities, that resulted in them being much fitter.
The non-profit/ charities' criticims of those who would never have trusted FTX doesn't come from a place of 'I'm a better financial expert than those at Blackrock' or 'why did you trust Blackrock over (their closest competitor being slightly more sceptical of FTX)'. At least in parts it comes from a place of 'why did you think that specific sub-sector which we know is prone to fall for hypes, which is into high risk, high profit, often sees big losses, and likes to play with money that doesn't represent concrete values is the best place to rely on when thinking about funding for your charity?' I think in this case 'be a better billionare or shut up' is misguided.
Just to be clear, my intention is not to argue against VC, billionares or traders, I just disagree with 'as long as you can't do better, be silent'.
I guess your initial point was: don't beat yourself up too much over a wrong decision, and I actually agree with this one. But I think one needs to find a better reason for that, which maybe is just to say that everybody is making mistakes, that's human, and sometimes those mistakes can have costly consequences. In this case, many others made a similar mistake. Making a mistake, even a costly one, doesn't mean you're a moral monster.
I'd probably also argue to seriously reflect on this mistake and lessons learned, rather than saying 'ah, all the experts were wrong as well, so whatever, let's continue as always'.
I think in this case you didn't make a medical-knowledge failure, you made a meta-level failure in determining which supposed-experts to trust.
Obviously figuring out which experts to trust is hard, and sometimes "go with the most prestigious ones" goes badly, but I think it's the best heuristic most people who aren't experts themselves have, and people who follow it mostly can't be faulted. Our hypothetical alternative medicine mom is blameworthy insofar as she rejected the consensus prestigious experts for non-consensus non-prestigious experts.
I think Blackrock, the SEC, etc, *are* the most prestigious consensus experts in the financial world. If it was a failure to trust them instead of someone else, I still don't know who that someone else would be. I don't think there was some other expert affirmatively saying "FTX is bad!" (and I don't think people who hate all crypto on principle but didn't identify any specific issues with FTX should count)
I know (online acquaintance) somebody with a PhD in molecular genetics, a real genuine physical syndrome, and who believes in Reiki healing that has improved their condition and is now offering to do Reiki healing over the phone/internet for people.
Do I 'trust' "well they've got a PhD in a biological science, I don't even have a basic degree in anything, they are clearly the expert here"?
It could be worse. Remember "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV...now here's some medical advice...?" That stuff actually works. We're amazingly gullible as a species. It's probably one reason we are also so tribal -- we need *some* defense from the risks of our individual gullibility, and joining one of Scott's "trust networks" can help with that.
>I don't think people who hate all crypto on principle but didn't identify any specific issues with FTX should count
I don't see why - obviously, that's fair that they didn't say "SBF is a fraud but CZ is fine" and didn't predict that FTX was going to fall and Binance be left standing. But also, they didn't claim to predict which specific crypto businesses would collapse in what order - they just claim that all of them will and that all of the money invested in crypto will be a dead loss because the entire business is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. Given how many crypto businesses have failed, I'm updating strongly to "David Gerard is right".
This also explains why they aren't making money - creating a synthetic put option against the entire sector would be hard, and the margin would be so big that (as Keynes put it) the market can easily stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Moreover, the counterparties of that transaction are crypto investors; it's very hard to see how they would have the ability to pay out if you are right, since they are likely to go broke. What you would need is something like a credit default swap backed by a highly-diversified financial institution that has some exposure to crypto (if it has zero exposure, then it wouldn't be issuing those CDSes) but not so much that it would be at default risk if the sector went belly-up. But Goldman Sachs aren't issuing crypto CDSes.
[To simplify the above: I can't bet that "you're going to go broke" because if I win the bet, you can't pay out, so I have to bet with someone else that "he's going to go broke" and I have to be sure that you going broke won't bring them down too; the people I trust not to go broke if crypto crashes are not taking that bet]
It seems to me that there are two positions to update in favour of:
First, crypto is fundamentally a problem, anyone involved in it is not to be trusted. This is comparable to accepting charity funding from other sectors that are unethical, like casinos or tobacco or coal.
Second, any business that is making an especially big deal about its ethics and charity giving is more likely to be unethical/corrupt in its business practices. This is the old "mobsters give to the local church/school" idea writ large.
There's a much better and simpler heuristic: don't trust anyone (unless you have a good reason to (and prestige isn't a good reason)).
And yes, trusting somebody you didn't have a good reason to trust is your fault.
I think this is a reasonable heuristic in the big picture, but that it is being misapplied in this particular case. Big financial firms have a different purpose and live in a different ecosystem than big medical firms. The environments can't be compared to each other. Big financial firms are legendarily well known for not caring whether their counterparties are trustworthy, or honest, or are going to survive beyond the very short firm. Their collaboration says exactly and only "this is going to make money for me". Any other consequences and participants can go sex act themselves. You only need to have read one Michael Lewis book to understand this. Big medical firms have their well being and survivability tied to solving problems for the population at large and big financial firms absolutely do not. Blackrock making money and cooperating with something is no basis for assuming that anyone else will make money, or not be scammed, or that their partners are not criminals. No one in that industry cares about any of that. That's where most of the margin comes from. The mafia is an expert in smuggling but they are not a trustworthy source of information about the topic. The FSB is an expert in the Russian security state but they are not trustworthy sources of information about it. Etc. If you've missed the existence of this entire category, that's not good.
Also, it's really aggravating that you keep bringing up the SEC - you have no basis for doing so. The link you cite makes the following argument: "The offshore crypto exchange to which US law does not apply was not prevented by the SEC via unicorn powers from committing fraud. With that as evidence, plus the evidence of anonymous people and from extremely trustworthy Republican politicians making accusations that they totally always have a good basis for, definitely maybe SEC was in cahoots with FTX, after all they have held meetings, or maybe not but definitely a "bad look".
It's an offensively poor and non-empirical argument, suggesting that you don't know much about the processes and practices of the SEC, the legal, regulatory, or habitual constraints under which they operate, or even the basics of what they have or have not done concerning FTX or the crypto industry, and even worse, you don't even know what you don't know and that you don't know it. But claims that "the SEC endorsed the bad guys" .. are a very convenient thing for a lot of people to claim/believe right now for obvious reasons.
> I think in this case you didn't make a medical-knowledge failure, you made a meta-level failure in determining which supposed-experts to trust.
Yes, that's a fair summary of my point.
> I don't think there was some other expert affirmatively saying "FTX is bad!
I'm not expert enough to give you a lot of detail here. But if I was to go to any financial expert close-by, and say: I need money for altruistic cause x, and I want something that gives me more money rather than less money, but I also want something that is low risk, because (all kinds of reasons)' I kind of doubt FTX would have been the advice of the day.
I don't think anyone was arguing from first principles that FTX was the best company to get money from. I think FTX was offering people money, and you could either say yes and have FTX money, or say no and have zero money. I think the bar for accepting an offer like this is pretty low - basically just "not so fraudulent that it would be offensive to their victims to accept" - and that it was very fair to be surprised when in the end FTX failed to clear that bar.
I agree with most of that except the last sentence. It should have been very clear to anyone that FTC had a decent chance of failure. Especially after JUN.
You can say you don't like Mormonism, but if you say after a Mormon sex scandal "how could anyone have missed the red flags? It was so obvious!", then people have the right to not believe you. After all, if they were so obvious, why didn't any of the many critics of Mormonism see them? Why didn't the police see them?
This seems like a pretty transparent misreading of the article?
This section wasn't about not blaming FTX, it was about not blaming non-expert individuals who didn't notice the problem with FTX sooner.
> "This is just rule utilitarianism"
Actually, that's not quite right. It's multi-level act consequentialism. The difference is explained here:
https://www.utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism#multi-level-utilitarianism-versus-single-level-utilitarianism
My latest post gives more of a breakdown of the different alternatives to *naive* (single-level) act consequentialism:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/naive-vs-prudent-utilitarianism
Your Mistakes disclaimer, the opening statement; I don't promise never to make mistakes. Grammar and sentence structure. You never promise to make mistakes. Correction of a double negative should read: I don't promise to never make mistakes. Trivial? yes, but totally changes the meaning.
That is the joke
This is cutting against the grain of this thread, but does anyone here still take COVID seriously, or are all of you basically over the pandemic? My brother and his girlfriend still mask up when going to certain places, and they also got the latest booster, and my corner drugstore and my parent's cafe still requires masking, but otherwise, I rarely see people masked up. Am I right in assuming it's pointless to care about COVID still?
I have resumed wearing mask on public transport for the winter season. Not really because I am concerned about Covid specifically, but rather because I think it is a good general hygiene standard.
And when I get cold symptoms I test for Covid. I plan to isolate a little more strict with Covid than with other colds, but not much more. (Isolating is no longer mandatory in my country even with Covid).
I'm a "vax-and-forget"-er all the way, my man. Used a N95 on one occasion when meeting with some elderly relatives last month.
I pretty much stopped caring about COVID back in February, but I wore an n95 when flying at my parent's insistence and I may decide to get the latest booster just in case (mainly to protect relatives when traveling for the holidays, rather than myself).
I have a risk factor that makes my risk approx equivalent to that of a man in his 70's. I go where I like, but mask in indoor public places, get the boosters, and run a big air purifier in my office. The degree of risk of my getting very sick with a respiratory illness is going to wax and wane as flu, covid and RSV cases do, but it's not low enough to shrug off. If I were 35 with no risk factors I think it would be. The other concern I have is Long Covid. I'm sure a lot of things called Long Covid are just slower-than-average recoveries, symptoms that in fact having nothing to do with covid, neurosis, malingering etc. But I'm pretty positive that does not account for all the Long Covid cases. I had what I'm pretty sure was a post viral syndrome myself 20 years ago and it absolutely ruined 3 years of my life. I never want to go through that again. Just for the record, I am not indignant that most other people are not masking.
Mostly my behavior has returned to pre-pandemic norms, and my comfort level is squarely there.
The only exceptions to that would be one-offs like if I was exposed, I'd stay in and wear a mask to go out until I could reliably test negative, or if I have a friend who is uncomfortable for some reason I'd mask, hang out outside, or whatever.
I got vaxxed, and got a booster last December. Since things went back to normal in Ireland about 6 months ago, I have too. Pharmacies used to ask you to mask, but now even they don't. I was drinking at the bar in my local pub tonight, and have been frequently.
I'm not convinced by the booster thing at this point - I think if you are working in public health or something maybe it is useful. But it doesn't prevent infection, and other than reduce the chances of infection for a couple of months. all it does is give your long-term immunity a prod IMO. Encountering virus in the wild probably does that just as well. I don't think it would hurt to get another booster this Christmas, and if my family fret about it I probably will. But I am basically treating Covid as just another endemic virus.
As far as I know I haven't got it, but I quite likely have had it asymptomatically. Then again my sister had it a few months ago for the first time (her son who lives with her got it previously but she wasn't infected). She said it was nasty, but she was over it within a week.
I mask if I'm sick (and probably contagious), because that is one of the few cultural changes I'm hoping lasts after the pandemic. Otherwise I don't worry about COVID beyond what I have to with regards to my family's jobs (my mother works in healthcare, so I get tested before she comes to visit if I might be sick)
I'm taking it seriously in the sense of getting new boosters when they come out, but at this point I think that's about all it is reasonable to do if you're not in a very at-risk population.
I'm still avoiding gatherings as much as practical, wearing an n95 when it's not, not eating indoors, etc. I expect to do that until:
a) I'm convinced that long Covid odds are well under 1% per infection, ideally under 0.01%. (Currently the studies, which are all flawed in various ways, more research needed, etc. etc., seem to point to closer to 1 in six, with 1 in 20 about as low as it gets. While vaccination helps it seems to be more on the order of 40-50% reduction-- maybe less, maybe a bit more, not vastly more-- than my preferred .999...)
I'll be very glad to see a persuasive study that shows it to be much lower, and due to the low quality of the existing data that's not ruled out. But thus far I'm still waiting.
Advances in prevention and treatment would also work, of course. But we're no longer doing Warp Speed-type programs and even funding for existing research has been largely blocked by budget struggles. (The administration is going to try again in the lame duck, but I imagine that it will fail again.)
So I expect that to be back to the usual timeline for new drugs, i.e. not getting to approval any time soon, even if there's something to approve. (And I've read Derek Lowe for enough years to know how many candidates there are for each drug that works.)
b) prevalence is low enough that it's reasonable not to expect to be infected once or twice a year in the absence of precautions. I don't go out of my way this much to avoid flu because 1) it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same rate of sequelae, and 2) flu prevalence times infectiousness meant I could go 5-10 years without getting the flu. That's clearly not currently the case with Covid.
c) the expected seriousness of long Covid is assessed to be lower than it currently looks. (I'm concerned both about life-changing but not immediately deadly things like long term fatigue or permanent anosmia, and actual life-threatening issues like greatly increased cardiovascular risks in the years following.)
d) social/economic pressure makes that unsustainable.
(Or, I guess, e) I actually decide to stop worrying and love repeated SARS-Cov-2 infections, but that seems less likely.)
Even if I go "back to normal" in some sense, I still don't expect I'll ever, e.g., fly without a mask again. I routinely got colds and worse from flying and I'd be just as happy not to go back to that even if Covid risk drops below my threshold.
I got the bivalent booster some weeks back. I am considering masking up in the most crowded environments I frequent, namely the subway and the supermarket.
n95 masks help substantially (not as much as I'd like, significantly more than zero), and I don't find them all that uncomfortable. YMMV.
For those looking for comfortable ones, I like Kimberly-Clark's duck masks. 3M's Aura models also get good ratings for both comfort and filtering capacity.
Don't order from Amazon. They're full of counterfeits. (Or were last time I was buying from them.) This seems to be a general problem with filtration products for them-- I stopped buying water filters there a few years back after I noticed that I was getting fakes (that weighed half as much as the genuine article).
One thing that perplexes me is the continued prevalence of cloth and surgical masks. In 2020, sure: there was a shortage of n95s, and something was better than nothing (more true pre-omicron). And a lot of people were wearing the minimum they could get away with to comply with mask requirements anyway.
Now no one is required to wear a mask if they don't choose to (at least most places-- I think my health care system still requires them), and there's no longer a shortage. So I'd expect things to have sorted into no mask ("No mask? No mask!") and n95/KN95/etc. Instead, I still see, among the minority of mask-wearers, a fair number of cloth masks that are probably very porous and minimally protective, and surgical masks that leak out the sides.
(And that I at least found much less comfortable than an n95. Surgical masks were sweatier, and I never found one that didn't fog my glasses. Having the seal and space to breathe an n95 offers is a huge improvement!)
Maybe it's cost. But it doesn't really seem to correlate with income. (And it's possible to make n95s last if one is motivated-- buy seven and rotate them daily till they're visibly dirty or damaged.) And KN95s especially are pretty cheap, though I was never able to get a good seal with one.
"The King In Yellow" was definitely a play about covid. That's my headcanon now. Hastur is pleased.
Working in grocery, I've also remained baffled by the prevalence of barrel-bottom masks, often in addition to nose-out wearing. Have always wanted to see what's in someone's head when they run that kind of heuristic. What sort of strange information did they get about covid? Is it just a "better than nothing" rationalization? A virtue signal? (The strangest is still occasionally seeing people trying to make do with, like, bandannas or pulling their shirt collar up...) Sometimes wonder if it's just a collective-action problem, and if there was a loud enough PSA that "Actually Most People Won't Judge You Weird For Not Masking", perhaps a significant fraction would sigh in social relief. That's the only reason I still do it, on occasion: not wanting to ruffle any tribal feathers. Beware Trivial Social Inconveniences.
(Conversely, some people enjoy the social acceptability of masks for convenience - they don't like having facial expressions read, do like the reduced makeup requirements, whatever. I'm sympathetic to such people. Still seems like that wouldn't account for a huge fraction of maskers though.)
I see what you did there 😀
"Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda) No mask? No mask!"
Yes, agreed! I don't understand this phenomenon, and I very, very much don't understand how we *still* have people wearing masks with their nose sticking out in places where there's no requirement to mask at all.
I can only conclude it's just a fundamental lack of information, except I also don't understand that, because if you think the risk is high enough it's worth ameliorating, how do you then think "but it's not worth researching for five seconds to find out how to effectively do that"?
Oh come on! LHN didn't say or imply anything remotely like they're delighted to do it. Nor did they say they planned to do it the rest of their life. And you & I both know that if LHN is masking it's because they are concerned that covid for them would be something worse than sniffles. It's a lowdown, unfair tactic to misstate what LHN said while sneering at the absurdity of the distorted version you present. It's as though I responded to your post this way: "Trebuchet's take is that the world has a right to see their glamorous face 24-7, and that their courage and realism about covid are as rare & impressive as a perfect LSAT. Lord save me from these egomaniacs!"
Covid isn't the sniffles, as the 2300 Americans dead of it this past week could attest. But at this point no one's making you protect yourself or anyone else against it.
As for understanding: Maybe we assess the risk of Covid differently. Maybe we assess the burden of masking differently. I'd guess probably both.
The recommendations were for those who are still interested in comfortable, effective masks at least some of the time. Which by my observation is a minority, but not vanishingly small fraction of the population.
Hm, It's arguably worth getting an omicron booster, especially if you're in a vulnerable population, but aside from that yeah pretty much (unless you're severely immunocompromised, but then you'd have to take extreme measures to avoid flu anyway).
It's a huge exaggeration to say there's nothing you can do to avoid it without spending your entire existence in self-imposed lockdown. I go to stores, movies, etc., but mask in these indoor public places. I go to work, but run a bit big purifier in the office in lieu of wearing a mask and asking the people I meet with to mask. Before parties & the like my friends and I test. That is very far from self-imposed lockdown, & so far it has worked to keep me from getting covid. Of course I am aware that I may still get it, but the point of my precautions isn't to guarantee that I never get it -- it's to minimize the number of times I get it. Zero is my preferred number, but if my precautions mean I get it once, rather than 3 or 4 times, that also seems like a worthwhile goal, worth the trouble I'm taking (which in total is maybe 2 hrs per week of wearing a mask, testing once a month or so, and flicking the switch on the air purifier when I arrive at work).
>All of the stuff we did besides the vax was a giant waste of time and money
You're ignoring the period of time early in the pandemic when the medical systems were being genuinely overwhelmed, there weren't enough ventilators or even beds to go around, and "flatten the curve" was the (even in hindsight, correct) Narrative. Merely slowing transmission made sense as one of the terminal goals.
(There's some debate as to whether the US could have done better with a faster/stronger response, or whether it was naive to expect that to ever work when partisans were creating a low-trust cooperate-defect scenario, but the above isn't predicated on that)
Everything after the booster, though, much less clear that it wasn't a waste of money.
Agreed. Flatten the curve well after the curve was flattened was a classic mission creep.
The country got caught up in the dream that we could eliminate covid, the way we have various other disease. At the beginning, I bought the idea that that was theoretically possible, though I didn't see how we could do it in practice -- locking everything down for a few months seemed like it would do terrible damage to the economy and to a lot of individuals. I now understand that covid just isn't the kind of disease you can eradicate the way you do polio, and I'm sure docs & epidemiologists at the alphabet agencies realized that from the beginning. Why didn't somebody in government say so? Why didn't somebody come up with a plan that optimized our chance of having the best outcome with this damn disease, given that eradication was not possible?
>I'm sure docs & epidemiologists at the alphabet agencies realized that from the beginning.
Other variants of SARS and MERS were successfully contained. It doubt it was immediately clear just how much more difficult SARS-CoV-2 was in that regard.
" Why didn't somebody come up with a plan that optimized our chance of having the best outcome with this damn disease, given that eradication was not possible?"
They probably had one, but it failed on the critical item: the populace must go along with it.
Sweden was one of the few countries where enough of the population didn't successfully protest (cue politicians jumping in) the state epidemiologist's original plan.
In retrospect, should it have been a red flag that FTX didn't buy a billion malaria nets and distribute them in Africa?
EDIT: Aka, should it have been a red flag that an entity claiming to be Effectively Altruist was only doing high status effective altruist activities not low status but effectively effective effective altruist activities?
One can make some convincing arguments that AI safety research has OOMs more cost effectiveness than bed nets.
Maybe, but as Scott points out FTX was acting like it was idea-constrained not funding constrained, and it still put $0 into bednets. Maybe "AI safety" is so much better than bednets that you fund all AI Safety ideas first before buying a single bednet, but FTX was spraying money everywhere.
Actually yeah, I'd assumed they put at least some of their money in that but looks like they weren't? This one is a retroactive yellow flag.
> Like many of you, I’ve been following the FTX disaster.
What is/was FTX?
Out of sympathy, here is the very short, very vaguely accurate cliff notes summery:
FTX was a very successful cryptocurrency exchange run by a man who was very connected to Effective Altruism. As an exchange, it was supposed to hold people's cryptocurrency and make money off of fees when exchanging from one cryptocurrency to another. It turns out that instead of holding on to people's money, they were using that money to speculate on cryptocurrency. Also there was a lot of financially shady stuff going on that is too complicated to summarize, but most financial people agree was a deceptive attempt to make a particular cryptocurrency that FTX controls look better than it was. Another successful cryptocurrency exchange in competition with FTX realized they were puffing up their cryptocurrency, and did some maneuvers to cause the price to drop really far really fast. As part of this many people wanted to withdraw their money from FTX, and then FTX stopped letting people withdraw their money: this revealed that they didn't actually have the deposits because they had been spending them on speculative investments, which they were not given permission to do. FTX is collapsing as a company, and a bunch of people lost the cryptocurrency they had deposited with them.
This has led a lot of Effective Altruism people to say publicly "Don't steal people's money in an attempt to make even more money: it's wrong, even if you planned to use the money you made to make the world a better place."
Sounds like Google is your mortal enemy
If I search "what is FTX" none of the results are as good as what FLWAB posted.
The results I get are (in order):
* the FTX official website.
* the wikipedia article
* a bunch of articles about the collapse of FTX. When I spot-check these, they are written as if I already knew what FTX is/was.
I don't know about that but they are a very dubious company one would do well to avoid.
I created a prediction market for whether any FTXFF grantee will be legally compelled to return money due to FTX's bankruptcy. I think it's unlikely. https://manifold.markets/JonathanRay/will-any-ftxff-grantee-be-legally-c
"True, there are also other people outside of finance who are also supposed to look out for this kind of thing. Investigative reporters. Congress. The SEC. But the leading US investigative reporting group took $5 million from SBF. Congressional Democrats took $40 million from SBF in midterm election money. The SEC was in the process of allying with SBF to anoint him as the face of legitimate well-regulated crypto in America. You, a random AI researcher who tried Googling “who are these people and why are they giving me money” before accepting a $5,000 FTX grant, don’t need to feel guilty for not singlehandedly blowing the lid off this conspiracy. This is true even if a bunch of pundits who fawned over FTX on its way up have pivoted to posting screenshots of every sketchy thing they ever did and saying “Look at all the red flags!”
Scott,
I very rarely comment here, but I follow you voluntarily. I don't think you're a bad guy, I've learned some interesting things from you. But this reply is really a joke, I'm sorry. I'm a random well-educated liberal, and it's been wildly obvious to me that FTX was a Ponzi scheme for years, and more importantly, not just me, but a thriving crypto-skeptic community.
https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
You'll see right in the biography that this guy's been covered by the MSM for years. Ever since Mt. Gox blew up, there has been a super-abundance of critical analysis of crypto as a giant scam.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/09/07/el-salvador-bitcoin-day-how-it-went/
I'm just posting random links I used in emails years ago. Here, this was easy to find from 2018:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/04/study-single-anonymous-market-manipulator-pushed-bitcoin-to-20000.html
Does this sound like a trustworthy basis for assigning financial value? No, it does not. This is CNBC.com - I am not deep diving here.
I am neutral on your point as to whether NGOs should feel *bad* about taking money from a criminal. They were presumably using the money to do good, and it's easy to get confused and not know if and when the scammer was crossing the line from unethical lying and cheating to criminal behavior. That's an individual ethical decision. But I guarantee you that the Democratic party, ProPublica, and the SEC were extremely aware that SBF was an untrustworthy scammer, although they may not have all known he was crossing into criminal behavior.
The details of how SBF appears to have committed fraud were not obvious and well known, but crypto was readily knowable as a Ponzi scheme that was consistently bringing ruin to naive people. You absolutely could have done better due diligence to understand that, and so could any NGO who wanted to understand with an hour of research. Of course, it's easy to do research badly and not realize that you have done a bad job, so I'm not personally scorning anyone who was rugged, but those people absolutely should hold themselves accountable for mucking up something not overly difficult.
You don't need a prediction market, you just need a reasonably diverse base for information intake and a willingness to take adverse information seriously. Crypto exchanges have been blowing up on the regular for a decade, all the info was there in plain sight.
Scott is guilty of being human. This is a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing, if people he knew were saying that people they knew said these guys were okay, why would he doubt them?
It's also the technocratic strain in Rationalism and EA that believes anything done with modern advanced high-tech methods has to be so much more efficient and better. I'm suspicious of technocracy so crypto always sounded to me like a very elaborate way to get scammed, especially when some people were enthusing about how it was untrackable and you could safely buy your guns/drugs/illegal but shouldn't be stuff with it.
However, it's always very hard for people to believe that others who share (or seem to share) the same general beliefs as they do, and move in the same circles, and are involved in the same good causes, can be up to no good. This may not be the strawman 100% rationalist who takes nothing on trust and always runs tests on if they should trust their spouse when their spouse says they love them, but it's a lot more human and a lot more personable.
You are overstating your case (just like many commenters before you); crypto is not ENTIRELY a scam.
BUT, more importantly, it is an obviously sketchy industry, just like, say, personal development advice ("this book will change your life!") or medical supplements or something like that.
Any "crypto-billionare" should be automatically viewed with suspicion unless proven otherwise (and in my eyes, number of crypto moguls who proven themselves beyond suspicion is so far exactly 0). Failure to see that does indeed seem like significant error of judgment.
>I'm a random well-educated liberal, and it's been wildly obvious to me that FTX was a Ponzi scheme for years, and more importantly, not just me, but a thriving crypto-skeptic community.
Yes, but there are probably 5 other things you think are obviously Ponzi schemes (or otherwise criminal/corrupt) that aren't.
Of course for any controversial claim, there will be people who believe it and people who dispute it. When facts come out that prove one side right, everyone in that side will get to crow about how 'obvious' it was the whole time and get to feel superior to everyone on the other side.
That doesn't actually mean it was obvious and that the other side didn't have a coherent rational story for their beliefs, or even that the 'winning' side necessarily evaluates evidence in this domain better in general. You need an N of more than 1 to prove that.
Also, more specifically: I'm 100% with you on the side of believing that crypto and web 3 has been a speculation bubble from that start, motivated by grifters and confidence agents. But that doesn't necessarily mean that *every individual actor* on the scene is intentionally committing fraud and lying about their intentions at all times. You still have to make judgement calls in individual cases, and can be wrong for negative judgements.
I agree with you. It's hard to strike a balance in the reply and in how to talk about these things. You're right, I don't have any evidence that some notional "side" that is "crypto skeptics" is generally better at evaluating evidence about scammers than a notional side that is "crypto friendly". I also agree that not everyone who believes in crypto, or even believes in and markets it, is a "scammer" in terms of committing securities fraud, etc. Speculation bubbles are weird. You tell people "buy this coin, and then its value will go up and you'll be rich", and that.... is true at the time! And will be true for an unspecified future amount of time. Everyone is being completely honest and accurate... until they stop being accurate later, and the "dishonest" part often comes in from secondary lies and deception about the nature of the market, the marketplace, and the financial games happening offstage. Which not everyone is aware of, or fully understands when they are told about.
I don't really think that "crypto skeptics" are even a side, or a coherent community, etc, although they probably overlap with market skeptics and small-c conservatism that may have some overlap with "conventional NPR liberal"... whatever that trope really represents about its own population base, etc.
Anyway, to me personally, I wrote the reply because Scott's reply suggested or implied, to me, that everyone who fell for this had no reason to take stock, no reason to doubt themselves or their process for evaluating trustworthiness, and there was no easy way to know about any red flags. I don't agree. If you got rugged by this, in this day and age, you do have a reason to doubt yourself and change your methods going forward. Mistakes are part of life, but learn from them to avoid repeating them. Most of all, I want to push back on the last part. The red flags were widely reported and readily available to be known.
There's a very important difference between "Crypto doesn't have real value/potential, and FTX is a company profiting off of people playing casino-like games, which I think is bad" and "FTX is committing actual fraud and/or is insolvent but hiding it"
Even believing crypto is basically a scam, it was plausible that FTX was no morally worse than a regular casino, which in general are (I assume?) non-fraudulent businesses taking advantage of people throwing their money away.
(caveat: I don't actually believe crypto is a scam, I just think even if crypto is a scam, FTX was plausibly non-fraudulent")
This is a valuable distinction, and other replies also draw a distinction between "crypto is a speculative bubble that will pop and selling it is shady" and "committing financial crimes". This is true... I guess. Not every crypto-related business is committing financial crimes, and not all of them are even lying to and/or concealing material information from their customers, which is also not always a crime, although it is always shit behavior.
To know that FTX was committing crimes, you needed to be paying attention to more specific info. However, that info was also out there. The Bitfinex'd link is a gateway to lots of that info. How many offshore crypto exchanges are committing massive financial crimes? all of them. Every single one. No doubt whatsoever. And there's plenty of evidence. But it is true that this is a complicated and messy topic and that nonexperts can interpret evidence and facts in multiple ways and also get bored and tired and distracted and not know what is a crime and what is true.
So I don't think everyone who didn't realize FTX and every other offshore crypto exchange platform are criminals, is a bad person or an idiot for that. But if it is your job to figure these things out, and you didn't figure it out, you can and should have done so. It wasn't a case where the needed info wasn't available; it was.
Just as a matter of diplomacy, you're probably better off not relying on David Gerard for a big chunk of the support for your argument. At least not here.
Care to elaborate? I have no idea of the backstory here. Anyway, he's by no means and in no way unique or critical to the argument, I just can't be bothered to hunt down other sources for the community.
Gerard is _very specifically_ opposed to Scott Alexander at length, and more generally to whatever he sees as the 'right wing' of the ratsphere, to the point where he had to be [topic-banned on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1061#Propose_topic_ban).
I don't think it undermines Gerard's position on crypto, specifically (it's probably made him a _little_ more opposed, but only in the tribalistic sense that red/blue affiliation tweaks everyone), but it's an issue in other spaces, and I say that as someone who interacted with him better on tumblr.
Do you believe all crypto businesses are scams?
Blockchain technology has the possibility to change the world for the better but we have yet to get it truly woven into the fabric of our society and the regulating powers that be may ruin it because it makes so many of their institutions obsolete. Right now it's like the internet in 1996. No idea how to invest other than in the broad idea that it will move forward. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, doesn't have a super compelling use case for developed economies other than being like a wildly speculative commodity.
My favored examples of real world blockchain utility mostly come down to enforcing government transparency. As an example, Nigerian land speculators have found that, instead of buying land from existing owners, it's often much cheaper to bribe a land registrar to surreptitiously alter the title [1].
Consider a land registry on a public blockchain where records can only be updated with two of the following three cryptographic signatures:
A) The existing land owner as stated on the blockchain
B) A land registrar official
C) A state-level judge
Such a system doesn't make it *impossible* for corrupt officials to illegally alter records, but it makes things much more challenging by enforcing transaction transparency on a record system that the government doesn't directly own or control.
Alternately, imagine a system where govt contractors are paid in cryptographic tokens that can only be cashed out for untrackable dollars if and when they're paid as salary into individual worker-owned accounts. When paid from one contractor to another, or shifted between expensing units within a contractor, those transactions live on a public blockchain. If you want to figure out, for example, where exactly the money went for NYC's 2nd Ave subway, it's a database query rather than waiting for the NYT to spend several hundred hours doing investigative reporting [2].
In neither of these examples are you necessarily *replacing* an institution, but rather substantially *reforming* the behavior of an institution by making malfeasance harder to hide.
The primary case at present for blockchain fully replacing an existing institution is, basically, when you want to coordinate crime. Specifically, something like bitcoin is useful as a way of illegally circumventing capital controls and currency pegs in failing states with a hyperinflationary currency.
There are speculative notions about how blockchain could enable things like opt-in transnational states [3], or be used for public goods financing [4], or perform some kind of secure online voting system [5], but none of that's here yet and I don't understand any of this stuff well enough to confidently opine about viability.
1] https://guardian.ng/property/land-registries-remain-cesspit-for-bribery-in-nigeria-says-report/
2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html
3] https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html
4] https://consensys.net/blog/enterprise-blockchain/white-paper-equitable-public-good-allocation-and-the-unlocking-of-economic-value-through-token-based-markets/
5] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8853836
In neither of the first two examples is blockchain necessary to achieve the benefits -- if a government is willing to designate a blockchain as its "source of truth" for land ownership it could certainly do the same with a third-party database hosted and run by a neutral party outside their jurisdiction. (For the record, in neither case do I believe it's realistic that a government would actually do this).
And requiring all government contractors to be paid in internal accounting dollars that could only be transferred internally unless paid out to worker-owned accounts might work _better_ run through a centralized Federal database, as there could be a strong validation process to ensure that the worker-owned accounts were actually worker-owned, and that submitted expenses, etc. were valid, contractor organizations had actual existence as corporate entities with Federal tax numbers, etc.
The fundamental argument for blockchain solutions for these types of problems is that they remove the possibility for modification of the source of truth or the transactional history and therefore remove manipulation of the database as a source of corruption, but they are by no means corruption-free (51% attacks can enable violation of the integrity of the chain, bugs can enable all sorts of malfeasance and hacks, and even barring the above, just because a transaction is valid doesn't mean the input data was correct or the participants are actually who they say they are).
I think your comment about whether it's realistic for the government to "actually do this" is important in the discussion. You are correct that the blockchain is not technically necessary, but if the alternative solution is wildly implausible, isn't there value in the blockchain solution over the current system especially in places with significantly more "old school" corruption? Assuming the tech was there to implement this fairly easily and you could really improve transparency--wouldn't millions of powerful local officials feel threatened and work to prevent adoption?
I actually agree with your criticisms and should clarify that I don't presently endorse any of those use cases as, necessarily, a good idea. My intent was to scope out the best presently plausible use cases for blockchain, not to present blockchain as the ideal solution to the problems under consideration.
There are institutions, they are just code instead of people. You can read the code and opt in. Anyone can make new code at any time and people can move to it freely.
Anyone can fix any problem by writing new code and moving to it.
The blockchain part simplifies the distribution and running of code and establishes truth (immutability) and identity (private keys).
Im handwaving a whole lot here but maybe you get the idea?
I think the specific case where a blockchain is useful is where there is a mechanism to do that which would (in a non-blockchain situation) result in a specific guy making the change, but specific guy can also be bribed and he just makes the change without going through the mechanism.
Like, the law is officially supposed to be changed by a public vote in an elected assembly, but in practice, the clerk can just change things and you can bribe the clerk and not bother with the vote. In that sort of low-trust situation, you could put the law on the blockchain and set up the DAO so that the only way to change it is for a majority of members of the assembly to directly input their approval of the change - ie the vote takes place on the blockchain. That cuts the clerk out of the loop (obviously, you can still bribe the legislators, but that tends to be more expensive).
I think these sorts of problems are relatively unusual - ie problems where the official records are changed by bribing the records-keepers.
Also, I think that voting on a DAO is sufficiently technically difficult that I wouldn't trust elected legislators to do it correctly; and they would get a staffer to do it, and now you're back to the original problem: you can just bribe the staffers.
I think Scott's piece on EA as a tower of assumptions is particularly relevant now: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of.
If EA were a single indivisible idea that includes the FTX affair, that would be pretty bad.
But luckily, it is a series of distinct assumptions. One can be skeptical, for example, of the idea that one should prioritize a high expected value, even if the modal outcome is neutral or negative, but that would be no reason to doubt much more basic EA assumptions, like "not all dollars of charity have equivalent impacts." Or "poorer people generally benefit more from charity than richer people, and by global standards, very few of the poorest people live in Western countries."
Unfortunately for EA, those assumptions are not unique to EA thinking, and EAs now have a lot more baggage.
EA has a few decent insights, some of which are not unique to EA - though EA is making positive inroads to making them more widely considered. Also unfortunately for EA, some of the other hills them seem inclined to die on involve perspectives with limited value for most other people. AI Risk, animal welfare, "weird" Rationalist trapping like polyamory. These were already troubling to a group that was just becoming well known. Now that FTX is getting linked to EAs, they are going to have a much harder time getting positive messages out.
For anything concrete you'd have to go back in time and be smarter than SBF. Here's the archive link (which of course doesn't prove anything)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220317072103/https://donate.thedigital.gov.ua/
Hence including this in the topic of "updating". My prior on "big political donor is involved in money laundering" is high to start, of course. When the donor in question is a finance guy I update higher. When he appears to be a force for good in the world like SBF I revise downwards. When he's caught doing actual fraud, I revise upwards again.
Admittedly, my original prediction of technically-legal finance shenanigans may be much higher than most readers here, but I don't -feel- cynical. It's what allows me to laugh off critics of Bernie Sanders saying he has three houses and a couple of supercars. Well yeah, but I'm sure he got all his assets in ways that are technically legal. He's in Congress, what do you expect?
(Huey Long, when asked how his personal wealth had grown 10x more during his time in office than his gross salary, famously replied, "Only by exercising the most exTREME frugality.")
> The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”
You know, I asked myself some similar questions after being cheated on by a spouse and friend. In the end, I decided the act of trusting itself has intrinsic value. It's not infinite, so you have to take some care, but if you trust 100 times and get burnt once, and that once isn't the end of the world, maybe you came out of it OK?
Also, telling everyone proactively how, when you were fooled, it made you feel bad and take more care in the future means placing trust in you is a better bargain than placing trust in any other random person.
"...but I am just never convinced by these calibration analyses."
I'd be more convinced if the *polls* seemed to take this into account and get better over time.
One thing that I think hurts a lot of this is that folks really want to assume independence because it makes the math so much easier. The underlying reality often isn't independent.
I have a super-short writeup about this and how I think it helps to explain the 2016 election errors by the pollsters.
http://mistybeach.com/mark/math/CorrelationsAreReal.html
Correlations are, indeed, real. But they usually revolve around a "hidden variable". Still, one should realize that that hidden variable probably exists, even if one can't identify it. (But sometimes it really *is* just random variation, and won't persist.)
I used FTX and left some money there way longer than I should have because of EA/SSC/Rats implicit and explicit vouching for SBF. Obviously I don't blame anyone but myself, it wasn't a big portion of my portfolio (sadly I can't login to check specifics) and I'd still trust the related communities more than most but it still seems like a big collective L.
Why are you demanding proof from me? I didn’t endorse it as proven! But it is an angle that was not mentioned by Scott and I thought it should be included as a possibility since he is trying so hard to figure out what to think about this.
https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/122943-marc-cohodes-ftx-is-dirty-rotten-to-the-core-hedgeye-investing-s?with_category=17-insights
Someone else posted this link here but maybe you didn’t see it. I recommend it because even though it isn’t directly relevant to the Ukraine theory, it argues very strongly that SBF was put up to create FTX by much older and more experienced figures and that FTX never made any sense as a legitimate business.
Was this top-level comment meant to be a reply to another comment? You may have been hit by the Substack bug where replies through email don't work.
> make a list of everyone I’ve ever trusted or considered trusting, make prediction markets about whether any of them are committing fraud, then pre-emptively be emotionally dead to anybody who goes above a certain threshold.
Do you think you should add to that list a certain blogger who advocates for a monarchy in a time when the more religious party coalesced around a figure who sent a mob to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, given that your association with him has pulled his audience into yours and given your halls a well deserved reputation for racism and fascism among those who have had the good sense to be driven away from that stink? Or are you still being charitable to bad ideas from a dude whose qualifications consist of having a blog with smug essays on it? (I suspect you're about to learn that headlines are short-lived, and those trotted out as stars for a few years can be abandoned and ignored in a mere turning of the times. If you want to stay shining, and I'd like that personally, you're giong to have to think about your mistakes. Thiel won't even look at Moldbug if it doesn't suit his purposes anymore.)
The problem with the SFBA Rationalist cult is very specifically that their anti-credentialism led them to discount the importance of any establishment knowledge and utter crankery is the result.
Someone else called it: hubris. It's hubris that causes EA/Rationalist types to attempt to solve the same problems as everyone else believing their magic online blog juice will prevent them from making the same mistakes as everyone else, so they make not just the same mistakes but the same mistakes from a past era.
Credulity isn't a virtue if an entire community forms around someone who sorts out the most credulous and willing to believe the narrative of genius even secondhand...
Why are you platforming moldbug with this comment on this commonly read blog post that isn’t about him?
In what respect is it even intelligible to say that Scott "trusts" Moldbug?
Only in a very bounded sense — but still a meaningful one: Scott does believe there's positive value in reading him. Some would argue that Moldbug is the type of insidious proselytizer who is not *safe* to read even if you go in telling yourself "I disagree with him on core moral points and always will, I'm just curious to see what his object-level arguments are"; who will pollute your thinking with memes — in the Dawkinsian sense — that will make your thinking trend more right-wing over time without your conscious awareness.
Personally I want to think better of Scott's skill as a rationalist than that; that he would fall for such a "honeytrap"; but a more paranoid/cynical person could very, very easily made the case that this happened to him. That even as he tried to reject the overall worldview, he allowed disjointed Moldbuggian ideas and assumptions to creep into his thinking little by little, Cathedrals and left-swimming Cthulhus and the lot; and that a critical mass of those has caused him to become much closer to being reactionary-adjacent than 2012-Scott is likely to believe reading Moldbugg could or would make him.
I am skeptical that "dangerous meme" / infohazard is a useful concept. Like "misinformation ", people are only going to apply that idea to their outgroups as a way to discourage testing and exchanging ideas, to police social boundaries. (As we see here with Impassionata's excellent impression of a NYT commentor.)
Having said that, even if "trusting Moldbug not to publish infohazard" is an eccentric interpretation of the OP's usage, it certainly qualifies as intelligible.
Why did you write this?
I struggle to believe that you wrote this, or could reread it now, and with the intent to change our minds or persuade anyone here to your perspective. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you did genuinely think that this was persuasive, but that's pretty hard.
If you wrote this to express your hatred and disgust, and more broadly the hatred and disgust certain factions on the left have for people here, I'd like to assure you that we are all well aware of it and have been for some time. It has been expressed by a wide variety of writers and methods for well over a decade. It was shocking and hurtful years ago; it's normal now.
But, in summary, the rules here are very clear and always have been. I'm not sure anyone could classify what you've written as kind and it's really unclear, to me at least, what is necessary or true of any of it.
PS, seriously, the non-troll way to write this is some variant of "Has this FTX misjudgment caused you to reevaluate any of the controversial writers you've written about in the past or beliefs you've become associated with."
It is so over the top that it reads like a hate generating psy-op.
Why did you write this?
I struggle to believe that you wrote this with any intent but to lecture me on how you wish you were spoken to. I speak as one without regard for your feelings because facts don't care about your feelings. The fact is that Scott Alexander's writings and their **consequences** drove people away. A lot of people away.
I'm here because I like some of Scott's work and still have some hope for reasons I don't fully understand myself.
Scott Alexander platforms someone who actually advocates for a strongman to take power, which no matter what word you put on it (monarchist or fascist) is essentially, in the consequentialist view, a call for violence against minorities of various idpol stripes unless you are a blind fucking idiot too credulous and too easily taken advantage of to be considered a serious political writer. You might not believe it, but enough people do (and those people have a voice, too).
> it's really unclear, to me at least, what is necessary or true of any of it.
Think about it then, and trouble me not with your insipid handwringing about tone, for I don't care. If I am banned for speaking truth then I shall laugh and cross Scott Alexander off my list for good. I always hoped he&his would come around.
Cry less. If Scott Alexander's communities harbored racists and fascists because of Scott Alexander's choices, I want to believe that Scott Alexander's communities harbored racists and fascists.
Is there a standard definition of "platforming" and "harboring" people?
Ah, I figured the PS was a bad move, ah well. I was genuinely curious whether you thought it might convince someone or, more seriously, whether there was some third option I hadn't considered. That happens sometimes.
Have a wonderful day!
> Have a wonderful day!
If I'm callous and cold at least I'm not a disingenuous little shit.
I dunno man - you don’t sound cold so much as inflamed, and the jury’s out on whether you’re a disingenuous little shit or not. Catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar, though.
Don't think you understand me or my motivations. I'm interested in pointing out the flies and urging for their prompt removal. The failure mode of kindness is unknowing indifference to the malign and deceitful. The racists and fascists know their foul full opinions will get them removed.
Ah, the Passion Flower continues to flourish even when transplanted to a new patch, I see!
Impassionata, I have been highly amused by your writings over at r/drama, especially your version of history about engaging with Rationalism. As my admittedly flawed memory recalls it, you spent most of that time arguing that this time for sure, latest investigation was going to end up with Trump in jail. The last prediction of that kind you made was that within two weeks' time he was going to the slammer. Naturally, this did not happen. Naturally, you were joshed about it. And naturally, you left, set up your own site, and went overboard with the marshmallows.
I'm glad to see you seem to be doing better and have found a new happy home!
I'm glad to see you fell for the marshmallow facade. As to your admittedly flawed memory, it seems like it is indeed as flawed as you admit.
All of my statements about Trump were in the vein of what _should_ happen. Were we not captive to the twin bindings of boomer ideological fog and weak rationalist political confusion it might have happened; recall, of course, that Nixon lost political power very swiftly. This is a mark of how low we have fallen. I was wrong of course about the level of corruption in our politics.
So my statements about time were in this vein: that at any point the axe might fall. Now we see what that axe falling looks like, and the interesting times are ahead for the Republican Party: will it eject Trump like snot into a kleenex, and will the snot metastasize?
The real frailty of the ignorant in the culture threads seasoned by the abominably stupid "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was this: that among generally atheist populations used to seeing blind faith in the nation's citizenry and all the dangerously poor thinking that denoted, it was in denial about a fascist movement on US soil. Shall we drop the signs?
* the more overtly religious party gathering under a strongman type politician via a xenophobic impulse,
* incorporating threats, from that politician, of physical violence against journ*lists
* making blatantly dishonest claims about the veracity of elections
* separating children from their parents in camps
* engaging in a physical crackdown on a protest and then touching a Bible
* convening a mob and sending it in the direction of the hall of Power in which the peaceful transition of Power was occurring
* continuing to belabor the lie in order to further division in what should be a united country.
This is fascism. Fortunately the American public could see what Scott could never seem to admit or even understand: that "You Are Still Calling Wolf" was the beginning of the end of his career as a political writer taken seriously outside of his small circle of neoreactionaries brought in as an effort to expand his audience. (/r/sneerclub is populated by fifteen thousand subscribers: people who were repelled by the stench.)
Still, it's good to see you, BothAfternoon (right?)! It's always good to have a personal herald.
> the end of his career as a political writer taken seriously outside of his small circle
> /r/sneerclub is populated by fifteen thousand subscribers
/r/TheMotte has eighteen thousand subscribers
/r/slatestarcodex has over fifty thousand
In a world where the mainstream academic opinion of Trumpism is that it's fascism and slatestarcodex has 50000 Reddit representatives, are you saying you don't think it's a big signal that 15000 people walked away from SSC?
American mainstream academic opinion is that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad. That part is completely predictable and independent on who happens to be the Republican candidate today. (I am not saying that the opinion is wrong, by the way. Just that it is constant, so we cannot use it as evidence for anything specific that happened recently.)
Also, 15000 is a relatively small number compared to the number of internet users: you could easily find 15000 supporters of a mainstream theory, or 15000 supporters of a conspiracy theory. (Probably even easier for the latter.)
But most importantly, 15000 people in sneerclub does *not* mean 15000 people who walked away from SSC. Many of them have probably never been SSC fans in first place; and would be sneerclub members also in a parallel world where Trump does not exist. There are all kinds of reasons for joining a nerd-bashing online club. Mostly, because it is fun... if you happen to be that kind of personality type.
You really put the "rational" in "rationalization."
Ooooh, mainstream academic opinion!
Well, that sure solves the entire problem of what, who, how and when to believe!
My opinion of mainstream academic opinion is the same as your opinion of all of us on here, Impassioned One.
"All of my statements about Trump were in the vein of what _should_ happen."
Ah, my delicate little petal, it was that you said "he WILL be going to jail" not that "he SHOULD be going to jail" and when your prognostications did not happen, you flounced off.
Well, we can all rewrite our personal history, and the good folk over at r/drama are not going to be too credulous one way or the other.
As for the rest of it - why do you keep expending so much mental energy on a failure like Scott etc?
> it was that you said "he WILL be going to jail"
There's still yet time my voluptuously verbal friend!
> when your prognostications did not happen, you flounced off.
That is how you tell the story, but the way I tell it is that I was just sick of being browbeaten and not being able to return fire. People can bully leftists a lot in a lot of subtle ways that don't catch moderator attention.
I flounced off because being unable to say "that's racist" or "that's pretty much just fascist" is pretty precisely what drove themotte into its present state.
The same pattern emerged on Discord: a community under Scott Alexander with a sidebar community that was for the mask-off racism. It was uncanny and very interesting how it essentially mapped Scott's own mind: a connection to the racist/fascists that was never allowed to be fully 'conscious' as it were.
> why do you keep expending so much mental energy on a failure like Scott etc?
A good question. He wrote something that impacted me personally once, might be the only real answer.
Out of curiosity, just how many SSC and related elements have you signed up to? I've never gone near the Discord, so O fiery-hued blossom of indignance, you are more devoted a follower of Scott than I am!
The subreddit and the discord. Maybe I was a devoted follower of Scott, but his fruit didn't fall far enough from the rotten rationalist tree. He's better than they are, or could be.
I, uh, so Scott Alexander and rationalists generally are secret fascist theocrats, as evidence here's bad behavior from their weird Berkley sex cult?
I jest but there's a core thing here that confuses me. I'm not sure if you've attended rationalist or EA meetups but they're really, really different from the people attending your average, say, Trump rally. And clearly these things are tied together somehow in your mind and I'm genuinely curious what connection you see. Like, I know Thiel backed Trump for awhile but your average rationalist and your average, say, Oathkeeper are just phenomenally different along virtually every significant personality aspect. How do these groups work together, if at all, in your mind?
I respect your mission deeply. I got directly involved through trying to cut through the shitty politics of these people so that's just the beat I walk, without intending to distract people. (The reality might unfortunately be that these people are too thick in their denial for any of what we say to have an impact in either direction...)
Multiple approaches are necessary in cult deprogramming. I'm hoping to wrap my participation up before too long, I've spent an alarming amount of time in this ego charity of mine...
Godspeed fellow traveler.
I strongly suspect there's a motte and bailey definition of scientific racism coming soon, where the motte is some wannabe eugenicist breaking out the skull calipers, and the bailey is anyone who knows what IQ and crime statistics by race look like.
Oooooh, sorry, sometimes I forget that people can live in parallel worlds.
It's because this is one of the few places where smart conservatives can have open conversations. If it's a credible institution or big site, we get censored off in fairly short order. If it's Fox News...it's Fox News, I don't want to have a conversation there anymore than I would want to in the CNN comments section.
To perhaps make this a bit more concrete, I think there's some really interesting arguments around feminism in Lasch's "Women and the Common Life". I'd like to discuss them somewhere and will probably post a few points of interest in the next open thread. I can't post it in a general area or on most social media, I've seen enough people get banned and depersoned to avoid that. Imagine a conservative posting about feminism on Reddit, sounds miserable. However, the best conservative discussions I see, DSL and the Distributist's comment section, aren't really that great.
So yeah, there's no secret Reactionary signal Scott is sending up in the sky. Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things. Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
PS, if anyone does have recommendations for another conservative site with a thoughtful discussion forum, I would greatly appreciate it.
You're sort of right, but in a way that doesn't make a great case for yourself.
I mean, the main counterpoint is that maybe there's a reason those views aren't tolerated by anyone intelligent elsewhere.
"Don't tolerate people who champion race essentialism as racial science" is a recently-erected Schelling-point-now-Chestertons's-fence that came about as a direct response to the holocaust and other similar genocides. If you want to tear down that fence, you have to be very sure you know the consequences before doing so.
>Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things. Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
Once again, consider how saying, with a straight face, "Every place with intelligent conversation bans us and the places that allow us are filled with idiots" reflects on the things you want to say. Maybe everyone else is wrong, or maybe the marketplace of free ideas has judged your ideas to not be marketable.
And it's certainly *possible* that everyone *is* wrong on some things. Hell, it's even probable for at least a small portion. At some point, though, you have to wonder about the sheer number individual of things you're claiming every place with "intelligent discussion" is wrong about in order to ally with all the people in those "ghettos".
(Also, I can't help but point out the irony in using "ghetto" as your insult of choice when implicitly defending accusations of racism)
>Imagine a conservative posting about feminism on Reddit, sounds miserable.
Speaking of parallel universes... some of the biggest anti-feminist communities on the internet have been hosted on reddit. They've cracked down on *some* of them, but many still exist. (I mean, take a look at /r/conservative)
...Unless you're saying that it would be unpleasant because conservative reddit is one of the "ghettos". In which case, I agree that engaging with conservatives on reddit is pretty miserable. I much prefer the quality of their conversation here... on average, at least.
This has been engaged with before. The condensed version of it is "If you set up a space that is free from witch hunts, you end up with three principled people and a zillion witches".
The further problem is, who is a witch? As the post on the Hexenhammer showed, the description of "well she's old and mean and lives alone and has a pet cat and we had a quarrel and then all my milk went sour so clearly she's a witch" isn't good enough.
All we can do is discourage people who go around casting spells and putting curses on people when they do that, and leave the mean old cat ladies alone if they're not riding around on broomsticks.
You want us to conduct a witch hunt. Scott is not, nor does he want to be, Matthew Hopkins.
I'm beginning to think that conservatives' claims that any form of censorship of their views constitutes a witch hunt is an implicit admission that you know you're witches, consorting with the political devil.
(Or maybe it's just that everyone on this site likes making references to things Scott just wrote and it's a coincidence. On the other hand, you and Treb are the only two who've made that reference in this thread...)
I'm not asking for a "witch hunt". You're perfectly free to conduct your witchcraft elsewhere, and express yourself in other ways here, so long as you're articulate. I think the trend of teenage SJWs digging up that one time you said the N word when you are 14, or straight up twisting facts to prove someone is "problematic", is a pox on civil discourse norms.
That being said, I *am* saying that you shouldn't be allowed to practice witchcraft openly in the [idea] market square, while encouraging others to join you, without consequences - and those consequences should probably involve being removed from the [idea] market.
Adding on to that, our mayor, Scott, probably shouldn't be openly reading books on witchcraft and loaning the books out to others to read and - God damn, the longer I torture this metaphor, the cooler you come out as sounding. Be gay do witchcraft.
Weirdly, there's not an idea market czar who gets to decide what ideas are allowed to be discussed in public.
But first you have to define what is "witchcraft" and it's not as plain, easy and obvious as "well clearly everyone can recognise witchcraft when they see it".
Like you, I was (and indeed am) very, very positive about what is witchcraft. There are beliefs, philosophies, and current social paradigms that I think are witchcraft, and worse than witchcraft: the child sacrifice to Moloch, demonic worship.
Like you, I wanted to ban that. There are things I think are pure poison, hateful, abhorrent, damaging to society and harmful to the self.
But you know what took me a long, hard time to come to grips with? That people are entitled to believe these things. That they are entitled to talk about these things. That they are just as entitled to stand out there in the public square as I am.
I don't know if you identify as a liberal or a progressive or what, just that you're 'not conservative'. Well, I was as zealous as you to burn the witches and the heretics. Except my heretic and witch is someone on your side, probably, and the views that you think are right, good, and proper.
I've had to work hard to learn to tolerate the people in pointy hats on broomsticks on your side. Especially when many of them have long mocked the judge's position on obscenity ("I know it when I see it") when it came to things they wanted made legal, but are now turning around and applying the same test themselves: "I know witchcraft when I see it, and I demand it be banned"
https://history.wustl.edu/i-know-it-when-i-see-it-history-obscenity-pornography-united-states
So, first off, this is what I get for not reading the original post in enough depth to see that it was very "HBD" specific and giving a general conservative gripe instead of something specifically on topic. My bad and I apologize.
I'm not interested in defending HBD in general but I'd expect this trope to apply to them 10x. I can't imagine most HBD sights are fun or interesting places to post because most of the HBDers I see here are...not great people. But if there's 1000 cruddy HBD sites and one decent site you can talk on, I don't think there's any great mystery why they keep showing up. As for why the mainstream shuts them out so hard, I agree that it's for a host of good reasons. I don't think the logic you presented is particularly appealing, mainstream society has been wrong on wide spectrum of bipartisan issues within living memory, but I do think this line "If you want to tear down that fence, you have to be very sure you know the consequences before doing so" is incredibly true.
And yeah, conservative "ghetto" is a bad term but I genuinely can't think of a more communicative term. It's the general idea that, because network effects are real, most people will stay on websites they don't like because all their friends are there and only the weirdos go to alternatives. At which point the alternative website is full of weirdos and it's not a very good place to post. Remember Voat? (1)
So yea, bad post on my part, and I would have written it very differently if I'd spent more time reading it, but I fundamentally don't think this is complicated. HBDers come here because, well, it's nice here and (I'd bet) the nicest place that will tolerate them by a wide margin.
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
> sometimes I forget that people can live in parallel worlds.
Miss me with this postmodernist subjectivity bullshit. You so-called 'intelligent' conservatives lived in a world where the Christian fascist theocratic movement installed a strongman who sent a mob into the Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and now demand my respect as if you have a place to stand in your "oh we just live in another screen."
Yeah, and your screen is wrong and stupid.
> So yeah, there's no secret Reactionary signal Scott is sending up in the sky.
Wrong.
> Sincerely, this is by far the best place for intelligent conservatives to discuss things.
"Intelligent" conservatives in what way? Are you here to reinforce your consensus reality? That would be the Dunce Trap.
> Everywhere else literally bans us or is a conservative "ghetto".
Oh you're still in a 'ghetto,' you just live in denial about it because you chase off anyone who will challenge your views.
Settle down, cranky.
Thank you for your contribution. I hope your day is going well.
Oooh, WoolyAI, you should know from what the Passion of the Flower posted, so how do I get in on this Christian fascist theocratic movement? I keep seeing the progressives telling me that this is happening all around and the Christian fascist theorcrats are running the place since the 80s but I keep not getting an invite, and I can be a Christian theocrat no bother!
Is there a uniform? Do we have our own flag? Are there medals? What are the hours, only I wouldn't be able to devote meself full time to the oul' racism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkL91LzCMc
I'm not an HBD guy, and I don't read Moldberg, but as a conservative who has hung out around Scott's blog for years I can say that it's obviously why his content is compelling to me: it's because he only banns people when they're breaking the Rule of 2 or otherwise being uncivil, and he doesn't mind discussing an idea with someone even if he disagrees with it. I've learned I can trust Scott because he doesn't say things he doesn't believe just to make sure people see him as having the "right beliefs". He cares more about truth than what is heretical to consider. Lately he has decided not to talk about certain topics that cause him to receive more hate, but I trust that he doesn't lie about the things he does write about.
Why do you think his content is compelling to people?
Scott _knows_ why: he invited them in consciously in an attempt to secure more readers; those leaked emails told us this. Whether or not he's learned from the experience is, perhaps, the open question. (The unfortunate part of writing for a large crowd is you necessarily become a subject.)
I support prison sentences for those who commit crimes and those who induce others to commit crimes. I support social opprobrium for those who believe that what's needed is a single individual to take on all the power because that's, truly, dipshit moronic idiot grandiose bullshit. Anyone who can't see that is an idiot who needs to look into the bloody history of monarchy.
> one or two degrees of separation
Your relation to politics is completely broken. You seem incapable of modeling ideologies as directed by leaders except as some spherical cow model of nodes in graphs. I think you could benefit from posting online about politics a lot less and reading about political theory a lot more, for at least a few years.
I don't come in here and say that anyone and everyone who supports SFBA Rationalism should be shut out of public discourse because that essentializes a movement. Thus it is that your attack of Black Lives Matter is braindead stupid, your false equivalence is rejected.
Reading about political theory? Might as well read the Kabbalah or Family Circus, for all the relevance that load of ivory-tower navel-gazing has ever had to events in the real world.
lmao political nihilism is for pseudo-intellectuals
Hmm..I would probably have said nihilism is more the province of the sophomoric. But maybe that's not very different from what you mean, so I suppose I mostly agree.
The flower lashes its petals in righteous fury!
"idiot" "mindfucked" "shitty whataboutism" "fucking idiot"
Ah, how I have (not) missed this level of austere and clear argumentation.
I call it like I see it specifically because I saw racism and fascism as protected speech in Scott Alexander's enclaves. Every single one of them had more ambient rightwing shitfuckery than average. And the moderators seemed clueless to it: it was just the background.
Thus: dunce traps.
> Just as God made me, sir.
Proud. Ignorance. So common among the SFBA Rationalists.
> For example, the democratic state of Weimar Germany empowered a particular monster we're all familiar with and who probably out-killed most historical monarchs.
Thank you for making my point for me. The thirst for a monarch type government is nothing but a thin veil over this desire for strongman politics, made in ignorance of the degradation into violence inherent in empowering a single individual.
> I'm also not interested in silencing its proponents.
There's nothing virtuous about refusing to reject ignorance on some imagined principle: you end up hearing out idiocy and popularizing it (Scott, this is to you).
To the clear leader there is little difference.
"The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”
You can. You have to. If prediction markets are what works to help you, then go prediction markets.
I've been through this with the entire sexual and other abuse scandals in the Catholic church. It's really awful when you have to accept that all the horrible stuff is indeed true, and one reaction is naturally "How can I ever believe anything or anyone ever again?"
I'm still Catholic despite it all. It's the wheat and the tares, and we just have to try and do the best we can until the end. There will always be bad actors, but we should not let that make us doubt everything.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013%3A24-30&version=ESV
One of the deep indignities of the timeline that we live in is that the Catholic Church realized it was infested with pedophiles and took action in response...and that action wasn't to reassign all the pedophiles to a remote parish in Northern Québec where they could be clubbed over the head and buried in shallow graves.
Your comment says loads about you. All good. Nice to share a thread with you and the others here who in the main seem compassionate. I too hope Scott can get past the initial shock and err on the side of trust. What did Reagan say, "Trust but verify"? Trust should be the default for any happy person. To live a life filled with suspicion and distrust is a horrible fate. So my advice is to not globalize distrust because one institution/individual broke the covenant. Trust and compassion are the glue that holds humans, families and societies together from the forces that splinter and sunder us.
Agree! Situational caution and due diligence never hurt!
Three.months ago I had never heard of Ea, prediction markets, FTX, or any number of guests of the modern scene that everyone else on this thread takes for granted. I am old and out of touch; the world moved on while I stayed still.
So my opinions only have limited value; they are what one might hear from a reasonably well educated liberal, put in cryogenic storage in 1979 and just thawed in 2022! I and my impressions are truly from a different era.
But here, for what value there may be, are some opinions.
1. EA seems a good concept, but I detect a little hubris that might lead to cultic qualities down the road (cults were a problem in my era,) But it would be a kind of crowdsourced, decentralized one without the usual charismatic leader. There are obvious downsides to diverting philanthropic energies from small scale present benefits to notional large scale far future benefits. One starves the present to feed a future that may never instantiate. Best, seems to me, to establish some ratio, perhaps 80/20 to do both. The EA community, if it's identical with the rationalist community, seems to over think things a bit; to get lost in analysis and minutiae. Might be best to take a break ever so often and drop the glowing screens. Go outside and hike or do physical labor; put on jeans, boots, and work gloves. Ground. All of this stuff is extremely ephemeral after all!
So much for EA, both admirable and problematic
FTX and the financial world that gave birth to it. Mixed blessings, but badly in need of regulation. Seems fragile, has questionable grounding in real value, so falls under a strange variation of the Red Queen Hypothesis. If notional value and traditional "real" value are competing for resources perhaps we need to look at Competitive Exclusion concepts? Over my head and pay grade, in any case.
Prediction Markets. Ingenious innovations (tho' variants must have been around for a long time). Seem to be gambling under a different name. Are they regulated?
ACX:. You all are collectively the most impressive group of thinkers and writers I've ever seen outside of graduate seminars. I'm seriously not in your league and in over my head besides being behind the times.
That's all. TL;DR! (the time traveller learned finally what that meant. Short attention spans in this era!)
Just so you know, after TL;DR you're supposed to write a short summary for those who did indeed consider it TL and DRd it. It can be a bit more blunt, like so:
TL;DR Put a summary after your TL;DR you oldie
My faults are many.
And worse, I'm not even a quick learner!
[Signed]
Oldie
"You all are collectively the most impressive group of thinkers and writers I've ever seen outside of graduate seminars."
Damned with faint praise.
🙂 you just proved my point!
Regarding your penultimate paragraph, I think there is a strong bias towards noticing higher quality content, and therefore ranking yourself lower relative to it.
For what its worth, I was scrolling through a whole bunch of comments that seemed to contribute little (to me, at least), then I got to your comment, read it, learned a few new terms (e.g. Red Queen Hypothesis) and took a moment to respond.
So at least from this sample, it seems to me like you are certainly not a below average contributor here.
That said, while it is nice to know the limits of one's own credentials, knowledge, and abilities, I think that credentials are a poor measure of intelligence, and intelligence is a poor measure of being right.
Many people can be intellectually gifted, but if they don't bother systematically using those gifts to find truth, then their abilities are not really relevant. The democratization of knowledge through the internet and other media has increased the ability of moderately intelligent or credentialed people to gain a great deal of knowledge on topics of their choosing.
So while I think that you are probably very much in the same league as median posters here, even if you weren't, that would hardly be a reason why you wouldn't be entitled to an opinion or to your own contributions.
Have a wonderful day!
I'm wondering whether we should be expecting to see a system of contractual courts evolve in the crypto space. I can't remember what David Friedman calls them.
I've been dubious about the idea because I'm not sure of where the initial trust comes from.
"I'm wondering whether we should be expecting to see a system of contractual courts evolve in the crypto space. I can't remember what David Friedman calls them.
I've been dubious about the idea because I'm not sure of where the initial trust comes from."
I think the crypto crowd is trying to do this with 'smart contracts' ... also on a blockchain so no initial trust is required. Ethereum is supposed to be one of those blockchains that enable smart contracts (I think).
Smart contracts are basically automated programs that do blockchain operations. They can be used to make automatically enforced rules, like "if X happens, send Bob a bunch of money," and that's useful for finance stuff.
But the issue is that contracts can be buggy. Maybe you can trick the contract to releasing the money early, or sending the money to Alice instead. In that case, a self-enforcing contract is worse than useless - all that cryptographic power is being used to ensure that your money is irrevocably transferred and no court can force it to be returned.
I don't see a way around this problem, because crypto is designed from the ground up to make it impossible for any one entity to revoke transactions - you would need the entire network to agree to that. (Which has happened - once in Ethereum's history the developers decided to roll back a big hack that stole a lot of money and would have killed their proof of concept - but isn't really reliable.)
The problem is that there's really no provision for enforcement. When someone does a rug-pull, the only consequence is that they lose whatever name they were operating under. (There can, of course, be consequences outside the crypto-community, but that's really saying "We need government regulation!".)
FWIW, I'm generally extremely skeptical about the value of crypto-currencies, except as a means of doing illegal financial transactions. (Even then there needs to be some external enforcement mechanism, or all you've got is a con game.)
Does anyone know of prominent voices in the EA movement that were warning ahead of time that FTX was possibly fraudulent? I ask because although Scott addresses that EA doesn't support such things in theory, there's another question about whether EA is just basically competent at evaluating risks. That's supposed to be their whole thing, and yet in one case where we know the final outcome, they blew it about as hard as possible. If you are worried about, say, AGI due to the messages put out by EA, you probably need to take another good hard look at those beliefs.
I think the problem with FTX is worse than if it were fraud. I think SBF thought he understood finance better than other people, and went headlong into something that's been a known failure mode in financial situations for many years - not keeping enough cash on hand to account for withdrawals.
This aligns with one of my criticisms of EAs, that it's mostly made up of intelligent young people who equate intelligence with knowledge and don't know what they don't know. SBF should have known that using client money to prop up his other business even while incurring losses was a known failure mode and that it could easily end in disaster. But apparently he didn't know, and didn't have anyone in the room with him who could have helped with that. If he had a Goldman Sachs executive advising him, he might have been told long before this blew up. It would have limited his reach, and wouldn't have been as exciting on the way up, but it may have prevented the drop.
I feel a little bad for anyone who put a child in charge of their money, but frankly that's how we all learn lessons. The guy is 30 years old now, so people were giving a 20-something billions of dollars in a highly speculative field for him to run out of Hong Kong and the Bahamas. If they didn't know those things, then that's on them too.
from what I understand, it wasn't exactly a Ponzi scheme- it was more like an Enron scheme, where FTX used it's own crypto, backed by actual shares in the company, as collateral for loans to make prop trades. It collapsed when a rival realized what was going on and sold its own holdings of FTX-backed crypto, leading to the Enron-like collapse of FTX.
Which is to say, it was definitely a deliberate fraud (P>0.99 IMO). A bit more clever than the usual crypto fraud but there was no way to do what they did by accident.
I could certainly be wrong, but his behavior in this collapse doesn't seem to me to match someone deliberately defrauding anyone, but instead someone who got caught doing something very dumb and not realizing how stupid his decisions leading up to it really were.
I find it hard to believe that someone capable of setting up such a financial scheme like that would be completely unaware of the financial history of such things, especially considering the recency of Madoff, Enron, MF Global, etc. And it's not like he's some tech bro that doesn't have any background in finance, both he and his accomplice gf had enough finanical background to know exactly what they were doing.
Seems a lot more likely that his current behavior is a sociopathic attempt to play dumb.
That's certainly possible. My gut is still that he's a very intelligent idiot, who knew how to work in financial markets but not why there may or may not be rules and separation. Keep in mind that he was like nine years old when Enron happened and still only around 16 when Madoff pled guilty.
Yea I'm basically the same age as him and have never worked in finance. I know about Enron/Madoff and why investing customer funds is a huge no no. The idea that he didn't is laughable.
I deleted the markets, EAs were taking loads of flack for being galaxy brained, so it was poor timing from me.
I have pretty severe seasonal affective disorder, instead of dealing with antidepressants and light therapy each winter I wondered if I should just up and move down south to Texas or Florida, does this work for stopping the disorder? Have any of you done it and what do you recommend?
have been debating this as well, and have been reminded just how much the winter sucks for me yesterday when we got hit with our first snow of the year and I had to scrape off my car. It took me until recently to realize that even though almost everyone complains about winter, not everyone feels it as severely as I do (and it sounds like you as well). I was reminded reading this post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/) linked the other day that it's not universal to never feel fully awake 4 months of the year (even with the max dose of Wellbutrin in my case).
If you're like me and have a partner who loves the winter or is otherwise not sold on the year-round summer of Florida, I'd recommend doing what we did and trying out somewhere very sunny but still wintery (in our case, St. Moritz Switzerland, which Google tells me has 322 days of sunshine a year, and the high altitude means it's intense light as well.). This experiment helped me verify that the cold is just as big a player for me as the light, but it certainly was a colossal improvement over the northeastern US. California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado all have options for winter + sun if you are in the US and want to stay domestic (or if you need more options for possible job locations if you're moving permanently and don't work remotely).
If moving is not in the cards right now, one or two week long trips to Central America in the winter feel like an injection of serotonin that last for up to a month after returning home for me. I work remotely, so I travel on the weekend and don't even take any time off. They're not very complex or exciting trips; I just rent an Airbnb with a patio and bask outside on my laptop all day :)
That's good to know, thanks for your input!
Instead of moving your whole life just rent a place for a few months and telecommute.
Also, as a Dallas resident, our winter is gloomy and cold too, though for (for sake of example) a native Michigander the cold is probably small potatoes. It was dark at 6 pm here yesterday ( Nov 13)
But you may need to consider a Puerto Rico stayover as well.
"True, there are also other people outside of finance who are also supposed to look out for this kind of thing. Investigative reporters. Congress. The SEC. But the leading US investigative reporting group took $5 million from SBF. Congressional Democrats took $40 million from SBF in midterm election money. The SEC was in the process of allying with SBF to anoint him as the face of legitimate well-regulated crypto in America."
I can't speak to the finance side of things (though are they looking at 'is this a scam,' or are they looking at 'will this make money?' those are two different questions and for a while it made money). But the other examples don't seem great to me?
Taking people's money, so long as it doesn't come with strings doesn't usually mean you've vetted/agreed with them, quite the reverse in fact. And the SEC thing was that regulations were needed, which just seems transparently correct at this point? Now, SBF was presumably trying to use them to limit competition, without limiting his ability to commit what really looks like fraud, but it's not at all clear that he would have succeeded in that, even if everything hadn't collapsed.
> 9. The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot of stuff along the lines of “how can I ever trust anybody again?”. So I was pleased when Nathan Young figured out the obvious solution: make a list of everyone I’ve ever trusted or considered trusting, make prediction markets about whether any of them are committing fraud, then pre-emptively [...]
This is being taken way out of context to show what total freaks we are. I don't think people realize this is tongue in cheek.
(This is tongue in cheek, right?)
I think there are no tongues in these cheeks. Unfortunately.
My twitter is blowing up thanks to you guys. Pls keep up the content
I have a question about election odds and prediction markets generally -- anytime I see backward-looking analysis, it all says they're well calibrated, etc. But those analyses I've seen seem to just take one data point of odds during election day -- "if the odds are 60% on election day, that candidate wins 60% of the time" for instance.
But that doesn't seem helpful to me -- what about 1 year in advance? 6 months in advance? Have those odds proven well calibrated? I'm very surprised these markets don't hover very close to 50/50 until about a month out.
I think you'd need a lot more data to get a reasonably meaningful calibration at earlier points, because there's more noise to work through.
"But that doesn't seem helpful to me -- what about 1 year in advance? 6 months in advance? Have those odds proven well calibrated? I'm very surprised these markets don't hover very close to 50/50 until about a month out."
I think assuming a 50:50 split when there are lots of unknowns is one of the classic statistics mistakes.
1 year out, for example, I'd assume that an incumbent US Representative would have something like a 90% chance of retaining his/her/its seat. At the beginning of a football season (college or NFL) every team does NOT have an equal chance to win the championship. Etc.
Point taken, but they still seem overconfident/overly reactive, and to be clear I was talking about aggregate House/Senate odds, not just individual candidates. I'm happy to be proved wrong or my misunderstanding corrected, but I am just never convinced by these calibration analyses.
I'd say that predictions more than 3 months out are untenable. Howver even under that standard PI for instance did horrifically this year.
It is a good point, though. Many prediction markets are open for much longer time than 3 months, and it would be good if analyses took account the prediction forward time span. (Good predictions would more impressive, too.)
The markets longer than three months would be primary markets, candidate markets, etc. The GE market at best can open post primary but personally 3 months is the longest I'd say you can make useful predictions.
Re: point #2
> But right now is a great time to be a charitable funder: there are lots of really great charities on the verge of collapse who just need a little bit of funding to get them through.
I don't actually know what order of magnitude "a little bit" means here. I'm not a VC or anything, just a fairly boring person who happens to batch their charitable donations to once per year for convenience (yes, I already know this is not generally how charities prefer funders operate). I suspect when Scott asks for potential charitable funders he's talking about bigger game than me, but if a four digit sum of money would make an outsized difference somewhere it would be nice to know about it.
Think the triage process Scott's working on will publish a shortlist of in-trouble charities soon, for small donors like me? Or is there already a post on the EA forum or somewhere that I haven't seen?
Have people done calibration studies on prediction markets? E.g., take all the markets that had $0.60 as the final price for yes and see if 60% of those resolved to yes. I'm especially curious if prediction markets show any systematic overconfidence or underconfidence in their results.
They seem pretty well calibrated: https://electionbettingodds.com/TrackRecord.html
Manifold tracks their accuracy here:
https://manifold.markets/stats
They recently shared some further analysis of it here:
https://twitter.com/ManifoldMarkets/status/1589703623935565826?t=deXkPb8hGxUCgDEdJj3vVg&s=19
Others will have better answers for other sites, but I know Metaculus has a great track record page https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/
Elon Musk weighs in on SBF: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591895343570243585
Interesting.
I do think a huge areas where our social/political tehcnolgoy is "shitty" and "underdevleoped" is not trating high level bureaucrats and elected officials like jurors.
Poeple in these positions should be "sequestered" and should have their connections/relationshuips highly scrutinized. You would probably not allow a juror on a trial if the jurors former boss's duaghter was the one on trial.
Being elected to say congress should be a 2 year ticket to a bunker in the nevada desert where there is no access for lobbyists and where the infromaiton that is allowed in is tightly constrained to publicly availble sources. Maybe not quite that extreme, but close.
These are the most important positions in our society and the standards are just atrocious in terms of who gets selected. Fuck the president some cycles seems like they probably aren't even a top 10% person for the job. Like there are literally millions (tens of millions?) of people who would do a better job.
On point #5, EA does not endorse doing clearly bad things, but prominent EA people such as MacAskill have definitely endorsed taking big risks. SBF's thinking and behavior is very much in line with the EA idea that an action that will probably fail is justified if it has mathematically higher expected value compared to other options.
For instance, in What We Owe The Future (appendix) MacAskill argues that we should not be afraid to "chase tiny probabilities of enormous value"—in other words, we should take actions with the aim of improving the far future, even if the likely outcome of those actions is nothing. He draws an analogy to the (supposed) moral obligation to vote, protest, and sign petitions, even when again the likely outcome is nil. In MacAskill's example, say you can press Button A to save ten lives, or Button B to have a one in a trillion trillion trillion chance of saving one hundred trillion trillion trillion lives. If you're a normal person, you press A and you save lives. MacAskill says you should press B, even knowing that the likely outcome is nothing.
This is directly analogous to SBF's idea that we should weight money linearly (in other words, rejecting decreasing marginal utility of wealth). SBF is willing to "accept a significant chance of failing" in exchange for a small chance of doing a lot of good.
So MacAskill and SBF both endorse taking actions with a large chance of failing if the expected value is high enough, whether that's speculating with customer funds or pouring resources into uncertain projects with a very tiny chance of shifting the far future in a positive direction.
Now there's a distinction between "very risky actions" and "clearly morally bad actions"...but that line is not so bright. SBF took a risk (morally as well as financially) and failed. But no one would be criticizing him if he had succeeded. FTX took big risks, as EAs advocate, and failed. But EAs should understand and acknowledge that frequent failure is a predictable outcome of taking big risks, and, given these values and assuming the math is correct, failure doesn't prove that the actor's underlying thinking was wrong.
>For instance, in What We Owe The Future (appendix) MacAskill argues that we should not be afraid to "chase tiny probabilities of enormous value"
In other words, Pascal's Mugging?
"But no one would be criticizing him if he had succeeded."
That depends on the specific mechanics here. If he took money out of trust accounts, I don't care if he succeeded or failed, it's not his money to gamble.
(I've mentioned before, MacAskill's worst-case scenario being no change is dangerously wrong, and is why it's important to focus on causes whose results can be directly observed. You can press button a to save ten lives, or you can press button b to have a one-in-trillion chance to help trillions AND a one-in-million chance to kill tens of thousands. The far future loves to juke you.)
As SBF showed, the EA framework is a great tool for rationalizing whatever cause resonates with you. He likes AI stuff, so he donates to that cause. Then the EA branding makes it seem like he is doing real charity in the service of mankind, rather than tinkering with his hobby.
But I expect to see a lot of EAs/rats bending over backwards to distinguish themselves from SBF, simply because he's currently unpopular.
What the heck kind of suppression is this? FTX is an almost unprecedented blowup with huge political implications because they were the second largest Dem donor after Soros, nobody knows key details because they were radically non-transparent, by definition SOME kind of conspiracy was involved in a situation like this so ANY investigation of who did what will be possible to disparage by calling it a “conspiracy theory”, and this is a frigging OPEN THREAD.
Open your eyes, man.
Was this meant as a reply to another comment or a reply to Scotts comments in the post?
It was in reply to another comment
In case this is the problem: if you're replying by email it'll make your comments top-level instead of responses, so you need to go through the app/site for that.
Yes, that was the problem, but I’m not going to bother trying to correct it now, people can just go through the tree below my previous comment to see what I was responding to.
Ok I reread Scott's opening and must have missed the relevant section! Please ignore :)
I still don't get it. Is there a part where Scott says "don't talk about FTX?" Or are they saying it deserves its own post?
My correction was actually wrong too as the original comment was a reply to a convo down thread about some rumored conspiracies involving Ukraine. But I am not 100% certain of the whole thing!
Nefarious activities involving more than one collaborating person which were concealed from the public.
I do not think SBF was the only human being who was aware that FTX was failing and was hiding that information. His girlfriend Caroline Ellison who ran Alameda must also have known, but probably many more people did.
I was just sitting here, before this open thread, thinking about how my inner critic is excessively harsh and just kind of an asshole. Then I open your thread and see what I think looks like you being hard on yourself for what seem to be similar reasons. You’re doing great work, Scott. If you never trust a scammer at least once in your life, maybe you are missing out on lots of chances to do real good?
Your inner critic isn't that harsh. There is a lot more room for skepticism/cyncism in you and Scott.
Crypto is such a big scam. Lots of VCs and investors are into it because there's money in it. That doesn't mean people have to have amazing insight to beat their assessment of FTX, just basic due diligence that while FTX might be a money hose at present it's built on scams. Crypto is useful for crimes and some extremely limited database functions. It's a scam! Always has been. So yeah, easy for people with a basic understanding to beat investors on the question "is this a reputable organisation" even if they should defer to the investors on the question of "whether or not this potentially criminal enterprise will make money."
You what I just remembered? NFTs Remember all that? Over about a 6-month period it went from new thing, to "is this as stupid as it looks?", to that famous long YouTube video ("Line Goes Up"), to, hey, a bunch of scams a rugpulls revealed, and now nobody thinks about it anymore. Loosely speaking. (I notice that, in my semi-expanded view of this entire thread, there are 0 mentions of it.) Maybe there was something to be learned there.
I think "scam" is overselling it. It's a poor investment, certainly. But as a transaction mechanism in certain cases it has a niche. The inherent problem is that people started treating it like they would a new silicon valley startup rather than what is was: ForEx. And huge returns on ForEx are highly unlikely.
It's the old old rule: "if it seems too good to be true, then it is".
You don't get easy money like that, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and eventually the cows come home and the chickens come back to roost. The problem with electronic trading like this is that it is all in the ether, there's nothing real there, so it's easy to shuffle it about and make huge illusory gains - which then turn into real losses.
Whatever about crypto currency as a new unit of exchange, it went the old route of "people want to make money off this thing" and they found they could money by speculation on it more than by using it as a currency, so speculation became the way to make (and lose) fortunes.
People are genuinely surprised by the collapse of FTX. Yet there is no shortage of smart people who have been arguing that crypto is ponzi due for collapse. Nobody who calls themselves a rationalist should be surprised any more than a gambler who loses at roulette. The possibility of collapse was a well known possibility
I had an opportunity to buy Bitcoin in the very early days, and obviously I could have done so since then. But I can't escape my reasoning from back then, which is just as correct today. Bitcoin (and all "investments" that are only valuable because other people are buying them too) really are a scam. It's a pyramid scheme. There's no underlying value. If you make millions of dollars, which many people have, it's literally at the expense of someone else who put money into Bitcoin instead.
How much does this apply to government currencies?
Modern government currencies are backed by, among other things, the very real value of not going to jail for tax evasion. If you do business in a nation, you must pay taxes in that nation's currency or you will be going to jail (or maybe just having all your stuff taken by the government). Regardless of the ethical questions surrounding taxation with or without representation, so long as governments *are* in that line of business, the stay-out-of-jail-for-a-price nature of fiat currencies is a thing of real value that guarantees a real demand for that currency.
Maybe not as much value as you and/or the government were hoping. But if someone offers to pay you in dollars, there is no risk that you'll be stuck holding a bunch of dollars when everybody else says "we now think that this was all just a scam and none of us want your dollars any more".
This is true most of the time, but countries' currencies have become almost worthless before due to hyperinflation. If US dollar inflation next year is 40%, you really don't want to be holding US dollars, even if the IRS remains in business.
Thanks for the strong version of the argument. But:
1. Technically you can pay your taxes with a debit card backed by crypto which gets converted to fiat at the last instant, so tax payers aren’t obliged to own any fiat outside of the last nanosecond before the deadline on April 15
2. Some large percentage of Americans have no tax liability
3. Some large percentage of Americans need bitcoin to gamble online or buy porn or all sorts of other of e-commerce that traditional payment processors look down upon. Not as big as the demand for taxes, but only a difference of degree. The USA is just a very large corporation that chose to accept dollars in payment for its services. Bitcoin will always have some of those albeit on a smaller scale.
Fiat currencies are literally centralized shitcoins backed by nothing and inflated at will by a central bank.
The dollar is just numbers in a database, with supply limited only by the whims of a handful of humans at the fed.
Bitcoin is just numbers in a database too, but the supply is tightly limited by an algorithm and a very strong consensus against ever changing that algorithm. That's a big improvement for the purposes of storing value over time.
"The dollar is just numbers in a database, with supply limited only by the whims of a handful of humans at the fed."
No, fiat currencies are supported by one of the most compelling aspects of humanity - violence.
The controlled application of violence is how they maintain stability, and until crypto currencies can secure themselves in the same fashion they will continue to be a pyramid scheme.
If the product is so bad that you need to use guns to force people to use it instead of the competitor, maybe reconsider the product.
People all over the world want dollars.
Currency is millennia old and one of the best economic coordination tools invented. Cryptocurrencies are rubbish. Bad as tokens of exchange, account or stores of value.
You sound like an economist "sure fiat currency works in practice, but it doesn't work in theory."
Exactly.
Not at all. Governments have two ways of giving underlying value to currency, the first, now out of fashion, is to pledge its exchange for a tangible asset, e.g. gold, silver, or even land has been tried. The second is to be willing to accept it in payment of taxes. Since pretty much everyone owes taxes, and taxes are usually the single largest expense of any wage earner, this immediately gives value to the currency: even if no one else will accept it, your single largest creditor will accept it in payment of your single largest debt. Even if you used BTC for every commercial transaction in your life, if the USG only accepted dollars for payment of taxes, you'd have to keep a big store of dollars around, and they would be valuable to you (and everybody else).
The same would be true for crypto -- if it were widely accepted as payment. That would give it underlying value. However, unlike fiat currency, there does not exist an enormous nearly universal creditor that could give it value all at once, shazam, for nearly everybody, the way a government can. So it has to build such acceptance one economic player at a time, and clearly that has the risk of powerful network effects, both helpful and (in this case) damaging.
Somehow taxes didn't prevent hyperinflation in any of the countries that had hyperinflation. So in what sense do taxes guarantee the value of a fiat currency?
Well, they don't, if you have a government that deliberately inflates its currency, and as far as I know there hasn't been a case of hyperinflation that didn't start off as a quite deliberate attempt to inflate away government debt. It just turns out to be hard to keep the fire under control once you start it.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that government can't *destroy* the value of a currency, they absolutely can, in a number of ways. I was just addressing the fact that government unlike current crypto currencies has the unique ability to *establish* the value of a fiat currency in one fell swoop, and that taking it in payment for taxes is how it's done.
Nitpick: sometimes rapid inflation results from an unplanned currency crisis due to import overreliance, as opposed to an intentional government plan to devalue sovereign debt. EDIT: Carl Pham correctly points out that these situations rarely, if ever, meet the common definition of hyperinflation.
AIUI this is what happened recently with Sri Lanka. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-sri-lanka-is-having-an-economic
taxes are only part of the denominator.
I'll try to be nice: you seem to be parroting talking points (ie politically motivated "questions" which are disingenuous), while your question otherwise implies an ignorance of even basic economics.
So, to answer your question, taxes alone can't stop hyperinflation in situations where hyperinflation is going to happen; there are other ways to avoid hyperinflation. We see the US Fed currently raising interest rates to curb inflation, for example. This is an alternative to raising taxes. We could also just like, let inflation keep running at 8-10% for a while. There is no reason to expect hyperinflation in the US due to current fiscal or monetary policy and there is no indication to me that any political groups with *any* serious influence have plans to promote policies which would even threaten hyperinflation.
It doesn't apply to government currencies, because governments accept their own currencies as protection money. (If you don't pay the government, they'll take your stuff, and perhaps store you in an unpleasant place.) This is what gives "fiat currency" it's value. Because of this, everyone else accepts the money as valuable, because they can trade it to someone who needs to pay the government.
It absolutely applies to government currencies. The question is whether these governments value consistency (keeping inflation low) and how much we trust the government and economy to stay stable. In general for major countries, we have pretty good reason to believe that both of these metrics will do well, or at least remain in a a fairly narrow window. For comparison, you can look at the pricing history of Bitcoin (probably the most stable cryptocurrency) and see how wildly it fluctuates. Even that undersells how volatile it can be, since there is nothing (not even the governmental reputation government currency has) to back it.
There's also the question of whether we have a choice but to use government currency, which for most people is no.
They have guns and the law behind them. Everyone buying in is literally baked in.
That is a YUGE difference.
You'll find that third world countries are not very good at forcing people to use inferior currencies consistently. Guns and law can only do so much. Black markets are inevitable when the black market offers customers a much better deal. It comes down to consumer choice, and one possible future is that the fed allows too much inflation and undermines confidence in USD and causes people to seek alternatives.
Third world countries are inefficient at applying violence in the right place, that is why their currencies are unpopular.
The internet and cryptography makes it virtually impossible to use violence to force people not to use crypto. Fiat will have to compete on the basis of consumer choice to some extent.
Space piracy question: using known physics, is it plausible to catch up to a fleeing space craft and board it?
The limiting resource for space travel is Δv. It scales logarithmically with the amount of fuel you bring, so while the pursuer will have more Δv, it seems implausible that they have ten times as much.
I will assume that the tech to detect ships over long distance is there, this should benefit the pirates. (Hard to do piracy in fog and all that.)
Capturing a spacecraft which has the bare minimum of fuel it needs for its flight plan is not hard: track it, figure out when it will do it's burns, intercept it at some other point in phase space (e.g., match both the position and the velocity at interception time).
This does not see like a stable equilibrium, however. Eventually the traders will carry their own spare Δv.
In that case, the trader will try to add maneuvers to avoid the interception point, and the pirate will do burns to keep up. What factor of spare Δv does the pirate have to have over the trader to succeed?
One assumption would be that the trader is traveling between mars and earth, and both a mars orbit and an earth orbit are safe havens from pirates. So the pirate has do to the interception somewhere en route.
If both start near to each other, it seems like an easy win for the pirate: they mostly have to match the velocity of their victim maneuver for maneuver, and just invest a little extra Δv to close the distance (and get rid of their relative momentum afterwards).
If they start further away from each other, the task seems harder, but I can't really say by how much.
I am also unsure if gravity fundamentally matters for the outcome or if it would be the same if the pursuit happened in interstellar space (where it is probably easy to calculate).
Also, the point of piracy would be to rob goods or claim ships and take them elsewhere than the destination the original owner had in mind. This seems to put limits on the economics of robbing bulky stuff like ice transports. Robbing stuff with a high price density seems more plausible, but these also seem in a position to have a high fuel-to-payload mass ratio.
From a delta-V perspective, catching up with and boarding the target is not the hard part. As you note, just a little extra Δv will do it. The hard part is getting away afterwards.
If the ship you just seized used half its Δv to boost onto a trajectory to Mars or wherever, and needs the other half to slow down when it gets there, then it almost certainly does not have enough propellant to change course to some asteroid pirate base and decelerate for rendezvous with *that*. So you're going to need to use your own pirate ship to carry off the cargo.
Which means your pirate ship needs to have the extra Δv to A: boost onto a trajectory that will intercept the freighter, then B: match velocities with a ship headed for Mars even though that's not where you want to go, next C: change course to Not Mars, and finally D: decelerate at Not Mars. If both ships have about the same propulsion technology and payload fraction, and the freighter uses it for the optimal trip to Mars, you're probably not going to be able to pull that off. If the pirate ship is much bigger or has much better engines than the freighter, you can probably do it, but then your ship is so much more expensive than the freighter that you probably can't turn a profit seizing the freighter's cargo.
And then there's the problem that the authorities will be able to watch all of this from halfway across the Solar system, so they'll either dispatch a punitive fleet to the pirate asteroid base or send a radio message saying "that's a pirate ship headed your way, we know it, you know it, you know we know it, so if you don't want a visit from a punitive fleet you'd best arrrest them as soon as they show up." Piracy really needs for there to be an "over the horizon" where people can't see what you're up to or where you're going.
Doing the piracy in space is a pain. Instead, bribe the harbormaster and hack the cargo loaders. Redirect goods to locations you favor while the ships are at rest.
The pirate can threaten the fleeing spacecraft with a railgun, which will have no trouble catching up.
A more interesting question is how piracy works if there is no stealth in space, and space royal navy can blow the pirate up from a safe distance.
The railgun needs to be fired from a fairly close distance, since dodging an unguided projectile is easy from a thousand miles away. So you still need to match orbits reasonably close before you can start threatening them with violence. Plus you need to match orbits in order to recover the cargo, anyway. It doesn't do any good to shoot down a merchant if their cargo drifts out into deep space afterwards.
Indeed, actually intercepting the ship seems superfluous to the goal. It would seem far more efficient to just shoot a missile at the merchant ship and then threaten to let it strike if they don't divert to your port of choosing, or at least ditch the cargo on a trajectory to your favour. Of course, that's a trick that only works until they start carrying missile defences, but even then an armed ship is always going to be at a massive disadvantage against an expendable strike.
Piracy only works if you have somewhere to sell the stolen goods. If every ship is permanently trackable by radar or ir any ship implicated in piracy will be put on a sanctions list and seized as soon as it tries to land, lest the spaceport harboring pirates get a visit from the space force.
Depending on the circumstances, Mars, or certain corrupt officials on Mars, might be willing to risk a certain amount of collusion with Mars-based pirates until the point that it risks serious retaliation from Earth. Much as Caribbean pirates often relied on a certain amount of collusion, or at least a no-questions-asked tolerance, with local officials.
But I suppose if everything could be seen from Earth and Earth has the means of unilateral enforcement, then there's not much that pirates could do (at least without collusion with authorities on Earth).
That collusion from corrupt officials in Tortuga or Madagascar or wherever, depended on the corrupt officials being able to maintain plausible deniability about the people they were doing business with being known pirates. If the authorities can track the pirates from a distance, and they can, then any port they fly to will have been told unambiguously that they are pirates and anyone doing business with them is an accomplice to piracy.
I can imagine excuses. "Our sensors were down for maintenance! It was a bureaucratic slip up!"
With an added layer of "We poor Martians don't have the privilege of being born on a planet that has water, a breathable atmosphere, and a self-sufficient economy. So sometimes things break down or fall through the cracks. Though there'd probably be less of that if you would send more supplies our way."
But I'd agree that piracy like this probably won't happen if Mars is ever colonized (which I consider a big "if" in itself). I'm really just spitballing here.
There's no practical way to board an aircraft in flight, because of the relative wind that *starts* at hurricane strength and winds up exceeding even an F5 tornado for the planes carrying the sort of cargo that would really attract a pirate's attention. In space, boarding is fairly straightforward if you remembered to bring a spacesuit.
I dunno. Ae we assuming the pirates sneak in, two by two, through the unguarded emergency airlock? Because otherwise there's a lot of ways, many pretty low-tech, to put a hole in a spacesuit. The pirates might be better off trying to put a hole in the freighter from a distance, to let all the air out and kill the crew. (Presumably holding them prisoner costs way more than you can expect in ransom for a nobody cabin boy.) But at least some of the freighter crew might still be alert enough to jump into their own spacesuits, with their guns holstered on the *outside*.
It has always been the case that piracy involved the possibility of battle, with sword and pistol and the unavoidable possibility that a pirate might wind up with a hole through which their precious life-sustaining fluid is rapidly escaping. This has historically not stopped piracy, because pirates have historically been willing to accept risk and have generally been much better at armed combat than freighter crewmen. Enough so, that many freighter crews didn't even put up a fight, because hoping for mercy gave better odds than hoping for victory.
Well, yeah, but that was in the days when 300 of you could jump over the gunwale all at once[1], and overwhelm the other crew in 60 secionds of mayhem. I'm just observing it's hard to do shock 'n' awe when you have to clamber clumsily into the airlock one or two at a time, cycle it...tum ti tum ti tum geez this takes forever...and then...I dunno, wait in the corridor outside for an hour or two, polishing your space cutlass and practicing your footwork, until your war party can fully assemble and storm the bridge.
-----------------
[1] https://youtu.be/3wUkq6JBoMQ
Judging by the progression of major shipping operations to larger and larger ships with smaller and smaller crews, I can imagine a space freighter with a handful of crew and a very big cargo being standard. A small ship with a dozen pirates may be able to easily overwhelm them regardless of how few can get through a hatch at a time.
I can imagine gravity making a difference. At a suitably high tech level (or possibly even the current one) it might be easier to travel between two craft maintaining constant relative position in 0-G than in a planet's gravitational field, for boarding actions.
I’m looking for a software engineering side project that’s fun, useful, and won’t take too long to implement. Any ideas ?
I've been writing a small bot for Telegram in Rust that messages me a few times a day to ask how I'm doing and record the result to a SQL file. I'm using it to build up to making another that acts as a middle-man between two people to filter and modify messages (for non-malicious purposes, more of a roleplay kind of thing). You could do the same for Discord or any other system with a decent API. I dunno if that qualifies as "software engineering" though.
Whilst it doesn't satisfy the ancient hacker saying, beloved by GeoHotz, that "before you hack, let your design pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is it fun? At the second gate ask, is it useful? At the third gate ask, is it short?", creating a raytracer in one weekend[1] sounds fun.
[1]Create a ray tracer in one weeked: https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.html
Technically a path tracer, though the book "Ray tracer in one week" does show you how to make a ray tracer.
Reimplement an arcade game like asteroids
Does anybody know of a memory aid, such as a mnemonic, for the differences between spondylosis, spondylolysis, and spondylolisthesis?
For the mystified: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZBeNGVPslw
Going entirely off that video, we have:
Spongy (spindly?) losers - Let's all point and laugh at their long-term sad sack discomfort.
Spongy Low-Lying Sis - on the ground that she's fallen down and broken her back.
Spongy Loli's Thesis - you don't wanna know. But you already do.
...best take's probably just learning the latin. I'm sure they'll all come up elsewhere.
Longer word = worse? That's how I've always remembered. Spondylolysis is easiest for me because lysis means to break up, and it's a bone break
Scott's recent post on unfalsifiable internal states made a passing mention of Galton's research on visual imagination, which got me thinking about the topic again and reading Galton's original paper on the matter (https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm).
One of two things has to be true. Either (A) I am somewhere close to rock bottom on this scale — I identify most closely with the response that Galton ranks #98/100 — or, (B) the people much higher on the scale are either miscommunicating or deluding themselves. The past century and a half of discourse on this topic has mostly been people higher on the scale patiently explaining in small words to people like me that no really, it's (A), and these differences are real and profound. But I'm not convinced.
I do have *spatial* imagination — the ability to hold a scene in my head as an index of objects with shapes, colors, and spatial relationships, and from there make geometric deductions. But to say there is anything visual about this imagination seems strictly metaphorical. The metaphor is a natural one, because humans derive spatial information about our surroundings mostly through sight. But when considering imaginary objects, it would be no more and no less apt to analogize my thought process to feeling around the scene with my hands and deriving information through touch.
Incidentally, I don't dream visually either. My dreams contain emotion, thoughts-as-words, proprioception, and sometimes pain, but I would characterize my spatial perception in dreams as just a dim awareness of what's surrounding me rather than anything visual, like walking in a dark but familiar room. The rare exceptions to this invariably are perceptions of written words.
I have no trouble accepting that there are certain commonplace mental experiences that are just completely missing from my neurology. I already know that sexual jealousy is one of those, and can easily recognize and accept that one because it has easily observable behavioral consequences: that I've been in a comfortable relationship with a polyamorous partner for seven years, while the vast majority of people run screaming from the notion of such a lifestyle. The reason I find visual imagination harder to accept is that it seems like this kind of evidence *should* exist, yet I've never seen it. The ability to visualize a scene in any literal sense, even dimly, seems incredibly useful and should have a lot of unfakable consequences! It should be easy to create a test at which anybody who has it to even a modest degree should be able to easily outperform me. Yet, on some tests that seem like they should work, I come out near the top.
I'm thinking, especially, of blindfold chess. I can play chess with my back turned to the board and just communicate coordinates with my opponent. I've even played two games at once this way, and won them both without making any blunders or illegal moves. Blindfold chess is by no means easy for me — it requires a lot of concentration — but I can do it and I've been able to do it ever since I was very young and a beginner at the game. Yet, most people, even most people who are better at chess than I am, find this ability almost unfathomable (lots of chess *masters* can do it, but I'm nowhere near that level). It seems like any degree of true visual imagination should render this task far easier. I don't understand how I can apparently be near the bottom at visual imagination, yet near the top in this skill.
This all leaves me skeptical that the differences in mental experience are anywhere near as stark as Galton claims. I think that the people who claim much more vivid visual imagination are communicating poorly and insisting that they mean their words more literally than they actually do.
What's the difference between spatial and visual imagination? When I talk about visual imagination I mean I can tap into the mental machinery that processes visual stimuli into a model without having the direct visual stimuli itself.
I "imagine" the Mona Lisa. What's her hair like? It's dark brown and very straight. Is it glossy? Kind of, there's some reflexions on the top of the head. Can I picture her with curly hair? Yes and it feels the same as when I just recalled the memory of the original picture. This I experience outside my field of vision.
It's definitely not the same as seeing with my eyes, but as for literally casting images into my vision I'd call that a visual hallucination rather than imagination.
If you read Galton's paper, a great many people seem to think that they can *literally* mentally cast images into their field of vision, and that these images have the same detail, richness of color, and field of expanse as what is actually before their eyes. I think that such claims are testable, and that testing shows them to be bunk.
I think there's no such thing as free computational power hidden in the depths of your brain.
My intuition (for whatever that's worth) is that if I wanted to visualize a mental image with the same detail as reality, then my imagination would be up to it except that I'd also have to be aware of all those details, and I can't keep that all in my head at once.
For applications like daydreaming, this doesn't matter. Our actual field of vision is also more of an illusion than we think. We focus on something and then we see more details. You can do the same thing with visual imagination, provided you either (a) have memorized those details ahead of time, (b) are willing to make shit up, or (c) a mix.
I suspect that for most people, it's mostly (b) with a tiny bit of (a), but brains don't exactly show their work, so unless you question it, the result doesn't feel meaningfully different from looking at what's in front of you.
I think we agree. Human vision is a mess and our visual field carries a lot less information than we would naively assume. Nonetheless, there's still a lot more information there than we can fit in our working memory. If you make me peer through a tube such that all I can see is the roughly 5° arc of foveal vision where everything is in sharp focus at once and read off a card placed at the end of the tube, you could fit many chess boards' worth of legible information on that card (a legal chess position can encode about 143 bits of information).
I have to agree with you. I am a visual artist and also on the low rungs of the scale (while my spatial imagination is also way above average). Many people who claim a visual imagination are surprised to hear that I am aphantasic, but many artists actually are. In fact an artist, particularly a realist representational artist, is acutely aware of how our brains fool us into thinking we see a faithful representation of the world, when in fact all it does is check a very few points against a pre-rendered model for discrepancies. If there aren't any, we can go on our merry way walking down the street without seeing any of the details, while we actually think we saw every cranny in the pavement - this leaves processing power available for searching for actually important information such as a tiger suddenly leaping in front of you, or simply recognising an acquaintance. You cannot take it all in at once.
Once you actually try to draw what you see, you realise that you weren't seeing *at all*, and that truly seeing instead of just looking, letting all the input in, is overwhelming and exhausting, and takes a good deal of concentration (you'll surely miss the gorilla while you were looking at a ball) and training. You then have to constantly fight yourself to draw what you see instead of the poor, low resolution, idea and edge based model in your head. To actually see in proportion, perspective, value, hue, reflected light, etc, etc, etc. It is actually a humbling and mind expanding skill that I recommend to everyone.
I believe that people with vivid visual imagination do exist, but are vanishingly rare. Watch a video of the late Jung Gi drawing, and marvel. That's what actual visual imagination looks like, no guide lines, no reference, just start drawing on one end of a huge piece of paper and end up on the other. If it would be that common, artists like that would be a dime a dozen; it took Jung Gi decades of dedicated training and constant practice to be able to do that, but there are countless artists who have done and do just that, most of which will never be able to come anywhere close. Even if the hand eye coordination is not there yet, a visually imaginative individual should be able to put down all of the details, however clumsily.
Our brain fools us while we dream, making us believe that to some extent, the dream is a complete and detailed "movie" with all the information in it, but I think what is being played is again this low res, concept based model, more related to touch than to sight (look at the drawings of little children, they draw what they feel, the contours and edges of things, as they recently first explored the world with hands and mouth as babies; and the ideas of things that later come with language and stories), and as in the waking hours, the rest is assumed to be there and not challenged, because in dreams there's no reality to check back against. To which extent you can fool yourself, both in dreams and in waking, would perhaps be indicative of where you'd land on this scale.
Here's maybe something concrete. I can take some funny-looking 3D object and "visualize" it: imagine seeing it in front of me from different angles. I can also imagine touching it and running my fingers over the sides to see what shape it is. These are obviously both metaphorical to some extent, because there's no real object there for me to look at or touch. But they are different processses in my head, so I'm forced to say that "I visualize this object" and "I imagine feeling this object" are both more than just "I can hold the geometric properties of this object in my head".
That being said, I, too, need to calculate coordinates if I'm playing chess blindfolded and want to check where a long bishop move ends up. But chess seems like an unusual test, because when I remember a position, I primarily remember the relationships between the pieces and not their separate coordinates. I feel like I would do better if I were better at chess; the places where I have trouble are places where one "chunk" of my model of the position needs to interact with another "chunk" that I was keeping track of separately.
Geometric properties can be discerned through multiple senses. But if I assign the scene I'm considering some property that can only be discerned visually, such as color, this isn't fundamentally different to me than assigning objects a particular texture or a particular odor. Yet it seems that other people go on about their "mind's eye" but never about their "mind's hand" or "mind's nose".
I totally agree that skill and familiarity with chess allow for "chunking" as you describe. I basically have a big dictionary of positional motifs in my head, and starting from a familiar motif and then filling in details allows me to compress the position's representation. It's easier for me to keep track of my opponent's position when I'm playing against someone at or above my level than someone far below it, because their moves make more sense and fit in with motifs that I already have in my dictionary.
That is interesting, I would definitely say I can imagine images and sounds far easier than smells and textures, which is why I'd talk about a "mind's eye" or "inner voice" but not like, a "mental hand" or "mind's nose".
I'm curious whether you'd say you can "hear" a song in your head, in a way that isn't just remembering the lyrics? If I'm familiar with the song I can easily recall the beat, tune and intonation. I'm genuinely unsure if your reaction is going to be "of course I can imagine music, that's different" or "what are you talking about, you're now saying you can hallucinate sound as well as images?"
I can recall sounds more vividly than images mostly because I can mimic them quietly to myself (as in physically, by tapping/muttering/humming/whistling) and compare those noises against my recollection. If I force myself to remain still and silent then auditory recollection no longer seems particularly different from recollection of other senses.
Well, the mind's nose is in any case a much less useful tool for imagining things :)
I was thinking less about color or texture than about shape. Take a piece from a Soma cube puzzle. I can visualize what it looks like, and I can imagine what it would feel like if I were holding it in my hand. Both of these carry the same information about the shape of the piece, but I feel like - because they're different internal experiences - they are not *just* metaphors for manipulating that information.
There's an entire memory technique based around imagining a familiar location and inserting whatever information you want to remember into it.
https://artofmemory.com/blog/how-to-build-a-memory-palace/
I've tried using this with relatively good results. Imagine a chunk of wood with a hardhat on, and low and behold, you remember to "inform your supervisor of the changes or note them in the log."
I have limited success at remembering things accurately; I'll get most of it right, but things like colors or height will shift around. A silver flashlight with a blue bulb gets remembered as a blue flashlight, but is otherwise correct in shape and size. And there was an event way back in the day where I was shocked to find a picture in my friend's house because I'd been seeing the exact face in my dreams multiple times. (Presumably I'd seen the picture before and forgotten.)
I can't play blindfold chess for beans.
This claim is equally weird to me because when I remember visual images, I can't see how I could possibly describe it as anything other than visual. It's not like seeing it in front of me, it's pretty low resolution (except for the small region in focus), but I can imagine how all the colors and shapes fit together, and if I had the talent I could use the image in my head to create an artistic depiction. My dreams are pretty visually vivid, although again they're low resolution, only "rendering" the field of focus. I'm leaning towards this being an actual difference, although possibly we're just describing the same experience in different ways, I certainly feel that it's not metaphorical but actually the best description of the experience. If you tell me to imagine a specific object, I will picture it in my head in a very specific way, and if you later showed me images of that object I could say which ones looked more or less like the image in my head.
I would struggle with blindfold chess, not because I can't imagine a chessboard with pieces on it, but because my imagining is not a photorealistic 8x8 grid. I can imagine say, white knight at E4, but I can't do that for all 32 pieces simultaneously, and I'm impressed that people are able to hold all that information in their head (assuming some level of abstraction, but chess really is about the little details and I'd definitely get those wrong).
I'm not sure chess is a good test here. When imagining a scene, you choose where each element is, so if you don't remember each piece's position your imaginary chessboard isn't useful; you say you can imagine spatial relationships, and that's the most important element, so *would* we see a difference here?
A better test might involve something like "from this description, imagine which building would appear more fantastical" or something.
The bandwidth of my spatial imagination is nothing close to what I can get from vision. I can remember what piece is where, but if i want to verify the legality of moving a bishop from g4 to d7, I need to double-check the coordinate math to confirm that those squares are actually on the same diagonal, and then think to make sure that f5 and e6 are unoccupied. Having a board in front of me lets me do this at a glance, and even being able to look at *empty* board speeds things up a lot.
If I take the people in the top quartile of Galton's survey at their word, sufficient information should be available in their mind's eye to play blindfold chess just as easily as I can play ordinary chess. Yet the proportion of chess players able to play blindfolded at all is far, far lower than a quarter.
Memory and prediction are not the same skill.. Once you start moving pieces in a blindfold game, you're not recalling an image anymore, you're creating one. If you ask me to remember the ruler on my desk, I'll remember it pretty accurately. If you ask me to imagine moving the remembered ruler from point a to point b and measuring something, both the ruler and the room are going to start shifting and warping, unless I have a memory of doing this exact task before.
I concur. I rank very highly in terms of visual imagination, as far as I can figure it, and the difficult part of blindfolded chess for me is not knowing where pieces are in relation to other pieces (as in, is this bishop on a diagonal to that rook), but in remembering what pieces are where. I can equally easily imagine chess pieces in any number of configurations, which makes remembering where things are on the actual chessboard much harder.
Not that I've ever tried to play chess blindfolded, mind. Its just that remembering where the pieces are over many moves sounds to me like the hard part, recognizing the spatial relationship of pieces I am visualizing is simple. Translating that visualization to grid coordinates also sounds difficult: it would be a bit of a pain to count the rows and columns every time, but presumably with practice it would become easier.
I'm also aphantasic. I'm told that the pupils of phantasic people constrict when they imagine seeing a bright light.
Also, I've experienced waking visual imagination after a surgery (presumably, under the influence of some anaesthetic) and it was very different from the way I normally do spatial tasks. I remember hoping that the capability would be permanently unlocked, but nope.
Now that we are permitted to post frivolous ideas again, it occurred to me that Scott - instead of simply declining a Conversation with Tyler [Cowen] - might consider writing a satire as if one had happened. For example:
T: It's time for overrated or underrated.
S: If we must.
T: The mental health benefits of Ixtlilton. Overrated or underrated?
S: Ix...? No, wait. You can't fool me into thinking an Aztec god is a medication!
T: What is the Scott Alexander production function?
S: Oh, same as everyone else. *Discreetly swallows Ivermectin tablet*
"I didn’t actually tell other people they should trust FTX, but I would have if those other people had asked."
Why? I hope this doesn't come across as an aggressive question, but I'm curious to understand what it was about the situation which would have led you to that conclusion. Was it based on an assessment of the people involved or of the exchange structure?
"I just subscribed to Astral Codex Ten" got SBF only 22 likes (23 is me, right now). Ok, Jesus had just 12. - Nice post. Makes me think of: All the smart and nice people who work(ed) for gov.-agencies/NGO supposed to do good, but really are often/mostly not - or mostly embezzlement of tax-payers taxes. I am still sorry I complained about the silly stuff I was supposed to do for the Goethe-Institut - which got me fired. I might have been able to spend some funds in a slightly less silly way. And I would have gotten me 200k in net extra-life-earnings. - At least I never taught at schools. Well, except, when I did. Can a good person work in a wrong-doing org/company? Ofc not, except when they do. Which is: all the time. “It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.” "If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket." Bukowski, obviously. RIP
Why highlight the 40 million going to democrats only? A stronger statement and a better one for supporting the thesis of the point, i.e. "Most people everywhere were hoodwinked including in the political system" is in the article.
"Of that total, 92% has gone to the Democrats, with the remainder going to Republican candidates and campaigns. FTX co-CEO Salame favors the red side of the political divide, donating $23.6 million to Republican campaigns for the current cycle.
The top political contributor was billionaire investor George Soros, who has pledged $128.5 million to the Democrats. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has backed several crypto startups, was ninth on the list with $32.6 million for the Republicans."
Putting the 40 million went to democrats makes it seem like they were uniquely vulnerable/compromised by ponzi crypto money when it's not the case. Especially now when the democrats are about to lose the house.
"Lower your opinion of me accordingly."
Done.
Your trust in effective altuism and those who believe in its validity is an epistemological red flag.
I am not an effective altruist and find it quite fraught with issues, however I agree with Tyler Cowen's assessment:
"I would say if the FTX debacle first leads you to increase your condemnation of EA, utilitarianism, philosophy, crypto, and so on that is a kind of red flag for your thought processes. They probably could stand some improvement, even if your particular conclusion might be correct. As I’ve argued lately, it is easier to carry and amplify damning sympathies when you can channel your negative emotions through the symbolism of a particular individual. "
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/how-defective-a-thinker-are-you.html
The FTX debacle has had an infinitesimal impact on my assesment of crypto, human nevsriousness, or EA adherents in general given that I already believed it was bunkem. The excuses peddled, words written, and reasoning used to buttress EA post FTX have lowered my opinion and assesment of EA. All they hsve done is furthet reinforce my opinion that, to put it glibly, EA adherents and utilitsriand in general suffer from the same cognitive defect that a paperclip maximising AI wouldhave if it turned all humans into paperclips to make more paperclips for humans to use. As they say, it's the same energy, the two pictures are the same, etc.
Well denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
If you don't see FTX as another decent sized condemnation of crypto you a complete fucking moron.
Literally one of the main critcisms of the space, since ~2012-2013, is something like the following:
Crypto is effectively an expensive, wasteful, poorly functioning database. Except with no admin which is controlled by "votes" among large players. No recourse to fix anything or track anything. The big virtue of crippling yourself in this way by using it is that it is "trustless".
Except...using it is overly technical for the vast majority of the population who will be left to place their trust in entities which are actually *less* trustworthy than the banks and states they are claming to want to flee due to lack of trust.
And this is yet another datapoint on that this is the exact dynamic. People worried about the hounds running straight into the arms of the hunters, and getting shot.
I am not a crypto enthusiasts and don't own any. Nothing about the FTX fraud requires it to be done with crypto.
Anyway the quote from Cowen isn't about whether crypto or ea or what have you is good or bad just that this single data point isn't useful for forming an opinion.
>Nothing about the FTX fraud requires it to be done with crypto.
Sorta disagree, the hype around the crypto-sphere is what enabled the FTX fraud. Yes it's technically possible to pull off the same kind of fraud with beanie babies, but it's not the 90s anymore. And the EA/rat community has perhaps played a significant role in lending legitimacy to that hype.
That said I sort of understanding where the Cowen quote is coming from. We're burning a scapegoat here and possibly updating too harshly in some ways. But I've long been a crypto-skeptic and I think the community needs some harsh updating in that general direction even if it comes on the back of a single point of data instead of more holistically.
See that is just rank idiocy. It is definitely useful for forming an opinion. It shouldn't be the only thing you consider, but surely the fact that it is a case where one of the main criticisms of crypto came true seems like it should give you pause. It is *some evidence*.
You and him sound like the goddamn bolsheviks "sure everyone warned if we dispossessed the kulaks there would be a famine, and now there is a big famine, but that is just one data point! It doens't mean ANYTHING!".
The idea that it isn't "useful for forming an opinion" is just sticking your head in the sand.
Not to mention which this is not data point 1 on this in the crypto space, but instead like datapoint 12.
I'm not convinced that the FTX situation is actually an example of the main criticisms of crypto. When people say "crypto is a ponzi scheme", they aren't saying that individual companies have a high likelihood of doing fraud. They're taking aim at the idea that the currency itself has any value. "The companies are actively lying to you about how much they hold in assets" is a critique I see coming from within the crypto community far more often than from outsiders. Stablecoin managers are constantly getting harangued to release public audits of their books, and clearly for good reason.
I think the ponzi nature of crypto was a significant cause of the disaster. The collapse of Terra-Luna seems to have been a major factor in Alameda requiring a bailout from FTX (as argued by https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175), and that collapse happened because Terra-Luna was a ponzi scheme.
Yes, there's a valuable distinction between "this token has no value except your ability to persuade other people to buy it, and eventually no one's gonna want to buy it" (Ponzi), "this token has few protections against theft or loss, far outside of its advantages" (the patio11 critic), and "the guy holding the tokens or maybe dollars for you is _in the current process of stealing them_" (FTX). FTX's specific behavior would have been a problem even had they been 'merely' a traditional non-investment bank!
(Possibly caught earlier, but then again, see Wells-"you wanted an extra account, right"-Fargo)
That said, there is a more general problem that crypto exchanges go bust for perfectly legal reasons on a pretty regular basis. The fraud here is getting additional publicity and scandal, but the EffectiveAltruism forum posts estimates that a little over 1/3 of 'committed' 2022 funding came through FTX or FTX Future Fund, and is talking about making sure people can pay rent, now.
Its... 'validity'?
What exactly does it mean for ffective altruism to be invalid?
Utilitarian offshoots obsessed with using resources for improving the lot of those decoupled from the generation of those resources is just a manifestation of entropy. It is a fundamentally against thr processes that lead to good human existence, and uses self wanking utilitarian ideology to justify thid breaking of selection mechanisms for biological, cultural, etc order that leads to human survival, prosperity, and reproduction. It does so by dressing it up as charity, decoupled from why charity might be adaptive, and is emblematic of the global end of history world as a single utopian village cognitive error.
Tldr; EA (and utilitarianism in general) is analogous to paperclip maximising AI risk but applied to human wetware.
That's before even getting into whether EA is sincere at all, its adherents are liars trying to status -launder, engage in FTX style shenanigans, etc.
There are lots of possible answers to this.
One thing I would say is that it's important to distinguish the ideas and ideology from the movement and people claiming them, and as someone who believes strongly in the former I am deeply sceptical about large parts of the latter - I think that a lot of the "long-termist" things (especially AI risk) that people associated with Effective Altruism push are not actually effective altruism, and detract focus from short-termist projects like malaria and international development where an extra pound of spending probably does much more good.
I think that the large-EA Effective Altruist movement could fairly be called "invalid" (although that's not a word I'd choose myself) if it's not doing small-e effective altruism, and although some of it definitely is, I suspect quite a lot of it isn't.
I also think that there's at least a plausible line one can draw between the kind of high-self-confidence galaxy-brain thinking that leads to favouring AI over mosquito nets and the fall of SBF.
I'd say EA would be invalid as a movement if it turned out that the majority of EA adherents don't actually want to act in an altruistic way, or find out the most effective ways to do so. Instead they could have other goals, like learning to sound smart on the internet (mea culpa), or frauding intelligent, well-to-do people who lack defenses against social attacks from their own (perceived) ingroup, or quickly climbing the social ladder, or stinging other people's brain stems and laying eggs in their bellies.
So if thousands of people suddenly found themselves bursting into wasps, and a major EA proponent was found to be responsible, you'd update away from "EA is a good strategy that many people genuinely want to make happen" and towards "people who fund antihelmintics research and obsessively buy mosquito nets don't actually care about saving lives, they're giant wasps trying to reduce competition from the worm and mosquito people".
Is this the case? Personally, I don't think so. I believe the average EA proponent genuinely cares about other people, would sacrifice some personal comfort to help them, and is interested in knowing how best to do that. I also believe that people who deviate from the as-stated EA norms are a minority, and that most deviations result from morality creep instead of blatant bad-faith actors. I'll continue trusting them.
EA adherents turning people into wasps if it happened to set the value in a utility metric higher is the kind of tbing I would expect them to make excuses for... "but but but but they are *happier* as wasps!" or something like that.
One would guess a disbelief in the accuracy of the adjective.
Yes, I don't think it can ever be effective. I doubt it is altruism.
I doubt both whether altruism is effective as the common understanding of the word might imply, and I also doubt whether the reasoning and underlying imied worldview of effective altruists can lead.to taking effective altruisitic actions.
On point 7 - I think the main anti-crypto claims made by hostile media outlets were that crypto is full of grifters, that lack of regulation makes crypto a dangerous industry, and that crypto is a series of ponzi schemes. And I think the first two of those claims do an accurate if not precise job of explaining (predicting?) what went wrong at FTX, and you could make a case that the third one does too.
A question for guys who make "crypto is sound money/could be the next gold standard/would stop fractional reserve banking/reign in the central banks/more stable than fiat currency" type arguments. Has FTX lowered your confidence?
If SBF was investing his customer's assets and covering the difference in account balances by minting his own token, isn't that basically fractional reserve banking? The whole thing looks a lot like an ordinary bank run to me.
I work in the field. FTX has not affected my confidence in the soundness of the _technology_ I personally work with/on, which is always the part that has been of greatest interest to me. But it has lowered my confidence that it is possible for the _industry_ to function in a way that is good for the world, yes.
(EDIT: I guess I'm not really responsive to your question, since I'm not a crypto-goldbug or whatever.)
Everyone in crypto knows the entire "industry" is scams stacked on top of each other.
I'm quite impressed at the illusion of a legitimate financial instution FTX managed to create, despite being a bunch of autists abusing stimulants on the Bahamas.
It appears that the proliferation of crypto is based directly on the recent low interest rates and free money floating around. There's been too much money in the system for a number of years, and lots of people chasing investments when returns are dropping. It seems quite likely that all of these digital currencies are in danger of sudden collapse if the monetary situation changes. This seems likely in the next year or two.
The problem with treating crypto like gold or some other type of more normal investment is that there's no actual good that can be held. Sure, gold can lose a ton of value as well, but you at least still have a metal with some inherently useful properties. With crypto you have literally nothing if the value bottoms out.
I'm agnostic on the main question, but no; the FTX thing has zero influence on my view. It was a centralized business; none of its faults are due to the tech of ETH.
This. If someone invents an (almost) unbreakable material, and someone else starts a company where they supply locks made from it and hang on to the keys for you, and it turns out they were selling the keys to burglars, that doesn't affect my confidence in the structural properties of the material.
But you won't think the material is going to create a new age without burglary.
But the point is that it's still possible for crypto based institutions to behave the same way dollar/gold/fiat based institutions do.
I mean, you don't have to go through a centralized exchange to engage with crypto. People do it because it's more convenient, but there's nothing stopping you from using DeFi, or practicing self-custody.
Yeah -- and I don't see a counterfactual world in which that statement is not true.
The core idea of crypto (or at least one of the core ideas) is to have tech that does away with the need for trust. This applies to various things; if I hold ETH in a personal wallet, I'm not relying on any other people. But it doesn't apply to centralized exchanges.
One should also point out that as far as I know, there's really no reason to ever leave funds lying around on a centralized exchange. You could and should use them only briefly and then transfer your funds to a personal wallet. (And also worth noting that it's possible to avoid them altogether.)
Don't you need high-speed low-cost low-latency Internet for crypto to have any value? Does that kind of Internet run on trust at all, or require government, or could we imagine it arising spontaneously in a libertarian paradise or anarchy?
You could say this exact same thing about money/fiat.
No need for trust just make sure each day you cash out into hard goods! People don't do that because it is super inconvinent. Ditto crypto. The "trustless" "feature" is not a feature 90%+ of the users are going to be able to take any advantage of, and they are just goign to end up trusting even more shaky institutions.
How is "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor" parsed?
Is it ( selective ( serotonin reuptake ) ) inhibitor" or "selective ( ( serotonin reuptake ) inhibitor )"?
It's a monoamine neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitor which is selective for serotonin (as opposed to dopamine and norepinephrine). Serotonin / dopamine / norepinephrine are all structurally similar, and drugs tend to have activity on all three systems.
(So of your options, the second one.)
Generally, my surprise at "another crypto outfit goes down in flames among accusations of fraud and deceit" is on the "time to get more popcorn" level. Apparently, the demise of this particular outfit hurts genuinely well-meaning people, not just the usual fools who have not bothered to watch "Line goes up" yet, which is unfortunate. But to me, the big question is, who's next? If, as Scott describes, one company managed to hide behind an altruistic window-dressing and almost achieve regulatory capture - what are the other timebombs that are ticking in the US and European economies?
I wouldn't be too surprised if Elon Musk's empire collapsed next (I feel there has been a shift in public perception from "tech wizard/ genius entrepreneur" to "Bond villain/ bumbling fool", which may make it harder to pull off more stunts). Who/ what else?
If a 'line goes up' company collapses it might leave nothing but a crater behind. Maybe some software and servers to run an exchange. If Tesla collapses the floor isn't the floor way higher than that? Another company will surely takeover or repurpose all those factories and warehouses and the tech running them. I'm a giant Musk critic but at least most of his companies are making real stuff.
I wonder how much Tesla's customer driving data is worth by itself? Any company that wants to compete in self-driving would need to capture a similar dataset.
SpaceX certainly depends on government contracts. If there were a timebomb it would probably be that one. I think the government would happily bail them out though. Seems like a no brainer in national security terms alone, no matter how unprofitable, we need to have some launch capability in the US as insurance at the very least.
SpaceX should be fine. NASA has a clear interest in keeping them running and they are probably reasonably (but not very) profitable. The real question is around Starlink, since Musk has said it isn't profitable and he has sunk a lot of money into building it. It's not really clear to me that it will ever be profitable, and that's something that will create turmoil over the next few years for Musk.
SpaceX could probably spin off Starlink if it came to the worst, and then continue running on NASA contracts. I'm much more skeptical about things like Starship, however. I think the demand just isn't there, and in any case the rocket doesn't make a lot of sense for orbital applications. If it ever works I suspect it will only fly a handful of times per decade.
I thought the claim was that Starlink will be profitable if Starship flies, since it reduces the cost per satellite a lot.
It would reduce the cost of launching the satellites. The satellites themselves would obviously still be kinda expensive, Starlink would still have to launch a lot of them just to replace the losses (15-20% per year), and they'd still have to get a lot of customers to dish out 100$ a month... and I suspect that the regions with a sufficient density of potential customers, but no fiber-optic connections available, will keep shrinking in the next years.
I think Starlink would be bailed by the US government because of the significant military benefit (as seen in Ukraine).
That's what happened with Iridium, so yeah. But it didn't happen until Iridium had declared bankruptcy, so the original owners got nothing.
I think musk's companies (at least Tesla and SpaceX) are net profitable now? I wouldn't be shocked if their stocks crash and Musk personally declares bankruptcy, but I'd expect Tesla to keep existing and producing cars under new management.
From a cursory web search: SpaceX is a private company, they don't have to publish info on their financial status. They SAY they are profitable, which means exactly nothing. They apparently make profits on commercial Falcon 9 launches, but whether that outweighs the money they invest into Starlink and the development of Spaceship is doubtful.
W.r.t. Tesla, you're probably correct.
More on the technical side, frances coppola explains a bit what was going on at FTX-Alameda:
https://www.coppolacomment.com/2022/11/the-ftx-alameda-nexus.html?m=1
"his hedge fund can make money by taking risky leveraged positions, but it has to raise funds, and that's not cheap. And his exchange can make money by charging fees on transactions, but although that can be a nice slow steady income, it's not going to make him the trillions of dollars he wants.
But Joe's spotted an opportunity. The exchange has lots of customer assets that aren't earning anything. If he puts those customer assets to work, he can earn far more from his exchange customers. And he's got an obvious vehicle through which to put them to work. The hedge fund. If he transfers customer assets on the exchange to the hedge fund, it can lend or pledge them at risk to earn megabucks.
Of course, there's a risk that the hedge fund could lose some or all of the customers' funds. And the exchange promises that customers can have their assets back on demand, which could be a trifle problematic if they are locked up in leveraged positions held by the hedge fund. But this is crypto. There's an easy solution. The exchange can issue its own token to replace the customer assets transferred to the hedge fund. The exchange will report customer balances in terms of the assets they have deposited, but what it will actually hold will be its own token. If customers request to withdraw their balances, the exchange will sell its own tokens to obtain the necessary assets - after all, crypto assets, like dollars, are fungible. "