geriksonWhy do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?
hemkoI like the idea behind cryptocurrencies, decentralized and outside of the control of any single person
Obviously there’s gazillion problems with them that makes the whole thing fall apart in practice
“I like everything about cryptocurrency except all the things that are wrong with it”.
Not really sure why currency has to be “outside the control of any single person or entity”. Other than an intellectual curiosity. Currency is inherently social. Goldbugs keep harping on about the inherent value of gold, but its value is just as socially constructed as cowry shells or giant granite rings. China was a huge trading party in the time before the Opium wars and it preferred silver to gold.
Rekall IncorporatedAre you sure something that approximates that is a good thing?
Not to mention that I don’t think it’s possible to truely make something like that in the physical sense. You can make Forward Time Traveling Anal ZProof Coinbutt that gives you free Blockchain blowjobs, shit is about as good as using the money in SimCity 3000 save files as a medium of exchange if it doesn’t connect to reality (i.e. has a system of sourcing and managing information in a reliable manner).
Or am I missing something? Genuinely curious.
You often hear crypto proponents on Threadi (not the oort cloud of types who de facto only care about high risk speculation and are pushing bags, the genuine ones) say that they want to use crypto as a way to fight data brokers/collection, but that doesn’t make make sense. The payment is just one step of the process and you can’t leave civilization at scale.
But for me personally, I don’t see the point of such a system if one can’t manage current challenges with human organisation in democratic leaning countries or perhaps even more broadly (at whatever level/scale that is relevant for you). It seems like you would just be back at square one but with more wallets, random useless shit you have to memorize and having to track client/protocols updates and some other crap.
Sure we might get a technology at some point in the future that truly impacts human nature, but in that case all bets are off and we are entering pretty avangarde sci-fi.
As long as there are unjust laws, I would like to have untraceable crime money. Overall, I would rather not have unjust laws, though.
ArchiteuthisNeither ‘untraceable’ nor ‘money’ describe crypto very well though, that’s just how it’s marketed.
One person’s unjust laws are another persons ideal legal system.
Not to mention that I still don’t get how an allegedly untraceable money would work in reality. Let’s say you place an order for x32 pack toilet paper for delivery. They need your address and your name, you paying with untracble crypto is just one part of the process.
Realistically it would only be good for drugs (not a crime in the moral sense if it’s for consumption or modest distribution of pot, MDMA, psychedelics), real crimes or scam/investment schemes (any investment schemes where you don’t know the name of those who manage it is highly suspect by definition).
Isn’t Monero, Zcash and a whole bunch of newer once exactly what you are looking for?
I’ve lived in several countries and if by unjust laws you are referring to recreational drug use, it’s not the money that’s the real risk in truly authoritarian countries, it’s getting stopped by the authorities with consequences including being to forced to give them all the valuables to your name (savings, car, jewelry) or straight up disappearance to a secret camp for “undesirables reeducation”. Untraceable money isn’t going to help you there, if anything you would probably get more attention on you (ISPs are heavily controlled by the gov in such countries and they can track mail deliveries) than using good old cash with a reliable in-person connect.
i can kinda understand “liking the idea” in the same way that i “like” the very simple currency systems in single-player video games, where you do work (fight monsters, collect items, win Pokemon battles) and are automatically rewarded with currency you can use to buy items, which are always reasonably-priced because the game developers balanced the game well. It’s just that these systems have nothing to do with reality. But that simplistic view of money is pretty much all that’s left of cryptocurrencies if you look past the get-rich-quick scheme.
Because they’re very stupid people.
That’s a reductive statement, but it’s basically the whole thing when you get right down to it. The entire rationalist movement - referring specifically to the Elizer Yudkowsky bastardization of the term here - is basically bad logic that appeals to people who think they’re smart, but aren’t actually smart enough to recognize it as bad logic. Elizer sells the fiction that smart people don’t actually have to trust in experts or commonly established scientific methods because they can just deduce all the answers to the universe by applying logic. This presumes some kind of inherent superpower of intelligence and effectively teaches it’s adherents to treat every presumption they make as scientific fact. This makes you very prone to reinforcing bad ideas, and makes you extremely vulnerable to scams that prey on your belief in your own intelligence. Crypto is the perfect version of such a scam.
There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies. And of course, it takes a very special kind of stupid to believe that libertarianism - a school of thought that proposes that we privatize roads by building quadruple decker porous glass bridges, among other things - is actually a good idea.
There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies.
This is absolutely true and, I think, is also the core answer to OP’s question about why rationalists love cryptocurrency.
Because the core conceit of Bitcoin, and everything that followed, was the idea that you could “be your own bank” - that you would have complete control over, and complete responsibility for, your own financial transactions. If you get hacked or scammed, or send your money to the wrong account, or lose your private key, or forget your password, there’s no bank or government you can appeal to to fix the problem. Once cryptocurrency is gone, it’s gone for good.
For normal people, this is obviously a horrible idea, because normal people recognize they can make mistakes and want to be able to fix those mistakes, especially when they involve things like their life savings.
Libertarians, on the other hand, don’t really believe they can make mistakes. They think other people are stupid and irresponsible. Other people could screw up and lose their money. But the libertarian himself won’t make such foolish mistakes. So the libertarian doesn’t need the safety net of laws and governments and banks and credit agencies that protect the average person from theft and error. If anything, that safety net makes the libertarian’s money less safe - because governments and banks and credit agencies could fuck up, but the libertarian himself, thanks to his superior mind, never will.
So when the libertarian is told he can be his own bank, and save his wealth in a format designed for irreversible transactions, where one mistake would lead to his wealth disappearing forever, the libertarian thinks this is a great idea, because he doesn’t believe he would ever make a mistake.
You have to think yourself very smart indeed to be that stupid.
There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.
I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.
This makes so much sense, and also explains why siskind’s readers are fine with him being openly disingenuous sorry I meant amenable to straussian readings.
I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking “I’m not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet,” Siskind thinking “I’m not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people,” and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking “bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together.” Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.
most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around
The good old cultic milieu.
zogwargI would phrase this as “good marks” and “foolish” rather than “stupid”, it’s important to stay humble enough that no one is safe from a con.
Echoing something that has been said here before (too lazy to find proper credit sorry): “Rationality™ is a get smart quick scheme”, falling for one family of scams makes you more likely to fall for a similar one.
I’m gonna need you to expand on the bridges thing. This sounds like it’s up there with the bears in terms of obviously bad ideas wholeheartedly endorsed by libertarians, but I haven’t heard anything about it.
Oh god, the porous glass bridges.
So, Walter Block is a Libertarian economist with some pretty serious sounding credentials. Chair of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, Senior fellow at the Ludwig Van Mises institute… Like, this guy isn’t a crank with a blog. He gets paid, and published.
And he wrote what is, among Libertarians, considered the seminal work on the privatization of roads, a book called, no surprise, The Privatization of Roads and Highways.
Privatizing roads is a really funny gotcha to throw at any Libertarian you meet, because it’s basically an unsolvable problem. How do you have fair and free market competition for getting out of your driveway? Ask the average Libertarian about it and they’ll panic. Ask a Libertarian who’s been around other Libertarians long enough, and they’ll more likely retort by telling you to go read Walter Block’s book.
Now, I want to be clear; none of these people have actually read Block. It’s just an easy way to dismiss the question, because the average leftist isn’t going to read an entire textbook just to prove you wrong. But the reason I know they haven’t read Block is because I did, and everything he wrote is objectively insane.
The majority of the book is basically just an argument for why we should privatize roads (his argument is “Accidents will go down”, his source is “I made it up.”), but in the last third he addresses criticisms of his previous work on the subject, and in doing so is forced to address the practicalities. This is where Walter Block stumbles into an entire Battle City of trap cards. It’s… A long road (ba-dum, pssh) and someone like Dan Olsen could get an easy two hours out of the layers of insanity happening here, but basically Block ends up acknowledging that;
- It would probably be really bad if land ownership extended into the sky, because then a few land owners might be able to basically encircle a city and prevent any roads going in and out. So you need to be allowed to build over other people’s land. Not on it, but, you know… Bridges. Unsupported miles long bridges.
- It would probably be really bad if land ownership didn’t extend into the sky because then you could just build a bridge over someone’s farm and block all their sunlight and rainwater. Wait, no, that contradicts the previous point.
- OK, you’re allowed to build over other people’s land but everyone has a right to sunlight and rain so your bridge has to be transparent and porous. A glass bridge, full of holes for rainwater to sluice through. All the cars on it definitely won’t block any sunlight. They’ll, um, probably be made of glass too.
- Cities are a problem because you can’t just build a road next to someone else’s road. Because there are buildings there. No problem, just build on top of them. We’ve already established that building over other people’s property is OK. Why, you could probably have four or five companies all competing for your drive to the shops. Imagine it; four elevated highways stacked up over a street level road with the most insane corkscrew onramps feeding them.
- OK, there should probably be some rule about how close you can build to the people below you. A hundred feet sounds about right to Walter.
So now we have our inevitable outcome. The Libertarian answer to the question of competition in a market space where competition is functionally impossible; a quintuple decker porous glass highway.
This man is, I cannot emphasize this enough, considered to be a serious Libertarian economist, and Libertarian influencers cite his book as the treatise on this subject.
David Gerardreally because they come from the same Californian Ideology roots