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Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

by cultus 7y ago

api 7y ago
There's a fairly substantial overlap between the people who completely drank the cryptocurrency kool-aid and the people who got sucked into so-called "alt-right" and associated fellow-traveling stuff ("red pill," NRx, etc.) around the same time period. Seems like there were some incredibly virulent meme plagues that afflicted the high-IQ-but-gullible crowd in the middle part of this decade. Cryptocurrency has done a lot of damage to the tech world due mostly to the sheer amount of brainpower it's sucked up that might otherwise have been used for more useful stuff. It's been kind of a tar pit where you have vast resources chasing things that have no actual real world value. It sort of reminds me of that Star Trek TNG episode where they try to kill off the Borg collective by giving them an impossible geometric shape to ponder endlessly.
Barrin92 7y ago
there's also an ideological component to it tied into all the libertarian crypto fantasies that makes people believe they're sticking it to the man and so on. A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical. Another space where I have observed this is online education startups. Lots of "you don't need a degree", "the universities are just trying to keep you out", "we're bringing education to the masses" etc. Same sales pitch.
- Blackthorn 7y ago
  The worst thing about those online education startups is how they've actually made online education worse. All those universities that donated lecture videos to places like edx and Coursera? Yeah, you can't access most of those lectures anymore. They're either paywalled or deemed not to fit in with their paywall platform of the day and are no longer accessible. For a brief glorious moment it actually seemed like we'd have a great quantity of quality University material available over the internet for anyone who wanted it. But it's all gone now.

Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

by cultus 7y ago

Gullibility and analytical intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

api 7y ago

There's a fairly substantial overlap between the people who completely drank the cryptocurrency kool-aid and the people who got sucked into so-called "alt-right" and associated fellow-traveling stuff ("red pill," NRx, etc.) around the same time period. Seems like there were some incredibly virulent meme plagues that afflicted the high-IQ-but-gullible crowd in the middle part of this decade. Cryptocurrency has done a lot of damage to the tech world due mostly to the sheer amount of brainpower it's sucked up that might otherwise have been used for more useful stuff. It's been kind of a tar pit where you have vast resources chasing things that have no actual real world value. It sort of reminds me of that Star Trek TNG episode where they try to kill off the Borg collective by giving them an impossible geometric shape to ponder endlessly.

Barrin92 7y ago

there's also an ideological component to it tied into all the libertarian crypto fantasies that makes people believe they're sticking it to the man and so on. A lot of these crypto companies frame themselves as liberators from the banks who don't want to give you a share of the pie and so on, targetting vulnerable people who seek opportunity. It's very cynical. Another space where I have observed this is online education startups. Lots of "you don't need a degree", "the universities are just trying to keep you out", "we're bringing education to the masses" etc. Same sales pitch.

Blackthorn 7y ago
The worst thing about those online education startups is how they've actually made online education worse. All those universities that donated lecture videos to places like edx and Coursera? Yeah, you can't access most of those lectures anymore. They're either paywalled or deemed not to fit in with their paywall platform of the day and are no longer accessible. For a brief glorious moment it actually seemed like we'd have a great quantity of quality University material available over the internet for anyone who wanted it. But it's all gone now.