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On queue > self-referential babble

by BrianOnHN 5y ago

dsco 5y ago
How is this helping the conversation Brian?
- shebek 5y ago
  He is right. None of this has any obvious utility.
  - dsco 5y ago
    You never provided counter arguments. How can I trust you if you’re just an anonymous person online stating something without backing it up? At least the crypto guy had some examples. How about you state why those applications in questions have no utility?
    - magila 5y ago
      chrisco255's post was a textbook gish gallop. I would not blame anyone here for not bothering to do an item-by-item refutation.
      - chrisco255 5y ago
        Oh poppycock, it was not gish gallop. It is a list of in-production applications that you should research and understand before you do some drive by criticism of a rapidly evolving and growing technological ecosystem. If you lack basic curiosity, there's not much anyone can do to convince you. Anyone can be an arm-chair critic, go find the fundamental flaws in these in-production systems and tell me why they're not sustainable. Tell me why they're not the future. Be specific.
        magila 5y ago
        A project's mere existence say nothing about how useful it is. Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you just picked one or two projects and showed evidence of their widespread use as something other than a speculative instrument.
paisawalla 5y ago
First, HN is not the place for this sort of flippant Reddit-tier style of dismissal. Second, crypto boosters -- I am not one, but interested and not pessimistic -- would say that an economy or a monetary system is nothing but a closed, self-referential bubble that has the useful property of sometimes correlating to predictable real-world activity. It's an abstraction over the real world: not the real world itself, but a way to influence it. It it were the real world, you would presumably have a much easier time determining whether and how much inflation is actually rising. As it is, you have a debate over it today because numbers say one thing, and people experience another. The crypto people are attempting to bootstrap just such another system, except one that doesn't rely on central banking. So I don't think self-referential is an effective critique then, because that's the intention.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  This is a very sensible comment. The difference between the two abstractions (thus far) is that the traditional financial system attaches itself to the real world through the legal system, and the crypto system does not aim to do that. Maybe the core question of this entire endeavor is whether the legal system is a necessary component for layering a system of abstraction on top of the real world, or merely a useful one.
splix 5y ago
Well, for example, the Amazon AWS is a self-referential babble for the traditional web. But I guess it doesn't make it useless.

On queue > self-referential babble

dsco 5y ago

How is this helping the conversation Brian?

shebek 5y ago
He is right. None of this has any obvious utility.
- dsco 5y ago
  You never provided counter arguments. How can I trust you if you’re just an anonymous person online stating something without backing it up? At least the crypto guy had some examples. How about you state why those applications in questions have no utility?
  - magila 5y ago
    chrisco255's post was a textbook gish gallop. I would not blame anyone here for not bothering to do an item-by-item refutation.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Oh poppycock, it was not gish gallop. It is a list of in-production applications that you should research and understand before you do some drive by criticism of a rapidly evolving and growing technological ecosystem. If you lack basic curiosity, there's not much anyone can do to convince you. Anyone can be an arm-chair critic, go find the fundamental flaws in these in-production systems and tell me why they're not sustainable. Tell me why they're not the future. Be specific.
      - magila 5y ago
        A project's mere existence say nothing about how useful it is. Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you just picked one or two projects and showed evidence of their widespread use as something other than a speculative instrument.

paisawalla 5y ago

First, HN is not the place for this sort of flippant Reddit-tier style of dismissal. Second, crypto boosters -- I am not one, but interested and not pessimistic -- would say that an economy or a monetary system is nothing but a closed, self-referential bubble that has the useful property of sometimes correlating to predictable real-world activity. It's an abstraction over the real world: not the real world itself, but a way to influence it. It it were the real world, you would presumably have a much easier time determining whether and how much inflation is actually rising. As it is, you have a debate over it today because numbers say one thing, and people experience another. The crypto people are attempting to bootstrap just such another system, except one that doesn't rely on central banking. So I don't think self-referential is an effective critique then, because that's the intention.

sanderjd 5y ago
This is a very sensible comment. The difference between the two abstractions (thus far) is that the traditional financial system attaches itself to the real world through the legal system, and the crypto system does not aim to do that. Maybe the core question of this entire endeavor is whether the legal system is a necessary component for layering a system of abstraction on top of the real world, or merely a useful one.

splix 5y ago

Well, for example, the Amazon AWS is a self-referential babble for the traditional web. But I guess it doesn't make it useless.