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So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is t
by tux3 5y ago
So, that's a good argument for why you shouldn't dismiss a show or a thing in general based only on negative secondhand impressions. The lesson to takeaway is that you should judge a thing by its own quality, not by your negative impression of the fanbase.
But from that, there is no way you should conclude that cynicism is wrong in general. You should not overreact to too much cynicism by discarding criticism entirely! You should react by seeking better information.
- baby 5y agoI don't think that's GP's conclusion. GP's conclusion is that crypto is rooted in real innovation and the noise surrounding it gives the false impression that the tech is just a scam.
- _bfhp 5y ago...relying on the evidence-free invention of not merely some specific fictional benefits of the technology, but a category of material improvements in the world: > And a whole bunch of problems who we don't even realize exist that can one day be solved
- tbabb 5y agoIt's not clear that the impression is false.
- xchaotic 5y agoand what is that 'real innovation' exactly? Writing checksums of everything in multiple copies, very slowly? Databases had these features for decades.
- baby 5y agoI don’t know you could, like, read about it? A few keywords: threshold signatures, zk-snarks, consensusless protocols, byzantine fault tolerant protocols, vrf, vdf, starks, bls
- nathias 5y agoCynicism should be discared because it's cynicism. It is a pathologicaly warped worldview misshapen by deep narcissism of people who got conned into believing something false and have instead of changing their beliefs made their disillusionment into their identity.
- dkarl 5y agoI think the GP is trying to say that there are some people who are so horrified by a few cringeworthy aspects of Star Trek that they want to create a huge blanket stigma against it to ensure that nobody watches it, and anybody who does watch it is buried in ridicule. Likewise, there are some people who react to blockchain scams and BS by trying to create a blanket stigma against anything related to the topic. I haven't personally looked into blockchain or related ideas enough to get excited (I'm harder to excite now that I'm older, and I have less time) but sometimes I feel like I ought to, just because the flavor of the criticism reminds me of the smug nastiness that got directed towards people who were interested in things like computers and Star Trek when I was young. These nerds think they're onto something cool, and we have to mock them until they can't believe in it anymore. I almost feel like I should start learning the technology out of solidarity with the little kid I used to be who embraced computers despite knowing how hopelessly dorky that made him. Of course the concept of nerdiness has been socially rehabilitated since the 1980s, and now the stigma is nominally directed towards scams and environmental waste, but the people delivering the stigma have designed the blast radius to work pretty much the same. The entire topic is stigmatized, any interest or optimism is stigmatized. I think the history of computing and the internet shows that it's hopeless to try to disentangle the utopian hope for social transformation from the grifting and greed. Scam artists can smell the hope for progress and transformation like sharks can smell blood; it means a meal for them. It's a crude distortion to argue that either optimism or greed alone properly characterizes "web3" without the other. When we look back twenty years from now they'll both be part of the story, whether these ideas fizzle out or have a transformative impact or something in between.