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> This is pretty funny to me. The forum users immediately point out problems that have in retrospect have kept Bitcoin from becoming mainstream, and which alway

> This is pretty funny to me. The forum users immediately point out problems that have in retrospect have kept Bitcoin from becoming mainstream, and which always struck me as notable flaws of the design. If you like that feeling, you'd love digging through historical magazine, newspaper, and book archives. The Harper's Magazine archive is especially great for this, since it stretches back 150 years and always published analysis on newsworthy happenings. For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, etc first arrived on the scene. It doesn't mean critics should always be deferred to just because they're often right, but it does mean that you can do a lot of preparing for the future by reading what they warned was coming.

organsnyder 3y ago
The trick is sifting through the predictions to know which ones are prescient and which ones are just alarmist. That's a lot easier in hindsight.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ajkjk 3y ago
In one of my high school classes, can't remember why, we discussed an article from the 1950s-ish where people were predicting the future: that by 2000 we'd have flying cars and floating cities and robot helpers and stuff. And I remember distinctly that the tone of the class was: "look, people were so wrong about what the future would be like! They really had no idea. So you shouldn't assume you have any idea what the future will be like either." At some point when I was older I realized that there's something really weird about that. Of course the article about people's predictions for the future sounded foolish and absurd. It was selection bias: they picked the foolish predictions and published them. There were countless people alive at the time who knew those predictions were foolish, but they didn't get featured in the article... because being sober and intelligent is less publishable than being stupid and naive. I think about this a lot, because every time something new shows up (crypto, AI, whatever) there are thousands of articles about what the future is going to look like and how outlandish it's going to be... and I think they're mostly just dumb. And it's sad to think that in fifty years, someone will be presenting those articles to explain how confused 2000s-era technologists were about the future. They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were." When in fact it was just the foolish idealists who thought that stuff and wouldn't shut up about it. The rest of us were rolling our eyes, but nobody wrote that up.
- yawniek 3y ago
  Then again, we now do have flying cars, floating cities and robot helpers. They just look different and are not (yet?) that common.
  - ogogmad 3y ago
    Floating cities?
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      I think you could make a case that the largest cruise ships would be recognized as such by people from the Titanic era. E.g., https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-largest-cruise-vessel-5-times-titanic-size-to-set-sail-in-2024 https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-lar... People are starting to live onboard these things full-time, because it's apparently cheaper than a retirement/nursing home.
- ogogmad 3y ago
  > They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were." I get the wider point of your comment -- which is that most people don't agree with the wild predictions of futurists -- but I wanted to respond to this quote in particular. I think a lot of people mistake being cynical with being clever. In particular, treating blockchain and AI like they have the same potential as one another is maybe overlooking what each of them does. I'm going to quote from this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa... He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says. His the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb. But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface. [EDIT: I think my original comment was a bit uncivil and missed your wider point, which remains an interesting one]
xboxnolifes 3y ago
> For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, etc first arrived on the scene. It doesn't mean critics should always be deferred to just because they're often right, but it does mean that you can do a lot of preparing for the future by reading what they warned was coming. I feel the problem is that there is always somebody claiming <new thing> will fail, and there's also always someone else claiming <new thing> will succeed. You just end up looking back with hindsight to see those who were right. There are always critics who are right. But there are also always critics who were wrong.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  It's usually not about the binary guess of success or failure, though. Or at least that's not the interesting thing to look for. Initial criticism often helps see the future silhouette of a happening even in its success. You can see that American racial tension won't immediately end with emancipation or even with reconstruction, that Europe will remain tense and unstable after the Treaty of Versailles, that Bitcoin will struggle against genuine societal concerns around accountability or dispute resolution, etc and people almost always call these things out at the time. Keeping an eye on those original critiques, even when something proves generally desirable or successful or inevitable, helps make the challenges of today and tomorrow something to one might prepare for rather than be surprised by.

organsnyder 3y ago

The trick is sifting through the predictions to know which ones are prescient and which ones are just alarmist. That's a lot easier in hindsight.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ajkjk 3y ago

In one of my high school classes, can't remember why, we discussed an article from the 1950s-ish where people were predicting the future: that by 2000 we'd have flying cars and floating cities and robot helpers and stuff. And I remember distinctly that the tone of the class was: "look, people were so wrong about what the future would be like! They really had no idea. So you shouldn't assume you have any idea what the future will be like either." At some point when I was older I realized that there's something really weird about that. Of course the article about people's predictions for the future sounded foolish and absurd. It was selection bias: they picked the foolish predictions and published them. There were countless people alive at the time who knew those predictions were foolish, but they didn't get featured in the article... because being sober and intelligent is less publishable than being stupid and naive. I think about this a lot, because every time something new shows up (crypto, AI, whatever) there are thousands of articles about what the future is going to look like and how outlandish it's going to be... and I think they're mostly just dumb. And it's sad to think that in fifty years, someone will be presenting those articles to explain how confused 2000s-era technologists were about the future. They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were." When in fact it was just the foolish idealists who thought that stuff and wouldn't shut up about it. The rest of us were rolling our eyes, but nobody wrote that up.

yawniek 3y ago
Then again, we now do have flying cars, floating cities and robot helpers. They just look different and are not (yet?) that common.
- ogogmad 3y ago
  Floating cities?
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    I think you could make a case that the largest cruise ships would be recognized as such by people from the Titanic era. E.g., https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-largest-cruise-vessel-5-times-titanic-size-to-set-sail-in-2024 https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-lar... People are starting to live onboard these things full-time, because it's apparently cheaper than a retirement/nursing home.
ogogmad 3y ago
> They'll write: "look, people used to think we'd have blockchain-based economies and that AI was about to take over the world! How silly they were." I get the wider point of your comment -- which is that most people don't agree with the wild predictions of futurists -- but I wanted to respond to this quote in particular. I think a lot of people mistake being cynical with being clever. In particular, treating blockchain and AI like they have the same potential as one another is maybe overlooking what each of them does. I'm going to quote from this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa... He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says. His the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb. But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface. [EDIT: I think my original comment was a bit uncivil and missed your wider point, which remains an interesting one]

xboxnolifes 3y ago

> For almost every trouble in the present, you can cite people loudly anticipating it when whatever new political event/initiative, technological innovation, etc first arrived on the scene. It doesn't mean critics should always be deferred to just because they're often right, but it does mean that you can do a lot of preparing for the future by reading what they warned was coming. I feel the problem is that there is always somebody claiming <new thing> will fail, and there's also always someone else claiming <new thing> will succeed. You just end up looking back with hindsight to see those who were right. There are always critics who are right. But there are also always critics who were wrong.

swatcoder 3y ago
It's usually not about the binary guess of success or failure, though. Or at least that's not the interesting thing to look for. Initial criticism often helps see the future silhouette of a happening even in its success. You can see that American racial tension won't immediately end with emancipation or even with reconstruction, that Europe will remain tense and unstable after the Treaty of Versailles, that Bitcoin will struggle against genuine societal concerns around accountability or dispute resolution, etc and people almost always call these things out at the time. Keeping an eye on those original critiques, even when something proves generally desirable or successful or inevitable, helps make the challenges of today and tomorrow something to one might prepare for rather than be surprised by.