What's the Unit of Interestingness?

April 19, 2021 12:00 PM

Vitalik Buterin in conversation with Julia Galef (Rationally Speaking podcast). Julia and guest Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum) explore a wide range of topics, including: Vitalik's intellectually honest approach to leadership, why prediction markets appeared to be biased in favor of Trump, whether it was rational to invest in Bitcoin ten years ago, the ethics of life extension, convex vs concave thinking, effective altruism and so on. (2hr interview, transcript).

Julia Galef on Buterin: "...the reason I started following Vitalik a few years ago, and reading his blog is because he’s also a really sharp and insightful thinker about politics, economics, rationality, how to improve the world. And even though I’m not that into crypto myself, I came to really enjoy reading Vitalik’s public communications as a leader of Ethereum because – as we talk about in our conversation – I find his leadership style refreshingly nuanced and intellectually honest."

Julia Galef: "You know, this question -- of the efficient market hypothesis and how much to rely on it -- what it reminds me of is a debate in the rationalist community a couple years ago about whether we as a community should have been better at recognizing early on that bitcoin was worth investing in. And to be clear, there were a lot of rationalists who did get rich on
cryptocurrencies. A lot more than the base rate in the population, or even than in Silicon Valley, I think. But there were also a lot of people who looked at bitcoin and were like, "Nah, it seems really unlikely that I could outsmart the experts here, so I'm not going to bother investing even a little." I'm curious, actually, do you think that was a reasonable inference for someone to draw at the time? Or do you think there was something about bitcoin early on, that a rational person should've been able to tell, "Here's a case where I can beat the market," or “where the efficient market hypothesis doesn't hold”?

posted by storybored (4 comments total)

a debate in the rationalist community a couple years ago about whether we as a community should have been better at recognizing early on that bitcoin was worth investing in
The speed at which this debate got theological when it came around (observing from the outside) should have been a clear indicator in just how much a-rationality was/is tied up in Internet Rationalist thought.

If I remember right, this line of argumentation was commonly paired with the community's obsession with grey-market nootropics, particularly modafinil & derivatives. In other words,

If a divine entity (or AI superstructure running the simulation that is our universe, or whatever metaphor you prefer) were to have a chosen people, and that chosen people were rationalists (for totally not self-serving reasons, naturally), and said entity wanted to bestow its favor upon its chosen people... what could be better proof of said entity's existence & the value of the Precepts of Yudkowsky than for bitcoin & modafinil to exist?

After all, both items are things that portions of the community are going deep in, and have very strongly held beliefs that the community programming makes them near-uniquely qualified to identify as more valuable than the world-at-large thinks. So if you wanted to seed wealth & intellectual advantages within a community, what could be better designed than those?

---

For myself, I think the entire subject is one great combination of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" + markets being bad at finding morality (but good at talking up the people carrying out its worship).
posted by CrystalDave at 1:13 PM on April 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

(Which, to be clear, this is an *interesting* interview, even as I have some very fundamental philosophical disagreements with even the more 'moderate' position Buterin takes in many connected topics. It's worth taking 10 minutes to read through the transcript, as he's very good at providing a view that's compelling to people likely to be compelled by this sort of thing? But also, the rhetorical gaps (imo) are still very clear, so it might be inoculating as well.)
posted by CrystalDave at 1:30 PM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

fwiw...
@juliagalef: "My debut book THE SCOUT MINDSET just came out... It's about (unsurprisingly) the 'scout mindset,' my term for the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were; trying to be intellectually honest, objective and curious about what's actually true... (That's in contrast to 'soldier mindset,' in which our aim is to defend our beliefs against evidence that might threaten them)"

@juliagalef: "how scout mindset can help you persuade others" [Interview: Julia Galef]
posted by kliuless at 8:35 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

As someone who has been working in the blockchain industry, specifically with Ethereum, since 2018, the current (2021) prices of ETH are such that the 'gas fee' (fee to transact) is a lot higher than a SWIFT bank transfer. It's a fascinating space, but it's also sort of broken (at least for small dollar transactions.)
posted by gen at 10:14 PM on April 19, 2021