ngpio

> a narcissist who thinks he's the best is at greatest odds to another narcissist who thinks he's the best.

Only if both have very literal, wide-reaching interpretations of 'the best'.

Arrogance and narcissism are often contextual, and I've met many self-absorbed, but ultimately capable people who value a similar imbalance in others.

Who am I kidding, I'm talking about myself.

Awesome. It's a fantastic community, full of incredibly smart people, novel perspectives and ways to actively improve the functionality of your mind.

Coincidentally, the user I originally replied to up above, Eliezer, is the founding member of LessWrong and author of most of the early posts.

I see the main barrier to developing a "platform for meaningful, balanced debates" as one of semantic clarity, not discourse-level organization.

I cannot truthfully answer most of the questions I see on the site, because they have variable answers depending on what amount of game theory I apply to my thought processes:

* 1-step strategy: I answer by interpreting the words and phrases in the question exactly how I, personally, define them, with no regard to how widespread an interpretation like mine is.

* 2-step strategy: I attempt to discern the majoritarian interpretation of the question and answer accordingly.

* 3-or-more-step strategy: I attempt to mix my own interpretations with majoritarian ones to answer in a way that will maximize the propagation of my actual view and all its nuances.

The third option, in this case, is leading me to eschew voting and commenting on the platform altogether.[1] Though I am glad that it's led me to organize my thoughts on this matter.

What I'd really like to see in a discussion platform is more tightly networked semantics. Something more powerful than straight hyperlinking. Something that automates the conversion of broadcast and multicast text blocks (like forum posts) into tailored unicast ones (like private messages). Something that gives each user the background and definition set they need to interpret the content accurately. An API for people -- a PPI?

I really don't know how to make this happen. Arguably it's the sociological question of the century, the P vs. NP of human interaction. Maybe even the best first step is a platform like Saysaw. It's hard to say. But right now, I feel like there hasn't been any real progress since email or phpBB.

[1] This is also what made me stop using OkCupid. If anyone wants to take these thoughts on discussion platforms and apply them to a new dating platform, that'd be fantastic.

I think there's two things wrong with this comment exchange:

* you're not interpreting the quoted phrase literally enough;

* I'm being way too generous with the definition of 'inflation' to expect myself to be understood.

I say "inflation" is innate to the cryptocurrency environment, because the environment's very existence encourages the perpetual creation of new coins with new features.

This should be distinguished from traditional inflation — perhaps "meta-inflation" is a better term — to represent the fact that existing currencies lose value when mining power is redirected towards new ones.

As more currencies are created, each one becomes less able to reach its mining cap. (This ignores the extremely significant social ramifications of cryptocurrencies becoming more popular every day as a result of this, but those network effects are a fairly predictable S-curve.)

You're absolutely right that we've yet to see a preference emerge, but you're also modelling it as a choice between two options. In an environment where new currencies are being created daily, I doubt that the existence or lack of a mining cap will be of much relevance. I suspect that new generations of currencies will repeatedly overtake older ones (either as general-use currencies like BTC or specific-value ones like NMC) long before mining of the older currencies is cut off.

I don't think we'll ever settle into a one-coin environment, and I don't think that would be healthy. In fact I would hope that the opposite situation occurs — a world where currencies take on semantic value due to the way their particular featuresets interact with human nature. Value and wealth should maintain some amount of non-universality. That effectively dissolves the question of capped vs. uncapped mining as ideals.

It's not just about words. Written media is no longer limited to a few basic structures and voices. Grammar needs to be able to shift away from English in-line while maintaining semantic clarity, and sometimes that means the reader needs to distinguish between graphemes without any of the typical contextual cues that classic written languages provide.

The most common issue is hand-copying a piece of text between devices, such as a cryptocurrency address or a URL. Sure, it would be great if those sorts of non-linguistic bits of information were always tagged appropriately such that they show up in a different font, but that rarely happens in reality. Even here, on Hacker News, we can only talk in plaintext with a few minor markup features.

A general-purpose web font should be able to handle a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strings and not choke up on edge cases. In that respect, I really like the differentiation between a capital I and a lowercase L in Clear Sans, no matter the inclusion of 'Sans' in its name.

> it's no wonder the author delves into ridiculous banter about singularity

"Post-singularity society of Silicon Valley" was facetious.

A response to Jamil Elie Bou Kheir's comment on Facebook (presumably jamilbk on HN), because I do not have Facebook:

> hello from hacker news. thoughtful article! i think it's not the mere intelligence, beauty, or wealth that defines someone. perhaps it's the reasons and difficulty through which they are achieved. suppose i endure years of hardship and suddenly, in a flash of creativity, uncover a specific life path which i choose to follow. if the journey down that path necessitates an increase in intelligence, then wouldn't that conscious pursuit of intelligence qualify as a viable aspect of my identity? similar points can be raised about beauty and wealth.

> accordingly, i think no real identity is assumed when an individual gets these things "for free". enthusiastically expressing one's beauty, intelligence, or wealth that have existed since birth (or a lucky event) is actually rather distasteful... so yeah delete those qualities kthx.

You've made negation your identity the same way that others define themselves through beauty, intelligence and wealth. This is neither unique nor particularly useful, and I've found it to be generally unhealthy.

Entrench yourself in any region's activist scene and you will be surrounded by this mentality. Despite being a higher level abstraction than beauty, intelligence and wealth, it is equally commoditizable given enough time and positive feedback. For instance, consider the phrase "social capital".

The original post does not strike me as a rejection of one end of an axis in favor of its converse. Rather it is a dismissal of the axis itself, of an entire model of thinking, its conclusion resting in rational, subjective passivity. To ascribe any particular aesthetic about how things "should be" or how people "should act" is to miss the point.

I would summarize the original post's conclusion thus: stop projecting; question abstractions; remove inconsistencies from the bottom, up.

That conclusion invites a plea. We all have a utility function, and it will eventually fail; how do we best extend its (and our) relevance, and do we even want to?

> One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others.

I agree. I'm very grateful to have a common name. Nate Perkins is about as generic as it gets. Global searches for my name come up with a variety of people completely unrelated to me.

Still, there are potential downsides. For instance, searching for "[my name] [my city]" brings up a mugshot of someone who isn't me. And of course, Stephen Law of the original post has a much more frustrating issue.

None of us are really in a position to say with certainty "it's better to have a common name than an uncommon one" or vice versa.

I would argue that pseudonymity is necessary to overcome negative situations arising from having a common name or having an uncommon name. But this argument is strictly from my own experience and should be taken as such.

Like most things, it comes down to the importance of teaching kids to think critically about how their choices will affect themselves and their environment rather than accepting truisms not backed by relevant statistics.