tCfD

> And then another time my statistical mechanics prof informed me that "physics is just drawing cartoons of reality with math." That came as a huge existential relief by the way.

One of the most formative and sublimely influential 'aha' remarks I've ever encountered was a line in a Willam Goldman book about screenwriting which simply read, in the manner of a final summation to a chapter: "POETRY IS COMPRESSION." Caps in the original. I had the same sense of instant resolution, like wearing glasses for the first time, that you seem to have had with your prof's insight.

This could also be phrased '[...] are increasingly reduced to numbers', in order to be rationalized by algorithms. How much wealth is counted multiple times by multiple models all recognizing the same qualities under different enumeration schemes?

I expect to see more and more references to Goodhart's Law as this increasing bias in favor of numerically digestible value amplifies the (often unacknowledged) premise that 'that which cannot be counted, doesn't count'

"a boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into"

Good luck to this guy, but it seems every solution to a blockchain scaling problem is ultimately the creation of a blockchain decentralization problem, and vice versa.

Unfortunately it's a misunderstanding of alchemy and it's role in the development of modern science that causes these knee-jerk negative responses to what is in fact a useful and non-pejorative comparison. I suppose next time I'll make my case in more detail.

Alchemy gave birth to science, this is not trolling.

Cryptocurrency is just alchemy for the internet age. Same failures, same etiology, same promise of unexpected insights in another, future form

In most if not all cases the answer is: they can't. The price of crypto, especially that of the ICO era, is propped up by the same individuals that would most want to sell it. It's their HODLing of the coin that keeps it illiquid enough to allow them to drive the price up to the ico target and beyond. By casing out they'd be selling largely to themselves + the thin wisp of actual rubes they've duped into believing there's any substantial buy support under the listed market price.

A centralized cryptocurrency is just digital currency. It may be cryptographically secured against unauthorized transfers/access, but if it doesn't employ some sort of game-theory based custodial sharing scheme which is intended to incentivize decentralization of control (successfully our not), it's not using the 'crypto' protection in the special sense that cryptocurrency implies.

tl;dr anger is a great tl;dr compression algo

The misguided belief that "if it can't be counted, it doesn't count" lies at the heart of all structural social conflicts. When complex reality is overcompressed into digestible, uniform units of account, whatever values fall outside the perception model is discounted to zero and lost.

Expect to see this, and/or its close cousin the McNamara Fallacy, among the top blogpunditry memes of the next few years. If only it were possible to buy stock in these phrases...

Don't forget the moose! cm.org

Op may be thinking of the 'flipper' type of home buyer, where these would be investment only transactions, kept marginally in the black between sales by prior profits Airbnb etc.

Kuro5hin was built by Rusty on slashdot's codebase so I don't think it could have been prior