> Buterin comes from a long tradition of Silicon Valley special smart boys, who have had it hammered into them that domain expertise — i.e., actually knowing stuff — pales into insignificance compared to pulling ideas out of your backside by virtue of your superior intelligence and upbringing and social position.
I detest this worldview. New knowledge is formed through creative conjecture and criticism. The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge. What we should strive for is better explanations of reality, not a restriction on who can make those explanations.
Except the point being made is that only the rich and affluent get to make creative decisions. Though the experts who get any traction also belong to this group in my experience. A CMU Professor just draws more eyes than one from The University of Minnesota.
The "boy genius" cliche in Silicon Valley journalism is flawed and sometimes unhelpful, but it's not because it's strictly limited to "the rich and affluent"? Not sure where you're (or the author) is getting that.
Vitalik wasn't some rich kid who went to Harvard and was groomed by VCs. He was gambled on because he had some interesting ideas.
The fact the media loves Mozart types also doesn't mean that their cliches are true or representative of the culture either. It just shows what the readers of Wired and pop-science want to hear.
Gerard used the subtle term “social position”. People might take that to be “affluence” but it isnt necessary so. For example, a technically promising white child from any californian public school would be in a vastly better social position (from SV media’s POV) than a rank and file googler.
It seems like lots of funders are looking for creative ideas to fund? Y Combinator is an obvious example but there are many others.
But it's true that it's competitive and you need a certain amount of education to even know you can apply and come up with a decent proposal. (And if you already have money, you don't need to look for more.)
> The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge.
Abstractly, I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think the part of Gerard's post that you quoted is making the point that you're countering.
Broadly speaking, a lot of discovery work comes from domain experts precisely because of the work it takes to become such an expert. My read on the phrase "actually knowing stuff" is that it refers not just to a solid understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of your field, but also a more general grasp of the field's history. This kind of contextual knowledge is extremely helpful when attempting new or experimental research because it gives you an idea of which areas of knowledge might contain some novel insight while also cluing you in to which approaches might help you arrive at that insight. I interpreted Gerard's critique of Buterin here not as one of insufficient academic clout, but of arrogance, a reification of great man theory [1] through a techno-libertarian lens that positions himself among a host of other so-called "great men" and frames every societal problem as solvable through whatever lens the Great Man might think is particularly interesting.
Gerard's critique of Buterin's approach to sharding (which goes into further detail here [2]) seems to back this interpretation up:
> Buterin blogs extensive essays full of great thoughts on how to reorganise the world, and how Ethereum will be the basis for this once they add amazing new functionalities that will only require solving P=NP.
> Remember that Buterin spent years working on a sharding plan for Ethereum that, had he done Intro to Theory of Computation, he might have realised was probably impossible.
Seems less like "Buterin is a fool for not Being An Academic" and more like "Buterin is arrogant enough to assume he can solve a really difficult problem without understanding why nobody's solved it yet."
> Seems less like "Buterin is a fool for not Being An Academic" and more like "Buterin is arrogant enough to assume he can solve a really difficult problem without understanding why nobody's solved it yet."
Whether or not Buterin knew that the problem was unsolved shouldn't influence his decision to attempt to solve it within the constraints of his research area. Vitalik is very smart and works for a research foundation who spends time on complex things that might pan out if they work on them.
Very smart people usually take the time to understand the historical context behind the problems they're attempting to solve, IMO. (Especially if solving that problem requires proof that P=NP.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Vitalik Buterin is indeed a smart guy with his heart in the right place, but every time he opens his mouth the nerd in me winces and prepares for impact. Even when cryptocurrency interested me, I found his talks to be weirdly insufferable and content-adverse. It's interesting to see more people share the opinion that his musings aren't really hard-hitting.
Do you have specific examples, preferably of something within the past 5 years? I think his writing and speeches are very well thought out and insightful. Often the criticisms people make of him are superficial and because he approaches topics from a very different perspective than what is traditional, but I'd be very happy if you can link to a specific blog or talk that you recall being insufferable.
Rather than being content-adverse, his writing and talks are actually very dense and informative.
Personally I've always enjoyed Vitalik's blog. It's definitely brought a new perspective on a lot of things and that's more than enough for me. If not technically impressive, or even "right", I take it these as what they are: personal ramblings.
Dude's not really trying to convince anyone, as far as I can tell, but more like sharing his thoughts. It's fine. I appreciate it.
First time reading this author. This critique of Vitalik being an elitist, sounds elitist to me. I didn’t have to look up nearly as many references, jargon, and philosophical terms reading Vitalik’s posts as I did for this critique of them. My impression is this guy is trying to sound smart by bashing someone who many believe is actually smart.
Balaji is is a double standard prick. He speaks about democratizing banking in the US while he supports totally backward culture and interference of religion in his home town India. He is such a prick he tweets them in the Indian language so he can keep misleading. I don't know what else he is up with the pseudonym.
It wasn't written by Vitalik. I don't think anyone praises the original Bitcoin paper because of the quality of its prose, but because it introduced the world to an incredibly innovative idea and did so in such a simple and straight forward way it left many people wondering what they never thought of such a thing before.
Buterin's writing is absolutely phenomenal. It is highly technical and yet accessible, and all-encompassing yet precise and detailed.
Buterin's best quality is in understanding complex topics and articulating that understanding. I attribute the quality of his writing to effort and not some inherent skill. Skill only takes you so far. Effort takes you most of the way there.
yeah, I'm certainly not questioning at any point that Buterin knows how Ethereum works ;-) in fact, the explanation of Ethereum mining in ''Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain'' is based on a Reddit comment where Buterin responded to me directly to correct my confusion.
I didn't have a lot of respect for David Girard before this, and this essay really made me certain: David Girard is not very sharp. I revisited a few of Vitalik's recent essays and in all honesty believe they're lucid[1] and content-rich[2] even when he strays outside his domain of specialization[3].
Girard seems like a mid-tier but highly-focused motivated reasoner[4] who is working on a specific brand of anti-tech journalism. Nothing to see here really, even if you dislike crypto and Vitalik's projects.
Did you actually read [3]? I think that contains lots of good examples of what Gerard describes as "bizarre conspiracy theory economics".
That article centers around a political map by Balaji, which presents this weird idea that the New York Times (and woke-ists) controls the US in a balance of three competing ideologies, the other two being crypto-anarchists and communists. Even if we ignore that the political compass is an obvious oversimplification, Balaji clearly doesn't even understand the political compass: the communists are presented as being authoritarian social centrists, why the NYT is presented as being just anarchist as the crypto-anarchists, despite the self-evident incorrectness of also saying that they control the US.
Buterin himself seems to understand that a lot of what Balaji is saying is, well, crazy, so a big part of that article is giving alternate arguments for his idea of network states so that people can still agree with Buterin, without agreeing with Balaji. But, while Buterin does present 4 critiques of Balaji, notably absent from those critiques is this bizarre map of the political landscape.
Does Buterin actually agree with Balaji's map? And even if we generously assume Buterin doesn't agree with Balaji on that, why even bring Balaji into this? The ideas Buterin actually does espouse didn't originate with Balaji--surely Buterin could have found a less schizoid starting point for his presentation.
As for your links [1] and [2]: sure, those are great, but Gerard is specifically talking about Buterin's philosophical writings. While I do agree with Gerard's point that some basic education could have prevented some of Buterin's bad technical ideas, I generally do think Buterin is extremely technically intelligent, and I don't see anything that indicates that Gerard would disagree.
Finally [4]: never, ever, is calling someone out for motivated reasoning a good argument. You're also guilty of motivated reasoning, as is every human that ever reasoned.
Showing my own hand here: I tend to disagree with Gerard on almost everything, but I'll at least give Gerard credit that my disagreements with him tend to be pretty nuanced. Buterin, on the other hand, I tend to agree with on technical points, which is most of his writing--but his philosophy tends to be pretty wacko, as Gerard points out.
Some people in my area point out the resemblance to Jack Ma.. the juxtaposition of cringey intellectual frontmanship and otherworldly wealth/bone structure.
>But I am deeply unconvinced any of the ideas in Buterin’s essays are worth anything — because they’re concocted without reference to anything that people who aren’t weird cryptocurrency anarchocapitalists want.
Well, in his stablecoin blog post he actively argues for negative interest rates in case the index the stablecoin replicates grows faste, you don't have to be a genius to understand negative interest rates, you have to abandon the idea of being a capitalist forever for that. The other factor is that he talks about harberger taxes which are basically just a different way of implementing X(including land) value taxes where everyone assesses the value themselves.
When you consider these incredibly impactful changes it is hardly possible to see buterin as some "weird cryptoanarchist" because these two demands are nothing short of eliminating the dynastic land ownership system and ensuring permanent full employment while avoiding pointless recessions which are also just an dynastic artefact of holding money hostage. Having a higher salary with lower costs of living and not fearing
unemployment isn't something that just some elite wants, elites don't need these things.
Context note: David Gerard is the dude who tried to get Scott Alexander canceled. He fed a lot of dirt to that NYT reporter. Whether you think his crusade is legitimate is up to you, but I figure y'all might want to know who you're reading.
Plausible, though 2 ad hominems dont make an argument. I kind of put Scott and Vitalik in the same subbox of thought leadership. psychiatry being more generalist than technical. and. possibly no-one would write an essay likening cryptosystem architects to painters, to say naught of (building) architects.
"the dude" implies I actually personally did it, reached in and deleted his blog or whatever your claim is. "go google" is not much of a response when you made the ill-specified claim.
What was your specific claim? Note that I'm not the only one asking you.
And the important point, since you made it on this post: how does your claim relate in any way to Buterin?
I was called by Cade Metz well after Siskind pulled the blog - I didn't seek him out - which is why I'm asking how precisely I cancelled him.
(There were arguments for revealing his name in the NYT (mostly that it was already very public, entirely by Siskind's own hand, as directly linked to SSC) and arguments against it (mostly that the NYT is a different scale of publicising it).)
Direct question: do you know what this claim of me cancelling Siskind could mean, since OP doesn't seem able to answer? Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin. Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.
> Direct question: do you know what this claim of me cancelling Siskind could mean, since OP doesn't seem able to answer?
That I'm not sure on: I wasn't asking to accuse you of cancelling Siskind, I was asking to hear your description of the events. Given you have actual descriptions of events in a chronology, I tend to believe your story on this one.
> Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin.
Well, nothing--it was an ad hominem attack on you by the poster. It's Hacker News: a lot of people here are capitalist to the point of sociopathy, and will defend any money making venture even if it means abandoning ethics, logic, evidence, and/or social acceptability. You lost the respect of most of Hacker News, but have you seen the guys these people respect?
> Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.
I don't get the feel that Siskind was just reasoning from first principles--that was some of what he did on SSC, but I do think he knew a lot as well (and, given he has a doctorate, there's at least a few people who agree on that point). If anything, I think what I got a lot of from SSC was the opposite: using knowledge to figure out what the first principles are.
As for there being a lot of these guys and a lot of words: I'm not sure why I should care about either of these criticisms.
I detest this worldview. New knowledge is formed through creative conjecture and criticism. The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge. What we should strive for is better explanations of reality, not a restriction on who can make those explanations.