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Fake Books

lcamtuf.substack.com

271–280 of 371 posts

Re: Fake Books

#271

I would like to mention the concept of "Soulbound Tokens" as a way of attacking this problem. This is the subject of a paper this year by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), E. Glen Weyl (economist/researcher at Microsoft Research) and Puja Ohlhaver. Here's the abstract: """ Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust. Yet many core ec…

I honestly can’t tell if this abstract is also GPT-3 generated.

Which part would you like to be elaborated?

Re: Fake Books

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Value ... grounds out in human desires You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. Interesting historical note is…

'Intrinsic value' is an oxymoron. 'Value' is a social construct.

The conclusion I came to is that "intrinsic value" is fundamentally an extroverted (object-oriented) rather than introverted (subject-oriented) concept, to use Jungian terminology. In other words, the subject projects their psychological evaluation "into" the object. The path to reconciling the two usages of language is to scope the subject, e.g.:

- to human beings (subject), food (object) has "intrinsic" value

- to Americans, US dollars have "intrinsic" value

- to Redditors, karma has "intrinsic" value

etc

Interesting aside -- this is also how falling in love works (overvaluation of the object via the subject's projection of value).

Re: Fake Books

#273
post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

> observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument.

Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0 (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).

Re: Fake Books

#274
post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

> It is completely possible to demolish entire massive argument edifices in 10-20 of the correct words, and the fact that the "other side" has deployed literally hundreds of thousands of words does not make them right if the foundation is rotten.

See also the "Gish gallop" [1], a strategy that relies on spewing out a huge number of specious arguments and half-truths that are each individually time-consuming to refute, and to which the correct response is usually just to refuse to engage with the bullshit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Re: Fake Books

#275
post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

[deleted]

Re: Fake Books

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Value ... grounds out in human desires You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. Interesting historical note is…

> You wouldn't believe how rare it is for me to meet someone who agrees with this. I'm in leadership at a web3 company and I need to reiterate this point over and over again. NFTs don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. ERC20s don't have intrinsic value OR arbitrary value. If it doesn't tie back into user psychology, it's not worth anything. I came to a similar conclusion: The sole criterion for the viability…

> USD is accepted worldwide, even though its based on less than even a shitcoin

The full faith and credit of the the United States government is pretty solid.

> and 90% of it doesn't physically exist according to the Fed themselves.

That's how debt works

Re: Fake Books

#277
post #46

I think there’s a good chance it was ghost written by a content farm for someone who wanted to publish a book in a popular category to make a quick buck. I recently learned that this is a soft-scam technique advocated for by a couple of guys called the Mikkelson Twins. They say you can make money by publishing audiobooks on audible by finding a popular topic on audible, then hiring a ghost writing service to write yo…

> Except what the Mikkelson Twins actually make money on is selling you on a “money making course” where they tell you to do the above. So there’s all kinds of people trying to follow this method out there, it seems. How do people still become wealthy selling "money making courses", when enough people have created "money making courses" that they are, themselves, a commodity?

Just send me $49.99 and I'll teach you my fool-proof method for how to steal $49.99 from an unwitting dupe.

Re: Fake Books

#278
post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

> observing that my kid's doodles are scarce but not valuable is not a cute tweet; it is a complete and utter demolishing of the argument. Scarcity is not quantity. Its the relationship between supply and demand. In your scenario, supply (1 kid doodling) meets demand (1 person wants them), so the value doesnt move from 0 (which is how much you would pay for the doodles).

[deleted]

Re: Fake Books

#279
post #223

One of the things that has kept me out of the cryptocurrency space is that when their advocates discuss value, they speak in pure nonsense. A big part of that problem is that value is very difficult to discuss. On the one hand you have the classic goldbug that insists that gold has "intrinsic value", which is some sort of platonic ideal thing that gold simply ambiently has and defies any attempt to nail down what it…

The value of something is simply what other people are willing to pay for it.

You're conflating price and value. I'm going to repost a comment I made a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857769

> It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. ...

> When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.

> Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.

> It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.

I'd expand that you actually have to define what value means to you, relative to the context in which the discussion is taking place. You'll likely find yourself considering value from different perspectives in different situations; I find myself doing so.

Re: Fake Books

#280
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...

The original Rambo was actually anti-war. Did you even watch it?

Everyone should read the book (First Blood by David Morrell). I haven't watched the movies, since in my mind Stallone is type-cast as someone who doesn't seem smart enough to play Rambo. But my recollection from 30+ years ago is that the book is an excellent page-turner and might be the originator of the thriller genre. Also, spoiler alert Rambo dies at the end of the book.
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