No. He warned of the risk of a pandemic. The nuance of that is an important distinction, here.
Anybody who is confident what the world will look like in 5-10 years, is a soothsaying phony.
I mean, he has explicitly said he wants to turn Twitter into a WeChat clone, and has repeatedly stated admiration for the Chinese Communist Party.
Why will the average person jump through such hoops?
How many nostriches and bitcoiners are there on here from Los Angeles? Considering organizing a meet-up.
It’s pretty clear to me that CSW and Calvin Ayers are just bad people.
I think something even more pernicious can happen when you focus on saying things that please the most people. You can find yourself in what's referred to as "audience capture", where you will lie to yourself and others, because your main priority is to maintain your clout. Because it's addictive, and maybe even profitable.
Stick with the e-commerce use case. In person payments are one thing. Obviously, cash is an anonymous system, and that works fine for in-person retail payments. But go back to the diamond ring example. How do you safely buy something like that anonymously, without extreme risk of rugpulls in the form of non-delivery of goods or services?
I'm not sure I'm following the point of the hypothetical?
I worry that the era of constant, rolling, large scale grifts is upon us, and it’s a function of attention versus complexity, when our attention is increasingly at a premium. With a bunch of researchers around the world — irresponsibly in my opinion — racing towards artificial general intelligence, without the faintest clue of how we solve the alignment problem, I’m worried this problem gets parabolically worse.
I want to be more optimistic on this stuff. But the more I try to work it out in my head, the more worried I become that we’re up against a serious set of collective action problems that social trust has decayed too much, and geopolitical fractures have made impossible to address.
If I have one “doomerish” set of views, these are the closest to them.
I think peace comes from acceptance, gratitude and camaraderie. Durable positive change comes from trust-building, the pursuit of truth, and a healthy modesty for ones own capacities.
I mean, I work in an industry where I see fraudsters making off with people’s money all the time. Usually by pretending to be people who they aren’t. This results in the loss of billions of dollars from individuals, businesses and payment processors. The idea that they costs wouldn’t go up in a world where everyone presented themselves as anonymous or pseudo-anonymous to each other, strains credulity for me. And if fraud losses go up, then prices and effective transaction costs will, too.
Ladies and gentlemen, the global public square! Now with free speech or something. #[0]
Can we just set KYC/AML laws and regulations off to the side for a second, and really just focus on the implications of an economy in which most economic transactions are mostly anonymous. I'm just trying to focus in on what the potential implications within the private sphere are here, and considering how the increased risk trade offs would actually have very undesirable economic costs, due to extremely high transactional loss rates. And then trying to understand why anyone would believe that an ethical position around privacy would prevail in the face of these negative economic incentives.
The fact you are admitting you don't have an answer in the first sentence, suggests to me that your vision of the likely future may not be as cleverly thought through as you might have first thought.
I mean, some thing are easy! But some things are genuinely incredibly complicated, and that complexity is irreducible. We can sometimes use perturbative approaches to approximate those systems to some reasonable margin of error, in order to derive useful predictions using simpler, abstract models. But only to a point.