Honestly, I’m not sure it’s ever particularly useful to advance understanding. Is there, perhaps, an example you could give that would demonstrate the utility of black and white thinking as a good thing?

In Dawkins’ definition, yes.

It’s really crazy how hard it can be to not fall into all-or-nothing thinking. Even people who are philosophically trained, or have a general disposition towards uncertainty, can quickly lapse into all-or-nothing thinking when stress takes its toll, or emotions take over.

When it happens to me, as it does, and has recently, it really causes me to reflect on how much of my own mind I consciously control. I know, intellectually, that the answer is: very little.

You probably sell yourself short, here.

People do.

If you’re talking about “memes” in the way Richard Dawkins defines them, then yes, you are correct. But we both know that’s not what I’m talking about, here.

Yeah. But that’s not really the point. The point is what cultural valence they have, and what direction those cultural winds are blowing.

Of course, my fellow Canadian, Marshall McLuhan would agree with you there. 🤣

I would love more intellectual conversations on bitcoin, that don’t shy away from uncomfortable and challenging topics. I wish there were more intellectually honest debates around everything!

No. But it’s mostly bad. Group-affinity is driven by proximity and context. Not by simple dispassionate reasoning.

Yeah. Absolutely. But when you really look memes today … the vast majority of them are essentially delineating an in-group from out-group. Even bitcoin memes! There’s generally an enemy that’s being signaled out, and mocked.

It’s not just “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” anymore. To take a phrase from the culture war, memes in this sense, have become yes … virtue signals.

👌

Unpopular opinion: internet memes are actually a force for bad in the world. They are basically just digital versions of the kinds of group signaling mechanisms that breed tribalism and dangerous in-group/out-group behaviors.

Well, I'd argue with a straight face that money is information, and modalities that provide a substrate for that information must, by definition, be more important in terms of their historical purchase. But you're obviously free to disagree.

Need it standardized and available in every phone.

I don’t mean it literally like that. I’m talking politically and culturally, in the abstract.

I don't think Bitcoin is the greatest paradigm shift in history. I mean, the amount of things you need to take for granted to say that is ... a lot. Like, I don't think Bitcoin is more important than the internet itself, in terms of human history.

To the extent that bitcoiners may have low time preference behaviors, the first thing one might ask, is how do we eliminate selection bias? I'd bet a lot of bitcoin that there's a lot of selection bias at play, in the apparently low time preference dispositions we see in the community. Just like the fact that libertarian and anarchist politics are over-represented, stems from a selection effect.

I don’t think the average person’s time preference is going to change that much once they learn about bitcoin. This is one thing I really don’t get. I truly believe time preference behavior is driven by the mesocorticolimbic system in our brains, which is largely sub-cognitive.

I think notions people have that the valence of their cognitive functioning over their reward function is a purely romantic notion.

If people think otherwise, then might I suggest people explain to me what all the twelve step programs are all about.

I just assume bitcoin is going to continue to grow and continue to become more important, and it may very well cross a threshold of becoming the most important financial asset in the world, for all the reasons people make about it. But I still think that, even if hyperbitcoinization doesn’t happen — and I think there’s real reasons to believe it may not — that doesn’t mean bitcoin will fail. Or won’t be a force to be reckoned with in the future.

I think there’s a lot of people in this conversation, who would become incredibly dejected and depressed if they came to doubt that was a certain outcome. I think that’s the kind of thing that breeds political radicalism, and has the potential to become disconnected from reality in dangerous ways. To those people, and the people they influence.