Okay, read this, so here's a slightly better take: the article is brilliant and thoughtful and probing, as per usual.

And highly relevant to btc. It's worth asking why basically zero economists from the total population, and a negligible number from the populations you would most strongly suspect of "getting it" (e.g., the ones affiliated w/ mises.org) actually get bitcoin. The priesthood explanation offers a blanket explanation, but is there another one?

I agree w/ SA that priesthoods are generally good. Having been deep in the "alternate health" world I can confirm that it is mostly idiocy, and the arguments are mostly terrible, and the data confirms this when you dig into it with any sophistication. But also these views make surface-level sense, and in fact they can often be surface-level correct -- the issue is that real life is not at the surface level. You start adding in all of the special cases and weird circumstances and complexities of how people inhabit their environments and pretty soon your elegant populist theory is a jumbled mess.

So I worry constantly whether I am being really really dumb wrt btc. But I also have done the work and slogged through the mud and shit, so at least I know, in grotesque detail, why I think it's a Big Deal. I know why I believe what I believe at a deep level. But I still worry that no priesthood, even a rogue faction, champions it. Almost nobody's talking about it the right way.

As Feynman said, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. Which is concerning.

Anyway, thanks for posting the article, very worth reading and sitting with.

Scott Alexander is a god.

Corrected.

Glad you did this.

I asked about lows not bc I'm pessimistic, but bc I'm trying to help someone who has real budgeting requirements in their life who's thinking about putting some savings into btc.

The maxi idea that btc is for wealth preservation and also (somehow) that everyone should be fine getting their "preserved" wealth cut in half for years at a time is absurd to anyone who thinks about it for a second. Certainly it's absurd for people who want to use the damn thing to, like, live in the world.

Anyway, excited to see what the topside predictions look like!

I'm very glad to get this message -- as with @Undisciplined's point earlier, the idea that perhaps there is an overlay, where people know the people around them way less, and perhaps intergenerationally way less, but nonetheless have some sort of common cultural ties on another temporal/spatial scale, feels less apocalyptic.

Crazy to imagine -- wasn't a newscaster voted the "most trusted man in America" or something? Seems like I read that.

We are surely at that point already. I guess we'll see what the consequences are, and what structures / institutions / practices arise in response.

So we're united by our common loathing for The Other? Ugh. That's so bleak it's kind of funny.

I think these things are very closely related. It reminds me of the whole genre of "mixup" sitcoms, where one person thinks he's talking about X, and the other person thinks he's talking about Y, and hilarity ensues at the difference between those interpretations -- viewing X as Y and vice-versa.

References to certain local events (don't wanna dox myself) where the performers acted like the meaning of those events, and the context of the events, was X, when to me, the meaning is far away from X.

This sounds dumb in the abstract, I realize; but it's the kind of interpretive gulf that you're probably familiar with for anything that approaches politics. It's just that in this case, everything was so concrete, it's like being told a false story about something that happened in front of your eyes, and seeing other people agreeing with the story like it's consensus reality.

Appreciate the context.

Interesting to consider that having kids is, itself, one of the handful of anchors common to many people's experience -- something foundational and primal. The falloff in having children becomes, therefore, an additional cut line tethering us to each other.

Is there a way to know, with modest reliability, about when miners sell anything? Does anyone purport to?

It will be interesting to see what the reactions by artists -- and people who become artists -- wind up being. All art is a function of some inputs; when the inputs include AI art, and the context is a world full of AI art, what are the outputs?

hahaha

You've had an interesting afternoon.

Dust the 58k boys off, they're needed.

Do you generally think in terms of cycles, e.g., cycle high, then some pct of that for the low?

I find the halving-based cycles interesting, but only very coarsely useful. Much more interesting is trying to understand how the macro story has changed, and what the causal implications should be, but that's not usually on offer.

I hate it when they do that!

On another poll, presumably.

I appreciate the thoughtful analysis -- thanks for showing your thinking!