100 sats \ 0 replies \ @ratiotile 8 Apr \ on: What are your plans for the Bitcoin halving countdown? bitcoin
This is the halving counter I'll be watching. Awesome work!
No, I think history is least useful to the extent we try to apply it to predict what will happen. I would even say anti-useful. So much suffering has sprung from the idea that the past should be used to predict what's going to happen in the future. It's anti-scientific, because we have no way of testing the claims until they happen. It tends to lead to totalitarianism, since it tricks intellectuals (and subsequently the people who read them, i.e. future leaders of governments) into thinking their study of history has provided them with the prescription to fix society for the rest of us.
I think it's very ingrained in us to want to think that the primary task of history should be prescriptive -- after all, if we're not using it to better the future, then what's the point? But if we're not being scientific about the claims we make, then whatever conclusions we come to from our false premises are likely to do us more harm than good. And we can't apply the scientific method to history the same way we can to the hard sciences, for example, because we can't control the variables and we can't make repeat-experiments. History is one long continuous event with an essentially infinite number of factors working together to bring it about. We should stop tempting ourselves into thinking we can predict it with certainty. I think we can even notice strains of totalitarian thought in ourselves when we start to dream about figuring out how to predict the future -- if you can predict the future, then it's just a matter of finding the answer to "what got us here?" and then once you convince yourself you've found that truth, you'll be tempted make demands from others in accordance with that truth, especially if you're a political leader.
So what's the point of history then?
I think it is much better to look at history in terms of what could happen or what has happened as opposed to what will. We should use it to falsify universal claims, claims of the type "X can never happen". If X has happened, then great! You disproved the claim. There are a lot of false claims out there that need disproving, and so thorough knowledge of history can get us closer not by finding the "one true take" on history that predicts the future, but rather through a process of elimination of disproving all the false claims that people make all the time. If we just started there, instead of wasting our time trying to predict the future, we'd make a lot more progress already.
You'd be surprised how many preconceived notions you have about history that need disproving, about what people were like, the ways in which they were different than us and surprisingly the same as us, etc. I remember once reading this diary entry by a 20-year old John Adams talking about the likely existence of aliens, and what that implied about their morals and faith. I didn't think people had the perceptual framework to think about aliens at the time. I was wrong. Not a very "important" thing to be wrong about I guess but still fascinating to me.
The book that completely changed my take on this, by the way, is The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper, who, it's worth mentioning here, was a friend of F.A Hayek. Absolutely fantastic defense of democracy, but begins by talking about how this view on being able to predict the future basically provided the intellectual basis for totalitarianism going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and then moving from there to Hegel and Marx.
He also wrote a whole book about the impossibility of predicting the future and how dangerous the idea was called The Poverty of Historicism, which is on my reading list.
Finally, another big reason for me personally to study history, is that it's just so interesting. There are better, more interesting stories that actually happened than most TV shows and movies that people can even make up. And studying history also gives you a view into essentially the best and worst people who lived and what they were like, those who rise to the top to influence events. And while there are definitely a lot of terrible people, there are a lot of absolutely amazing ones too who willingly gave everything with the goal of improving our lives (not knowing who "we" would be), despite no tangible benefit to themselves except maybe being remembered by posterity. To study the heritage we received from them can be an inspiring and liberating experience.
Sorry for the rant haha, didn't think I'd type this much but this is such an important question.
Final reasons history is useful put into much better words, from Will Durant's The Lessons of History:
The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo’s, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire’s, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.
If subjective utility is the fundamental insight of economics, doesn't that necessarily imply that the value of economics itself is subjective? In which case, we can't ever know if anything we "discover" in economics is of inherent value.
Seems to me that if subjective utility is the fundamental insight of economics then we can't know if anything in economics is non-subjectively useful? In which case, why study it?
Here's another great one by @lightcoin: How to protect your personal information from the next ecommerce attack. I particularly liked the "mailing address" section because there aren't many articles giving specific advice about how to do that
The fact that you read all of this is at least as impressive as the fact that you curated it. Thanks for this!
I tend to think technology generally expands the range of our capabilities rather than being good or evil in and of itself. Although not all technology is created equal in that regard.
Nuclear energy also comes with nuclear bombs.
The internet is a repository of information which can be used to advance and democratize our collective knowledge, but also to algorithmically manipulate us, spy on us, and waste our time. You can use it to give yourself a near-free better-than-college education or you can use it, like more people do, to trade in your mental health for quick dopamine hits.
"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."
Therefore, like the quote in @davidw's post, what should be done becomes more important than what could be done, in light of technology's increasing power to do more and more.
Regardless, I don't hold much stake in the deceleration crowd since it seems to me that what can be built, will be built, whatever regulations we may collectively put in place in one time/place now may not be honored in another time/place. It's very possible that calls for deceleration won't slow down the people we'd want it to anyway.
So I think your only real option is to determine what future you want to live in (as opposed to other competing visions), decide what you can do to implement technology in a way that supports that future, and then build it and fight for it. Otherwise, by merely asking everyone to "just stop", you're really only giving up control of how it gets built to someone else's idea of what it should be -- someone who may not listen to your call to "just stop", and who may have radically different views than you on what to build with it.
Here's an article that covers the points on the website more in depth: https://brandonlucas.net/articles/bitcoin/payjoin
90 sats \ 3 replies \ @ratiotile OP 1 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Payjoin for a Better Bitcoin Future bitcoin
Definitely ended up longer than I expected. This was one of those "write about it to learn about it" things for me, so every time I wrote something and didn't understand it enough it ended up getting longer.
110 sats \ 2 replies \ @ratiotile OP 1 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Payjoin for a Better Bitcoin Future bitcoin
Thanks! This post by you was actually an inspiration.
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