Bitcoin Tech Talk #371
Interesting Stuff
Goodhart’s Law and Stupid Games - This is an amazing long-read on a common pitfall of anything that scales past Dunbar’s Number. That is, Goodhart’s Law, which states that any metric that gets measured and incentivized soon becomes a useless measure. The article starts with the US News College rankings and how they’ve been mercilessly gamed by university presidents to rank their institutions higher, but the real insight was that people use these dumb metrics to fool themselves. Metrics end up being stand-ins for values and sadly, they end with unsatisfactory outcomes, even if you win some stupid prizes.
No Longer Woke - A progressive goes through all the reasons why she thinks the woke crowd has gone too far. She identifies a smugness and arrogance of woke progressives (for example, their ignoring of the dangers of transitioning young children) as something that’s turning off a lot of people and how it’s setting them up for losing. While it’s good to see someone starting to explore the truth, the thing she keeps missing is that most of the ills she ascribes to the attitudes of progressives, is really the result of unbridled fiat monetary expansion. You can afford to ignore the populace when you steal their savings to gaslight them.
Modern Art is a PsyOp - Fascinating story of how the CIA was a major funder and promoter of Abstract Expressionism, the kind of art that you see from Jackson Pollack. Why would the CIA get involved in something seemingly so irrelevant to national security? As you can read from the article, they wanted to counter the USSR’s accusation that the US was culturally bereft. As you might expect the money that poured in as a result of their psyop corrupted the art world and continues to today.
What I'm up to
Navigating Health Care - I talked to Andy Schoonover of CrowdHealth and Veronica Max of UltraPersonal about how we should approach health care. The main message was that we should rely less on the system and take more responsibility with more prevention than reacting to bad outcomes. We also talked about health insurance, drug companies and food, all of which affect our health care.
PGP and Cypherpunks - My talk with Adam Back, Phil Zimmerman and Paolo Arduino is up. We talked about PGP, the lessons of email and government oppression among other things. There was also a ceremony at the end to honor the original cypherpunks, particularly, Assange, Zimmerman and Back in this Lugano Plan B Forum panel.
El Salvador - My talk with Max and Stacy from Lugano Plan B Forum is up. Having spent the week here, it’s pretty obvious what they are saying is true. The unleashing of development here is really astounding. Roads are getting paved, buildings are being built, and most importantly, people here have a lot of hope for the future. I suspect that hope is an underestimated feature of prosperity.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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