Bitcoin Tech Talk #502
Interesting Stuff
Library Card Fallacy - Freddie deBoer argues that LLMs are not the end of college or learning as many proponents like to believe. The title is a very useful way to describe that line of thinking: the idea that access is what’s missing. As he points out, we’ve had libraries for a long time and that hasn’t produced tons of geniuses. As with all things education, the real value isn’t the information, tooling, or even opportunity. The real bottleneck is grit and fortitude to suffer through the hard work of actually learning stuff that’s difficult and won’t give itself up easily. People need more than access to do useful, difficult things like deadlines, peer pressure and inspiration, most of which require other people.
Time Preference Violations - John Carter flips the famous marshmallow test on its head and argues that the current generation’s high time preference is not due to their lack of character, but the institutional promise breaking. Governments, central banks, and corporations have been telling citizens to wait, sacrifice, and trust the system for decades while systematically extracting value from their patience, so it’s no wonder generations after Boomers simply act in a high time preference manner. There are two sides to the Marshmallow test and there’s plenty of blame to go around for the lack of low time preference behavior today.
You Can't Build - Christopher Sandbatch writes about the deep moats of the current corporatocracy. The motivating question of the article is what it would take to build a big company from scratch in almost any industry in America today. He goes through banking, food, manufacturing and even software and concludes that it’s pretty much impossible to build anything without many tens of millions of dollars, largely due to regulation. He brings the receipts and shows how few banking charters have been issued in the last 15 years, for example. The implication of the article is that we live much closer to being a communist/socialist state than most believe.
Before Originalism - Grant Starrett traces how constitutional interpretation worked before originalism became a movement, revealing that the Founders assumed their words would be read plainly, not decoded through evolving judicial philosophies. The article argues that the need for originalism as a doctrine only arose because progressive jurists had already corrupted interpretation so thoroughly that returning to normal required a name. Unfortunately, this has meant that conservatives are not able to stand on principles that are higher, like Natural Law and Liberty, which has defanged much of their argumentation to interpretive squabbles.
Tabula Rasa - FutureDad dismantles the blank-slate theory of human nature that underpins most modern education and social policy, arguing that children are born with innate dispositions that parents must work with rather than override. Rousseau's idea that children are naturally perfect and only corrupted by society has produced a generation of parents afraid to discipline, structure, or direct their children. Original sin isn't popular in polite company, but it produces better parents than original innocence.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Way - I was on this show talking a bunch about quantum computing in general. It’s unfortunate, but QC seems to be a vector for grifting these days, and not just in the Bitcoin space. As I’ve said before, once you show me a quantum computer that can factor 6 using Shor’s algorithm without precomputed circuits, I’ll start listening.
BTC Prague - I’ll be at this conference June 11-13.
Origin Seoul - I’ll be in Seoul July 18th to be at this meetup. Stay tuned for the link.
Nostr Note of the Week
