> And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy (albeit to a lesser degree). You still have to make choices and decide how to live, even when you live in one of the authoritarian regimes that form the majority of the history of human societies.
It's of course possible that Bitcoin had less than a 1/10000 chance of hitting $10,000, and we're just living in an extremely unlikely world. But given that it _did_ happen, it's probably fair to bet that it was possible at the time to give it better than 1/10000 odds.
LessWrong is all about the Bayesianism, which means being comfortable with probabilities, even though it means you can never be "sure".
> Confirmation bias. How many things were discussed on rationalist websites that people were sure were going to be yuge, petered out, and were forgotten? You can't claim victory for rationalists without factoring in the ratio of failed predictions.
If there are indeed more than 10,000 of these, then I agree it's selection bias to only look at the successful one. Do you think there were? Personally, I'm having trouble coming up with even a single equivalent case, though I'm sure there are at least a few.
> If there are indeed more than 10,000 of these, then I agree it's selection bias to only look at the successful one. Do you think there were? Personally, I'm having trouble coming up with even a single equivalent case, though I'm sure there are at least a few.
Isn't this basically every startup? If it grows up to become Google or Microsoft, you 10,000X your money. And then 10,000 of them don't.
The average person never gets the opportunity to be an early investor in startups. You could buy 10 bitcoins when they were $1. You couldn't buy Google stock until after they were successful.
I don't think the ratio of failed predictions is the correct basis for assessing the quality of the prediction, particularly not with something the predictor himself explicitly states is a low probability event. If I only give a handful of horse-racing tips but one of the long shots comes in leading to a high ROI, your prior for me just being lucky should still be high. Especially if none of the factors I've suggested which might make that horse more likely to succeed than predicted come to play, but it incidentally wins the race thanks to a massive pileup that takes out most of the other horses.
It's that second bit which really matters. Sure, if you had taken gwern's advice to mine a few BTC in 2009 and sold in late 2017 you would indeed have made the $10,000 per BTC mined hinted at. So it's easy to take that as confirmation of the quality of his reasoning.
But what gwern actually says is that BTC has a +ev on the assumption that it has up to a 0.1% chance of "eventually replacing a decent-sized fiat currency" and in order to do so, the value of an individual BTC would need to hit $10k. This replacement of "a decent-sized fiat currency" hasn't happened. The status of the prediction that BTC had a low but not trivially low chance of replacing "a decent sized" mainstream currency is indeterminate.
It's entirely plausible that when deciding whether or not mining was worth a bit of time and electricity gwern also weighed up the possibility that BTC would have great potential as a speculative asset due to an ideologically committed base who would want to hold it, public interest due to novelty and hype, and readily manipulable markets, but that's not in the post. This might even mean that he considered the situation that has come to pass as less likely than a scenario which hasn't. (Maybe he'll be along to tell us what he thought about that at the time!)
From the point of view of people who listened to gwern being richer than people who thought he was wrong, that might be an irrelevant detail. But ignoring the possibility the reasoning about the probability of x being systematically underestimated by markets might be entirely wrong because x occurred anyway is also a form of confirmation bias.
Why does it matter if it's dangerous if used incorrectly, if the majority of users use it correctly, and the overall effect is that fatalities go down?
I don't think the argument here is whether technology features can improve safety. The core of the argument is (and always has been) over misleading marketing and naming (suggestive "autopilot"), which exactly encourages the misuse of the feature. When used correctly, with alert driver it can clearly be beneficial. But when misused e.g. by this poor young person who plowed into a truck, this feature could be deadly.
This has a long way to go for true "autonomy" and until then such marketing should be avoided and examples of misuse (which youtube is full of) should be explicitly discouraged and if possible penalized. Tesla should be more explicit and pro-active about it. This is my only point really.
I was thinking about the Chinese boy who hit the truck parked on the service lane, not the guy who decapitated himself in Florida. But either way, both were tragic.
I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise that have user-friendly account recovery tools. Due to the plug-and-play architecture of blockchains, that sort of thing will work automatically without any need for organizations like Aragon to integrate with them.
Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.
A flagship Solidity product has already been pwned for $50 million dollars, leading to a hard fork of Etherium. This is not fake "~deep concern~", this is a real problem.
It was a badly designed app written by a couple of over-eager developers who didn't have any security plan in place. If you blamed the language every time a website got hacked, there wouldn't be any languages left.
No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy (albeit to a lesser degree). You still have to make choices and decide how to live, even when you live in one of the authoritarian regimes that form the majority of the history of human societies.