Harris said he found it quite intimidating how smart everybody seems in the community. on the one hand, yay, go us, we are super smart 🤓
but on the other, I think the intimation is more a function of behaviour than intellgience. and it's indirectly a filter for humility.
2/n
there is simply no tolerance whatsoever for bullshit, and, simultaneously, the threshold for accepting something is that you understand it 100%, which means it needs to be perfectly explained to you also.
3/n
so there is likewise no tolerance for obfuscation, even if the content is essentially correct.
you can be as smart or as stupid as you like but this pressure forces you to admit you are only an expert in whatever tiny area you are actually an expert, if you are one at all.
and even then, you will get relentless shit so everybody is extra sure.
5/n
I think this is why the community is often referred to as "toxic" by people who might be well-intentioned going in and alarmed and unsettled on the way out.
as @dergigi has said multiple times (and I think has a tattoo now too?) this is a feature, not a bug.
6/n
compare this to whatever environment these people came from and you quickly realize theirs is far, far more toxic in terms of what really matters.
especially if they are academics, they will only ever have been told how great they are and may never have been disagreed with.
7/n
as Saif said when *I* was on his show, over and above any petty disagreements they may coincidentally have, the thing they absolutely agree on and will never argue about is that everybody needs more funding.
very simple: we only care about truth. we don't care about feelings or politics. in fact, we are trying to replace politics with truth.
they necessarily care about politics because that's how they get more funding. truth is an afterthought.
9/n
so which is more toxic? an environment in which everybody makes absolutely sure not to offend anybody else lest their access to the violence-backed money printer be turned off? ...
10/n
... or one in which I say Saif makes asinine arguments rather than following logic and he accuses me of thinkboi gymnastics and rhetorical flourishes to avoid the real issue (this happened the other week and I've already forgotten about what) ...
11/n
... and rather than agitating for the other to get fired or to lose funding, we like each other more because i) we've made it very clear how much we care about the truth, and, ii) the sparring is fun anyway and it's not like the other side can put up a good fight.
12/n
so what will we and what won't we fight about?
also very simple: we fight about the truth so we don't have to fight about anything else.
I'd be very, very, VERY careful dabbling in the "#Bitcoin is ESG" narrative and trigger-happily nailing your colors to the mast.
this narrative is absolutely true and will win out in the long run, but because bitcoin supports freedom, not because it supports audits 🙄
if you think capital allocators are going to give the slightest shit about greenwashing in the midst of a stagflationary bond market collapse, then I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you have been hoodwunk by ur-racoons, to happily borrow an @EpsilonTheory-ism.
"ESG" box-ticking is peak Cantillon.
in fact, it's Lenz's Law of Capitalism. it's not the horse you want to back, even from the most cynically capital markets-minded perspective you can imagine, *provided* you are sufficiently long-termist in outlook.
probably no group in human history has done more damage to the environment than "environmentalists".
the ultimate source of the climate being a political issue is that nuclear power is politically impossible.
we are in the early innings of the exact same thing with #bitcoin 🧵
the greenest future you can hope for with any shred of realism is predominantly nuclear and hydro, with pockets of wind, solar, and natural gas, all enormously aided by bitcoin mining reducing their cost of capital.
all else is virtue signaling bullshit, power-grabbing, or both.
and even in this greenest of greeny green greeneroo outcomes - assuming you want this, Mr Environmentalist - oil is sticking around for a long, long time to support the transition.
if you disagree, you hate humanity, are playing politics, or both:
I guarantee nobody will have heard this before or thought about it this way so I'm really excited, but it is important he tells it himself rather than me telling it for him.
the only problem is he is on a submarine and I don't know where it is or when it's coming back.
2/3
and in fact, nobody does. best guess is september or october ish, but there's really no way to know.
so when @MartyBent says "imminent", that's still true if your time preference is super low.
not that I speak for everybody or anything (except following thinkboi decimation EGMs) but my humble suggestion would be that the memes need to get more serious and more aggressive.
don't defend #bitcoin; make *them* defend literally anything else.
even aside from the marginal benefits to intermittent renewables, methane flaring, etc, the truly remarkable thing is that so many allegedly serious people have been conditioned to think that energy consumption is bad.
energy consumption is synonymous with human flourishing.
increased energy consumption per capita per year is correlated with (and obviously causally linked to) improvements in extreme poverty, child mortality, undernourishment, sanitation, education, and life expectancy.
i.e. not "GDP Growth" or other meaningless number-go-up, "let's measure the flow rather than the flow-over-the-stock because we don't know what a return is or how capital works" metrics ...
... that is, every conceivable non-economic measure of the avoidance of human suffering.
I'm gonna break it down for y'all coz I'm feeling charitable this beautiful morning and also coz I stumbled upon the perfect explanatory concept:
the use case this refers to does not need to be "economical" or "competitive" in terms of what you think those words mean.
1/4
it's a form of insurance. more specifically, it is buying a put option on excess generation for which there is no grid demand.
from your point of view, you are hedging against the price going to zero by buying upfront the ability to still sell and shorting the differential.
2/4