I was surprised by the claim about Stephen Diehl so I did a little googling. I don't think it's correct to say he "works on his own blockchain company". However, relatively recently he was working on smart contracts with a company called Adjoint.
He seems to have been interested in smart contracts but found the current implementations appalling. He wanted to use functional programming, particularly Haskell, to create something like a smart contract with better guarantees. But he is also careful to say that a smart contract doesn't imply a blockchain; he's talking more generally about code that executes over distributed databases.
This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.
That said, having examined blockchains in depth gives him more credibility, not less. And it would be a rather bizarre business model to continually decry blockchains if he was actually working on one.
I think it's fair to say the guy is not an indiscriminate hater. On the other hand, I also personally was already convinced that crypto "currencies" are terrible but IPFS and decentralized organizations might be cool, so I guess I like him more now.
I appreciate your reply. You dug into a claim I made and lay out your criticisms dispassionately, thanks. This is the kind of discourse I'd like to see more of.
> This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued.
Gives his passionate publishing against Blockchains I'd prefer he not hide this aspect of his past and actually talk about it. I guess I didn't know that he had moved on from Adjoint so that does add more credibility to his beliefs. But removing it from his website, removing it from LI, and neglecting to talk about it in public can certainly cast some doubt. I'm sympathetic to your view as well though.
Thank you for a response in the spirit of good discourse.
Anyway, I don't even know if he has moved on from Adjoint.
I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet have to be less public about their associations. Not sure what to think about it.
just to clarify this a little, stephen is/was (the status of adjoint is unclear but from what i can see it is now defunct) the CTO and co-founder of adjoint and he blocks anyone who raises this in public. https://twitter.com/billywhizz1970/status/146927786616050074...
he now seems to be a full-time anti-crypto propagandist. i'm not sure how he makes a living from that, but he seems to spend all day every day talking about it for at least the last 6 months and has gained a large following on twitter due to it. personally, i find it hard to trust anyone on either side of the debate who is this invested in their extreme position and unwilling to engage in any meaningful debate with anyone who critiques their positions.
here are some more links about adjoint for anyone interested in some more background.
As far as I know, there are no "crisis actors", in the sense of a conspiracy that pays protestors. At least not anywhere that has a functioning free press. While protests are sometimes organized by shady groups concealing their true funding, protestors tend to be actual people who believe they're gathering for some cause. Anybody paying protestors directly could be easily exposed.
There are lots of reasons why a startup might fail. Technical competence and disorganization are way, way down the list.
In my experience engineering at successful startups is often subpar. A successful startup engineer is above all productive, flexible, creative, and ships often. Their code gets the job done but probably wouldn't pass muster at a corporate job.
Management at startups is always flailing about. If things aren't working, then you should be taking random stabs at doing something else. If things are working, you probably have many more problems you did yesterday and you should feel under-resourced.
Your original post mentions something about laws being passed to outlaw your business model. That seems much more concerning.
But in any case, here's what I'd look for
* Is there a market for the thing we're doing?
* Is our iteration fast and are we learning from what we do?
* Do I trust the people I work with? Do they seem ethical?
Even if someone here wants to oppose the idea of an ethical business, consider that there are about 10,000 ways to get screwed over as a startup employee and you want the people in charge to resist doing those things to you.
I'm sure this person means well, and is very intelligent, but I stopped reading at the byline. I went and found what this person's expertise actually is.
Zvi Mowshowitz is a former professional Magic: The Gathering
player who also held a developer intern position at Wizards
of the Coast Magic R&D. He is known for having created
innovative and sometimes game-breaking decks TurboZvi and
My Fires.
Now, there is a balance between credentialism and amateurism. Amateurs can get a lot of things right. They can also get a lot of things wrong, and I at least don't have the meta-expertise to know which is which, especially when there's breaking news.
Do we need informed amateurs? Yes. But the crucial test is still whether they are accepted or promoted by the professionals. Zeynep Tufekci was vocalizing concerns that many professionals had, which is why her criticisms of health policy worked out.
In contrast, I have an extremely nerdy friend who has thinks it's her job to explain things to people, and thus writes deeply researched, well-footnoted blog posts about COVID, which are quite often wrong.
I for one can't tell what sort of person this is. But I also know that I'm not good at tagging facts with epistemic certainty. If I read a thing in a blog post it will probably stick, but I'll forget where I got that. So the simple solution it to not read it.
I think when it comes to writing explainers, it's 2021 and we have a wealth of resources and can wait for the professionals, including scientists who blog part time. I suggest that more people should be like me, and ignore the laypeople, indeed even most of the journalism, at least during the initial stages.
Especially when his conclusion gets into him predicting specific percent chances of things happening… I know he slapped a disclaimer around it, but that still feels more than a bit irresponsible. This really feels like a “wait for the experts” moment.
Edit: I don’t think the parent comment deserved to be flag killed. It’s entirely legitimate to point out that the author is not an epidemiologist or biologist or any other relevant -ist, and that early on you often need the domain experience to sift hype or panic from actual data. This is doubly true given the somewhat sensational tone here (“we’re f**ed”).
The author could be practicing a superforecasting exercise of coming up with probability estimates and grading them at the end of the year to calibrate, but this author doesn't show his work as to where these estimates come from.
For example:
> In hindsight the 70% prediction was somewhat overconfident, and a prediction of about 45% would have been better
That's a huge post-hoc adjustment, what factors were important? Just because a p70 event does not occur does not mean that it did not warrant a p70 at the time.
(On credentials, it looks to me like you ended up with his credentials specifically in the context of game design? He's also worked as a trader, which is some practice at turning unclear information coming out in real time into good concrete predictions.)
The whole article is a ln unreasonably self confident assemblance of either obvious/common sense points or facts grabbed together by other sources (most twitter) with some witty comments.
Not worth reading, except for the tweets embedded.
I think you should continue doing what works for you, but I would ask you to consider carefully recommending your remedy to others. The explainers you're mentioning kick down a lot of doors, whether their conclusions are correct or incorrect. They collect a lot of sourced information in one place, and widen the channels between everyone and information when they do blog. You said yourself this person's blog posts were well footnoted. That is an incredibly valuable, dying practice on the internet. Consider for a moment the people that are experts. Consider the grad student working elbow to elbow next to the doctorate researcher, who are not on a corporate or government payroll and do not have the resources and trappings that come with such positions. The infohazards you rightfully avoid as being wrong and repeating misinformation comes at a high cost to you, are worthless to these people. They're researchers. Their job is being wrong, many times, as quickly as possible, until they can finally be right about something. What they want is that wealth of information. And frankly, it's dwindling. We don't have the wealth of information in 2021 that we had in 2016. The rigor you'd see on an average wikipedia page is missing. News articles, including those quoting experts, allow their authors more leeway than ever to post their own opinions and interpret news, regardless the news source. It's becoming incredibly difficult to find all the facts in one place. I am absolutely not going to downplay the harm that misinformation does and I applaud you for taking intelligent steps to avoid spreading it. As an individual your policy, not reading something you're likely to repeat, is laudable. There's just room for both you and your explainer friend on this internet of ours, isn't there? And room for a diversity of approaches toward using our time online, I say. What's important is that we all care very much about the truth, and I am optimistic where that is concerned.
I like this. I do have large ambitions, swelling even as my daily achievements dwindle.
There could be a sort of vicious circle there. If you respond to short-term failure by putting more pressure on yourself to be outstanding, you end up being the sort of person who lives inside a dream of changing the world that they can never realize.
You are the kind of person the authors are talking about. You're getting way too much of your information from social media. You think the people who are not in your defined tribe take cartoonishly extreme positions and therefore they must be stopped at all costs.
Well, nowadays even a lot of the “conventional” news just repeats what was already reported in social media (usually in an even much worse state of condition), so I dunno if you’re going to escape this after quitting social media. (Also understand that you’re posting on HN which is another social media with its own bubble, and a lot of the takes people post here are either unimaginable or even heinous in various other parts of the Internet.)
The real issue is that, people began to understand that they have no reason to blindly receive pre-manufactured truth from above, so they began to manufacture their own instead. Your position of “these tribal people must be stopped at all costs” only accelerates this phenomenon, since that makes you more “part of the elite that wants to control the narrative”. The ultimate problem is not truth, it’s about trust: “why should we believe in those officials when they have ransacked our people?”
Millions of people are losing their ability to work. Can't be hired unless they have an irreversible medical procedure, can't be hired based on quotes for race, banned from social media, etc
Do you understand?
This is cartoonishly extreme and it is reality; I know multiple people living this experience today. Lost their job and can't get another one in the field of their expertise.
People are in their own bubbles and not listening to those outside of their class / social circles. IMO this is the impact of having half of the views being censored on social media.
>Can't be hired unless they have an irreversible medical procedure
How can something be extreme if it has been the status quo everywhere on the planet for 50 years? Something extreme is, by definition, unusual.
You can think compulsory vaccinations are wrong, but there were compulsory vaccinations ten years ago. It has always been difficult for antivaxxers to find work, particularly in healthcare or education.
> there were compulsory vaccinations ten years ago
That’s simply not true. People didn’t used to need to show papers to go inside McDonald’s in NYC.
Similarly, there are many many laws against discriminating based on medical status and they always had religious exemptions. Employers are ignoring that at the moment and there are hundreds to thousands of ongoing lawsuits atm.
And I know many people who were and are working in healthcare without vaccines. Some of whom have lost their ability to work only the past 6 months.
Anyway, it appears pretty unusual. There weren’t many of these issues 4-5 years ago. So clearly something extreme happened.
It frankly doesn’t matter if it’s an excuse no one has a say in a persons beliefs.
Theres also a lot more legal background than meets the eye. For instance, the sanctity of bodily autonomy falls under that umbrella. Meaning, you can object to literally anything going into your body for any reason, even if that’s just “I want the autonomy to do so — my body is my temple and I don’t want xxx inside as I want to be pure blood” literally what ever.
There’s a lot of legal precedent to that. Now that only means you need “reasonable accommodations” which could be testing, masks, w.e. Depending on what’s being challenged.
Historically, only ~1% objected to vaccines, but given the push a lot more people have done research and are concerned. I know many people who are now entirely anti-vaccine after reviewing data, others who are more bullish than ever. At the end of the day though...
We have never had a mandate barring people from exercise facilities, restaurants, etc based on vaccines. Even the historic attempts have had mixed results and the Supreme Court cases only covered minor fines ($5 in 1920 kinda deal).
This is far more extreme than a historic context. And for reference only schools have really mandated vaccines and they’re required by law to have exemptions, which courts have ruled can generally not be questioned all that thoroughly.
> It has always been difficult for antivaxxers to find work, particularly in healthcare or education.
This is incorrect.
In the U.S., there have never been any nationwide employment requirements for vaccination before the (currently blocked) Executive Order. During some pandemics, there were brief requirements at some local and municipal levels, but these were not nationwide or particularly widespread.
Mandatory vaccinations have existed for students, but not teachers, and certainly not healthcare workers. And certainly not workers in general.
Moreover the ease of getting exemptions meant that in some areas - like Marin County - more than 50% of students were not vaccinated against things like measles during the height of the anti-vaccine movement in the 2000-2015 period. However this was primarily limited to a few wealthy, coastal counties and was not a nationwide phenomena.
The fact of the matter is that there was never a big movement to not get vaccinations up until now either. Except for some hippie areas and perhaps some small religious groups like the Amish, vaccines were not a political thing or a contentious thing. Thus there was no point to even having big mandates.
But retconning this to just pretend that mandatory vaccines for employment were common in the past is incorrect. It's just not the case that the debate was already settled -- it was only settled for vaccines for school kids with a generous opt-out policy.
Not knowing what the parent wrote one question I'd have would be: At which point is it legitimate to hammer a political movement for things they have done?
As someone living in Germany, I know that the original Nazis deployed self-victimization as an strategy as well, claiming the other side has no legitimate interest to defend, but only critizises them because they dislike them. Then they set the Reichstag on fire, claimed it was the communists, declared an state of emergency and that was that.
I think we are too assuming that such a thing would be impossible in this day and age. It isn't.
I think it's evidence for "Billionaires Build", which is an apologia for billionaires. pg seems to think we are in a moment where billionaires don't have enough cultural respect.
I think pg is trying to show us that billionaires, at least the kind he funds, are just better people, or are at least more tenacious. The binder of credit cards is supposed to inspire admiration for their dedication (rather than horror).
And I think he's congratulating himself for being able to spot them. By extension, spotting billionaires (helpful, tenacious, people who love to build) and helping them - well, is he saying that he's a great person, squared?
Several of my ex employees have become millionaires. I'd rather not take credit for their hard work, and I can't take credit for spotting them either, they took every opportunity life threw at them, including working with and for me, learned what they could and moved on.
