Comment by codyb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codyb | Hacker News Reader

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The idea we shouldn't trust an entire field of experts who've spent their lives studying something because all the answers aren't known perfectly would lead to huge subsets of people who don't believe in things like climate change or evolution...

Oh wait.

Why should the average person need to understand the jargon of an economics expert? The average person should be able to buy bread and shelter. Isn't that the understanding they need?

Just like, why should the average person need to understand the different types of ozone depleting gasses? The average person should be able to breathe clean air and live in a city/state/nation that's not literally being swallowed by the ocean.

Does the average person need to understand what a software engineer means when they talk about concurrent asynchronous calls kept in check by a byzantine generals algorithm to ensure consistency across nodes?

I'm sure if the average person spent 100 hours studying economics they could grasp the basic concepts quite firmly.

But, quite literally, the entire point of having experts in a society due to the advent of specialization stemming from the agricultural revolution is so that people can do and learn different things and the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole.

If you want to learn more about economics than go do it, but attacking an entire field because you can't be bothered to learn its particular jargon seems shortsighted at best.

No one's saying "trust everything blindly", either.

The idea that we should trust entire fields of experts just because they are the experts is flawed.

Many of the "basic concepts" of economics are not empirically proven. This is not newtonian physics; it is a vague social science.

The economist will tell you that "the jury is still out on QE". http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/03/ec...

Many of the fed workers who did the QE admit that it was largely ineffectual other than inflating bank profits. https://www.wsj.com/articles/qe-the-greatest-backdoor-bailou...

Money printing has occurred up until now because there was no viable alternative to government issued fiat currency. Satoshi Nakamoto changed that.

Well... I'd say we've got a long ways to go before an extremely volatile transaction rate limited currency which can't be exchanged at the vast majority of businesses primarily measured based on it's exchange rate with the USD is a viable alternative to the USD ;-). Especially when it's currently consuming about a power plants output worth of electricity to perform primarily meaningless hash calculations in a world where many people don't even have electricity and electricity use is killing our planet.

Things like power outages making it impossible to perform transactions (although for some people that'd be true with credit cards) is another big issue.

Not that there's not a lot of neat stuff to the block chain and crypto currencies, and I think ethereum is really neat. I'm not anti cryptocurrency, but I'd say it remains to be seen if it's a viable alternative to fiat currencies.

A bit off-topic perhaps, but you misunderstand the purpose of mining (hash calculations). They are not meaningless by any measure. Calculating hashes is required for the network to prevent double-spends. There is no other known technology that can do the same thing in a distributed network. This property of the network (it being distributed), along with the basic functionality of a currency has obviously been valued by the market. This means that there are people out there who gain from using it. This means that calculating hashes is valuable and has utility for people. The way that utility is implemented is just a technical design question.

If your statement was correct, one could easily extend it and say that Internet is consuming a whole lot of power for the meaningless purpose of powering the switches and routers that make up the backbone of the network. That all that energy goes to waste to have some machines standing somewhere in a datacenter that noone sees.

Obviously, those machines transform the energy into practical utility, and so do ASICs calculating Bitcoin hashes.

Yes well if I were to put my response in a more politically correct manner, it would be something like: a statement "It's generally understood by technology experts that SSLv1 is insecure for most purposes and should be avoided" - that's one thing, with it's own level of certainty. When someone is saying "it's understood by economy experts that inflation of 2% is best for the economy" - there is an order of magnitude less certainty in that statement, because the whole field is just one giant experiment, where they make up things as they go, while having little to no real means of critically measuring their results. I don't think that economy experts are necessarily doing a poor job, it's just that the field itself is much more uncertain. And since we are discussing their performance here, it's only fair that this would come up.

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