Five Levels of Hype
johannesklingebiel.de
johannesklingebiel.de
Still, the trend seems to be: 1. New technology, over promises 2. Marketing latches onto the overpromise and bolsters it, regardless of lack of research 3. Companies built around the technology fail, until a few find the niche the technology fits into.
Makes you wonder how much money is wasted on just trying to capitalize on new tech. The last company I worked for wasted loads chasing the latest and greatest.
[1]: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767/understanding-g...
I’m somebody that spends a good deal of time thinking deeply on cryptocurrencies and the implications to society. I believe they a positive, revolutionary step in the right direction of human liberty. And I’ll gladly acknowledge that it’s still speculative until it’s not.
But crypto, like any other movement, attracts total scumbags. It’s unfortunate because people who speak negatively only serve to undermine their group - whether it’s crypto or a social cause group etc. and often they, themselves, are the insecure ignorant one that don’t even deeply understand what they’re fighting for.
And the comment’s wrong too… the scumbags probably want to cash their gains out to traditional currencies, they’re least likely to be in it as technology true believers.
Nobody is taking about infatuation except you.
Obviously the comment is talking about the incentive for people to try to drive the value of their holdings up.
The scumbags are the ones who do this dishonestly.
> And the comment’s wrong too… the scumbags probably want to cash their gains out to traditional currencies, they’re least likely to be in it as technology true believers.
No. Anyone can be a scumbag. It has nothing to do with being in it for a quick buck or being a true believer or not. It’s simply about what methods one is willing to use.
So yes, Hodlers, and crypto-utopians can be scumbags too.
Exactly this. There are scumbags in every movement, but crypto has structural incentives for scumbaggery that make it distinct.
I thought the writing and editing were excellent and well thought out. Can you give a specific example of when a logical fallacy was employed in the video?
> In terms of improvment over Bitcoin, Ethereum has many. It's not hard. Bitcoin sucks. Ethereum solves none of them and introduce a whole new suite of problems driven by technofetishistic egotism of assuming that programmers are uniquely suited to solve society's problem.
It's nice prose but for me that part was really mostly appeal to emotions/ridicule and association/composition fallacies. To clarify the latter: scams and ridiculous marketing are a problem, but unfortunately that's not enough to make a logical point. Their proportion neither.
Again there are good points, but it's weirdly positioned. For me it's a rant, but instead it's presented as a calm scientific/neutral content which I don't find very honest (and quite ironic given the subject). But I'm not a native english speaker, so maybe it's just me misinterpreting the tone.
And ridicule is part of the point of text (not subtext) of the essay. Dan is making an emotional argument as much as he's making a logical one, because a lot of people will hear the emotional one where the logical one would just bounce off. Making something harmful actually seem uncool is a valid tactic, IMO.
Like, calling out Vitalik as a butthurt Warlock main is an attempt to make his origin story around the EVM seem to have a pathetic origin. Instead of applying himself to getting better at the new warlock meta, he went off and created a thing that has enabled a lot of real economic harm.
And pointing out the connection to Peter Thiel is as much about pointing out the involvement of big money in cryptocurrency as any specific character of Vitalik.
And it's not like Vitalik hasn't had a lot of chances to go "damn, the EVM is being used for a lot of harm. Maybe it wasn't worth it?"
Or maybe he has, and I (and Dan, because I think he'd have brought that up) have missed it?
He makes a good point - cryptocurrencies are a transfer of money from late adopters to early adopters. That's implicit in anything where "line goes up" but there is no revenue, no dividends, it's zero sum, and there's no exit.
The NFT thing seems to be on the way out. The NFT industry is Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the little guys. Axie Infinity recently crashed hard. Their Smooth Love Potion token, the one players grind for, is down to $0.01246 (was around $0.35 at peak). Their other token, Axie, is down to about half the peak. OpenSea seems to be stalling out with limited liquidity - too many items with high prices but no bids. People are frantically issuing new NFTs every day, but the available sucker supply seems to have dried up. It's hard to tell, because wash sales to pump the price are so easy in the NFT space. This whole thing is starting to look like Pet Rock 2.0.
Bitcoin and Etherium don't look so good right now. Both are around half of peak.
And really, I don't think this should be surprising for most people. This is exactly what happened to Email - a decentralized system that also just happens to be 90% controlled by 1 company because people much prefer the benefits of centralization to the "freedoms" of decentralization.
We call them children.
If you don't want to participate in this ponzi, then chop wood and carry water until you can't anymore and let your body return to the earth.
These applications are obviously problematic for 3 main reasons: it wastes enormous amounts of energy, the investment is often at the expense of less tech/financial savvy people, and most people don’t want it to be easier for criminals to conduct financial transactions.
IMO, it is not a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. It is a bunch of bad apples with a few good apples mixed in. Even if your motivations in working in this space are good (not simply for your own technical stimulation/amusement), you are trading off furthering/enabling real world harm now against optimistic speculation about future positive outcomes.
Crypto and DeFi have a lot of applications, especially in third world countries with bad financial systems.
This is obviously speculative investment.
(Even if your local currency is so horrendous it lost more value than Bitcoin this month, less volatile ways of hedging exist. Maybe you bought lower or changed cryptoassets so you've gained far more than BTC fell, but that's speculative investment and trading, not maintaining value)
That sure sounds like a useful product to me.
I think HN is so anti-crypto because so few people in the industry currently have your use-case.
Personally, I think what you're doing is exciting and helps put a value on the utility of paying to run these contracts.
Also the whole DeFi ecosystem allows you to use your tokenized assets in different ways, giving even more value to it.
I think many people have my use case, it's just that you can't really see it unless you live in a country with a very mismanaged central bank. Which in my opinion is becoming more and more common every day.
In any case, many "stablecoins" are ponzi schemes waiting to burst. I would much rather use a government backed currency to hold wealth against inflation than something like Tether.
You say that but imo having a currency that loses 50% it's value every year is worse than holding Tether. I don't trust Tether either and thats why I am holding DAI.
What are you talking about? Tether (and many "stablecoins" like it, including DAI) are entirely based around the idea that they are pegged to the US dollar. If USD has inflation or deflation, so does the coin. The "50%" figure is just completely made up, and you know it - inflation right now is pretty bad, but saying USD lost 50% of its value is just completely and utterly wrong.
>you can't buy USD digitally
...again, this is just blatantly untrue on every level. You can use almost any bank and they will convert it for you. Of course, they will take a fee, but that's much preferable than having to involve yourself with cryptocurrencies backed by cryptocurrencies backed by thin air. Tether is especially egregious with this, and I assume that's why you don't trust it - but from what I'm looking at, DAI is backed by USDC and ETH. MAYBE USDC is being honest with how much money they have, maybe they aren't, and ETH has some very obvious awful problems (e.g. the insane instability).
Overall, you haven't given me literally any reason to believe that holding the flavor-of-the-month stablecoin is in any way, shape, or form better than using actual US dollars.
> The "50%" figure is just completely made up, and you know it - inflation right now is pretty bad, but saying USD lost 50% of its value is just completely and utterly wrong.
I am talking about the Argentine Peso not the US dollar. And this just makes my point stronger. If you think 6% (USD inflation right now) is pretty bad just imagine holding a currency with >50% inflation every year.
> ...again, this is just blatantly untrue on every level. You can use almost any bank and they will convert it for you.
What are you talking about? Not every place has a free market like in the US.
In Argentina the banks only sell you at most 200USD dollars per month and only if you meet very specific requirements. And that's what capital controls mean. The banks are not allowed to sell foreign currencies.
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/07/19/w...
This allows me to hold currencies I wouldn't be able to buy because of capital controls by the government.
It sounds like it falls mostly under illegal transactions because you are using crypto for something that would otherwise be illegal (avoiding capital controls). Is it technically illegal? I don’t know. Is it ethically wrong? I guess not directly. However, I imagine there are also a lot of nefarious reasons somebody might want to avoid capital controls which crypto could also help facilitate.
And either way I don't think grouping "criminal transactions" with "stuff that's illegal in X country" is fair. At many points in history governments outlawed things that are very wrong (e.g. nazi germany) Just because someone doesn't want to succumb to corrupt institutions doesn't mean he/she is a bad guy.
Which makes buying crypto (or stablecoin) illegal online purchase.
Illegal doesn't always means wrong or immoral, depends on whether the laws are good or not.
I am buying an asset that is pegged to the USD dollar. That is not illegal neither is buying USD denominated bonds. In fact the goverment even has sold USD denominated bonds.
I say this because as I read it, I think how little hype I put into some of my work, so little that it may not even register on the base level of hype. The downplaying, even discounting successes or achievements I've attained with products and such.
Perhaps such things don't belong there as they're almost the opposite of hype, and yet I think it would help me see the full spectrum of promotion and help me navigate it more confidently.
I was also thinking about 'negativity', but more along the lines of: I'm missing the author saying what the legal gray areas are. I mean, in level 2 he already talks about "fraud". ;)
I'm not sure the ratings of all the examples are quite right; some of them I think might be over or underhyped more than the author proposes. This isn't too big of a deal to me though, as it seems more like misapplication of the scale rather than the scale itself.
The other thing I might suggest is that I'm not sure the 3-4-5 levels are all that distinct, especially 4 and 5.
Most importantly along these lines, my experience is that the "othering" level can happen well within the realm of 3 and 4. so although I agree that the "othering" phenomenon occurs, I don't see it as distinct from 3 and 4, it's just that the magnitude of it increases as you go up in hype. "Othering" seems like another component dimension, along with present vs future focus and empirical basis for claims.
So something like this with levels 3-5 compressed, or maybe just 4-5, makes a lot of sense to me, like it's something you could maybe actually apply in some kind of scientific study.
Jamie Metzel [1] makes a very rational case that the Lab Leak theory is very likely. Check out is interview with Lex. It's more than 4 hours long (!), but worth a listen.
I think sometimes one person says the former and another hears the latter and vice versa.
https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1462953203067240450
"COVID-19 made in lab" has been revised to the narrower "COVID is a bioweapon". The remainder of the original broader claim ("COVID arose from reckless but not malicious virological research") appears nowhere on the new chart.
Of course the new chart then puts "Iran Contra" in the same category as "UFOs"; so infographics are perhaps not the best arbiters of truth in general.
There is absolutely such a thing as a 'Deep State' and a 'New World Order'.
For god's sake, the 'Project for a New American Century' think-tank published their vision for America in the 21st century and broadly used the term 'Pax Americana' and indicated a massive military buildup, specifically in the Middle East. The signatories: Cheney, Jeb Bush, Wolfowizth, Andy Card - and a handful of others, would occupy the White House a few years later and use 'Terrorism' as an excuse to invade Iraq. And of course the 'New World Order' term came out of Bush Sr's speech.
That 2000's neocon movement fits exactly into 'New World Order' concerns, among others.
The 'Deep State' is absolutely real. The Pentagon, CIA and NSA have massive parts of their budgets detailed as 'Black Budgets' with limited Congressional oversight. There's ample evidence of problems there, that's not controversial. But even in the public bureaucracy, there are power centres that have ideological and political motivations. Sometimes organically developed, sometimes because a particular administration 'stacked' an agency.
While terms such as 'New World Order' and 'Deep State' are used as lightning rods for huge conspiracies and misinformation, there's considerable legitimacy about the issues more broadly.
It's actually a social problem, because such terms are picked up by the 'Alt Right' and others, they can hardly be used in polite conversation for fear of being misunderstood, but they are real problems.
Finally - 'COVID as a Bioweapon' shouldn't be in that category. It absolutely could have been developed as part of a bio-weapons program, that's not likely, but it's not conspiracy theory either.
Those advanced labs are absolutely being used for military purposes of some kinds, and given the information made available by Metzel and others, there's reason to consider (though not likely) that the research would have been part of a broader strategy of the CCP, which includes bioweapons research.
Bioweapons are real, they are developed and contemplated for use by various powers. That is not a conspiracy theory.
The chart illustrates a few other points which are politicized - moreover, I wouldn't agree at all with the layering/characterizations to begin with.
It's just not a good chart.
Here's one example, but the rabbit hole is deep.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90247335/a-timeline-of-george-so...
"No Man's Sky" is also an interesting case study.
While NMS did eventually get their act together, what they delivered on launch was very much not aligned with the expectations.
AI solutions are hyped because they are AI solutions, not because of what they actually deliver. It's not that it has no uses, but the promises do not match up with the reality. Often it's enough to solve an already previously solved problem with AI to generate hype around a product, even if the AI solution is strictly worse than what's already on the market.
I’m probably in some kind of bubble, but is that hyped? I mainly hear about it on HN, maybe a bunch of joking off-hand comments on Reddit. No one else seem to care about it at all. So, my bubble in Germany, or is it actually a thing in the USA?
They're always behind.
[0]: https://heise.de
[1]: https://spiegel.de/
[2]: https://www.faz.net/
I think it has also revolutionised the industrial/product design/small batch manufacturing processes.
Another huge potentiality is metal 3D printing. Many aerospace companies consider 3D printed parts the future of rocketry/aircrafts.
> Examples here are (again) the cryptocurrency scene which has been pretty good at othering critics as “no-coiners” or lately with the phrase “have fun staying poor”.
There is no proof that self driving cars will ever be able to navigate in e.g. European cities with narrow streets and without lines on them.
Full driving would mean driving autonomous everywhere and between a highway with visible signs and lines and streets without any markings is a big difference.
its more like "LEVEL 3: UTOPIAN FUTURES" because there is the potential for it but no current systems can handle difficult situations in streets without clear markings.
Anyway, this is a fairly low percentage of the total street network. Even in Prague the medieval center is smallish (and many of those streets are off-limits to regular car traffic).
That changes the goal posts in my opinion. The “self” part of “self-driving” no longer applies.
I don't see how "helping beacons" for robots are unfair but street lights are not.
Alternatively, say it has trouble orienting itself and slows down. That can be just as dangerous if cars behind you are going fast (e.g. a highway).
That’s an odd requirement. There is no proof Intel will ever put out a faster chip. There is in general no proof for any new technology because it hasn’t been built yet.
Narrow city streets aren’t vastly different than normal city streets, and people used to constantly say sure operating on highways is easy, show me self driving cars inside cities. I think people underestimate how long self driving cars are going to take, but they are already good enough to be useful which means companies will continually invest in being just a little bit better.
Looking back automatic transmissions took decades and where seriously flawed for most of that time, but just a little bit better every year and eventually they became the default. Cruse control and every other major innovation went through that same cycle, it’s just that once something is good enough to be the default it has been around so long nobody wakes up and says “wow it’s finally ready” because it’s been in use for a long time.
IMO, take everything people are generally expecting self driving to be in 2030 and it’s going to be ready in 2060 and the default by 2090.
There is no prototype for complete full driving, including very difficult situations - so I see that as level 3.
The first generation of cruse control didn’t shift gears making it useless for maintaining speed up and down steep hills but it provided the basic functionality on a reasonable subset of roads. It was still called cruse control. So, my point was a Tesla’s ability to drive from a limited set of parking spaces to another set of parking spaces by crossing public streets, covers the basic description of self driving. It’s a poor implementation but fulfills the basic premise of you not having to turn the steering wheel and ending up your destination even if it has a host of limitations. Doing that but in Paris is really more of the same.
(Edited the above several times.)
Here's Waymo, dealing with San Francisco streets.[2] Right now, Waymo is offering some rides in SF on a trial basis. Fully autonomous. No safety driver. 29 cameras, some radars, multiple LIDAR units. Full hemisphere coverage for each sensor.
It's getting steadily closer.
The hype around "full self driving" is exaggerated because today it's not even "limited self driving," let alone SOTA.
There are not only missing lines but it's often also used by many people which walk on it. A self driving system doesn't only have to figure out where the steet ends and walkways begins but also has to correctly detect many moving people and animals.
Additionally, there are frequently side streets or walkways which are not mapped in every map database...
Detecting inconspicuous transition between sidewalk and road is difficult, but if you haven't noticed, human drivers don't seem to care much about it either.
Hyperloop? Cybertruck? Fully self driving cars?
But I agree that this applies to things other than technology. Sometimes it seems like most political movements lie somewhere between levels 3 and 5.
> This categorization is intended to help people better understand which form of hype they‘re confronted with.
> I hope this categorization is helpful for you to understand which form of hype you‘re confronted with.
But to what end? No mention of what you can actually do with this information. I guess it's useful if you want to try to sound like the smartest person in the room when explaining it to average people who only dabble in keeping up with tech trends. They probably won't question you. The fact that the draft image went viral on Twitter is case in point.
I'd even venture to say that this probably deserves a flag.
Linux is an important part of my identity and I will happily watch how infidels struggle with their malware-ridden proprietary tech, knowing most of them can't be saved anyway.
Now it's deeply in the plateau of productivity.
Also, unrelated, but for some reason, while reading, I kept thinking that COVID-19 vaccines fit all these levels quite well.