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Comment by zelag | Hacker News Reader

People like Ari Juels, Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin aren't intelligent to you?

Vitalik's the only person in the entire crypto space that gives me pause about my belief crypto is 90% a mixture of useless and fraudulent. He's clearly much more intelligent than me and much more thoughtful, and has come to the opposite conclusions about the topic.

I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.

Smart as he is, Vitalik also has a massive financial interest in the conclusions he's reached being the correct one, which can lead to all sorts of biases.

Same thoughts but also Sam Bankman-Fried, although his is better understood as likely “billion $ grifting is worth it if it’s used to benefit humankind more than it harms”

I'm pretty bearish on crypto long term, but Vitalik is one of the few crypto people who has actually thought critically about crypto. Most people who try to defend crypto struggle to answer the fourth or fifth why when pressured (if you use the five why philosophy for example).

The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.

Maybe how you square it is "if a really smart person disagrees with me, might I possibly be wrong?"

Lucrative opportunities attract frauds. The dot com boom attracted frauds, was the internet a big scam? Literally every technological development in history that was potentially very lucrative attracted swathes of con men. For every stock worth purchasing there are a dozen garbage ones. For every innovative product you can buy online there are dozens of cheap worthless pieces of junk. The fact that idiots and scumbags are attracted to crypto only means there's money to be made, it says nothing about the actual utility of the technology.

I believe there are a few intelligent people who have seen the opportunity to make money off the morons :) you know, someone has to sell the pickaxes :)

I know who Guido van Rossum is. I have no idea who those three are.

Just to be clear, there's very little you (or any readers) ought to conclude from the fact that you know who Guido van Rossum is but are unaware of those other people.

Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment, so I'm inclined to trust a known factor over three unknown ones. And he's known for good reason. Reputation is a thing. I figure I'm not alone.

There's much better arguments for/against crypto than appeals to authority. Consequently, you then cited an appeal to majority to defend your appeal to authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Granted, the crypto debate on HN is pretty well hashed & Guido's tweet doesn't add anything to the discussion besides making clear where he stands on the issue

I don't care about logical fallacies in this case because the world doesn't work in a purely logical way. If programming was purely logical, it wouldn't be so fad-driven, for instance. And reputation ends up being one of the best ways to filter out useless noise in basically every useful discovery system we programmers have come up with.

> Just to be clear, I have no idea who those people are or what their accomplishments are, but I do know and trust Guido's 1) intellect, and 2) judgment

This is a classic example of the Halo Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect).

I trust his intellect and judgment for Python, and that's it. I don't trust him for programming in general, for example, let alone a completely different arena.

People are conflating intelligence with wisdom here. Both Gavin and Vitalik are clearly extremely intelligent but have shown a lack of wisdom. A lot of us technology types are like that.

I don't know the first two. Vitalik intelligent? He used to believe, and maybe still believes, that you could do quantum computing by simulating a quantum computer on a conventional computer. In fact, he even founded a start-up if I recall correctly, based around this bizarre idea.

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