Vitalik Buterin’s philosophical essays: they’re not good
davidgerard.co.uk
davidgerard.co.uk
I detest this worldview. New knowledge is formed through creative conjecture and criticism. The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge. What we should strive for is better explanations of reality, not a restriction on who can make those explanations.
Vitalik wasn't some rich kid who went to Harvard and was groomed by VCs. He was gambled on because he had some interesting ideas.
The fact the media loves Mozart types also doesn't mean that their cliches are true or representative of the culture either. It just shows what the readers of Wired and pop-science want to hear.
But it's true that it's competitive and you need a certain amount of education to even know you can apply and come up with a decent proposal. (And if you already have money, you don't need to look for more.)
Abstractly, I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think the part of Gerard's post that you quoted is making the point that you're countering.
Broadly speaking, a lot of discovery work comes from domain experts precisely because of the work it takes to become such an expert. My read on the phrase "actually knowing stuff" is that it refers not just to a solid understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of your field, but also a more general grasp of the field's history. This kind of contextual knowledge is extremely helpful when attempting new or experimental research because it gives you an idea of which areas of knowledge might contain some novel insight while also cluing you in to which approaches might help you arrive at that insight. I interpreted Gerard's critique of Buterin here not as one of insufficient academic clout, but of arrogance, a reification of great man theory [1] through a techno-libertarian lens that positions himself among a host of other so-called "great men" and frames every societal problem as solvable through whatever lens the Great Man might think is particularly interesting.
Gerard's critique of Buterin's approach to sharding (which goes into further detail here [2]) seems to back this interpretation up:
> Buterin blogs extensive essays full of great thoughts on how to reorganise the world, and how Ethereum will be the basis for this once they add amazing new functionalities that will only require solving P=NP.
> Remember that Buterin spent years working on a sharding plan for Ethereum that, had he done Intro to Theory of Computation, he might have realised was probably impossible.
Seems less like "Buterin is a fool for not Being An Academic" and more like "Buterin is arrogant enough to assume he can solve a really difficult problem without understanding why nobody's solved it yet."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory [2] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/04/04/if-you-want-...
Whether or not Buterin knew that the problem was unsolved shouldn't influence his decision to attempt to solve it within the constraints of his research area. Vitalik is very smart and works for a research foundation who spends time on complex things that might pan out if they work on them.
Rather than being content-adverse, his writing and talks are actually very dense and informative.
Dude's not really trying to convince anyone, as far as I can tell, but more like sharing his thoughts. It's fine. I appreciate it.
When did you read it?
Buterin's best quality is in understanding complex topics and articulating that understanding. I attribute the quality of his writing to effort and not some inherent skill. Skill only takes you so far. Effort takes you most of the way there.
You can find a collection of his articles here:
An example of one of his high-quality explanations, 'An Incomplete Guide to Rollups':
But the critique in the article which you're responding to, is about Buterin's writing on philosophical topics.
Girard seems like a mid-tier but highly-focused motivated reasoner[4] who is working on a specific brand of anti-tech journalism. Nothing to see here really, even if you dislike crypto and Vitalik's projects.
[1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/09/09/ens.html
[2]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html
[3]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html
That article centers around a political map by Balaji, which presents this weird idea that the New York Times (and woke-ists) controls the US in a balance of three competing ideologies, the other two being crypto-anarchists and communists. Even if we ignore that the political compass is an obvious oversimplification, Balaji clearly doesn't even understand the political compass: the communists are presented as being authoritarian social centrists, why the NYT is presented as being just anarchist as the crypto-anarchists, despite the self-evident incorrectness of also saying that they control the US.
Buterin himself seems to understand that a lot of what Balaji is saying is, well, crazy, so a big part of that article is giving alternate arguments for his idea of network states so that people can still agree with Buterin, without agreeing with Balaji. But, while Buterin does present 4 critiques of Balaji, notably absent from those critiques is this bizarre map of the political landscape.
Does Buterin actually agree with Balaji's map? And even if we generously assume Buterin doesn't agree with Balaji on that, why even bring Balaji into this? The ideas Buterin actually does espouse didn't originate with Balaji--surely Buterin could have found a less schizoid starting point for his presentation.
As for your links [1] and [2]: sure, those are great, but Gerard is specifically talking about Buterin's philosophical writings. While I do agree with Gerard's point that some basic education could have prevented some of Buterin's bad technical ideas, I generally do think Buterin is extremely technically intelligent, and I don't see anything that indicates that Gerard would disagree.
Finally [4]: never, ever, is calling someone out for motivated reasoning a good argument. You're also guilty of motivated reasoning, as is every human that ever reasoned.
Showing my own hand here: I tend to disagree with Gerard on almost everything, but I'll at least give Gerard credit that my disagreements with him tend to be pretty nuanced. Buterin, on the other hand, I tend to agree with on technical points, which is most of his writing--but his philosophy tends to be pretty wacko, as Gerard points out.
Well, in his stablecoin blog post he actively argues for negative interest rates in case the index the stablecoin replicates grows faste, you don't have to be a genius to understand negative interest rates, you have to abandon the idea of being a capitalist forever for that. The other factor is that he talks about harberger taxes which are basically just a different way of implementing X(including land) value taxes where everyone assesses the value themselves.
When you consider these incredibly impactful changes it is hardly possible to see buterin as some "weird cryptoanarchist" because these two demands are nothing short of eliminating the dynastic land ownership system and ensuring permanent full employment while avoiding pointless recessions which are also just an dynastic artefact of holding money hostage. Having a higher salary with lower costs of living and not fearing unemployment isn't something that just some elite wants, elites don't need these things.
What was your specific claim? Note that I'm not the only one asking you.
And the important point, since you made it on this post: how does your claim relate in any way to Buterin?
(There were arguments for revealing his name in the NYT (mostly that it was already very public, entirely by Siskind's own hand, as directly linked to SSC) and arguments against it (mostly that the NYT is a different scale of publicising it).)
Direct question: do you know what this claim of me cancelling Siskind could mean, since OP doesn't seem able to answer? Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin. Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.
That I'm not sure on: I wasn't asking to accuse you of cancelling Siskind, I was asking to hear your description of the events. Given you have actual descriptions of events in a chronology, I tend to believe your story on this one.
> Also, wtf it has to do with Buterin.
Well, nothing--it was an ad hominem attack on you by the poster. It's Hacker News: a lot of people here are capitalist to the point of sociopathy, and will defend any money making venture even if it means abandoning ethics, logic, evidence, and/or social acceptability. You lost the respect of most of Hacker News, but have you seen the guys these people respect?
> Siskind is certainly one of the "There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs" reasoners from first principles rather than knowing things that I was talking about in the linked post, but there are (as I say) a heck of a lot of them.
I don't get the feel that Siskind was just reasoning from first principles--that was some of what he did on SSC, but I do think he knew a lot as well (and, given he has a doctorate, there's at least a few people who agree on that point). If anything, I think what I got a lot of from SSC was the opposite: using knowledge to figure out what the first principles are.
As for there being a lot of these guys and a lot of words: I'm not sure why I should care about either of these criticisms.