You pretty much know you're reading a rationalist if they use phrases like "less wrong", "mildly opinionated" or now "less than infinite".
Is there some reasoning behind those phrases? Rejecting the null hypothesis as a way of life?
Why not just say "why I'm still bullish on crypto even though everyone says the opposite"?
Also, "bullish" is generally a financial term, and in this case may refer to "price go up" which doesn't seem to be the intent of the article. The article is stressing usecases not price.
Oh I know just the type you mean. Of course, a type of person that is infinitely more annoying is the crypto evangelist explaining to you why they are making the world better because their startup is making it easy for grandma get in on the crypto revolution with her retirement fund.
My impression of the title is that the essay is a response to the largely maximally hostile stance many take towards cryptocurrency projects, and his attempt at moderation of that stance.
To my ear, saying "I'm still bullish" rather than "I'm less than infinitely certain about X" is the weird sounding one, like someone's trying really hard to signal to me they know and care about stocks and investments and stuff. To be honest I don't and still get confused on which is which between "bearish" and "bullish".
The other phrases are also vague enough that they are not really helpful. If you're "mildly opinionated" enough about something to write a blog post about it, I'm starting to how much degree is actually meant with "mild". If to people are mildly opinionated about somthing, who does have the stronger opinion?
I agree that things are often complex and not clear-cut, but I don't see how trying to mush everything into featureless grey would help here to gain insight.
"Less than infinitely" to me made sense too, it's what I would've liked out of my friend on the topic of crypto or really anything where we don't see eye to eye. I don't want an "omg you're right what have I been thinking", but maybe "I don't know about your conclusions, but I'll consider what you said and maybe they'll change my mind or maybe they'll help me better form my own arguments."
This is ironic understatement. It's not a rationalist thing, it's a joke!
Which is to say, this is just a propaganda rhetoric strategy: the opposition don't have valid points, they're just crazed by their hatred. Don't try to understand what they're saying because they're crazy and can be ignored.
Which is...not true. The fact that not enough people wanted DEC products might be a marketing issue, but more likely is that other companies made stuff that they wanted more.
It's like a last, desperate grab that's deployed when the argument has exhausted itself.
Read a bunch of papers in computational complexity theory (or any other subject) and you will see similar phrases pop up.
Heck, compare hacker news comments with some other forum website and you will probably notice subtle language differences.
> Is there some reasoning behind those phrases? Rejecting the null hypothesis as a way of life?
Not being snarky, but perhaps dumb: of all expressions above, "null hypothesis" is the one I understood the least.
The author's view is tangential to bull/bear in the financial sense. From the article:
> This post is emphatically not intended as a claim that crypto will go up more, or that it won’t go down a lot, or that there won’t be any more disasters or scams7. It’s a claim that aside from its going-up ability, crypto is still a set of interesting technological solutions to regulatory problems.
Basically an attempt at applying statistical reasoning to reasoning in everyday life. I don’t have a problem with the vocabulary as much as the way this group speaks: upspeak, overuse of “kind of” when they don’t mean “kind of” and a peculiar sort of thinking stutter when formulating a statement. It’s amazing how prevalent it is.
If you would like to understand why they use weird vocabulary, here is a request which I expect will induce frustration and then clarity:
“Please explain how someone can be similar to a bovine in their relationship to crypto”
Oh, that's easy. When looking at the carbon footprint per unit calorie, bovine flesh, is much larger than vegetarian options. Same with water and land use as well. It's actually significantly worse for your health as well. There are practically no up sides to consuming beef, except the taste.
That's what it means when somebody is bullish on crypto: they want a currency that has little upside and is horrible for environment.
It's the same thing with any sufficiently divergent dialect, you lack the context so you fill in meaning from your own context which is incorrect leading you to these conclusions. It's just linguistic compression focused on a cluster of common avenues of thought to make communication faster, easier and more precise when in those realms.