Tower of Blockchain

[Pecuniology]

I just finished reading Adam Lebor's Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World. While reading, I was struck by several uncanny similarities between the mentality of founders and executives at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the mentality of vocal Core developers and Blockstream executives.

From Paris to Washington, DC, the postwar committees and movements pushing for European federalism presented themselves as new and innovative, offering a fresh approach for a new era. But they were deeply rooted in the old ways of doing business—of powerful men gathering over lunch or dinner to reshape the world as they saw fit... None of these discussions were made public, even though the plans hatched there would shape the modern world... The key, for both the European project and the ever-broader mandate of the BIS, was to present decisions, policies, and actions as "technical" and "apolitical," of no concern to the average informed citizen... [T]echnocrats [believe] that a tiny, self-selecting elite, unaccountable to everyday citizens, should manage global finance. The BIS's privileges are a hangover from a thankfully vanished age of deference to authority, at least in the developed world. [pp. 174, 210-211, 258]​

Plus ça change, plus ça même chose...

 

[adamstgbit]

Blockstream and Core doesn't speak for us. they can fuckthemselfs if they like, i'm not sticking around for that show.

 

[cypherdoc]

More like the Federal Reserve wizards.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

The age of deference to authority will never end. It's in our blood, a tribal instinct. That is why Core's position is the default among the unthinking masses and especially junior coders who look up to the "wizard" heroes at Core.

Over the years I have looked at many fields and found that the marks of a field being fleeced by authority figures are pretty universal. Most salient is that semantic games always figure prominently: equivocation, weasel words and vague terms like "consensus," constant goalpost shifting, appeals to tribal identity ("cypherpunks"), circular arguments rinsed down with appeals to authority, blatant double standards, censorship in the name of free speech, buzzwordism, extremely short public memory just like in political cycles, the genetic fallacy, slippery slope, etc.

Other than the fact that semantic fallacies work especially well, the specific fallacy used is not so important. Once someone is in the thrall of an authority figure, the arguments do not need to be sophisticated, as the appeal is to the basic tribal instincts, not to logic. The mere patina of sophistication, flavored appropriately for the tribal culture of the field (be sure to overuse words like "orthogonal" if the field is CS), is sufficient to make the follower feel that warm satisfaction and camaraderie welling up inside them, ensuring them that they are in the right. The appeal to authority is thus rendered invisible, allowing all the other fallacies to slip passed unnoticed, until an entire worldview is built up out of pure fluff, each section reinforced by all the others so that even a devastating attack on one part of the worldview will be shrugged off.

Luckily such people usually don't make much money in the markets over the long term. How many great investors or entrepreneurs exhibit these joiner/follower traits like the inability to think for themselves or resist social trends and see past semantic tricks? I can't think of a single one.

 

[Pecuniology]

The age of deference to authority will never end. It's in our blood, a tribal instinct. That is why Core's position is the default among the unthinking masses and especially junior coders who look up to the "wizard" heroes at Core.​

Indeed.

Perhaps I should have cut off the last sentence and ended with "[The key dirty trick is] to present decisions, policies, and actions as 'technical' and 'apolitical', of no concern to the average informed citizen... [T]echnocrats [believe] that a tiny, self-selecting elite, unaccountable to everyday citizens, should manage global finance."

In addition to the semantic fallacies listed above, we should include the use of terms like "relevant" and "serious", which are indirect appeals to authority.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

The age of deference to authority will never end. It's in our blood, a tribal instinct. That is why Core's position is the default among the unthinking masses and especially junior coders who look up to the "wizard" heroes at Core.

Over the years I have looked at many fields and found that the marks of a field being fleeced by authority figures are pretty universal. Most salient is that semantic games always figure prominently: equivocation, weasel words and vague terms like "consensus," constant goalpost shifting, appeals to tribal identity ("cypherpunks"), circular arguments rinsed down with appeals to authority, blatant double standards, censorship in the name of free speech, buzzwordism, extremely short public memory just like in political cycles, the genetic fallacy, slippery slope, etc..

I nearly cried when I read this. So true, and so well written.

 

[Zarathustra]

> The age of deference to authority will never end. It's in our blood, a tribal instinct.

No no, dear @ZangelbertBingledack, the opposite is true. This is not a tribal instinct. This is a newly evolved instinct since consensus based egalitarian anarchic communities have been civilized (= collectivized, patronized, ruled and enslaved) 10'000 years ago, when humankind slowly but steadily became a cartoon of itself, where anarchic humans transformed themselves into hierarchic (patriarchic) citizens (idiots):

https://walkthroughegypt.wikispaces.com/file/view/Egyptian_Social_Classes2.jpg/231244460/568x441/Egyptian_Social_Classes2.jpg
https://puritanum.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/beten201.jpg
http://polpix.sueddeutsche.com/bild/1.1052048.1355716400/640x360/politischer-islam-moschee-muenchen.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_prayer#/media/File:Jews-pray-in-the-Western-Wall-1.jpg

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Before I read the links, are you saying tribal elders never held much clout in the ancestral environment? That seems hard to believe. I assume the apparent difference of opinion stems from looking at different sizes of community. A small tribe or family works well under paternalism. A large (perhaps 200+) one doesn't.

In the modern world we have our instincts operating as if we were still in a small tribe where everyone knows everyone else and elders really should get free deference, which causes all kinds of problems as we extend that deference to any figure that looks to our reptile brain like an authority.

 

[Zarathustra]

A family (famulus = house slave) is an invention of the church and state and works under paternalism. It is unnatural. Families in general don't work well. Pre-neolithic tribes did not know marriages and families. That's the reason why they worked well. Btw: the links above are not for reading; just for watching.