Notes on “Reducing Competition for the Serial Channels of Belonging: Bitcoin Modeled as White Noise Part I”

Patrick is getting lots of top-down feedback on this presentation, so I’m sticking to the details here.

2:00 Emphasize that this requires deferred gratification, which people living at subsistence are incapable of. This justification should go without saying but won’t.

7:00 Re: Ethereum, need to explain that the simulation testing costs of Ethereum smart contracts are massive because it’s ambiguous, i.e. difficult to predict what it’s going to output. This is risky for business-level code and completely unacceptable for production-level code.

14:30 There’s a great introduction to these ideas for normies on Netflix now called “The Social Dilemma”. Despite any criticisms I might have of the Emmanuel Goldstein character they create to divert blame from the people truly responsible, the overall message will get through: “This social media shit is bad for your health”. That’s how I justify my unqualified recommendation.

23:00 Could use flat earth “trust no1” epistemology as a reaction to systemic gaslighting as a real-life example of lizard people conspiracy theorizing.

26:00 Would be helpful to give an example of how some achievements produce more transferable skills than others here. E-sports may teach the value of obsessive-compulsive practice of something you enjoy, but not much else and certainly very little in the way of marketable skills. Even YouTube e-celebs at least learn how to speak very well in front of an audience.

28:30 I prefer plainstyle to Buckminster Fuller style, so I would replace the “Live-ness” label with “Survival instinct” (or “will-to-thrive”) and “Respect-ness” with “Professional” (or “reputation-as-capital”).

37:00 More to the point, considering the Gen Z stats acceptable is simply anti-human, bordering on evil. A workforce where average wages are subsistence level is just “harsh”, but when 90% young Americans are failing to launch it means modern America is a scam and anyone who denies such an obvious fact is probably on the take. Rather than saying this directly to the Boomers’ faces, I’d recommend throwing some iGen graphs in showing how wrong it’s getting, then asking for a commitment to the response “this is a problem that needs solving” and building a flowchart based on incremental buy-in (or resistance) to that idea.