Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you?
It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body.
My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.
Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph.
To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved.
Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.
I think academics have a weird susceptibly to grifting because they feel morally reassured that other people should listen to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
Choice quotes:
> a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies
> A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result
> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others
How many of those papers were retracted, you think?
It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.
Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version.
Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
I call this "Knocking down Chesterton's fence to be gored by a bull moments later"
> Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"".
Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
"I am good at numbers, money is just numbers" https://xkcd.com/1570/
I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.
Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you read £2.49 becoming £4.29.
Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not understanding compound interest.
Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.
Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in at the same time.
If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the return of my money — up to a certain threshold, but that guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.
well done, you just did it again.
> Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics
What a great way to defend the status quo as if every possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail. The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too big to fail or impossible to go against.
That's not even close to what I was saying and I have no idea how you've misapprehended me so badly.
I will however offer this aphorism:
Who is the bigger fool, the one who messes up, or the one who upon seeing the first one fail says "what an idiot, this is easy, I will do it myself"?
> “Wait, wait, wait, but why are we doing it this way?” Barroso said on the podcast. “And it just turns out that the people who had been living in that area hadn't really thought about questioning that. And sometimes it's something that was based on a good reason three years ago, and that reason had a sell-by date, and it's time to do something else.”
Good thing for the world, guys with the mindset like you doesn't prevent guys like Barroso great work.
"Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing."
You're reading non-existent intent between the lines.
Look at what I quoted in my original comment:
> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.
Criticising this point doesn't require me to deny the possibility that smart people can't come up with new things; to use your own example here, I'm saying normal people won't run their own cloud computing infrastructure.
Not even because it immediately stops being "the cloud" if they did — most people don't have the time nor inclination to understand RAID numbers, let alone cron jobs or keeping TLS libraries up to date.
Can you name the equivalent of those in finance? I can't, but I have tried reading the T&Cs of bank accounts so I do recognise the patterns that tell me they exist.
That's what we pay the middleman for, and why we still would even if there was a cryptocurrency that actually did what it's biggest fans all say it does.
I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.
but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap.
If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics.
We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git".
And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.