“It’s very important to live your life by an internal yardstick,” he told us, noting that one way to gauge whether or not you do so is to ask the following question: “Would you rather be considered the best lover in the world and know privately that you’re the worst — or would you prefer to know privately that you’re the best lover in the world, but be considered the worst?”
source: https://time.com/archive/6904425/my-650100-lunch-with-warren...
Both of those options sound terrible. It's a curse either way. I'd rather be known as publicly as "better than average" and privately know that I'm doing pretty well/my best.
If forced to pick between the two though, being publicly known as 'the best lover in the world' would seem most likely to present more opportunities to improve my skill/confidence. It's still a lot of pressure nobody needs.
The problem is exacerbated by content and replies trending shorter over time. It's hard to have a nuanced and thoughtful take in 10 seconds. It's much easier to have a simple, easy to understand, "dominant" take in the same amount of time.
I wonder if there's a social solution to this, somehow.
And honestly, I'm not sure I would have done better in the moment. On reflection? Sure. But in front of the king, presented with a completely unfamiliar argument stated with great confidence and demanding a reply? Yeah, maybe not. Even on topics where I have reasonable in-depth knowledge I sometimes really doubt myself when someone says something very wrong with great confidence, and sometimes I really double and triple-check things to make sure I'm not making a right fool of myself.
Few years back I ordered a sandwich at a deli. Still looking at the menu, the lady asked what I wanted. "Ehhh, well, ehmm, I don't eat meat, so, ehhh, something without that". "Oh, I have chicken!" And she said this so quickly and with such confidence that for a few seconds I was genuinely doubting whether "chicken" was meat or not and wasn't really sure what to answer.
I guess she had a bit of "a moment" and we had a laugh about it afterwards, but I thought that was a pretty interesting and harmless example of how you can really start doubting yourself.
NFTs are another example. When I first heard of it, I thought I had not understood it correctly because "surely it can't be this dumb". And for months when all the NFT hype was raging I thought it must be some very complex crypto bonanza I wasn't really understanding. All the obscure jargon and lingo the NFT people confidently use aided that notion. I'm not really interested in crypto in general, but finally gave in and did some more in-depth reading on it. I found that no, it really is that dumb, and I had understood it correctly months ago, and all the jargon was just meaningless bollocks word salad.
[1]: I read about this years and years ago, I can't find anything about it right now and this anecdote may be false, but it seemed trust-worthy enough at the time to remember.
Tough situations to handle.
My brother is an artist and absolutely refused to believe that the hype around NFTs was just bullshit. I'm sure if I called and asked right now, he'd still give me some word salad about how it's going to start paying off any day now. Now if anyone talks to me about NFTs, I send that me that Folding Ideas youtube video, 'Line goes up' and refuse to engage with them.
When someone talks to you about a topic you don't want to engage in you send them a link to a 2.5 hour long video?
I mean, can't the point be made in 3m?
Unless they don't bother to watch it. Then it gets them out of your hair permanently, because they know they're supposed to watch it before hassling you about it again.
Honestly, it can be made as fast you can say 'NFTs are bullshit' but some people don't want to hear it from a friend or family member.
Artists have it rough and I don't blame them for being charmed by con artists.
this sounds like a certain kind of stubbornness. but i wonder if the collison brothers listen with predatory intensity to critiques or their business from random strangers in the same way they listen to pg. perhaps some discrimination is useful
How can I buy a digital asset sold by an artist?
You also wouldn't be able to distinguish a fake painted for a few thousand dollars, much less so with a print or digital art, so the physical artifact is somewhat meaningless as well, at least as far as value goes. Collectors buy pieces and keep them in storage. They might buy a piece without ever laying eyes on the physical artifact.
The art market has always run on provenance and certificates of authenticity. You could argue that fine art is bullshit, and you can also that a blockchain is not necessary to keep track of certificates of authenticity, but arguing that the entire concept of art ownership without copyright is bullshit is to ignore what the reality of the art market has always been.
Any use case in which some blob of data corresponds to an individually specifiable concrete thing is a suitable use case for NFTs.
The problem with the speculative frenzy a few years ago was that the NFTs in question did not convey ownership over anything -- people were trading the NFTs themselves rather than using them as deeds/contracts/tickets corresponding to some other external asset. If the NFTs were used to convey copyright ownership or exclusive usage rights to the underlying artwork, they'd have made a lot more sense, but as it played out, people were paying huge sums of money for what amounted to tickets to nowhere.
Many places make money off of digital assets, but there’s no pretext of it somehow being scarce.
The NFTs just included public URLs pointing to files, so pepole were effectively buying and selling certificates of authenticity for artwork without owning the actual artwork itself!
The problem with that method of evaluation, is that it's not First Principles. Basically, pg's essay in this case just reduces down to, "Is that person steered by First Principles thinking?"
Obstinate - Stubbornly adhering to an opinion, purpose, or course in spite of reason, arguments, or persuasion.
I was talking to a friend about this, and I've come to see this as the opposite of real-recognize-real, something like bullshit-interfaces-with-bullshit. That is, often people that haven't executed complex projects have a skewed view of the factors of success, something that they try to imitate and at the same time is more easily misled by people emulating the same signals.
What I've found is that many times, people like the perceived confidence that obstinacy can bring. For example, let's say that someone points out a flaw in a plan. Person A responds by saying "That's not a real problem. It doesn't matter." Person B says "Ok, that's interesting. Let's dig into it." Person A (the obstinate person who doesn't listen) usually comes across as more confident in this encounter, even though Person B (the persistent person who is engaging) may actually end up learning something new and getting a better result.
This is especially true in public forums. If you go up on a stage and do a debate, the obstinate person comes across as more confident to more people. This doesn't mean that their plan is any good. But people will vote for them, give them money, etc.
For the record, I agree with Paul's assessment that persistence is a great quality and obstinacy is not. However, it's hard to actually get this across to the public.