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Grant Dever πŸŒ„'s avatar

I think this is an interesting idea and it's true that you need conviction, however short-lived, to find any alpha. Although, I think it is helpfulβ€”as I know you doβ€”when you can 'think in bets,' or otherwise manage your risk by getting exposure without betting the farm.

You can be skeptical that Bitcoin is going to replace all fiat currency, or otherwise succeed, and still have profitable exposure to it. It's undeniable that a lot of skeptics missed out on live changing money by being unwilling to take any risk.

You may also have varying degrees of willingness to experiment to improve your health. I am more credulous when I am told that eating more or less of something will be good for me, than I am when I am told that taking a supplement or a drug will be good for me.

I would have a greater willingness for radical experimentation that could quickly heal me or kill me when my alternative is, at least as far as I know, a certain and impending death.

There is also a question of the value of skeptics and the credulous at the system-level: humanity. We want people who move fast and break things. We want people who move slow, or not at all, and conserve things. Radical openness, without disagreeableness (often from the less open), can lead to its own wrong consensus.

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Mike Elias's avatar

100% agreed. I’m tentatively convinced the kind of openness I’m advocating really *cant* lead to wrong consensus, because that would mean being open to a point, and then deciding to become closed again, and doing that in the wrong place. But as I write this out, it occurs to me there will be a difference between theory and practice. β€œBetting” is a great model of rationality because when we bet, we close ourselves off for a practical purpose β€” eg β€œif this thing I’m betting on is false, I won’t win” β€” and that acknowledges the necessity of openness *and* closedness.

I still think skepticism (as a general approach, not toward a specific issue like Bitcoin) is so drastically overrated as to be indistinguishable from a psy-op. The costs to society and to individuals are simply staggering. This video is mainly just another shot at demonstrating that. πŸ˜ŠπŸ™

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