https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/04/14/privacy.html

privacy

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire

mimetic desire

Facebook banned pseudonymous identities after all. Immediately unbridling the power of mimesis.

what is good about transparency

scientific progress

I think our civilizational flourishing was unlocked when we provided proper incentives for people to share their discoveries of new theories and inventions. Patents, academic publishing of papers.

TODO TK: is this true? did our industrial age explosion result from systems providing social credit to shared knowledge? Money is social credit (or can overlap with it at least) by the way.

accountable government

we want to know what the people we have given authority over us are doing (to some extent).

But knowing everything might break down our entire system. If we knew every little thing electees did as part of their job, does that undermine the very job of serving us? Is there a fundamental amount of privacy we have to give elected officials in order for them to do their best job?

social acceptance?

Vitalik says transparency could have worked if we assumed “society would stop being harsh and judgmental toward people’s unique traits and instead become open-minded and accepting.” But what does being open-minded and accepting really mean? allowing desires to exist external to us? there is some sense that tolerance is the opposite of acceptance (“do what you want; i don’t need/want to know about it”). “accept me” may be perilously close to “covet what I am doing”. I accept that others have their own unique place in our world; should I then be ignorant of that place? I can accept their uniqueness, but that kinda means NOT paying attention to it, precisely because they occupy a DIFFERENT place than I do, hence why should I pretend to be them? There is a non-empathic acceptance

Here is something crazy: one way to achieve privacy is to be more like everyone else around you. Vitalik is famous and so sticks out in public. Also, a homosexual being bullied sticks out and can thus lose privacy. Everyone sticks out in their own way could be like “oh, yeah” Vitalik is famous, but also a person.

Sometimes we want to be treated fairly (“I am just like everyone else and deserve decency. Treat me how you would like to be treated”. And sometimes we want to be treated unfairly. “I am a unique and beautiful snowflake with different desires, talents, skills, experiences than anyone else”

Adam Grant’s Originals touches on this as well. (Just saw Peter Thiel blurbed it. I can see why as I went looking for it while writing this essay) Actually, Adam Grant’s Warby Parker story is amazing. Warby Parker, these guys went and did something original, and then Adam Grant missed out on investing for some reason. Just great. Take the intiiative to improve my circumstances, like Warby Parker, like the people solving their problem by pikcing non-default browser.

Adam Grant said the Warby Parker people “sepnt a combined 60 years wearing glasses”. Ugh, that is not how you add time. This is the same as mythical man-month. 9 women working reraly hard cannot have a baby in one month. It is another lnaguage crime. Im sure I commit other ones (probably more subtle, but no less devastating for their subtlety!)

The less mimetic, purer, ’thicker’ desires might be closer to the etymology of “desire”. External desires don’t come “from” (“de-”) the gods/stars (“siderus”) at all. Desiderate is an english word literally meaning to feel the lack of! SO internal external is the difference between feeling alack of what God brings (internal) or a lack of what not-God brings (usually his idols - other people shaped to look like him). External desire is an idol worship. The do not covet commandment seems to pick this right up. Internal desire could be closer to God speaking to you directly about what you should aim for.

“aren’t easily variable based on new encounters, seasons or experiences.” like good theories. A good theory of myself.

Burgis: “freedom from the ‘default’ mode that causes us to pursue things without examining why.”

Adam Grant : the fault of defaults

Burgis: “For instance, some people have a core desire to ‘comprehend and express’ – an enduring, motivational drive to do that one thing, no matter the context. This happens to be one of my core desires,”

I was thinking this is one of my desires. That is why I decided to write blog essays!

Another though is to entertain. I just thinbk so much can be funnier. and I love laughing.But sometimes laughing serves to illumniate the deep truth, not usually deep truth serves the purpose of laughter. Yeah That feels like the right order of things. I love etymology because of this. I am drawn to Burgis, Thiel, Girard, Newport, Deutsch probably because they also are drawn to this.

I want to explain things to others. but who are the others? Some of them want to hear from me, I bet some do not

Here is Vitalik getting close to the sharing of science that is good for everyone:

“One other important example of a social order that depends on limits to collusion in order to function is intellectual and cultural activity. Participation in intellectual and cultural activity is inherently an intrinsically-motivated public-spirited task: it’s very difficult to make extrinsic incentives that target positive contributions to society, precisely because intellectual and cultural activity is, in part, the activity of determining which actions in society are positive actions in the first place. We can make approximate commercial and social incentives that point in the right direction, but they too require heavy supplementation by intrinsic motivation. But this also means that this kind of activity is highly fragile to misaligned extrinsic motivations, particularly side games such as social pressure and coercion. To limit the impact of such misaligned extrinsic motivations, privacy is once again required.”

https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5100/polanyi_1967.pdf

“science is a coordinated effort”

“The only way the assistants can effectively co-operate, and surpass by far what any single one of them could do, is to let them work on putting the puzzle together in sight of the others so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one helper, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence”

Polanyi says markets use prices and science uses noting others’ results… I know there is more to this.

the market and science and social status games all intersect. Mathematicians wanted to get paid for their contributions to overall civilizational knowledge. What we’re talking about is alignment. Can we reward individual contributions to the increase in total wealth? Sometimes that is scientists, inventors, innovators. Do we pay the validation systems (academies?)