Soft consensus, aka fecal matter.

Wednesday, 09 January, Year 5 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

Motto : Dio perchè ci hai abbandonati?

Hey, do you know I've been running an options market maker bot in BTC for over a year now ? It will actually be a year and a half next month or something like that. And it's still in business.

This pretty much unique vantage has allowed me to accumulate some experience, which I'll obviously share. So, at any point in time "people" (aka "everybody") are in consensus over subjects of import. The reason is quite simply that "people" (aka "everybody") are trained to follow, and more importantly are essentially followers to their core. The intelectual, psychological and emotional cost of maintaining divergent opinions is too much for their puny physiques to bear, and so they give in.

It's really easy for "public sentiment" to reach "consensus" when "everyone"'s motivation is to reach a consensus, no matter which just as long as it's what "everyone" says. This is exactly how consensus and more generally the electoral process got to be such worthless futility in our present times. It's not a lack of "critical thinking" that makes the populace unable to think critically. It's a lack of... worth, basically. It's a lack of that which makes mammals humans, mettle, morals, identity, personality, a soul, however you'd call it they don't have it.

This consensus business has proven itself to be completely off with such regularity that it's making me laugh. For instance, back in August 2011 the consensus was that someone else will be "imminently" releasing an options market which will wipe MPOE. This had been announced, for months. It never happened.

For another instance, the consensus was that, and I quote,

[17:05:52] shareholder3_ midterm this will win against MPEX and others as they will get shut down soon too
[18:01:03] shareholder3_ me neither MPEX is doomed big time soon
[18:07:43] shareholder3_ once the news about what we are talking about gets out, MPEX will be under huge pressure, if they want or not
etc

News got out. Then a day passed. Then a week. Then a month, and another, and a third... Obviously given the finite lifespan of everything that's man made MPEx will probably crap out eventually. Citi failed what, five times so far ? Revlon is no more, tho it was my mother's favorite brand back when she was labouring to get a wonderful child such as myself. Nothing lasts forever. But that aside, the consensus was wrong yet again.

O wait, it was the consensus of a single person ? So what does that have to do with anything ? Everybody has this handy everybody in their pocket which agrees with them, it's how consensus is made. That's why there's riots in the US every time somebody else than everyone's candidate comes out first. Heck, Washington gets burned to the ground every November. You never saw this happen ? Well... I guess you weren't in the right frame of mind.

For yet another instance, the consensus was that ASICs will be developed and delivered by a rag-tag assembly of dubious characters. Leave aside that a novel run will take years if not decades and millions if not billions. These people can do it, no matter what it is! So everyone announced delivery dates within months. Then blew them. Then blew them again. Currently... everyone is saying March. The consensus is March. Thus the only thing certain is that no ASICs will be delivered in March. It's more likely for it to happen in February than in March strictly because March is what the consensus is. And the consensus is unequivocally, without exception and always wrong.

To continue the examples, the consensus is that S.MPOE is overvalued. I wrote about this before, but meanwhile there's two little tidbits I'd like to add to help this consensus thingee along. One's this :

smpoebet1

The money part is easy enough to grasp : bet a Bitcoin on Yes, get back ~100 Bitcoins if indeed it does crash.

The consensus part is also easy enough to grasp : fuckwits on parade. It's a scam! Child porn! Nothing's worth anything! I fail as a human being! Rawr!

The other tidbit is this : pretty much everything available on MPEx to buy is also available to short. "People" do not know this, mostly because... well, let's not go into that. So they build the usual flawed arguments based entirely on how things wouldn't work as they imagine them, and therefore things don't work. What, there's people smarter than them on this planet, that do things differently, and different from their consensus is unequivocally better ?! Heresy!

Someone (often but not always me) points out to them this simple hole in their mental representation : if you really think so, go ahead and short it. Do you know what happens at this point ? 'Cause it's also a consensus.

At this point people ask me for free shares to short.

No, really, I'ma let that stand on its own, read it again let it sink in for a moment. At the best - and I do mean best, it's something like

if you let me borrow some without collateral, i'll give you a detailed explanation of what i think is going on =)

Guy with an opinion wants no skin in the game. Why ? Why would you want no skin in the game ? Could it be simply that even the "people" themselves know their opinions are pointless drivel spawned by worthless subhuman lifeforms ? Could it be that the one thing everyone really knows, for keeps this time, is that everyone is full of shit ?

There's a very simple way to distinguish actual people from non-people. It's not whether their grandmother was Jewish or their hair is curly, it's not whether their skin tone is this or that shade of purple, it's not even if they do well in school, suck cock rapturously, work hard, obey the laws, go to church, respect their elders, floss, whatever the hell else. None of that matters.

Actual people are always on the lookout for games to put skin in. Everybody else just knows better, from the waysides.

And bathing in this consensus which instantly vanishes into explanations, excuses and elucubrations the moment a spec of skin is required to go further is really no different from that last bit they usually cut out of Salo.

salo-girone-della-merda

Category: 3 ani experienta
Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment below, or send a trackback.

63 Responses

  1. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    1
    Mircea Popescu 
    Wednesday, 1 January 2014

    Leaving this excellent Snopes article here for future reference : http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Wednesday, 16 April 2014

    Here's a reasonably convenient example (from Don Bailey) :

    If someone did nothing, they have ABSOLUTELY EVERY RIGHT to fight their case no matter what kind of deal is being offered. If someone DID DO SOMETHING, here is some advice: You will get pounded period. Don't be an idiot and try to fight any power. Weev and his lawyers can appeal until their faces turn blue, they will get nowhere.

    This was the consensus. The consensus of shitheads, the consensus made of fecal matter, the shit "everyone" on the interweb agreed with. Up to and including the unprecedented vacation of the guy's conviction, a few years later.

    This is the shit "everyone" on the interwebs STILL agrees with, and will permanently agree with, no matter what, period. Because "everyone" has shit for brains, and that's not about to change.

  1. [...] possible because Ignorance of language allows them to disagree without awareness of disagreement. Consensus is easy without nuance or consequence. These things combine with the other aspects of the maliciously stupid before in the [...]

  2. [...] mere talking and repeated mentioning of all the buzz words in whatever happens to be the current consensus-approved sequence. Since there is no recording of the talk2 I decided it's best to do this write-up [...]

  3. [...] a chunk of the New World, they would send their troublesome weirdos over the Ocean. The weirdos did what weirdos do, and decided to enforce all sorts of silly ideas as laws. By the time the colonies split, British [...]

  4. [...] during the dictatorship years alongside the leftists, the Latino agreement machine has spent years consensusing them into "the fascists" for being somewhat conservative. [↩]The Latino labor movement has [...]

  5. [...] came before, and who (fail to) coexist now, accepting to make their wine with some percentage of shit, to compromise integrity for convenience, and to stand behind nothing but a false-toothed grin. The [...]

  6. [...] no words for it, really. Fiat does not mean "something da people have agreed to be money" you highschool dropout you. Fiat means "something an authority has [...]

  7. [...] agreement creates reality, and so if he can get enough of his own side to agree that's that. Consensus (aka fecal matter)i is just one easy step [...]

  8. [...] especially among a youth trained to believev that fame equals fortunevi (and more generally, that group approval means you're right) and that traffic volume means revenue (indeed, by their count Grand Central [...]

  9. [...] MPOE/MPEx is doing 90% of it or more. [↩]A point discussed for instance in the article about consensus, rehashed recently in the discussion of difficulty futures. [↩]To quote Warren Buffett, Nor [...]

  10. [...] of "low information voters" with prisonguard "educators", all this covered under an array of fecal matter generously distributed as "commentary" by an array of grasshoppers promoted to bugle blowers. [...]

  11. [...] and perfectly willing to short S.MPOE in a purely theoretical perspective (which, of course, we've seen before). A playa', a roller, a baller, what can I tell [...]

  12. [...] dinner is at stake. The entire system that ruined the US, the unholy alliance between professional shitslingers and professional looters of the public treasury is being challenged, quite in the open, quite [...]

  13. [...] and misrepresentations of fact and while the various other social media venues showed very similar consensus, BitBet nevertheless saw significant BTC inflows : more than triple the volume of last month, [...]

  14. [...] aware that he's sprouting as his own knowledge something he's just picked up from soundbites and manufactured social proof. He actually thinks that he knows this as a fact, on the grounds of having heard it said a lot. Now [...]

  15. [...] thus forgotteni - yet at the time they agreed, perfectly impervious to their irrelevance, with that fecalous consistence typical of fucktards impervious to their irrelevance, that "trolling is bad mkay" and that "everyone agrees trolling is bad mkay mkay" and so on and so [...]

  16. [...] is as much wasted time : there's no objective way to be nice, and there's absolutely no value in the consensus of others. If you agree with their points you probably would do things differently next time, and probably [...]

  17. [...] It'd seem that this entire debate is a brown stain on the otherwise well stained underpants of the Interwebs. Clearly the universal agreement as to the universality of agreement as to the contrary thesis is telling a story. That story would be "the average Internet brain is made out of shit". [...]

  18. [...] that you may pick up on any sort of source bereft of authority, such as a forum, or wikipedia, or the collected opinions of any club of online derps, is fundamentally and universally wrong, mistaken, misguided and misleading. Everything. You may [...]

  19. [...] of itself an intellectual activity. They are consensus generators and consensus seekers, but it is a very soft and rather dubious smelling sort of consensus. They are not merely inhabituated to be catered to, they are actually dependent on being catered [...]

  20. [...] do, by the way. Note that this is not the first time when "everyone" supported a scammer, and when "the consensus" seemed to be that nonsense is now quite sensible. This did exactly nothing to alleviate the 100% [...]

  21. [...] you perceive you have perceived "the consensus" on the topic (another way to say "summary", this "consensus", it's like the official cliffnotes for whatever book, the set the teacher himself uses) and are [...]

  22. [...] that ended USGavin's career by saying so not even a month ago. Over the screaming mass of Reddit "consensus" (which meanwhile turned out to neither exist nor have really ever existed). What you and your [...]

  23. [...] was nothing there. I don't think she'd have expected any different. ———The idiot everyone. [↩]There are two horns to understand the concept of y2k as used here. One is Alf's [...]

  24. [...] he retired. The crime itself was never prosecuted. Amusingly enough, the "intellectual" press was in consensus before that date that "someone should do something", and after that date that "how is this [...]

  25. [...] among people unlike himself is a direct result of the historical tendency to run states on the (consensus-supported, by the way) slave model. If one's going to try and force those who don't look like him [...]

  26. [...] the intervening few months the putative "consensus" was degraded in official verbiage to a mere "controversy", for absolutely no reason given [...]

  27. [...] sums that actually sum to zero will be interpreted to sum to infinity by "the consensus" of "the community", and all sorts of things will be "obviously bad" and so on and so forth. It [...]

  28. [...] : bolund. It comes, get a load of this, from Spanish. Via Hungarian! No, I'm not kiding, the expert consensus among the Romanian imbeciles masquerading as linguists is that the word comes from [...]

  29. [...] I should have held out for 300%. For a long time it was accepted knowlege, on no basis other than consensus, that being a mid-range crafter is not worth the hassle. Large packages were constantly offerediii [...]

  30. [...] in 2012 the "community" of idiots and imbecilesiv saw pirateat40 as their fixed-income expert and nefario & friends as the equity experts [...]

  31. [...] "community" consensus was quick to form, on the usual lines : Then that theory didn't work out, but no matter, the same [...]

  32. [...] of sexual intimacy - the obvious alternative being "abuse" and ick! This agreement isn't worth the winds it's made out of, the correct helpings of Platonism and Stoicism to be decided at the time of the [...]

  33. [...] Recall Soft consensus, aka fecal matter. [...]

  34. [...] understood as the government's agitprop machine exclusively ; such as from "community consensus" (aka fecal matter) ; such as from inept wordplay and so forth. The chief property of the Markov-chain based "thinker" [...]

  35. [...] a position to know things rather than in the position of believing things, feeling things, seeking consensusen etcetera. In other words - you'll be a scientist, rather than a human latrine [...]

  36. [...] longer has the "alert key" nor are "alert keys" anymore a thing. Consequently that "opinion" of a "most viewed writer" is no longer there, as of early [...]

  37. [...] ever made" list of dubious provenance.ii This only goes to show what a fabulous counter-predictor "public opinion" aka fecal matter actually is -- the film is nothing short of [...]

  38. [...] They had reasoned that "everyone is there", except a hundred thousand Parisians reflecting the "consensus" of the largest city "in the known world" turned out not to even matter. It's not a question of [...]

  39. [...] so se mi spiego. ———Which was how they said "community consensus" (aka fecal matter) in 1122. [↩]The selection of where to attach the provided "productive" and "improductive" [...]

  40. [...] no way out of this bind (certainly nonsense of this sort will not be entertained, I don't care that pantsuit consensus is rather leaning that way), and specifically the overburdening of women with weighs above their [...]

  41. [...] a large amount of nameless idiots wrote lengthy "opinion pieces" which no doubt formed a "consensus" about how Bitcoin will forward their idiocy agenda. Because Bitcoin is new, and the idiocies they [...]

  42. [...] children think this sort of inane bullshit is even remotely socially acceptable (or, god forbid, fecal matter consensus "forms", in the sense of, cures, "experts agree" bla bla bla). The fastest development I do is [...]

  43. [...] the way, remember back when "progress" was "consensus" and so the only way anyone ever denoted The Republic was by presuming it is the avant-garde of the [...]

  44. [...] for such claims is intricate and complex, so most "people" evaluate it lazily : they go by what they perceive "most other people" to be doing. It's evidently trivial to herd a bunch of these lazy pigglets [...]

  45. [...] fucking habit ever, in the very simple sense that it's what animals do. It's not what people do. "Building consensus" is what animals do. [↩]I have one dick, in Romanian. [↩] Category: Zsilnic [...]

  46. [...] but whatevers. [↩]A point sufficiently well established by now : "consensus" votes aren't. [↩]Right, right, because this is science we're talking about here, a methodical approach, [...]

  47. [...] be part of something, and they assume (quite falsely) that the only thing there is to be part of is the mass of retards. Consequently, they censor themselves like highschool junior cuntlets, who will happily and in all [...]

  48. [...] : never take any SWAG-drugs. If "everyone" is taking Lipitor, you don't take it, because "everyone" is just another name for organised and militant retards. It's a heuristic, which means it won't work perfectly -- but it's a good heuristic, which means [...]

  49. [...] is no money in platforms ; nor ever will there be. Bathing in "consensus" as to the contrary is just another facet of being very fucking stupid. [↩]The in-universe [...]

  50. [...] ball point of the virtual pen, that had I taken out the wooden stakes, pitch, tar and fire then, "everybody" 'd have agreed being wrong in the same ways for the same reasons, just, much more strongly so, and likely strongly [...]

  51. [...] shop over demonstratively it did precisely and exactly nothing. Who knew power speaks loudly than "consensus", for srsly [...]

  52. [...] the cheapest dictionary and populate bureaucracies readily agreed human hunger is a problem, in the manner these agree on anything -- for to have had something agreed upon, and in that agreement assuage, at [...]

  53. [...] over demonstratively... it did precisely and exactly nothing. Who knew power speaks loudly than "consensus", for srsly [...]

  54. [...] it's actually consensus seeking that drives the behaviour in the shit-for-brains, and from there, contagiously, all around. Truly the only way to have perfect agreement among your [...]

  55. [...] too - for all the "different times", then as now and probably as ever, there's always plenty of public and "official" opinion to loudly if baselessly oppose the intrepid and the extraordinary, mainly on the grounds that they [...]

  56. [...] for managing to seamlessly avoid the utterly misstated "moral questions" and such quagmires of contemporary idiocy. Released (though not filmed) in black-and-white despite coming out in the middle of the television [...]

  57. [...] and a basis for distinction because every other idiot just like me that I know of (through the simple procedure of carefully avoiding knowing anything else) has their ass up their own asshole, and we really [...]

  58. [...] as confusingly incomprehensible as Ed Wood's fare. The passage of time with its attendant loss of "social consensus" and such "rules" "everyone knows" that meanwhile nobody remembers will do just that. The comedy of [...]

  59. [...] mankind is going to remember your little excursion in ridiculousness for all time, your impuissant "consensus" on the topic as thoroughly as readily [...]

  60. [...] definition of vice is "whatever the mass does". It doesn't matter what it is ; as long as "everyone agrees", it's vicious. [↩]If the emarpsamen scene doesn't make this point for you, it's not a case [...]

  61. [...] them ridiculous rather than merely unfounded. Indeed the claims and smears and desperate ploys for consensus ran quite the gamut, from uninspired spins through the Rolodex of Shameful Epithets (racist! [...]

Add your cents! »
    If this is your first comment, it will wait to be approved. This usually takes a few hours. Subsequent comments are not delayed.