This privacy thing...

mircea_popescu So now that everyone else can be busy, ughlol what was it you wanted to discuss ?
ughlol Let me know if you have 10minutes to spare.. after that, I'll not bother you. But on pm, if you dont mind.
jurov What if he rapes you?ⁱ
steven-__ What about the log?
ughlol I know im practically nothing, and probably don't even deserve talking to someone like you. But I admire billionaires.
Dimsler Why? He's just a scammer like you are.
ughlol Thats my dream, which I might never reach.
Dimsler You might even learn somethin from him
ughlol Yes, I am sure I can learn something from him. Hence I want to talk.

mircea_popescu It's not practical to discuss things with me privately. We have no basis for that, and whatever you say is perhaps useful for others, later.
jurov Dimsler she learned nothing so far, 10 mins wont change that.
Dimsler Oh well.
ughlol mircea_popescu: I wont ask you about investment. Just want to learn and understand your opinion. I read your blog article, and what you say makes a lot of sense. Thats why. It's a request.

mircea_popescu So go ahead and ask, what.
ughlol Over pm please? Otherwise all your friends - Dimsler, jurov, etc will keep interrupting with their comments. Ok?

mircea_popescu Lemme explain how this works. I'm currently donating my time discussing things with people who otherwise would never get to talk to me, because I believe in some things. You can't try to leverage that into something that otherwise costs a whole lot of money.
ThickAsThieves thanks for the post MP.
ughlol I'm only asking 10mins on a private chat.

It's not just that some random kid from India with what he perceives is a business idea that automatically and unthinkingly yet insistently and tenaciously defaults to trying to talk to me "in private". It's everyone. Some SEC lawyer ? Wants to talk on the phone. Suppose I was walking down the street, run into this girl and asked her for her phone number...ⁱⁱ

And everyone in between, too. Every single journo that emailed me yesterday, after having finally heard about the release three days agoⁱⁱⁱ wanted to talk on the phone, but if that wasn't possible some were quite willing to come over to Freenode. Wherein they struck up a private conversation.

Why ?

I have been trying to put myself in their shoes since noticing it yesterday, and I'm not getting much. Suppose you were going on a journalistic expedition in the jungles of the Amazon, where live this tribe of people who have powers, or oil or whatever fascinating and great and barely understood thing they may happen to have. Except it's not either fascinating or un-understood a thing to them, it's a central part of their culture. So what do you do, do you sorta-sneak behind the tribe chieftain, or high priest, or whoever has the tallest headdress and sorta start whining in their ear "hey, can we go somewhere private" ?

I mean, if you're a barely socialised, autistically awkward child with a serious shyness problem you might, I see it, but it's not really for adults, is it ? Not really tolerated by society past the age of maybe seven or so, that's what schooling preteens exists for in the first place, to get the girls and some of the beta boys out of this pathologic mode. No ?

Seems to me that if I were the journalist in the Amazon, and the chieftain, or priest, or guy with headdress or whoever the fuck bid me to go ahead I'd do exactly that. And the more people that gather round the better! Because they're not "interrupting", they're contributing. They're helping me get context and depth and meaning out of what this guy is saying. They help me check alternatives and find which paths even are alternatives, irrespective of what my stupid brain may be telling me. Because odds are that as far as the topic at hand goes, they'd know. They'd fucking know, and I wouldn't.

Which is exactly what bars me from a private adventure with the alien : my perception that I don't speak the language, and as such there is no basis for intimacy with that guy^iv and hence it makes exactly zero sense to seek privacy. But zero sense, not even epsilon, zero outright!

And this not even getting into the whole discussion of how privacy is overdone even for intimacy, at least of the sexual kind. Who the fuck are those people who go to a petting party and then break off from the group to "be alone" with the girl ? You don't fucking want to be alone with the girl, you want to be with her and all the other girls, to see how her tits look on a backround of everyone else's tits, and how she sucks on one while you're sticking it in her. What "alone" ?

Privacy exists as a hiding place for the deviant, so as to have a space where his inadequacy to the rules isn't directly, painfully or dangerously visible. At least within some limits there's nothing wrong with that (but it does carry the seeds of insanity). The trouble starts however when you're not talking to the deviant but with the normative. The normative does not have this problem of privacy, because the rules come straight out of him, and are by default and by definition tailored for his very comfort. Quite on the contrary from the deviant, the normative perceives privacy mostly as a burden, because now he's going to have to repeat the rules for all the other people who weren't present for your little private session, and that's inconvenient and wasteful, not to mention it creates the possibility of a rulechain fork. The resolution of which is even more inconvenient and wasteful.

So this privacy thing... it's really not for everyone.

1. He'd know. [↩]
2. "Oh, but that's different, asking a woman for her phone number is just how you say "let's fuck" in modern English." Really ? Fascinating! So what'd be the basis for the presumed intimacy here, exactly ? I don't know you, you don't know me, we've never slept together, we don't intend to, yet you want to talk to me on the phone. Who ever heard of this ?!

   Not that I don't maintain offices or anything, you can call +40 731 076 827 and talk to the receptionist any time you feel like. It's in the fucking phone book. And do you know what people who do call the receptionist all.the.fucking.time do ? They want to talk to Mr Popescu. Who is this ? Just someone who wants to talk to Mr. Popescu. What'd it be about ? That they want to talk to Mr Popescu! Yes, well, he's not available at the moment, [because he is actually doing stuff and doesn't talk to random people he doesn't know on the phone because why in Carnation would he!] So when will he be back ? Well... just as soon as you're somebody he talks to on the phone, I'm sure. [↩]

3. Of which they could have heard ahead of time if only they were following the proper channels. And yes the Buffett bet was also lead there, and the OpenBSD story literally happened there, and so did everything else. [↩]
4. O wait, hence "what if he rapes you" makes a whole lot of sense ? Aww, and you thought jurov is just being stupid ? Well... this is exactly what we're talking about now isn't it ?

   And boo-hoo that means there's a lot of material. Well of fucking course on a marshmallow there'd be a lot of material. There'd have to be! What do you imagine we've been doing here for the past three years, rubbing two sticks together and expecting a new world order to come smoking out just like that ? We've been building stuff, the smartest people alive today got together and worked together at the greatest thing in the history of humanity to date, bar none. And you expect to fit this within your head in an hour, or a day ? Count your blessings if you manage to fit any identifiable part within a lifetime, and understand that the best you can ever publish are your feverish, desperate notes, carrying all the flourish of a stretched intellect desperately trying to cope.

   None of this "here's the template the editor told me to fill" bullshit works for this purpose. None of that "we understand what we're reporting, it's a car chase or a public demonstration scene or whatever ready-made press category". It doesn't work like that, you too will have to change to fit Bitcoin or disappear. What, you thought it's only the SEC that has to alter its process flow to make me happy ? Heh. [↩]