Quote from: Cryptobro on October 07, 2014, 04:00:47 AM

Quote from: TheFascistMind on October 07, 2014, 03:33:23 AM

Quote from: smooth on October 07, 2014, 01:59:40 AM

Quote from: TheFascistMind on October 07, 2014, 01:56:21 AM

Quote from: smooth on October 07, 2014, 01:52:49 AM

Quote from: TheFascistMind on October 07, 2014, 01:50:54 AM

I am not sure if I agree with you that rpietila destroyed Monero

It would be better for your own reputation if you did not misquote me, or quote out of context.

Who is confused?

You apparently, because I did not state anything about anyone destroying Monero.

Of course you did. I didn't intend to imply anything about your intended meaning, rather only the possible literal interpretations given the circumstances. Remember my father is an attorney. I suppose I learned it from him.

Quote from: smooth on October 07, 2014, 12:35:48 AM

rpietila doesn't even have access to the repo, nor would he have any idea what to do with it if he did...

He's a user and self-appointed promoter.

If Mark Karpeles shows up here...

P.S. what I am trying to say is that I think rpietila contributed the political and organizational situation we have now, but I don't know if he solely responsible. And IMO the current situation is not so huge of a potential for the long-term (but I guess that could change depending what you guys have coming). Perhaps 'destroyed' is too severe. Better to say 'limited potential'. My personal opinion only subject to change depending on what is discovered and changes.

I think he also contributed politically to some design decisions, such as originally being against perpetual debasement.

You are one strange individual.

What is psychosis is the continued denial that rpietila was not part of anything that has transpired with Monero.

I mean I am not trying to put XMR down, but it is obnoxious to read that the moon is made of cheese.

If you will pull the Bill Clinton wordsmithing, then I will put the mirror in your face.

If am ever in similar delusion, I hope someone throws cold water on my face.

What has bothered me since the start was the marriage of open source with the investment herding. I am refuting that the two are orthogonal. It feels like a massive conflict-of-interest, because as I pointed out, it impacts critically important design decisions.

I have been bothered by the attempts to declare ring-signatures as the Holy Grail solution to anonymity. It seemed there was a push to suppress any further consideration and that all non-technical investors should move immediately to that technical conclusion.

I'd rather to give time to work through it technically so we can see what comes out the other side. I have tried to help investigate tradeoffs and attack mitigations for ring-signatures for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Philosophical_theories

Quote

His book The Bed of Procrustes summarizes the central problem: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas". Taleb disagrees with Platonic (i.e., theoretical) approaches to reality to the extent that they lead people to have the wrong map of reality rather than no map at all.[17] He opposes most economic and grand social science theorizing, which in his view suffer acutely from the problem of overuse of Plato's Theory of Forms.

Relatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research.

Taleb's writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the "structured randomness" in quantum physics where probabilities are remarkably computable and games of chance like casinos where probabilities are artificially built.[66] Taleb calls this the "Ludic fallacy". His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato's Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place but could have taken place. Discussing the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, "The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort."

In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of quantitative economics are faulty and highly self-referential. He states that statistics is fundamentally incomplete as a field as it cannot predict the risk of rare events, a problem that is acute in proportion to the rarity of these events.

One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the 'barbell' strategy which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed by Taleb to be more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets with a limited downside. He asserts that by adopting these strategies a portfolio can be "robust", that is, gain a positive exposure to black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events.[68] Taleb also applies a similar barbell-style approach to health and exercise. Instead of doing steady and moderate exercise daily, he suggests that it is better to do a low-effort exercise such as walking slowly most of the time, while occasionally expending extreme effort. He avers that the human body evolved to live in a random environment, with various unexpected but intense efforts and much rest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution

Quote

In economics and finance, a Taleb distribution is a term coined by U.K. economists/journalists Martin Wolf and John Kay to describe a returns profile that appears at times deceptively low-risk with steady returns, but experiences periodically catastrophic drawdowns. It does not describe a statistical probability distribution, and does not have an associated mathematical formula. The term is meant to refer to an investment returns profile in which there is a high probability of a small gain, and a small probability of a very large loss, which more than outweighs the gains. In these situations the expected value is (very much) less than zero, but this fact is camouflaged by the appearance of low risk and steady returns. It is a combination of kurtosis risk and skewness risk: overall returns are dominated by extreme events (kurtosis), which are to the downside (skew).