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Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Todd’s urgent dismissal of the documentary reads to Hoback like an attempt to throw Satoshi-hunters off the scent. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Peter would go on the offense. He’s a master of game theory—it’s what he does. He has spent a lot of years now muddying the waters,” says Hoback. “He’s an unbelievable genius.”

I haven't seen the docu, but I did like his (Hoback's) docu about Qanon, Q: Into the Storm.

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[–] [email protected] 230 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (28 children)

When someone says "He's an unbelievable genius," I now understand that the person speaking is either a con artist or a gullible idiot. Unbelievable geniuses don't exist, there's just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard. So if you're saying someone is such a genius, either you have no metric by which to measure genius, or you're selling something.

“I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film.”

Cullen is absolutely selling something: he's selling his documentary.

The various denials and deflections from Todd, [Cullen] claims, are part of a grand and layered misdirection.

Smells 100% like bullshit. I had no take on this documentary one way or the other before, but now I'm very skeptical.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)

What is Noam Chompsky or Daniel Elsburg. If you ever have a conversation with folks like this, you know there is a level of genius that is unbelievable

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.

I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don't know about Elsburg but wouldn't you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.

How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is "normal" that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by "just" being.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't think most people could have the same capacity to store the knowledge in their brain (with immediate recall) no matter how hard they worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I bet, but that's just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to "most people" who have never written essays since high school and I possess only a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.

That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely "selected" him for the practice.

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