on "ooh" vs. "woo"

in response to: "Ethereum enjoys a deserved reputation as the smart person's cryptocurrency, helped by Vitalik with a bronze medal in the international informatics olympiad. But Telegram has 17(!) gold and silver math, informatics and programming olympiad medals, and specifically hires only individuals on that level. This is like the Manhattan Project or Skunk Works of cryptocurrencies. These dudes aren't dumb enough to think there's even 1200 people out there who can make meaningful contributions to their design, let alone hire that many then have to lay off half (ala Consensys)."

I've coined the term "ooh", as a variant of "woo", to describe technology (and ideas) that is justified with "ooh" as an intermediate inference

in other words, the

1. do thing
2. ????
3. profit

meme, has an intermediate inference of "????" that is unspecified, it's not clear how 1 --> 3

in the idea of "woo", pseudoscientific ideas are criticized by being magic-like as the intermediate inference. "a juice cleanse removes the toxins from your body" and so on. you don't question it by virtue of its showiness; you'd have to ask like 5 followup questions, and most people are too cucked by agreeableness (alternatively phrased: they aren't disagreeable enough) to do that.

in my concept of "ooh", some showy or impressive thing provides the intermediate inference.

so, very recently, I asked why lucas roitman was in a group made for substantial discussion, because he contributes the opposite of that. the group creator linked me his resume, which is impressive. I'm supposed to "ooh" at his resume, and think this provides an inferential skip that leads to good output.

alex chen -- if you know him, and you might -- delves into this occasionally. he's in a research chat I'm in and invited someone based solely on the fact that they've "done important work." (as opposed to what he thinks they will contribute.) to my knowledge, the person he invited has never even checked the chat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgls9IwWUyU this parody of apple products also gets at the idea of "ooh" I'm using here. the impressiveness lets the audience skip inferences.

so when someone says:

"Ethereum enjoys a deserved reputation as the smart person's cryptocurrency, helped by Vitalik with a bronze medal in the international informatics olympiad. But Telegram has 17(!) gold and silver math, informatics and programming olympiad medals, and specifically hires only individuals on that level. This is like the Manhattan Project or Skunk Works of cryptocurrencies. These dudes aren't dumb enough to think there's even 1200 people out there who can make meaningful contributions to their design, let alone hire that many then have to lay off half (ala Consensys)."

the "oh these guys are so smart" vibe of this sounds like ooh here.

I don't know what contribution they are actually making. you could say the same of IBM, which has a notoriously smart staff. IBM has succeeded at a lot of shit and failed at a lot of shit. google also hires ridiculously smart people -- and just ridiculous people -- so we don't know how central the super-smart people are to TON.

I do want TON to succeed, and I've been following it because I am well aware of the talent they've recruited, but it seems like an amateur rationalist-adjacent move to let status or domain-general-ability (as opposed to domain-specific ability) guide how you think price increases will happen.