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Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions
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==== Financial services as a paradigm, and critiques from without ==== | ==== Financial services as a paradigm, and critiques from without ==== | ||
Like any communal activity in which there are things to be gained and lost — i.e., ''any'' communal activity — “[[financial services]]” is what [[Thomas Kuhn]] called a “[[paradigm]]”:<ref>{{Br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}} (1962).</ref> a community intellectual structure which develops its own rules, language, hierarchies, defeat devices, articles of faith, and credentialisation process, usually encrusted in so much obscurant | Like any communal activity in which there are things to be gained and lost — i.e., ''any'' communal activity — “[[financial services]]” is what [[Thomas Kuhn]] called a “[[paradigm]]”:<ref>{{Br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}} (1962).</ref> a community intellectual structure which develops its own rules, language, hierarchies, defeat devices, articles of faith, and credentialisation process, usually encrusted in so much obscurant flummery that it is impossible for non-initiates to get near it without being swatted away on ground of ''detail'' — insufficient grasp of buried, esoteric intellectual constructs that only the truly learned can know. | ||
This is an evolutionary design feature of any [[power structure]]. (I take it that “power structure”, “paradigm”, and “intellectual construct” are essentially synonyms, describing any self-organising, bounded community of common but esoteric interests). It is in equal parts benign and malign: without ''some'' commitment to the cause — some unconditional faith in the wisdom of elders — no bounded community consensus can take to the air in the first place. But once it does, the higher it flies and the more it ''[[scale|scales]]'' — and the more there is for those with [[skin in the game]] to ''lose'' — the more ossified and moribund it must necessarily become. We see this time and again, with [[Power structure|power structures]] of all kinds. | This is an evolutionary design feature of any [[power structure]]. (I take it that “power structure”, “paradigm”, and “intellectual construct” are essentially synonyms, describing any self-organising, bounded community of common but esoteric interests). It is in equal parts benign and malign: without ''some'' commitment to the cause — some unconditional faith in the wisdom of elders — no bounded community consensus can take to the air in the first place. But once it does, the higher it flies and the more it ''[[scale|scales]]'' — and the more there is for those with [[skin in the game]] to ''lose'' — the more ossified and moribund it must necessarily become. We see this time and again, with [[Power structure|power structures]] of all kinds. | ||