Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result. And that learning is extremely valuable and also takes time.
Then you learn, adjust and try to avoid that in the future, ideally helping others from making the same mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, the scope/extent is slightly different for all of us, but everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm. Otherwise we'll run out of compassion very quickly.
> everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm.
You're changing the subject. Nobody is arguing that the author is irredeemable. On the contrary, the author seems to have recognized his own mistake and changed his course, at least to an extent. The question is whether the author's years in crypto were a waste, and I would say that it's indeed a waste to spend 8 years on something just to "learn" that one shouldn't have done that thing.
> Everyone makes mistakes
This is also changing the subject. Everyone does not spend 8 years in crypto.
I've made some big mistakes, and I think I've also wasted a lot of time. The wasted time was not "valuable" by learning that I wasted my time. It was simply regrettable.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society. I don't need to do that in order to learn that I shouldn't do that. Some things are just blatantly obvious in advance, or should be. You shouldn't need to dedicate your life to crypto to realize it's all a big casino.
It's not about "learning to not do that single thing" but learning from everything you picked up during that period, good or bad. And even if what you did had the net-effect of being negative to society, you can learn from the things you experienced during that time, meaning it wouldn't be a waste, at least in my mind.
> I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society
Me neither. I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society, so seems we're more or less the same on that point.
But everyone's frame of reference and reality is difference, there is no absolute truth here, trying to paint it as such is actively doing a disservice to any sort of discourse we could have about the subject.
One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front? Seems inhumane if so.
> you can learn from the things you experienced during that time
Of course you can learn from your experience, and the author did learn from his experience, which is the entire point of the tweet, so the author doesn't need to be told that he can learn from his experience. He already knows!
Nonetheless, the author considers his time to have been a waste.
> meaning it wouldn't be a waste
This does not follow.
> I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society
Ok...
> One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front?
If that was proven? Well, prove it. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, this is just a silly piece of sophistry with no applicability.
I guess that would depend on your own personal moral backbone as to which direction you would go at that point. Undoubtedly you’ll learn something either way, but hopefully someone would adjust for their next effort.
> "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!"
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
Sorry if you were offended, I was just making a joke. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theories, but a lot of people do, and that’s what I was poking fun at.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
