More from Stephen Diehl -- Decentralized Woo Hoo

I really should have started reading this guy earlier. His blog and twitter feed just jumped to the top of my crypto/Web3 reading list.

In science communication there’s a term that’s often bandied about to describe a type of ineffective communication style that flirts with quackery and pseudoscience, it’s known as quantum woo. The term refers to a class of rhetoric that works backwards from some large human phenomenon, which is shrouded in scientific ambiguity and deep questions, and then proceeds to derive an explanation for said phenomenon by working from quantum mechanics.

It extrapolates the micro “weirdness” of quantum mechanics up to the macro level of human experience through a series of non-sequitur claims involving the misreading of complex ideas and/or misinterpretation of technical terms. These arguments are often used to justify claims for things like crystal healing, panpsychism, heaven or other human mystical or pseudoscientific beliefs. Or similarly they suggest misguided equivalences, like that that quantum mechanics and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivelent without a reference to a mechanism. The Dirac equation has nothing to say about the phenomenon of mind except to describe the chemistry that gives rise to it.

Much of this confusion is nothing but word games arising out of imprecise language. Quantum mechanics uses the word observable to refer to a technical concept, however the word has a colloquial meaning that carries emotional and anthropocentric baggage. Used interchangeably the word mistakenly connotes a person or a mind is involved with this process when in fact the scientific usage has no such requirement. This ambiguity itself has led to an amazing amount of quantum woo purely from the misinterpretation and interchange of words.

The essence of the fallacy is based on either an intentional attempt to construct a post-hoc rationalisation for a crackpot idea through a specious relation to the rigour of physics; or it is an unintentional category error that attempts to use reasoning applicable for one strata of discourse and apply it to a different level, where such models cannot make predictions. In technology we have an almost identical phenomenon surrounding the word decentralized.

In a vast amount of the legal, regulatory, ethical, and policy discussions around crypto assets we encounter questions about the intrinsic value of these investments. Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. But crypto assets come with an attached narrative economics that tries to rationalize their existence by appeals to either libertarian politics or technology. If we venture down the technology arguments, at this point the discussion of intrinsic value of crypto assets reduces down to a rhetorical word salad of decentralized woo making all manner of appeals to alleged ideals of decentralization and networks, yet like with quantum woo, without a reference to a mechanism.