Pretty good analogy after all
MindMatters briefly touches bitcoin...

Mind Matters News spoke with Bill Dembski, who has been studying cryptos for years. As an information theorist, he sees money as a type of information: “For people to claim ownership of information is nothing new. Our society even dedicates an entire industry to preserving and tracking ownership claims to information: intellectual property law.” But information does not require paper or tokens in order to exist. In an information society, systems like cryptocurrency are bound to arise and need only avoid such pitfalls as too much centralization and lack of security, he suggests.

First thought: Money as information? That's meaningless.

Second thought: Well, it's superficial, but it leads to a better thought.

Money is a lot like language. Both need to be stable enough for common usage. Both need to be allowed to vary naturally, not by force. At the other end, both need to be tethered or constrained to prevent hijacking of value.

Government-forced change in language = Orwell.

Hijacking language = PC, changes forced by corporations or organizations.

Government-forced change in money = price control, ZIRP, inflation to monetize debt.

Hijacking money = cornering the market.

= = = = =

Does nature give us a guideline? Yup, in a third form of information. DNA is gold, and the epigenes are the paper currency. Paper can vary its value within a generation or two, but the DNA remains constant. When the epi-inflated generations die off, the unmodulated DNA reverts the epigenes to default.

So we can add:

Government-forced change in DNA = sterilization or genocide.

Hijacking DNA = GMO.

Bitcoin fails because it doesn't have DNA or gold. It's just the paper, designed specifically to be easily hijacked by big bullies.

Do we have a gold for language? Not exactly.

Grammarrhoids are goldbugs, insisting that ONLY the standard meaning as of 200 years ago is valid currency. This doesn't work. Language, like prices and interest, needs to vary naturally in response to present needs.

'Progressives' refuse to recognize any standard because, like bitcoiners and stock traders, they want to corner the market on meaning.

For a while dictionaries were like a paper currency pinned to a gold standard. The American Heritage was ideal, supplying the gold standard meaning along with the present exchange rate for various regions. You could see the differential, the negative feedback, between current rate and gold, and you could pull your meanings back toward standard if you felt things were getting out of control. I don't think dictionaries even try to fulfill this role any more. We're in Semantic Zimbabwe.

Labels: defensible cases, Language update, Metrology

  ¶ 3:20 PM