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by wpietri
4487 days ago
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If all of the people putting money into Bitcoin had put this much thought into their investment, there wouldn't be a problem. The people I think are likely hypocrites are the group I think of "glibertarians". A fine example is Wall Street and its army of fluffers. They are deeply opposed to government intervention, except suddenly when government intervention is in their favor that's ok. It's not libertarianism; it's IGMFY wearing a bow tie. Also, a writing protip: basing an argument on a dictionary definition is an almost universal sign of a weak argument. It means you've given up trying to engage with what other people are actually saying, and are just trying to "win". And it's even worse when you're just wrong. If I type "hypocrisy" into Google, the first definition is "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense." E.g., the advocacy of (or betting on) independence from or the obsolescence of existing regulatory structures and then turning around and asking for protection from those structures. |
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And a writing meta protip: Attacking the form of your opponent's argument instead of the content is a universal sign of a weak argument, too.
Also, you better should not confuse "basing an argument on a dictionary definition" with "pointing out that the conclusion of your argument only works because your definition is flawed". Your argument is based on the implicit premise that hypocrisy is generally considered bad. There are reasons why hypocrisy is generally considered bad. Those reasons depend on the common definition. Now, you are using a definition that differs from that common definition in a way which happens to invalidate the reasoning that leads to hypocrisy being considered bad. So, when I am pointing out that you are not using the commonly understood definition, I am doing that because it invalidates your implied conclusion that MtGox users asking for regulatory help are/would be behaving badly.
Advocating for something but doing something else is not hypocrisy (and in particular is not necessarily bad, which is why it is important to point out that it is not hypocrisy), not even by the definition you quoted.
You have to distinguish between someone suggesting to change some common behaviour because that would supposedly be beneficial and someone claiming that they have actually changed their behaviour. If someone just says that they think doing X would be good without claiming or implying to be doing X, there is no pretense. It is perfectly normal to consider some behaviour better than one's own and even advocating for it without it being one's moral standard, for all kinds of reasons, often having to do with the practical impossibility of (completely) changing one's own behaviour unless the suggested better behaviour reaches some critical mass of supporters.
For example, someone could be convinced that only traveling by train would be better than using a car (for whatever reasons). Now, in order to achieve that everyone travels only by train, he starts advocating for train travel. But unfortunately, the rail network is in bad shape and it really is currently impossible to travel by train only. That's why he still has a car and uses it where necessary. The point is that he advocates for train travel and against cars, but his moral standard is not that one only should be traveling by train right now - his moral standard is just that one should advocate for train travel in order to enable the transition away from cars to trains and that one should be using trains where it's easy enough to do so, and that is in complete agreement with what he actually does, he doesn't claim to only be traveling by train, he doesn't judge you for using your car, he only judges you by whether you advocate for trains and maybe whether you use trains where that is practicable. That's obviously the only way that could possibly lead to the idea gaining critical mass so that a better rail network could be built and thus it could become realistic for people to actually travel by train only - it's completely idiotic to expect this person to essentially stop travelling at all until a good rail network exists just because he suggests that that would be a better thing to do, or to suggest that he'd be hypocritical if he expected to be rescued if he had a car accident.
If your moral standard is that one should advocate for the use of bitcoins, and you state that one should advocate for the use of bitcoin, and you do indeed advocate for the use of bitcoins, then you do behave according to the moral standards you claim to have, that's why it's not hypocritical, no matter whether you also do use bitcoins or not.
Only if you claimed that your moral standard was that one should not be using any currencies besides bitcoin right now (so, you would judge people for using USD, for example) but were actually using USD, then that would be hypocrisy.
The reason why that distinction is important is that hypocrisy is considered to be bad because it is a form of deceit (and then there are deeper reasons why deceit is considered to be bad). But just saying that you would consider some behaviour to be better ("advocating for it") without claiming or implying to be behaving in that way is not deceitful, hence not hypocrisy, and hence not necessarily bad.