There's a book about alchemy and other delusions which is actually still really interesting. I'd recommend it. It was originally published in 1841. It includes chapters on financial bubbles as well as alchemy.
Sometimes I wonder how much of the weirdness in alchemy was due to people getting mercury poisoning and similar problems while experimenting with unsafe techniques. There's a long history of chemists poisoning themselves when discovering things.
There's some sort of good analogy in here about how the modern-day search for "AI" is akin to the search for an alchemist recipe for gold. In the search, many interesting substitutes are created and many other useful discoveries made.
Those proclaiming to have general AI that solves everything are charlatans like the man in the article professing to have a way to create gold, but they create investment into research which leads to other useful knowledge, processes, and artifacts.
I have used this analogy for cryptocurrency, which in almost every respect is such a close fit for alchemy that word swapping the terms leaves papers discussing these phenomena almost entirely unchanged.
both trying to create scarce money out of not-scarce not-money.
both slavishly grinding away at technical attacks as solutions to the irreconcilable structural flaws in their basic assumptions, rather than reexamining the validity of those assumptions.
Both utterly infested with corrupting motives, con men (and women) and charlatans who pretend to ideology but are merely opportunistic scroungers who mastered just enough technical hype-speak (or as it was expressed in Faust, "warmed up stuff") to bamboozle other, less sophisticated pretend ideologues into propping up their scam.
both ending up incidentally furthering technology which will go on to do interesting things unrelated to philosopher's stones/blockchains.
They even have strikingly similar origin stories in a fictionalized, pseudononymous creator-ideologue (hermes trismegistus/Satoshi nakamoto) who proposed the outline of their respective magnum opus processes on a color-coded sacred text (emerald tablet/white paper)
it's also speculated that his supervisor [Walther von Tschirnaus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirn...) was the original inventor of European porcelain; and that Bottger had stolen Tchirnaus's notes from the family's tutor after von Tchirnaus's death and claimed the invention as his own
> In 1719 the arcanist Samuel Stölzel escaped from Meissen to Vienna and betrayed the secret of porcelain production. He claimed that Tschirnhaus and not Böttger had discovered porcelain. Also in 1719 the secretary general of the manufacture in Meißen, Caspar Bussius reported: "that the invention of porcelain is not due to Böttger but von Tschirnhaus and that Böttger received the written 'science' from Steinbrück
> Three days after Von Tschirnhaus’s death, there was a burglary at his house and, according to a report by Böttger, a small piece of porcelain was stolen. This report suggests that Böttger himself recognized that Von Tschirnhaus already knew how to make porcelain, a key piece of evidence that Von Tschirnhaus and not Böttger was the inventor. Work resumed on 20 March 1709, by which time Melchior Steinbrück had arrived to assess the dead man’s estate, which included the notes about making porcelain, and had met with Böttger. On 28 March 1709, Böttger went to August II and announced the invention of porcelain. Böttger now was nominated to head the first European manufactory for porcelain. Steinbrück became an inspector and married Böttger’s sister.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] thread[1] Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Mad...
Those proclaiming to have general AI that solves everything are charlatans like the man in the article professing to have a way to create gold, but they create investment into research which leads to other useful knowledge, processes, and artifacts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
both trying to create scarce money out of not-scarce not-money.
both slavishly grinding away at technical attacks as solutions to the irreconcilable structural flaws in their basic assumptions, rather than reexamining the validity of those assumptions.
Both utterly infested with corrupting motives, con men (and women) and charlatans who pretend to ideology but are merely opportunistic scroungers who mastered just enough technical hype-speak (or as it was expressed in Faust, "warmed up stuff") to bamboozle other, less sophisticated pretend ideologues into propping up their scam.
both ending up incidentally furthering technology which will go on to do interesting things unrelated to philosopher's stones/blockchains.
They even have strikingly similar origin stories in a fictionalized, pseudononymous creator-ideologue (hermes trismegistus/Satoshi nakamoto) who proposed the outline of their respective magnum opus processes on a color-coded sacred text (emerald tablet/white paper)
> In 1719 the arcanist Samuel Stölzel escaped from Meissen to Vienna and betrayed the secret of porcelain production. He claimed that Tschirnhaus and not Böttger had discovered porcelain. Also in 1719 the secretary general of the manufacture in Meißen, Caspar Bussius reported: "that the invention of porcelain is not due to Böttger but von Tschirnhaus and that Böttger received the written 'science' from Steinbrück
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_B%C3%B6ttger
> Three days after Von Tschirnhaus’s death, there was a burglary at his house and, according to a report by Böttger, a small piece of porcelain was stolen. This report suggests that Böttger himself recognized that Von Tschirnhaus already knew how to make porcelain, a key piece of evidence that Von Tschirnhaus and not Böttger was the inventor. Work resumed on 20 March 1709, by which time Melchior Steinbrück had arrived to assess the dead man’s estate, which included the notes about making porcelain, and had met with Böttger. On 28 March 1709, Böttger went to August II and announced the invention of porcelain. Böttger now was nominated to head the first European manufactory for porcelain. Steinbrück became an inspector and married Böttger’s sister.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfried_Walther_von_Tschirn...