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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> deep learning vs crypto is a clear divide of rotators vs wordcels. the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but empirically works to produce absurd miracles. the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders yet mostly scams

Can anyone translate this from meme to English please?

Also, it would seem to be a very anti-crypto statement for Vitalik to be posting?

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No, it's common knowledge most publications on crypto in general are scams, and Vitalik has always been critical about money grabbing schemes. Vitalik's project Ethereum has been hurt a lot by "shit coins" (alternative cryptocurrencies that have money grabbing as their sole objective) as if there had been a magical way for regular users to become aware of which crypto technologies add something material to the space and which not, the space as a whole would be a lot healthier.

The other part of that sentence about crypto is a funny self jab though, apparently he's conscious about the research rabbit holes and mathematical abstractions the Ethereum team went through to get for example staking to work.

Had Ethereum not been near the top of every crypto exchange, and Vitalik not been somewhat of a known person, how difficult would it have been for the average crypto-interested person to tell Ethereum's "insane nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders" from the scams?

> deep learning vs crypto is a clear divide of rotators vs wordcels.

"deep learning vs. crypto is a clear divide of math people vs creative people."

> the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but empirically works to produce absurd miracles

deep learning doesn't seem like it should work to people who are entrenched in theory, but somehow it produces great results.

> the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders yet mostly scams

crypto is full of interesting technical challenges but mostly produces scams.

I haven't felt quite that out of touch in a while; thanks for the translation.

It's like glancing at Chaucer and wondering how that ever became the English language, but in reverse.

Luckily there's a website for that:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel

Shape rotator = someone who can rotate shapes in their head, a proxy for IQ. Someone with good mathematical or STEM skills and who feels unvalued for it.

Wordcel = someone good with words/rhetoric who feels like their skill in this field isn't valued enough / it doesn't get them far enough.

This whole time it was just about IQ? Are shape rotators just disgruntled Gifted Kids?

Subset of IQ. You can find high-IQ people who struggle specifically with shape rotation. Not clear if this is an artefact of "what questions get deemed to be part of IQ" or not, but I wouldn't base a division of society on it.

It's not, really. It's more about a political divide, with STEM vs liberal arts being used as a proxy. There are some people who don't want to give up the chauvinistic, pre-#metoo era of the tech industry. Clinging to the meritocracy myth is a coping mechanism.

Ultimately, it's telling on one's self that one is a bad communicator. One might generally perceive any use of -cel neologisms to be a projection of the speaker's own feelings of impotence.

I've never interpreted the distinction as being primarily about IQ, but about how that intelligence is applied. Rotators engineer physical reality, wordcels engineer social dynamics. I think the rotator disgruntlement comes from the fact that wordcels have the capacity to extract more value than they create. It is much harder for rotators to extract more value than they create. This is complicated by the fact that rotators, particularly in tech, are building systems deployed by wordcels to extract value from society (e.g., ad-tech).

> Can anyone translate this from meme to English please?

"ChatGPT, invent some jargon to make people who've bought in feel like insiders, while making ungullible people^W^W I mean haters keep a safe distance."

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