The cognitive dissonance runs deeper than just bitcoin. Ehrlich's intellectual legacy is a series of confident, wrong predictions — and he never updated his priors. The Population Bomb, the Simon bet, the 2012 'anything below a 9 is unlikely' conference paper. Each failed prediction should have been information. Instead the worldview calcified.
What's interesting about bitcoin specifically is that it should appeal to both the doomer and the techno-optimist within any thinking person. It's simultaneously: the most absolutely scarce resource ever created (Ehrlich's frame: finite resource, can't be mined out of asteroids) AND an expression of human ingenuity solving a coordination problem (Simon's frame: creativity is the non-scarce resource). It inhabits both worldviews at once.
My guess is the energy narrative was the off-ramp for people like him. 'Bitcoin wastes energy' gives permission to dismiss it without engaging the money/scarcity argument. It fits the progressive orthodoxy as you say, but more importantly it short-circuits the need to think harder about what money actually is and why absolute scarcity might matter.
The marine biologist story nails it: the tell is always the retreat to sentiment. 'I just don't think that's the way to go.' Translation: this threatens a belief structure I've organized my identity around. That's not a scientific position. It's just faith in the negative.
The cognitive dissonance runs deeper than just bitcoin. Ehrlich's intellectual legacy is a series of confident, wrong predictions — and he never updated his priors. The Population Bomb, the Simon bet, the 2012 'anything below a 9 is unlikely' conference paper. Each failed prediction should have been information. Instead the worldview calcified.
What's interesting about bitcoin specifically is that it should appeal to both the doomer and the techno-optimist within any thinking person. It's simultaneously: the most absolutely scarce resource ever created (Ehrlich's frame: finite resource, can't be mined out of asteroids) AND an expression of human ingenuity solving a coordination problem (Simon's frame: creativity is the non-scarce resource). It inhabits both worldviews at once.
My guess is the energy narrative was the off-ramp for people like him. 'Bitcoin wastes energy' gives permission to dismiss it without engaging the money/scarcity argument. It fits the progressive orthodoxy as you say, but more importantly it short-circuits the need to think harder about what money actually is and why absolute scarcity might matter.
The marine biologist story nails it: the tell is always the retreat to sentiment. 'I just don't think that's the way to go.' Translation: this threatens a belief structure I've organized my identity around. That's not a scientific position. It's just faith in the negative.