Aaron Swartz’s Theory on How to Save the World | Hacker News Reader

Aaron Swartz’s Theory on How to Save the World

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32 pointsmirandak423 comments

By wishing to assemble

"groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines — investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists — who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small",

he was showing his desire for the same kind of power Bertrand Russell was discussing in the later quote:

"Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure."

This is just an early stage of common elite pathology. Aaron was a good kid. They all start out as good kids.

> Aaron was a good kid.

I'm inclined to agree with everything up to and including this.

> They all start out as good kids.

...but I would disagree with this point in particular. Not all.

Sounds like you've got a Damien story behind this comment. Would you like to share?

Notice Aaron said "advocate for", and you quoted Russell saying "making them". I think that's a meaningful difference, don't you?

With "democracies" and mass-media, it's the same thing.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead (disputed, but still catchy)

What would be your alternative strategy for positive change? Is desire for change a desire for power, and thus corrupting? How is an individual supposed to make their voice heard?

If we are all God's children, why would I need to make my voice any louder than anyone else's?

...

I think we're working from a different set of assumptions.

Edit: To ask "Why should anyone have more power than anyone else?" is missing the point: people clearly DO have different amounts of power in the world.

What part in particular of "groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines — investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists — who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small" do you have issue with?

Is it that he would be at the head of this group (thus showing his desire for power)?

Is it that the group would be made up of experts (and thus presumably elitist?)

Is it that people should not form groups and make collective decisions or take collective action?

Is it that people shouldn't seek to make change in the world at all, since it's all up to God anyway?

Or something else entirely? Please clarify. Thanks! :)

What if we go with the secular equivalent of "all men are created equal"?

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." --Rousseau

(Ties in with my previous point: To ask "Why should anyone have more power than anyone else?" is missing the point: people clearly DO have different amounts of power in the world.)

Actions speak louder than words. All of these corporate baddies we wring our hands over today could be taken down several pegs with simple boycotts.

Cut out a few brands at the grocery store, and bring the Koch brothers to their knees. Switch to a flip-phone and watch Apple ask us all what they can do to "make things right".

Now we're talking. That's a prescription for action. I will agree with this.

Edit: Although I think there is more we do too. :) (Not defending Aaron's particular actions here.)

Look at it from a townie perspective. We all go to the town hall. I say my piece. You say yours. The people decide. If they choose right, great. If they choose wrong, also great.

When you start getting into increasingly leveraged situations, that's where it all goes wrong. There's the momentum problem (people mobilized for a once-noble cause carry on long after it ceases to be noble). There's the advocacy problem (right-or-wrong you have to present your side as strongly as possible because it's an adversarial system--no room for compromise or subtlety). And of course there's good old demagoguery where the alpha-dog rides rough-shod over everything else. All of this evolves into a mono-culture problem where they're all reasoning from bogus premises they re-enforce among themselves.

Anything that exacerbates the problem of one man having more than one voice is not a step in the right direction.

Okay, so you're advocating for some sort of direct democracy. It sounds lovely, but I'm not sure it's realistic. We sure as hell don't have it, so how do we go about getting it?

We live in a world where there are huge imbalances in power. We can say it ought not be that way, that it should be another way, but any sensible individual interested in making change must confront political reality and take it into consideration when deciding how they can best effect change.

> Anything that exacerbates the problem of one man having more than one voice is not a step in the right direction.

Some people have no voice at all, while others are hugely influential. This isn't about going from some current equality (1:1) to inequality for some group (1:2). This is about going from out state of gross inequality (100:1) to as close to equality (1:1) as we can get.

I think we're mostly on the same page, just coming at it from different positions.

Democracy doesn't even have to figure into it.

Until the machines take over, if people would just open their eyes and exercise a little discipline, they would realize they can flip that 100:1 around in record time.

Think Bartleby the Scrivener: "I would prefer not to."

If this article had linked to Aaron's original piece instead of summarising its argument and interspersing it with allusions to his life, I wonder if the HN discussion would have taken such an ad hominem turn.

Take two: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/save1

Personally I find the prospect of a system by which people with all different specialisms from around the world could coordinate their efforts as abstract groups highly enticing. One of the big problems of the left, at least where I am, is a feeling of not knowing how or where to get involved with things. I think this speaks to that problem. Discuss.

Free access to everything is great, but you can't also complain that you have no jobs left when those companies can't pay people to actually do the research anymore.

Most of the information that Aaron was 'freeing' cost lots of money in research and development.

A true hero would create an organization that spent their own money on research and development and then give out the results for free. This takes real sacrifice.

Most of the people that propose that everything needs to be free are talking about the hard work of other people and freeing it against their will.

This is not my definition of a hero or even someone we should admire.

I'm not wholly a fan of Aaron's approach here, but this critique seems a bit off-base.

JSTOR wasn't the organization doing the research and development. Various universities and academics, all tax-advantaged and often government-funded, were doing that research. And JSTOR charges them, not giving them a platform for free.

JSTOR itself does add value--it's a platform to publish, and presumably offers editing etc. But Aaron wasn't freeing any of the code that runs JSTOR, just the content it held. Compare it to the free ArXiv, which plays a similar role to JSTOR.

Sadly, editing is also volunteered by the same academics.

Does JSTOR add value, though? I used it a lot in college, but it's searching capabilities were terrible, and most of the articles were incredibly poorly scanned, almost unreadable.

Yes. Just because nowadays you can imagine much better implementations doesn't change how much a step forward it was in the 90s. There's a reason Aaron was able to download huge amounts of human knowledge in a couple hours. It'd have been pretty much impossible for him to do what he did before some organization like JSTOR.

I was under the impression that most of the information Aaron was freeing was publicly funded research. Elsevier et al do not fund research, they charge researchers to publish in their journals, they charge researchers to access those journals, and they generally lock down access to them. The thing they offer in exchange is conferring some of the prestige they've built up for their journals to your research paper.

Did he "free" any industry research?

>A true hero would create an organization that spent their own money on research and development and then give out the results for free. This takes real sacrifice.

Seeing as the man is dead as a direct result of his allegedly false heroics, I can't help but disagree with the implication in the latter portion of your statment.

Death is widely agreed upon as a very real sacrifice.

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