Comment by jimduk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimduk | Hacker News Reader

One irony is that these predictive/manipulative systems built on mass data and psychology are (currently) being used by the 'right' rather than the 'left', though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

Does anyone know of any work on the politics of trust/agency in the information/ algorithm age ? How does a normal democratic person self educate in this world without falling back to a siege mentality/ trust in a small cell, or proceeding in a 'happy-go-lucky', 'life is short' manner.

My uneducated guess is this is not that different from some periods of history (Russia, Communist Europe, French Terror, US west expansion?, Ethiopia?), but it feels different from 1960s-90s western Europe (though maybe not - qn raised by samsonradu in this thread).

Another way of putting the problem is as an arms race between vested interests with advanced predictive/ manipulative systems and the general populace. This is probably not new - does it balance out or does it get more concentrated ?

> though they fit better philosophically with the latter.

In which case you're talking about a different left to any that I would identify with. People seem to have begun to forget that there is such a thing as "libertarian left". On the contrary - When I first started learning about politics I was surprised that there was any such thing as "libertarian right" - it seemed obvious to me in my late teens/early twenties that the right was about maintaining power and the left was about making the world a better place (I was naive but not an idiot - I didn't regard state socialism as belonging to any 'authentic' left)

Power is power. Left and right are labels that shift hugely over time.

All that really exists are shifting alliances and existing power structures. "Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in".

This is why an independent judiciary, legislative safeguards, whistleblower laws, a free press and all the other checks and balances of a healthy democracy are the most critical things to defend right now.

I agree with your points, when composing I wrote "left (communist/socialist)" but edited for brevity, which was a mistake. I was trying to compare political traditions with different emphases on 'greater good for the many' vs 'individual rights'.

> ... and all the other checks and balances of a healthy democracy

Is there anything new we should asking for here ? Data disclosure/provenance laws ( a bit like supply chain traceability), Rights of appeal vs algorithm etc ? Unfortunately it seems like the EU was one of the more progressive forces here for the UK

Apologies - your graceful response deserved a reply in turn but I got sidetracked.

I'm not sure that many right-leaning people would agree that "the right was about maintaining power and the left was about making the world a better place". This is a perspective I see quite often these days, and I'd like to point out that left and right aren't equal to "good and bad". They're merely different perspectives on the best way to structure society - and the left-right spectrum doesn't even make that much sense in the first place, given that (as you've noticed) most left-leaning people hold as much in contention with marxist-leninists as they do with conservatives. So while I think you're right that left and right shift around, I think that's partly because they're fairly nonsense labels in the first place.

I find nothing to disagree with you on, here. I was careful to speak in the past tense about my own views.

I still have an innate affinity with the left in an idealized form, but I understand that there is such a thing as an intellectually valid conservative political philosophy based on something more than self-interest.

There are scoundrels and there are the righteous (and many of us are a mix of both). Making the world better for everyone in it is the only political aim I can fully support. If we agree on that we still have a very difficult task converting the aim into concrete policy decisions. Spotting scoundrels is sadly another intractable problem.

Please define "better for everyone" as I think this is the source of much of the liberal/conservative split.

I fight the left because of Venezuela, Cuba, and every place else where Marxist ideas have infected the minds of the masses to give assent to dictatorship. To me, the left will never conjure anything other than the ideas of misery, starvation, political violence, and destruction of life on a massive scale. The Soviet Union, the gulags, China, North Korea. Not one single success story.

You have a very narrow view of the left. How about civil rights, votes for women, basic protection from horrific working conditions?

How about the fight against absolute monarchy. How about the American Constitution and the Founding Fathers? Where does the term 'left' even come from? Who were Thomas Paine and Jefferson inspired by?

The long march towards basic decency in western society has been the task of 'the left' since the Enlightenment and maybe before.

EDIT:

> The Soviet Union, the gulags, China, North Korea.

To anyone on the libertarian left these are all abhorrences. I'm much more of a centrist than most who would identify with the left but - unless you swallow the narrative of state socialism whole, it's hard to include these examples in any authentic history of the left.

(not that that stopped a large percentage of leftist thinkers defending them way past the point of decency - to their eternal shame. Read up on the split between Sartre and Camus and the split between Orwell and most of the rest of the British left)

EDIT 2

> and every place else where Marxist ideas have infected the minds of the masses to give assent to dictatorship

Luckily there's no such thing as right-wing dictatorships, eh?

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