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Comment by genzoman | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why so many people choose to give any government more and more power. This is similar to a cultural nuclear weapon. Maybe it will work in the right persons's hands for an agent of good, but really, over the course of time, is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them? How can you tune your personal BS meter, if you never hear any BS? Who watches the watcher?

There is no singular policy that will solve global, complex problems. Sometimes capitalism isn't the answer, sometimes it is. Sometimes regulations are the clear answer, sometimes not.

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Given free hand, corporations can be just as dangerous as governments. I don't know why you would trust corporations more, since their only goal is to make money.

>just as dangerous as governments

Corporations don't have nukes or concentration camps.

Corporations have nuclear power plants that can be just as dangerous. Corporations can feed the masses miss-information, that may lead to destabilisation of a society by making them vote for the wrong person.

Corporations build unsave factories that kill 1000s when collapsing (see Bangladesh). Corporations will add addictive substances to food and sigaretes you increase sales, in the process killing millions.

They could easily get them if we didn't prevent them from doing so.

The Black Hole of Calcutta is a widely known example of what can only be considered a corporate concentration camp of the (at the time privately owned) British East India Company...

That is a bad example indeed. The event of the Black Hole of Calcutta, where soldiers were rounded into a tiny dungeon which few survived, was perpetrated against British soldiers working for the East India Company by the governor of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah.

At least with a corporation you understand their goal completely.

Not really, unless you can listen to every meeting or conversation and read every document.

I agree. The danger isn't simply "Big Government" or "Big <Whatever> Corp.". It's the concentration of power, whether by private or public entities. Private entities will abuse/buy/influence any power structure that happens to exist, to server their interests.

> is limiting what people can hear going to be a good thing for them?

I mean we currently have the exact opposite problem. We can definitively answer that people hearing everything and anything is quantifiably a bad thing for a good-sized portion of the population.

See here[1] and here[2] for some quick examples.

>Who watches the watcher?

Transparency is not antithetical or exclusive to any system that allows information to be properly editorialized. Dystopian hypotheticals kind of fall flat on their face when we have practical problems that run completely counter to some far off totalitarian future.

The worst part about the media landscape for me is not the massive maze of crap you have to wade through, it's that there's enough people willing to lend credence to some part(s) of that maze of crap. It can often remove any hope of a reasonable foundation for a conversation on whatever topic.

I think the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[3] applies well to this topic.

>The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

The current U.S. political landscape is a perfect example of this. We have people buying into certain political mythologies (either outright lies or just plain conspiracy theories, in regards to certain political factions and general policies) with no factual basis and it's wasting what is essentially valuable political capital at an alarming rate. And disappointingly, the actual conspiracies we do have evidence for are disregarded by the very same population that seems to be completely incapable of discerning and analyzing information (or misinformation) in general, across any field. Say, I don't know, climate change.

[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912917721061

[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2331/epdf

[3]: https://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-princ...

The baffling conceit here is that people in government are angels and people in business are evil. They’re still people, with all the same motivations.

No it isn't. It's the more prosaic observation that governments are more accountable by procedural mechanisms than privately owned firms. How well those mechanisms work is subject to wide variance; nobody believes that North Korea actually operates in a democratic fashion,. but there are many countries that self-evidently do. The concept of a constitutional republic (as opposed to all of its real world implementations) is one of maximizing the citizenry's ability to participate in the decisions that affect them.

Most corporations not only function but are structured as autocracies, in which junior employees have no rights over their conditions of employment other than departure.

The most level headed statement instead of immediately going with some Libertarian thought terminating cliche and it's being downvoted.

I'd be lonely without my downvoting groupies :-)

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