Social Cooling (2017)
socialcooling.com
socialcooling.com
When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
So of course we have something to hide.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/reduced-d...
In contrast, if you have full information, you can construct pricing schemes that fully extract all surplus from the consumer. You can, in essence, get higher prices without losing customers. Many pricing schemes today are trying to use more information to approximate that situation (for example auctions, anything with subscriptions, fixed components, packages etc.). It is why firms like Amazon and Google hire a lot of Economics PhDs and Game Theorists. You will also notice that many products are pushing toward such pricing models. This is not by accident.
So, your contention is half right and half wrong. In the greater scheme of things, full information is often (but not always) efficient for total welfare. However, in such situation total welfare also may accrue entirely to firms. That means higher profits, first, and higher costs for the consumer second.
In effect, you will pay more if you are more known.
It then depends on your faith in the fairness of the ownership and distributional properties of our capitalist systems, as well as the efficiency of the markets in question (e.g. competition), whether the increased profits are eventually redistributed to you, the consumer.
It seems to me that in many of the markets in question, even the description of oligopoly would be rather charitable. In that case, latter parts of your post do not seem likely.
Edit: Since you asked for the principles. The first iteration of this you may come across is called price discrimination. At that stage, it's not about information, but you can make that link in your head quite easily: The ability to set different prices, depends of course crucially on what you know.
Next, you may hear about auctions or contract theory, where such problems are tackled explicitly. Switching the roles, you may hear about principal agent problems, where a similar (really the same thing) occurs. For full generality, you may want to read into Mechanism Design. Tillman Borgers has a great book which used to be available free as PDF and you can probably still find it. If you are interested in questions such as: "What can we say generally about any sort of sales contract", then this is a good place to start. Needs some math though.
My dad has a Ph.D in Econ from an Ivy League institution, and lives near-ish to a few FAANGs. He's retired but gets headhunter emails from them consistently.
You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.
Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.
Cattle are products on a farm. They have purposes. A few bulls are left for breeding, the rest are gelded. Some cows are for milk. Others are fattened up as much as possible.
But all end up in the slaughterhouse. Anyone that steps out of line causes problems before that time may find themselves culled from the herd.
The purpose of the system is not to make cows happy, or meet cow needs. It's to produce as much economic product as possible.
To answer your question, people aren't always seen as intrinsically valuable, nor their suffering meaningful. In the wrong context, corporations, congregations, and other populations are only valued for what they produce, like how cows are valued (and raised) for their milk and meat.
My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they're doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn't always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it's too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else's. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn't mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.
I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there's no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he's sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He's not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn't want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That's when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.
I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.
(... not saying dumps are advanced noise, but this is on the right track. Don't hide the needle. Produce more haystack)
So instead of an ad blocker, we could have background bots in our browser visiting random urls and clicking on every ad in sight (of course it would need to mimic human UI input).
I wonder what affect that would have.
In our culture we feel deep embarrassment if someone sees us using the toilet, but this is not universal across people and cultures, and honestly, it shouldn't be embarrassing. There's nothing inherently wrong with pooping. We irrationally feel embarrassment when we shouldn't have to.
This argument doesn't show any negative consequences of invasion of privacy. It's also not clear how it extrapolates to situations that don't involve toilets or nudity. If the problem is embarrassment, and people don't feel embarrassed that Facebook collects data, does that make it okay?
Obviously there are other arguments for privacy that do show potential harm. I find these more compelling.
But I don't think it's the strong argument in favour of privacy that we want to make, because:
1. We do give people privacy in the bathroom. The debate is over the data social media companies collect. If people aren't generally embarrassed that Facebook collects data about what they post on Facebook, how does it relate to being embarrassed to be seen on the toilet?
2. Do we always have to accommodate irrational feelings? What about people who are easily offended by things that things that most would consider non-offensive? Is it immoral for a child to dress as a clown on halloween given that some people have coulrophobia? If you're arguing with someone who believes law enforcement should have access to people's social media and you bring up that stuff posted on social media could be embarrassing, the obvious response is, "Well, too bad. Investigating crimes is more important."
I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean.
Could we perhaps group together embarrassment, loss of dignity and shame and summarize the point as follows?
"Invasions of privacy cause psychological harm."
Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
And that's not a strong argument.
It's not possible to understand the parent comment without knowing what dignity is.
> Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
What argument? I literally said, "I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean." I was just asking for clarification. I haven't denied anything in the parent comment.
It sounds more respectable if you call it an 'intuition pump'. Whether or not it is rational to want to defecate privately, this point may lead some fraction of those whose mind was previously made up to reconsider their position. In those cases, it can be the beginning of a conversation.
But that is precisely the rational reason. In a free society you want people to act freely. To be able to act freely it helps tremendously to not be under constant surveillance by authorities, powerful actors and/or personal and political enemies. If one happens to have the same cultural background or political ideas as all those on the other side and one is generally a careless nature it helps in not feeling threatened by that surveillance.
The new thing digital surveillance brought is the ability to automate and for search things that happened once. Where in communist Germany the state had to have a giant apparatus that would break into your flat and install microphones, have people constantly following you around and listening in on every word you said. The impact this has on a free exchange of ideas is quite obvious, isn't it? These things have become far less resource intensive in the age of the web.
And if you now say: "Yeah but they were communists" — that is the point. If you are hoping those in power will be respectful because your values (currently) align with theirs; or because your information is (currently) more useful to them when not disclosed to your enemies — then this is a very optimistic view of the world. But things can change, and not all have that sense of optimism.
Not having to think about whether somebody will knock your door with state police in a decade because of something you wrote online is the reason why privacy exist. Not having to censor yourself because you are afraid those fringe lunatics on the opposite political side will destroy your life is the reason why privacy exists. Not having to censor yourself because your violent husband reads everything you wrote is the reason why privacy exists.
So maybe you can read this as: Power that sees what you do can (and does) change how you act, even if they don't come after you. Not having them see you is a good way of not having to change.
> But that is precisely the rational reason.
I'm not following your reasoning here. You list several logical reasons why digital privacy is important (it protects us from nefarious governments, it protects us from violent spouses, etc.). What does this have to do with an irrational embarrassment over pooping?
Whether this fear is rational doesn't matter. Whether these intrusions are never actually carried out and always only remain a faint possibility, a story the actors make you believe doesn't matter.
John Oliver used a similar tactic when speaking about Edward Snowden and the Patrioct Act. Instead of framing it about rights, pricacy and stuff, he talkes about dick picks. It kinda worked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
When an employer, for instance, is able to request data aggregation services for a break down about your entire life without or with forced consent from you, or able to monitor and analyze every step of yours during working hours, it's dehumanizing.
Similarly, it doesn't matter whether those with access to data regarding you have only good intentions. It may be pleasing to have a store know everything you like and need right in the moment, you still should be able to walk in and out (pseudo-)anonymously when you wish to.
Same with the state. We say not to talk to the police. In trials the determination what evidence can be submitted is always an important step. So why should the police, prosecution, intelligence agencies, or any other entity be able to access or collect data about you and evaluate it without due process?
And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.
Seems to me that using word 'privacy' for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term 'privacy' for private interactions and use some other (like 'non-accountability') for public ones.
I don't see what's so problematic. If someone is in public, they are exposed and obviously don't have any privacy. Same logic applies to data people publish on the internet. People can attempt to create some privacy for themselves in these contexts but it's not really a violation or invasion if some stranger shows up and witnesses things they weren't supposed to.
It's completely different from someone's house or computer. These are our spaces and we have complete control over them. So someone installing sensors such as microphones and cameras inside our own homes is a massive violation of our rights. Everybody understands this. It's offensive when the state does it even when warranted. So it is also not acceptable for mere corporations to turn on our microphones in order to listen to keywords or some other surveillance capitalism bullshit.
Rights to wear clothes. Rights to not speak to anyone they don't want to. Rights against unreasonable search. These are all privacy related, and while we give some up to be a part of society, we retain some as well. Looking at this as black and white (on either side) is an obstacle to finding a sustainable and constructive path forward.
My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where "BLM" is just earnest liberals as you'd expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren't all that bothered by the situation).
Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates "microchipping" people is a cartoonish example but there's a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don't have).
If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).
1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don't-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they've experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.
2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the "social fire" crowd - they don't understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don't think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.
3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to 'social fire'. People who don't have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone's decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.
We were 'almost' there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).
Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
Universal cynicism and nihilism may function that way. But that was not the attitude of the person in the description. So I am not sure how that is relevant?
The cliche "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" is just the tech nerd's version of "if you don't know who the fish at the table is, you're the fish."
Folks behind the iron curtain got used to that mentality over a few decades in a time when information flowed slowly through newspapers, radio, and early TV... we're now being forced to reckon with these tricks over the course of a few years while moving at the speed of industrialized data collection, microtargeting, and engineered dopamine bursts that maximize engagement.
People living in the cold war era were at least mentally inoculated against these tricks -- in the US we've had no preparation for it. The ease with which we've turned against each other for the easy popcorn comfort of the conspiracy theory or outrage du jour is mind boggling.
It doesn’t seem like people there are obviously better at media consumption, let alone inoculated?
Presiding over steadily improving living standards tends to give leaders staying power in every country. Putin was there for Russia's bounceback from the 90s.
I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively
"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
Mad magazine used to run "reading between the lines" pieces.
[1] A while ago I learned The Game of Rat and Dragon is accurate insofar as felines not only have better reflexes than ours, they're among the best.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
The real difference is that those in the east were predisposed to be suspicious, whereas in the west that disposition or curiousity is not a thing.
But it's in Pepsi's and Coke's best interest to have you think it's only those two.
As to reporting unemployment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364947
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name & occupation) each spouting something humorous?
and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.
Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?
Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.
That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?
If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.
At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
A relevant, if flip solution to the 'bot' issue[0].
On the flip side, successful startups that aren't full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for example
I think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style "full-world" social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interest
And, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there's enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they're verified or not. You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users' subnetworks small enough that it isn't toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
can add levels.fyi to that list as they now use actual offer letters to build their data set
In my opinion HN is the gold-standard of online communities and it's being managed pretty well despite it scaling to what it is right now.
I wonder more leanings from HN (specially on the moderation front) can be applied to newer social platforms.
... Which is a good thing. (for the users, at least)
We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn't necessary.
I think you have completely misread the situation. The "fakification" of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated "influencers" and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.
I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.
I don't share your optimism. Significant portions of the population believe the Earth is 6000 years old or is flat. Not sure why their critical thinking skills would suddenly improve at an opportune time.
The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.
It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.
Ironically accounts with Twitter's blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
Now that's authenticity verification.
Any kind of widely used identity/authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation's products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.
For identity protocols I think BrightID (https://www.brightid.org/) is becoming more established and works pretty well.
Not so sure. I'd rather wage that people won't really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It's not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it's all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it's fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I'm not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.
Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse).
> However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them.
This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party).
To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
Likewise. But I wasn't saying that's not possible, I was saying that I'm not convinced many people change their opinions over the course of such conversations. Being civil is important, but the question was whether civil debate among people who know each other in person results in more reasonable opinions, or compromises.
It's obviously better than online conversations. But to what extent? I don't think GP made a sufficiently convincing case.
The idea of “right” and “wrong” views is flawed and to set out with the objective of persuading the other to your view is a mistake. Getting them to understand you view, whilst you get to understand theirs, is a better objective. You can’t change the world if you don’t understand it.
It is of course extremely difficult to have this kind of conversation online especially in short form.
And I don't see any chilling effect, other than "fuck that, I'm not gonna follow Facebook/twitter anymore"
They're not writing anything, but they're not consuming it. Now if so called journalists would stay off twitter/facebook, the problem will be solved. Because it's not a chilling effect if the entire aparatus is irrelevant.
Yes. For example, very few people in SV can openly say they are going to vote for Trump.
> the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves
Yes, people don't censor themselves when they are in majority. For example, those who live in SV, and support gay marriage and BLM, they can throw insults without repercussions.
The fun fact about the word "bigotry" is that people who use "bigotry" as insults are very often bigots themselves.
I'm sorry for not expressing clearly. People want freedom more than respect. In particular, freedom to express support of Trump.
> If you want respect don't admit to being prejudiced against the way people are born.
I'm sorry, I don't see a connection between your comment and parent comment.
It is somewhat similar (but to lesser degree of course) to China: there’s no law prohibiting talking about Tiananmen Square, but you better not do it.
That's something of a misnomer. In the case where the government (as in China) will visit consequences upon you for your speech limits freedom.
But others using their speech to express their displeasure with your speech does not.
Do you see how that works? If your peers disagree with you and express that, it's not limiting freedom, it's giving the same freedom to everyone.
I do believe that it's inappropriate (note the word I use here, as it has a specific meaning and implication) to target someone's professional status for a real or perceived disagreement (assuming that those disagreements are not relevant to the target's professional duties).
That doesn't make it illegal, just petty, vindictive and in bad faith. None of which limits anyone's freedom to express themselves.
There's a big difference between legality and social norms. Just because it's legal to do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
This whole dichotomy is just stupid and abused because of historic American politics, the word has lost all meaning.
What actually happens is that when you talk about it, you lose your job, etc. Rarely does the government step in. Which, and correct me if I'm wrong, sounds like what you're advocating as "free speech".
The Great Firewall and Social Credit system are both run by the government and definitely penalize this behavior.
Of course there's no law explicitly saying "you can't talk about Tiananmen Square" because that law would be talking about Tiananmen Square which is the opposite of what they want.
But people don't talk about it. It's enforced socially. That's my point. You don't talk about Tiananmen Square, you don't gawk at Falun Gong protesters, etc. Even many Chinese expats act like this. It's just something people know not to do because they don't want to be seen as a bad person and lose friends, jobs, and so on.
That happens completely outside the government's influence.
Yes it is; that's (most of) what "freedom" means. By your logic, if I would shoot you if you leave your house, then you would still be free to leave your house, 'just' not from the consequences.
Edit, a more proximate example: if the ministry of love will kindnap and torture you for criticising the government, your logic would hold that this does not violate freedom of speech, so long as they do not preemptivly prevent such criticism.
This phrase should be an example of Emperors New Clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Of course it is trivially correct for the most part because people have opinions, but the concept of freedom of speech directly addresses this.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation
You don't even need to read more than 200 words and people using this phrase seem overly interested in the retaliation part through social excommunication. Bigotry in its original form.
Not treating people with respect, regardless of their views, is also bigotry.
Nobody cares about your respect.
But please don't bully those who disagree with you.
I try to respect people enough to not tell them what "good" or "bad" must mean for them.
Wait until you read about the whole "free will" issue.
This is a lie. 100% debunked lie. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...
As far as women, framing Trump as a big meanie who says mean words totally ignores what he and his administration have actually done for women in the aggregate.
> Our nation has created more than 7 million jobs since the 2016 election — and women have filled over half, or more than 4 million, of those vacancies
> The unemployment rate for women stands at a minuscule 3.2%, and last September reached its lowest level since 1953
> And as the unemployment rate has declined, so too did the number of women in poverty, decreasing by 1.5 million in President Trump’s first two years in office
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/29/has_tr...!
The victims of sex trafficking are primarily women and children
> Worldwide, there are 40.3 million victims, with 75% women and girls and 25% children, according to The International Labour Organization
> Trump signed the Abolish Human Trafficking Act, which strengthens programs supporting survivors and resources for combating modern slavery
> [Trump] signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which tightens criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking
> Trump also signed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act, authorizing $430 million to fight sex and labor trafficking, as well as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which establishes “new prevention, prosecution, and collaboration initiative to bring human traffickers to justice.”
> since President Trump took office in January 2017, there have been nearly 12,470 arrests for human trafficking, according to arrest records compiled by investigative journalist Corey Lynn, and over 9130 victims rescued. Compare that to the 525 arrested in Barack Obama’s last year in office
http://www.dienekesplace.com/2019/07/28/the-number-of-human-...
Sadly, I think this is par for the course, and often those "crazy" things are accepted by a large enough part of society that the cooling effect is very low.
My theory is that this is why Full Name Required comments fields and also Facebook is way uglier than pseudonymous forums like HN and Ars Technica.
One conspiracy is certainly that the perspective of flat-earthers matters and should be addressed in any way. Same, with anti-vaxxers. We had vaccination quotas of 96% and as soon as people wanted to force others to vaccinate, it dropped considerably. Reactionary? Perhaps, but perfectly understandable.
It's why politics is full of goons. Who in their right mind would go into that arena, to do good, when the risks are so high, the exposure so great, the hatred so guaranteed? Just the wrong people willing to take the risk.
On the Internet, those same people are completely imperceptible.
Maybe flat earth isn't the best example, but you know, I don't want to looks like I'm opposed to POPULAR_OPINION_ONLINE lol
Among members of my team, I have far and away the most moderate opinions on Docker. I'm pretty sure that this is largely because I'm also the one tasked with maintaining what infrastructure we have that's based on Docker. So my opinions are largely driven by first-hand experience, whereas my colleagues' opinions are largely driven by things they read on the Internet.
The less certain people censor themselves. And the more other kinds of people censor themselves. There seems to be widespread colloquial agreement that those who don't censor themselves are usually more extreme in their views, more confident in their truthiness, and often more mistaken about basic verifiable facts.
This is very much a question of signal-to-noise ratio.
The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.
Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?
I mean identities that span across several networks and include emails, aged cookies, fake fingeprint generator, etc
Then doesn't this discount the threat being posed by the "Social Cooling" theory? If social media activity doesn't matter "when it comes down to real transactions" shouldn't we be less worried?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can't "social media fake" your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
> but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
This is more of the problem - the social impact eventually leads to financial impact.
Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.
Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.
-----
I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:
See also Deleuzes "Societies of Control":
https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...
and:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844512_Societies...
I re-read Deleuze's three-page paper every year. It really describes things well.
It definitely does, and he is scarily accurate in his analysis. I just re-read it myself, and stumbled over this part, which I certainly not anticipated in this form a few years back:
> For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potentially sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation -- as they say -- but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled.
This is certainly an accurate description of the control mechanisms various states have put into place in the form of apps that enforce selective quarantine restrictions.
The socialcooling website really a great project! Important content presented concise and on-point, thank you for doing this!
I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.
The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.
Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That's to be expected.
The way I see it is "Information wants to be free".
...It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren't affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.
Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to 'whoever has money' A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?
... These trends are worsening. People aren't spending more and more on data that has "no bearing on anything". That it's invisible to you makes it worse.
And societally it's not okay to create a complete nightmare for like 5% of people. So I totally get it.
Just that if you live in the First World and live a normative interface (my drug use doesn't leak into the professional environment, my illegal imports are on the quiet) you can get away with a lot.
Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
https://www.cloakingcompany.com
It's a fictitious company that helps you do exactly this. And while it's fiction, the tool actually does work.
Although as time passes, it seems maybe it should be real...
>You can just use the tool for free.
So can you actually use it or not? If you can use it, then I would say it is a real service in any sense of "real service" I can think of.
testimonials for cloakingcompany.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24328764
All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.
This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.
Glory to Arstotska
If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
/But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society.
I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
Sadly that's not the case since there is the phenomena of canceling people over what are called "hate facts".
The whole entire notion of a credit history, credit reporting agencies, and the idea of my personal information being out there and out of my control sounds so weird.
And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.
It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".
Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.
More or less I'm advocating a distributed social credit system instead of a centralized one. In fact I'd say "distributed social credit" is a pretty good term for the social conditions we have spent most of our time evolving in.
Both small towns and big cities have governments. Social norms can include being heterosexual or following a specific religion. Not conforming to those expectations can have physical consequences too.
Is this what's happening? What I see is more and more people falling into a few different tribes, each attempting to out ostracize the other. Game theory suggests this will end with two main tribes with peak hatred for each other.
This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.
When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.
It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.
In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.
That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.
Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.
And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."
One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."
Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.
When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.
But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.
Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.
I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.
There's a big difference between politeness and total conformity to established (by the powerful) norms. Disagreeing (politely) with government policy on a public forum could easily prevent you from obtaining certain positions or status in the future if this is an accurate trend.
Not to mention that the freedom to go outside of convention without arbitrarily large punishment is worth preserving in of itself.
"Freakin' internet. Whats up with that?" — M.I.A.
If it's a completely inaccurate trend, I suppose your suggestion then completely misses the hoop, so to speak. If anything, it seems like a lack of privacy has heated things up through the micro-marketing of a hundred types of off-kilter reasons to be angry to a hundred different slightly skewed personality types.
I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.
Remember “Don’t ask don’t tell?”
The truth is that what is generally accepted today will be guaranteed to not be the same exact things that are generally accepted tomorrow.
Society moves from being more liberal back to more conservative through culture. Punishing people for straying outside lines when they are not causing specific harm to others eliminates the very method by which societies evolve.
What you are describing has lead to the stagnation and ultimately death of many cultures and societies.
I see you've never been to the internet.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle (paraphrased)
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.
A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
I don't get the notion that social cooling was scoping itself to only the US, but even if it was, I don't think people are "learning better yet." Quite the contrary.
It's interesting that this is about big data generally and people are reading it as "Facebook".
The total amount of posting doesn't go to zero because not everybody is in the careful category.
I don't know whether the rest are silent lurkers like me, or whether they are bots, or FB is just inflating the numbers, but they surely aren't visibly active. I imagine it's not a special thing where I live, so you'll likely have the vast majority not posting publicly at all while a small minority is extremely loud. If the user count grows (hasn't the growth slowed?), most of it will not be seen by you while you look at posts and comments.
I would have thought this is obvious, but clearly not.
I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago.
Edit: I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
Most non-tech people I know have hundreds, if not thousands of unread messages in their inboxes and will probably miss some unexpected ones.
Since getting off social media, I’ve tried using email to connect with friends and it has been a good experience.
Second after SMS.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)
You can and should. Although at a certain point the benefit of being connected to those people via social media as opposed to say, a group chat via text message or an app like Discord/Slack, diminishes greatly. I think that's the paradox of social media: the only thing it does well that alternatives don't is connecting you to lots and lots of people, many of whom you barely or don't know at all, but the quality of the experience degrades with the number of people you are connected to and the weakness of your connection to them.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
Actually, my notion of this is driven by seeing a dsignated "Safe Space" on a college campus, and a "Free Speech Zone" at the University of Houston.
Don't make assumptions about other people.
How many people do you see on average using it though? Are students in wheel chairs the norm of the campus?
Ala - how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
I make the safe guess that the University didn't spend money on signs and and allocate public space without there being a demand for it. It sure didn't look like an art installation.
how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
If by "go," you mean "attend," no I am not a student. If by "go," you mean "visit," I did quite frequently when I lived in Houston. But I didn't make a habit of sitting on a park bench with a clicker and monitoring the habits of other people. Can you tell me that it is never used? Rarely used? Never used? Do you even go there?
Though, in an attempt to perhaps please you:
I go to the most liberal University in my state because I was born in the town and got an academic full ride. We pul about 25,000 students in a town with a pop of less than 5,000.
Our safe space office was actually just "repurposed" as it was just about never used. In the beginning in helped spawn some friendly campus programs that meet every now and then as University programs do. Most students who sought the Uni official safe space office migrated to those. Thus, it's purpose was served, and now it's gone.
Hope this helps in your research.
Looking back at your comment: No, you weren't a student who would in any way be affected by the office, yet you still are commenting on it from the outside. Seems... unnecessary. I'm glad you're so concerned about the dispersal of University funds. Must be wanting to know how each penny will be benefitting your community in the way you see fit.
The free speech zone exists so that anti-women's-rights protesters can show pictures of fetuses to students.
The safe space area was made when we found out it was physically dangerous for the student communist and anarchist groups to peaceably assemble in the free speech zone.
During my time at UH, the greatest threat to free speech was posed by the conservative student population. I was physically threatened and harmed on many occasions in my 4 years there.
That makes sense. Whenever I walk into a building with a bathroom, I assume I can pee anywhere in the building.
In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/academics-...
>Heterodox Academy is a group of 4,100+ educators, administrators, & graduate students who believe diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research & learning. [1]
Does anyone think that a person who joins a group focusing on promoting "diverse viewpoints" is going to have a representative view of sharing controversial opinions? This is a wildly biased population of people to be answering this question.
I'm sure that's also true in the Church of Scientology and a lot of religious congregations. That is how people work. Creating spaces where robust discussion and dissent is respected and productive is actually hard work and requires good management (which Lord knows most academic departments don't have, since the Head Manager is just whoever got coerced into being chair this time).
Nowadays it seems that this role has been forgotten.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
The person you responded to asked how many. The answer is that not many. And it is not like having black friends meant you won't be racist. Nor having wife or mom you like prevents mysoginy. Personal relationships have part only up to the point.
That being said, some nazi members had a Jew they personally liked or protected. It dis mot stopped genocide.
I'm proud you could come up with one guy who was saintly. For the rest of us non-saintly people, it's pretty tough to maintain and tend friendships with people who think we're bad, immoral, subhuman, or otherwise less than. Just makes conversation hard to keep up!
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
The solution is to not worry about them. If they don't like it, too bad. They're not worth knowing.
There are plenty of high-quality people and friendships to be made in the world. We don't need to cling to low-grade friendships just because they're people we already know.
In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress
You can't live your life worrying about what someone else "might" do.
The teacher can fundamentally change the course of my life by limiting my ability to take more advanced courses and/or what colleges I can get into. They can humiliate me in front of my peers. They could simply make it impossible for me to learn and engage with material that could be important to my future success.
The fact that a female student has the ability to speak out about being abused _does_ upset that power imbalance, but it would be a mistake to claim that it gives her _more_ power than the teacher.
Either way, power should be wielded with good judgement, and there are certainly consequences on both for using it (and abusing it).
I think it's kind of like the difference between e-sports and real sports. Real sports and e-sports share their competitive nature, but real sports have the endorphins that balance that out with positivity. Online discussion can be antagonistic just like real discussion, but real discussion often has non-verbal cues, food, relaxing atmosphere, small talk, jokes, etc. that balance that out.
Not any more than in days past. People just don't deal with it well anymore.
Possibly because they missed out on three formerly common phrases when they were growing up: "Too bad," "Who Cares?" and "Get over it."
That being said, I fully agree with the rest of your comment. This deficiency isn't new: Most people in any period of history have been unable to engage with ideas like adults, and there are a host of social technologies that prevent these infantile tendencies from blowing up society. Dramatic shifts in the way we live and engage with others (like those brought about by the Internet age) obsolete these safeguards, leaving this type of person vulnerable to a world of epistemological hazards until new tools and processes are created for them to follow by rote.
See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult. "Being an adult" is even more open ended. What does it mean, who defines it? Do you have to be "An Adult" to get elected to office and make rules that others have to follow? Is "An Adult" necessary to implement features on a website that dictate how people interact with each other?
I agree with your agreement statement. Infantile grownups in the past generally did not have a global audience in which they could wreak havoc with, and there issues tended to be local in context.
In what way does this sound silly? We could easily be talking about Dirac and Bohr both learning how to read, in which case "they're so smart, you couldn't possibly do anything they did" would be obvious nonsense. The point here is that exceptional people doing something doesn't imply a high bar, and
> "Being an adult" is even more open ended.
Well obviously. There's no objective test of what makes one an adult[1], so it's inherently an opinion. An adult _can_ do all of those things, though they probably shouldn't, and a big part of what makes the world shitty is down to people like this doing things and making decisions that they shouldn't be, including in the way they vote (it still boggles the mind that people think it makes sense to vote on the basis of a policy you haven't bothered to even _try_ to educate yourself on).
[1] Colloquially, obviously. The legal sense is defined fairly rigorously (though it doesn't mean quite the same thing as the colloquial sense)
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
Every newborn is like an angel. But they quickly learn and follow parents footsteps. Like infinite purgatory. Some break through, acknowledging that conflicting view can be right. That's an ideal. Sadly a lot of people would die earlier than achieve it.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.
As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.
1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...
I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.
Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.
It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.
Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.
I feel like they are.
Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:
(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.
This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.
OR
(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.
But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.
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If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)
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> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.
(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)
You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.
what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .
Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.
Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.
Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.
(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)
This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.
And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.
Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.
Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.
"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
In America, there has always been one side on the right side of history and one on the wrong, as far as health and happiness go. People and institutions switch sides, but the sides exist all the same. It comes down to how considerate you are of your neighbors, here and abroad. It's baffling that such a rich society continues to engage interpersonally with a scarcity mindset. Bootstraps are a myth; give until you can't and then ask for what you need. If we still then have racial issues, class issues, gender issues, religious issues, then the problem goes deeper than economics, and we'll need to face that with the same level of compassion.
We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.
That’s not to deny that we can serve people better. Create access to capital, lessen predatory practices on innumerate consumers, incentivize women to enter more productive areas of the economy, etc.
I don't understand how this would be a valid reason to not give a benefit. Even if that benefit comes with strings or can be taken away, isn't receiving that benefit for a period of time more helpful than never receiving it at all?
That's not an argument against state help & social services per se. It's an argument for being vigilant and ensuring the government serves the people more than it serves itself.
Perhaps. I personally don't buy the "self-made man" arguments. They feel too much like survivorship bias.
Seems like you're concerned about what's mostly a hypothetical when done by the state today- but probably hundreds of millions of people in the US alone are being coerced to do things they don't want to under threat of losing the exact things you're worried about. And in a lot of cases, what's one big thing mitigating that coercion? The very social safety nets you're worried about!
There isn't just one Government in the US. What we have is a system of branches, each of which must agree that a law is acceptable. If just one branch disagrees then it can effect change.
Similarly we are not just one state. We're a federation and individual states can fight against federal laws that their constituents find unjust. Washington and Colorado did just that when they legalized marijuana. It's still illegal at the federal level, but the ATF has no jurisdiction within state lines so they can't do anything about manufacture and sale within state borders.
Consolidating that all under the same umbrella erases a lot of the very complexity that serves to protect you. And you can't accord that complexity to a corporation because shareholders and the board have a level of tyranny not found in our government.
We can elect legislators who are opposed to abuses like Guantanamo Bay and campaign on fixing it.
What can we or the private sector do about abuses in the private sector?
The private sector is not above the law. The problem is that the government is. This is why, while both can misbehave, I see governments as a much, much larger danger to the average citizen than corporations. And the history agrees with me.
>market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.
Can you explain how the consumer punishes private sector entities engaged in human trafficking, for example? It seems there's plenty of evidence that deception and cutting corners is the most market competitive behavior that corporations can employ which allows them to offer the most appealing prices. Therefore market misbehavior is rewarded, not punished by consumers because the price signal is too reductionist to capture all of that.
>And the history agrees with me.
That is debate-able
Sure, a tyrannical government could take away your benefits for having the wrong views. They could also just take away your property in the absence of benefits.
This is genuinely sad-funny considering the state of the US federal government overreach (independent of sitting president), policing, justice and implementation of secret courts and police forces.
In any case, welfare states handle this quite well with a justice system largely independent from the social executive flanked by mandatory legal aid. Which, if anything, has resulted in a power imbalance towards those receiving state benefits.
How is this different than private power? Honestly, I've had to put up with far more arbitrary bs from my HMO than state or federal programs. With my state and the feds at least there is a clear statement of benefits, a clear procedure to appeal, and a solid attempt to deliver on promises.
How well does that compare to, say, your cable company? Or how well have big companies done respecting your privacy? In other words, lots of people get directly screwed by private companies, too.
I'm not trying to say that government programs are the ideal answer to everything. In the USA there is a serious need for reasonable debate, responsible budgets, and a commitment to good government.
There is plenty of potential for abuse with government over reach. But there is also plenty of abuse from government under-reach, too. Isn't it in everybody's interests to have a functioning government? One that that operates under good-faith intentions to follow it's mandate?
Meanwhile, corporations frequently do not have to compete, having either become a monopoly or having agreed upon "standards" without which they insist solvency in their given area would be impossible (as they rake in untold riches in profit). The only check on that power is indirectly through refusing to transact with them en masse. However, as long as their credit is good, they can continue to exist and operate with impunity.
In the end, the question is of the accumulation of which currency determines who is "good" enough to run your life: political clout or money.
Franklu, people who have to be nice to me tend to do better by me than people who just happen to have a lot of money.
Companies are controlled by the market, it's governments we need to worry about and find ways to control and regulate.
Companies are remarkably good at finding ways to control the market. That's why antitrust legislation is needed to protect consumers.
Every government intervention in the market will benefit established players and will hinder startups and thus the markets's self-regulating mechanisms.
There are many other cases where I'd be very uncomfortable trusting these so-called "self-regulatinf mechanisms", e.g. the abolition of slavery, child labour, and racial/sexual employment discrimination.
Modern economics research shows that the efficient markets hypothesis is not true and definitely requires government regulation to operate in the way that Chicago School econ describes it. So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.
This is a non-sequitor. The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency. I personally don’t believe in the efficient market (it’s why I’m an active trader). But elections, where ill-informed people vote on topics they barely have any knowledge about, risking nothing in the process, seem significantly worse at guaranteeing acceptable outcomes.
Can you go into more detail on how that could be for me? If the EMH is untrue, then there must be some other mechanism besides competition that checks the private sector, no? What would that be?
I'm implicitly lumping "regulation" as part of the Elections mechanism, btw, so I'm assuming you didn't mean regulation as the mechanism.
Meanwhile unregulated fields like software, computers and communication have enjoyed the fastest and most remarkable progress in modern history. Progress which benefits us all every day.
First of all, You seem to be confused because you are mistaking what happens in Russia, Venezuela and China for actual elections. Whatever happens in those places is certainly not what I meant by the term "elections."
Second, You point to "three" (or are those 3 things really the same thing?) successes in competition, each of which were aided by investment authorized by elected legislators. Then you point to one failure of elections and proceed to conclude that competition is the better of the two. It doesn't follow, I'm afraid.
As for Trump, yes, that was the elections mechanism failing. I never said it was perfect. But the Market competition mechanism fails more often, in my estimation. Neither is perfect, but competition seems to create much higher probability for imperfection, abuse, flaws, and suffering.
The effects of free market "failures" are comparatively laughable and always corrected by the free market itself sooner or later.
There is no contest which one is graver. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality and evidence all around us.
There are exceptions to this of course, such as government-sponsored monopolies (healthcare, ISPs, utilities). But a lot of that is regulatory capture IMO - we've ceded a lot of power to MegaCorp Inc. which I'm not comfortable with either.
As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc) and demand everything they have on you like the feds can. No one holds a candle to the potential of govt tyranny, everyone is at the mercy of "the man".
At the end of the day, massive consolidation of power at the top levels of society is never healthy, whatever form it may take.
This in an amusing statement considering that many people consider Google and Facebook to be terrible big private companies.
And note, their power doesn't come from government-sponsored monopolies.
Also, calling utilities and ISPs government-sponsored utilities is grossly misleading; both are natural monopolies due to the capital costs that are involved.
Capital costs do not create monopolies, just an obstacle solved by raising capital. Government regulations create monopolies - there is no way to fix those.
People believing in the so-called natural monopolies lack fate in the entrepreneurial drive, creativity and innovation of the free individuals working hard in their own interest, for their own betterment.
This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.
So when someone says, hey, when I joined this society, I was told its people upheld the right for all its members to equal opportunity? But my parents did not have the money that yours did? And that affected my opportunity? So what gives?
When you have the attitude of the government as a seperate entity, it becomes reality. The more you see the government as such, the more it is allowed to become a ruler over others, since that's how you depict it. When it should be the CEO that you, a member of the board, elected, and can booth out when you don't like what they're doing no more, and you also can join the government if you want to contribute more, etc.
Sorry to hijike your discussion about handling the homelessness crisis , but that's a sore point for me. I find it really weak of people to look for someone else to govern them, and I wish people took responsability for their government (in democracies), because they are its owner and fundamentally have power over it. But too many prefer to delegate and pretend they're powerless against the faceless man.
The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group. In most cases it's pretty mundane stuff you give up as an individual, basically 0 cost stuff for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society. Or via listening to the state in regards to the rules and policies they put in place.
But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same.
The entire purpose of a society is to harness the potential of the group in order to enrich each individual life within it.
Stow that scarcity mindset.
Notice I specifically said > for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society.
So, you might want to re-evaluate your bias towards what I said.
This assumes that people are naturally and totally individualistic, which is untrue even at a biological level. People work together instinctually, and they also decide, rationally, to work together. Individual and collective motivations are often the same; and while collective motivations sometimes stifle individual motivations, the former often (if not more often) replaces a LACK of motivation. In fact, the appeal to engaging in collective action in order to fill in a hole of individual meaning (motivation) underpins some of humanity's strongest and most common institutions: military service, volunteer service, protest, religion, work. That is society: individuals working in concert, by each's determination.
>I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
You're making a moral judgment privileging individual motivation, separating it from collective motivation.
Your argument is simply wrong on its face. It tries to generalize a solipsistic perspective to the rest of humanity, to which it very clearly does not apply. Perhaps only in this thought are you truly as much an individual as you seem to think people must necessarily be.
I share the same argument David Graeber was making in Utopia of Rules, you should give it a read.
Read "The Selfish Gene".
I don't see where in what I said you got the impression I was saying that they are one and the same?
I'm saying that, in a working democracy, you are a part of the government, which is very different from seeing the government as a seperate entity you are subservient too.
> The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group
The point of a democratic society is to create a friendly association with others. For it to be friendly, it kind of requires all participants to benefit and feel fairly treated. In turn, this often means that a democratic society will put a stronger emphasis on the individual than non-democratic alternatives. That is to say, the goal of a democratic society is to maximize everyone's rights at the individual level.
Now yes, that does mean that a democratic society is a group of people that assemble together in order to overpower individuals or other groups that would try to dominate over them through force. Maybe that's what you meant here, but it seems a bit of a sideway conversation. Since they do so in order to protect their own individual rights from being taken by force by others.
And anyone motivated enough can engage even further in the process, become a candidate, influence others, etc.
I find so many people are just complainers, but they barely take anytime to even understand how the system works, I wouldn't be surprised if half the people don't even know what a congressman can do, can't do, and does. And even less surprised if most people didn't even bother reading about each candidate for more than 10 minutes.
I'm not American, but now live in America, and I've literally had to explain how laws are made in the US to many Americans. That's depressing. And it's not like I'm an expert on it, I just took a few hours reading through the wikipedia page and the usa.gov website. (p.s.: It's not better in my country Canada, people are similarly lacking in ownership and awareness, so I'm not trying to point fingers at Americans exclusively)
Yes, we can discuss the system and issues with representation, like being first past the post, and all, but even before that, I think there's just a lack of ownership by a lot of people who don't consider themselves a part of the government, when they are. The word itself means: "the people rule" and is defined as: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state". As a citizen of a democratic state, YOU ARE the government.
Meritocracy works (barely) in private corporation but is completely useless in politics.
I take your point, but for an individual this is only true in a very abstract sense. The People may govern Themselves, but I do not govern myself in any meaningful way.
BTW, this idea came up recently on a different article and got some good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24528467
Isn't it apparent, though, that this type of leverage is inevitable in any societal structure? Some party will have a level of power where it can coerce many others to basically do their bidding at threat of witholding some essential sustenance. In the private sector, witholding employment means poverty and the resulting wretched consequences to health and status.
The proposition that government should be the only one with that leverage is the lesser of many evils, because at least there is electoral recourse against a government that abuses it.
This is opposed to leaving that leverage with the private sector, where there is no recourse, other that not participating, which is exactly their leverage in the first place, as you will be left with no income and in poverty.
There are many cultural assumptions that are built into the comments here. Worth examining.
* "What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits." Some countries use government to ensure every mom and baby-to-be has prenatal care and food. There is not a belief test there, just a pregnancy test. Could you give an example of the types of belief tests you are against?
I find the US emphasis on church charity rather than government services repugnant in particular because it often is used exactly for ideological coercion. Not all churches, but many, see the provision of services as a way to enforce/reward/punish certain beliefs and behaviors. I've always found that un-christ-like myself but hey I'm just a heretic. A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".
* Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot. That's another cultural assumption that I find interesting. In the culture I was raised in, it was assumed that government help is rightfully directed primarily at the very young, the very old, and the very sick -- in general, people without employers and with fewer opportunities to 'just help themselves' or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That is, after all, why we formed a bunch of these government agencies -- we as a people, as a community, felt bad seeing 87-year-old men starve to death in their apartments because they had limited mobility and no income, or watching 4-month-old babies refuse to get that corporate job they obviously should've that would've allowed mama who had a debilitating injury from birthing to afford formula for the kid. Ah, self-empowerment: works so well when it results in 4-year-olds becoming trash pickers to help their families, and 92-year-olds to sit by the road (if they even live that long) begging because it brings in a little cash! No. Some of these government programs were formed because there are times in a person's life where all the psychological empowerment and even job skills training classes you want aren't gonna help, but food and a place to live will.
To go back to discussions above this, I still engage a lot on Facebook for political argument purposes. It's boring just talking with people who agree with me (the people I live with, generally) so I do seek out other points of view on Facebook. It is interesting how some folks always slide an argument back to the point they want -- tried talking about Amy Coney Barrett's opinion in a Title IX case with a friend doing a PhD, and strangely enough she kept bringing it back to how universities shouldn't be policing "stuff that happens in bars". I just mention this example because campus adjudication of sexual assault cases and the relationship with Title IX and due process rights is, ugh, a totally different, complicated, legally interesting conversation than 'what happens in bars'. But we can't even have the conversation -- a conversation I feel I can contribute to in an interesting way because I've been faculty at a university and have dealt informally with harassment between students -- because it continually slides back to these fake talking points that dismiss all the important stuff! Is that social cooling or not?
Probably because the vast majority of Americans can only afford healthcare for those debilitating injuries by finding an employer who will sign them up for the employee health plan.
If the results of the latter were proven to result in generally a much happier and more cohesive society, would you be so confident and assured in your opposition and disdain for the approach?
But a whole lot of teen suicide and abortion is due to haters hating (I mean Christians being dogmatic) -- it's pretty well proven that coercive religious dogma is bad for mental health, as well as in the US divorce and abortion rates. The pressure to keep up appearances and lie about who you are and your actual life is not the bit that leads to a happy and cohesive society.
Warning: opinions follow
To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
For what it's worth I'm libertarian and lean towards having false positives for any of those three scenarios.
Whether you believe we live in such a system seems like a matter of opinion and outlook.
Obviously there is a lot of room for skepticism as to whether you think the approach works in practice, or if the approach is simply a front to enact changes that will nominally benefit the unempowered but in reality benefit the empowered. But I don't know of many who aren't in favor of something as vague as "helping people", and most genuinely believe they are doing so.
A conservative movement genuinely interested in making sure children are raised in wedlock could endorse routine family planning and reproductive health services, rather than building an entire totalizing culture war out of opposition to them. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a policy more antithetical to our founding principles than one that compels the reluctant unwed parents of unwanted children to marry.
These issues didn't seem to bother Ben Franklin too much. But: fair enough! A liberal.
I also think this is an example of how conservatives and progressives talk past each other. There's a difference between being in favor of divorce, and being in favor of recognizing that there are situations where divorce is a better option than staying married. Also, there's a difference between being in favor of raising children outside of marriage, and being in favor of an unmarried person or family raising an existing child that would otherwise not be raised by anyone.
Nothing of this sort has by any means been proven.
I’m from a country that probably has one of the highest—if not the highest—proportion of children born outside of marriage. I my self is raised by a single mother, my sister has a son born outside of marriage, and so do many of my friends. This country is also one of the wealthiest in the world and has way less poverty then many countries where child rearing outside of marriage is less common.
In fact you could probably argue just as easily that actively supporting single parents has greater economic benefits then to disenfranchise them.
> While it’s well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents are living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).3
Also the article you link to and quote is about unmarried couples vs. married couples, the source for these number is confusing to say the least, and focuses on the US where single parents don’t get that much welfare, which neither adds nor removes anything from my point that: single parenting is not by it self a good predictor of poverty.
I'd posit that it's not the benefits themselves that disincentivize such things, it's the rules surrounding how one accesses such benefits does so.
If our social programs didn't penalize such activities (through a variety of a restrictions on applying for and keeping such benefits) and we didn't make people jump through arbitrary and often degrading hoops to get them, all the while denigrating such folks as "lazy" or "greedy" or "worthless to society" I think that there wouldn't be such an issue to discuss.
What's more, at least in the US, there is a long tradition of blaming the poor for their poverty and assuming that it's their fault. Which makes it much more palatable to discriminate against those without means for many people.
But that's objectively false. There are many factors that impact poverty, some of which include specific legal and cultural incentives (both conscious and unconscious) which disadvantage certain people and advantage others.
It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.
First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.
Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.
What opinions about health care policy are people allowed to have, in your view?
What does this even mean?
The wording here demonstrates deep disrespect for people whose ideas, experiences, conclusions and understanding of the world differs from your own.
What I meant to wrote was 3 separate points:
- Bernie is not a perfect leftist
To be clear: I don't hold Bernie to the standard of being a "perfect leftist," rather stating the obvious that he is not one. And while I would love a candidate that agreed more with my viewpoints than him, I don't think he's a bad person because he doesn't.
- Bernie has had some shitty takes and policies
I do believe that Bernie Sanders, the politician, has not always wielded his power in my best interest; for instance, voting for the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" joint resolution that has been used as justification for our military presence in the middle east. I would, in a glib way, rate that vote and the opinions he gave during that time as a "shitty take." I don't think that disrespects him as a person.
- Sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't)
Sometimes people evolve their politics and beliefs as they learn more and the material conditions which they exist in change, which is good. Sometimes they do not, and that's bad. I do not think that adopting strictly leftist beliefs - of which there are a cacophony of differing, conflicting ones - is inherently good. Rather the lack of evolution is bad.
I'm plucking this bit out because I don't think that's a good summary of his position. He still doesn't "want immigrants to take jobs from locals." He's concerned about corporations abusing immigrant labor to depress American wages. He's long voted for bills to protect immigrants, even while being wary of increasing low-skill immigration. He's trying to find a middle ground between labor and immigration, and that isn't easy.
For an in-depth look:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...
To be clear, I don't think that it's a right vs left thing. I think that social media incentivizes people to behave poorly. Ben Shapiro had an enlightening discussion with a founder of Vox about the nature of polarization [1], but that's not why he's famous or how he makes money. His audience wants to see him bash unprepared liberals, so that's what he's going to do. Even if he doesn't, some other pundit will simply take his place.
As a former Mormon missionary, I couldn't disagree more. I didn't meet many people who were interested in the Mormon church, but I didn't consider them evil. If anything, it was my views on my religion and personal spirituality that evolved enormously over the course of the two years, far more than the 19 years previous or the many since. I learned a lot about myself and my worldview. Certainly a lot more than anyone changed their worldview by talking to me.
So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
Spot on.
It's basically a preemptive strike before anyone gets the idea to point at cancel culture and the like.
In that context, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with the idea that the travel ban is A Good Thing Actually. And I don't think I'd maintain a friendship with someone who thinks that it is. I do not consider this a character flaw.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.
This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.
Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
> You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
Exactly, and if you're not capable of engaging in that discussion productively, don't be surprised if your viewpoints and positions don't get the consideration you think they deserve.
Civil dialogue is the foundation upon which we find understanding in the face of disparate experiences. If you're feelings about the dialogue gets in the way of contributing to understanding, then it is you that is hurting your own cause.
+1 , want to add, almost everyone argues for limits on immigration because without limits that would be an argument for _unlimited_ immigration.
Sometimes we construe ourselves as vastly separated "islands" of ideologies, when in reality we're more like tight clusters. That is we have similar ideals, and differentiate on how to accomplish them.
For example "Help the poor" is often agreed upon, but then argued about "How to help the poor" . (Do we give them tough love and bootstraps yada yada? or Do we give them support, resources and encouragement and yada yada?).
This is not true. We do limit speech, both through moderation (like here on HN), terms of service (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook etc.), codes of conduct (in our workplace), in our legal society (slander, hate-speech, etc.), etc. But also through our moral behavior. As humans we know that some topics are insensitive to talk about around some people (e.g. we don’t tell yo'mama jokes around a recently orphaned person).
Debating against abortion around a person that is at risk of being forced into pregnancy, or against gay rights against a person not allowed to openly express their love for their same-sex partner is a truly offensive thing to do. When a platform limits such a speech it is acting in a very human way.
Sussing an offensive party to protect the rights of the disenfranchised one is what normal humans do in a normal conversation.
Second, if we rewind to the original comment, it's clearly talking about people "who are offended by everything", on a platform where everything offends someone. This is not about rules or regulations, or personal behavior; all of which have very specific context in which they apply.
Rather it's about the lack of engagement with different perspectives by labelling everything taboo at such a scale and breadth as to prevent any possible discussion, and the worrisome self-censorship as a result. You're only reinforcing this point with your sweeping generalizations on behalf of people and situations you don't represent.
If you find something offensive then you are free to not participate, but you do not have the right to limit their speech. You're not protecting anyone's right by doing so, and I find it the very opposite of human to regress towards silence instead of moving forward through reason.
However “people who are offended by everything” is often used as a synonym for left leaning folks (or rather folks in favor of societal diversity; SJWs if you will). Also “shutting down the debate” is often used to complain about when a left leaning person reacts offensively (or even angrily) during a debate. This is regardless of if the preceding comment was actually very insulting or threatening to some people that may be present.
In a sibling comment I explain that—in my opinion—it is actually a good thing if people that hold oppressing and insulting views self-censor after having received angry replies to their offensive views. I‘d like to add now that normally us “left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that. We—as grandparent points out—we actively engage in the conversation and point out (sometimes in anger) the flaws in the opposing opinion, explain why a thing is offensive and bad, and why we are angry about it. Then we hope that either they will change their view or at least reconsider before they say something like this again.
Again I should reiterate that I am specifically talking about debates that I consider threatening or offensive to some groups of people.
But that's what you just did, and are still doing. Offensive is subjective. Who are you to consider what is offensive to others? Are you in those groups? Are you personally taking offense?
Why did you say immigration can't be discussed? I'm an immigration who discusses it just fine, and I find it annoying and offensive that you act offended on my behalf and shutdown any discussion. I don't want or need that and am fully capable of engaging in the discussion or leaving myself out of it. Engage with the argument or leave it, but stop acting on behalf of others as if they don't have agency. It's just a soft bigotry to think that they can't speak for themselves.
And self-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas. At one point ending slavery and women's suffrage was also offensive to discuss, but good thing we discussed it and actually made progress. Let's not stop now.
I know I didn’t word it perfectly and I understand you might have misunderstood me. English is not my first language and I’m sometimes not as clear as I could be. Particularly in this case I left out the word ‘might’, hoping that it was implied from this being a hypothetical scenario. Sorry for that.
I’m sorry if I left you thinking that all immigrants think this, or are of a certain opinion, I don’t believe this my self and it certainly was not my intention to claim any such thing.
I also don’t hold the opinion that some topics can’t be discussed. Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed. Since you mentioned slavery, imagine a public forum about in Pennsylvania in 1849. Some people might think the debate about abolition is only theoretical and might play the devils advocate, imagining and stating arguments that make sense in a theoretical scenario. Who is this helping? Is Fredrick Douglass gonna walk by this forum and think: “I’m glad people are having this debate, I hope this person that argues for slavery keeps posting.” Say John Brown replies stating this for-slavery person “is an idiot” and “should keep silent, for their own good,” do you think that Harriet Tubman would be thinking: “Oh my, I hope John Brown—though well intentioned—will not silence this anti-abolitionist. In fact why is John Brown speaking on my behalf? he was never a slave. We got to keep this debate going if we want to end slavery.” Finally Harriet Ann Jacobs walks by and simply says to her self: “Well, I’m free now, I don’t need to participate in this forum. I’ll just leave it.”
No, this is ridiculous. We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist. If someone comes with an insulting argument based on a bigoted view, the normal thing to do is to insult back and hope they never speak of this again.
> [S]elf-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas
This is a silly argument given the above example.
Remember the topic is about self-censorship and whether getting offended about certain rhetoric is natural, not about any specific topic which might offend people.
Again, so what? It happens and is entirely subjective, and whether it's shared by millions of people or specific to an individual is an irrelevant detail.
> "Who is this helping?"
Who cares? Discussion happens. There is no imperative that it must be helpful, whatever that means. That's yet another subjective judgement.
> "We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist."
Discussion is what determined they were wrong views in the first place. Speech from the opposing side that, at the time, was considered rebellious and wrong eventually won and created change.
> "the normal thing to do is to insult back"
Yes. Counter speech and ideas with better speech and ideas. That is the opposite of (self-) censorship and limiting expression because of potential offense.
Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.
Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.
To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.
Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?
"developed": The US and Europe are rich.
"wanting": Other people want to be rich. That's why they come.
If US/Europe worshipped money less, they would be less rich. There would be less incentive for others to come, or for incumbents to keep them out. If you want to reduce flow, reduce pressure.
Here's the thing though: You, and your children, would have to work for a living.
> immigration does put pressure on a country's resources
Does it? Or are immigrants the resource being consumed? Seems to me they do the work. And once their children are Americanized, how many grandchildren will they have? Fewer. The US needs immigrants like a car needs gasoline. It eats them.
> if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
Only if there's a cap. Which is uncreative. Do the opposite. Aggressively add people to the ranks of the United States.
Imagine: Tomorrow, Trump comes on the TV and, in terrible Spanish, invites the people of Baha California (both states), Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to hold referenda under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, about joining the United States. They'd be enticed by what's left of the "American dream", sun-belt voters would get a shot at cheaper and sunnier real estate, and factory workers could go to where the jobs are. The problem with NAFTA is that capital can flow but workers can't. So let the people move freely too! And if the Russians can run a foreign influence campaign to make Brexit happen, why can't the US do a Mexic-enter?
We can make the sum be much, much more than zero.
Namely.. I am someone who is against illegal immigration but I would support mexico joining the usa
Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?
Again... completely apples-to-oranges comparison. Migrants between South Carolina and California share enough in common that it hardly classifies as migration other than due to the internal political divisions of the United States.
Legal immigration to the US is a zero-sum game, by law, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
I’m also a little confused as to what you mean by zero-sum by law. Is there a law that states that the federal government has to pay with each immigrant? If a Jamaican immigrant produces growth for the US (say by doing labor and contributing to the economy), then the US has to, by law, pay that growth back to Jamaica? Are we not talking about economic zero-sum?
If the countries they were coming from had better conditions then there would be less need to immigrate, and it would also help far more people. That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want. Why would you rather have countries be worse to stop immigration rather than lifting the others up?
And the vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that? Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
The US, and similar countries, are rich by global standards. A "normal", "not rich" middle class lifestyle there is enviable to "normal" people in most of the world. The argument about "better opportunity and living conditions" vs "rich" is about word choice and connotation. When I say "rich" I mean to call into question what Americans think of as "normal", and to consider how their "normal" is supported.
> to stop immigration
When a patient is sick, you don't want to stop the blood transfusions keeping them alive.
> Why would you rather have countries be worse [...] rather than lifting the others up?
The United States isn't actually better in a sustainable way. It operates a Ponzi scheme: Immigrants are lured in, they do the work, and hopefully they even get a little material comfort, but mostly they are working for the benefit of their children. The trap is that their children end up Americanized, which reduces their fertility to below replacement. Within a few generations they are all dead. Hence the need for a constant replacement flow. Without that, the US would be Japan.
It goes without saying that not every culture can operate in this way. An ecosystem made entirely of leeches will crash; there also need to be hosts.
> [t]he vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that?
The incumbents at the top of these Ponzi schemes have easy jobs. They certainly don't pick strawberries.
Those easy lives serve one purpose: They are the beacon that draws more workers in.
The top of the pyramid can be supported because it is constantly dying off.
> Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
Their culture, which gave them life, is destroyed, and replaced with The American Way of Life, so they have no great-grandchildren. In this way, America is a population sink.
> That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want.
So long as the draw of the American Dream is as strong as it is, any disincentives sufficiently powerful to counteract it will need to be inhumane -- think "children in cages". Laws that cannot be enforced humanely are not legitimate.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.
There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.
[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]
We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.
What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.
Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?
Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.
So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.
Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?
---
PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?
Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....
Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.
No it’s not. My premise is that there exist some topics that are disenfranchising to some people, and debating those can be insulting or threatening to some people.
I’m not gonna debate you on the merits of abortion laws or immigration laws, we can leave that for another time. Here we are talking about whether it is OK (or even rational) for us ‘lefties’ to get offended by some topics, and argue to an extend where some people might not want to say certain things in a future debate.
I say it is OK, precisely because there is another person with stakes in the topic who might be at risk if terms of the debate are not in their favor. I moved this to individualistic terms on purpose, precisely because some topics involve individuals. These individuals have feelings and you may expect them to react accordingly.
There are obviously some topics where that's true; for instance, no sane person will entertain a debate about re-segregating schools.
But then you have the idea that immigration is off the table because it dehumanizes undocumented people --- despite the fact that even American Latinos generally believe immigration is a colorable argument, or that abortion is off the table because it threatens the bodily autonomy of women --- despite the fact that a very large fraction of women support addition abortion restrictions. The principle just doesn't hold together.
It's possible that we're all just talking past each other, and that all of us acknowledge that there are going to be public policy discussions about these kinds of topics, and we're just talking about why some citizens will refuse to engage.
(Disclaimer: I think we have a moral imperative to issue a blanket amnesty and simplified path to citizenship for the vast majority of all undocumented immigrants, and oppose European-style restrictions on abortion).
Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.
Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.
That wasn’t the subtext at all. Interesting that you think the shoe fits so well, though.
When looking at this and your other reply to me elsewhere in this thread, it does not feel like you're engaging me in good faith.
I think there are a lot more people who think they do this than actually do this. Left-leaning spaces are some of the most homogenous around. I can’t tell you how many left-leaning people I know who were genuinely shocked and surprised that, when it came time to vote, “people of color” didn’t like Elizabeth Warren. Their perception of getting to know “immigrants from other countries” and “people who are racially minoritized” rested entirely on interacting with immigrants and minorities who travel in the same rarified elite circles as themselves and hold the same views. “Center people of color” during the primary became “f--k moderates” after the convention, without a hint of irony.
Of course I’m painting with a very broad brush! Obviously not all left-leaning people are like that. But I do think there is a lack of appreciation for the relationships right-leaning folks have with people who are different from themselves. One of the most racially integrated places I’ve ever been is rural Texas. It’s a function of economics and geography. Left-leaning cities are highly segregated—educated left leaning people generally don’t live and work alongside immigrants and racial minorities.
I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.
The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.
The ivory tower leftists are now pushing a narrative of pervasive “white supremacy,” pitting whites versus non-whites. And again, the ivory tower folks are being tone deaf. The NYT recently ran an article where self-described “liberal pollsters” asked about the views of Latino people. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
What the article describes as the views of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics reflects my own views as an immigrant. By contrast, the approach taken by these ivory tower folks is in my opinion unworkable and threatens to blow up something that works about America: our ability to assimilate and lift up immigrant groups. If you look at the data, all immigrant groups are on a path to reaching economic parity with white people. Asians are already there, and Latinos achieve parity within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/3/1567/5741707
Ivory tower leftists are leading these chants, amplifying people like Linda Sarsour who call assimilation “racist,” etc. And I think that ends in disaster. Nowadays, I have to keep an eye out to make sure my half-white daughter isn’t being exposed to this stuff. And frankly, I’m a pretty liberal person so this is distressing. I don’t like the direction Trump has gone by alienating immigrants. But there is a good chance that Nikki Hailey is the future of the GOP. Meanwhile, who comes after Biden? Elizabeth Warren, who talks about all of us non-white people as a progressive bloc, constantly assailed by white people? AOC? Ilhan Omar?
How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant? Would they treat them as an equal, or even defer to their lived experience? Or would they simply find another, less conservative immigrant, who would not oppose their world-view, and choose this one to be the speaker for the minority?
In my experience, there is not much difference between left-wing and right-wing people in willingness to help oppressed people. Seems to me they mostly differ in style: a left-wing person would probably create a non-profit organization and also write about what the government should do, a right-wing person would probably work under the umbrella of some religious group and also write about how individuals should help themselves and each other. On each side, a few people would actually do something, more people would talk about how someone else should do something, and most wouldn't really care. I am not saying the sides are exactly balanced; I am just saying empathising with people (but also twisting their opinions to better fit your ideology) exists on both sides.
(By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person as "anti-scientific", without actually addressing the substance of their argument, just because that person disagreed with some organization that has a mission to help this marginalized community. No more detais, because it happened in a private conversation, it's just a funny coincidence that first I read this, then I switch a browser tab and read about how empathetic left-wing people are. Some of them are, some of them are not.)
Rather, I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.
> By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person
This does sound like a funny happenstance. My original reply was about this same sort of funny coincidence in reverse; how I often see the left critiqued as being "intolerant" when I frequently see them lifting and amplifying the voices of those who are disenfranchised by the system that they materially benefit from.
> How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant?
First, debates are not typical discourse. In my experience, debates are meant to be a show of virtue. Whose virtues you're being weighed against will greatly determine your behavior or whether you even decide to participate at all. I think that Hacker News values sound, well written arguments, which is why I am here posting. :)
Therefore, I think that given the propensity toward identity politics (from both sides) and the difficulty in interrogating the root of the beliefs that immigrant without appearing to be questioning the validity of them, I (as a white leftist) would prefer not to debate them. So, yes, I would rather propose someone whose lived experience might be more similar to theirs - perhaps a left-leaning immigrant - specifically because I would be afraid of either appearing weak in the eyes of right-wing spectators by deferring to their lived experience, or seem like an asshole because I am questioning the validity of their experience. It would be a PR nightmare. :)
In a private, personal setting (i.e. not a debate) I think that talking to your hypothetical conservative immigrant would probably be a great opportunity for me to learn about their experience and explore the root of their beliefs. I hope I would get to share mine as well.
Yes. A political orientation is about - to put it bluntly - which parts of reality you focus on and which parts of reality you ignore. So, suppose we have a group of people who are e.g. simultaneously victims of racism and of high crime in their neighborhood. A left-wing person would be happy to help them fight racism, but would feel uncomfortable hearing about crime perpertated by members of the same minority against their neighbors. A right-wing person would be happy to help them fight crime, but would feel uncomfortable discussing structural racism.
Sometimes the existing structures are oppressive and should be torn down. Sometimes they are necessary for survival. Quite often, they are both at the same time.
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
There's no need to doubt this. It's been well documented in books and newspapers for decades.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
Everyone is not perfect. It is maddening when person with so many flows can't be respectful about another person minor inconveniences.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
> The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all
Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
Or are you saying that social media took off because those in the US already felt free to speak and then a platform appeared?
because US public discourse has been, in the past, dominated by elites. Politics was largely the domain of the upper middle-class, politicians were largely homogenous demographically drawn from top-tier universities, the media recruited from similar institutions, and so on. So you have a significantly narrower spectrum in what is considered 'political debate' than what is actually present in the population, and the people who are doing the debating are largely shielded in their personal life from consequences because it's a sort of intellectual exercise and filling op-ed pages, not a matter of life and safety. That's what created the idea of 'free' debate, but rather it's insular debate. Culture in the US was predominantly created top-down.
Social media kind of blew this wide open in all directions. You see this take alot these days that Americans 'used to live in the same reality' and now don't, and it's the fault of liberals, conservatives, the media, postmodernism or whatever else. But really what's happening is that Americans never lived in the same reality, but finally middle America, and black lives matter, and metoo get to actually speak up. And that's going to cause much more heat than a bunch of harvard grads in a debate club, because now the people who actually have skin in the game are part of the discussion rather than just the subject of it.
From my relatively small sample of the Czech Twitter, the discourse there is dominated by about thirty journalists and white collar workers. No ghetto voices to be heard; people in ghettos have more urgent problems than to sit on the phone and crank out 60 status updates a day.
I think that this is why there has been such a push back by each of the demographics and movements that you listed. They each have a voice and can be more powerfully organized than ever before albeit in some cases a more superficial basis hence the rise of cancel culture.
Traditionally if you wanted to get a way from push back in your locale you moved. Now that is not an option since so much of your speech is tied to a identifiable account that follows you hence the social cooling.
I think this time of change is a phase of growing pains that might last generations that will see us wrestle with these issues for a long time.
And yet it seems to me as an outside observer that it is precisely American academia that is obsessed with divisive ideologies. The shop owners seem to be way more pragmatic.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
I don't think that there is anything at all, in modern day politics that makes that much of a difference.
Individual circumstances and relationships matter much much more than basically all politics in the modern day.
But even if we are discussing things that pass this very high bar of where it matters (So as an actual real life world world, or civil war, and before you say it, the 2020 election does not count as a "civil war" lol), I would still argue that an individual person's ability to effect those politics is very small.
So, for example, even if that other friend was on the "wrong" side of whatever this "very important political topic" is, that person's actual ability to have an effect on that political topic, is so small that I would care more about that person, than their stance on this issue.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
At the same time that we are scoffing at the closed-mindedness of the past, in realms like politics, people were _better_ at working together across the aisle at some periods in History. Obviously, not the Civil War era, but for much of the early 20th century, as an example. Just because a lot of people are bad at something does not mean it isn't a laudable goal or practice.
> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"
How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.
> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"
What are you talking about here?
In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.
These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.
It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.
Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.
A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also more localized to elite urban areas. When people from this urban elite start calling everyone else privileged and intolerant to the point that they don't deserve a voice.. it's not a great look.
You (rightly) acknowledged that you can be privileged in some areas but disadvantaged in others, but seem to take the stance in a previous statement that there is no progress, just "gilded age nonsense" because there are still marginalized groups.
We can acknowledge progress while still admitting there is a lot of work to be done. There's no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive. My worry is that those who take the alternate stance ironically end up alienating potential allies. Or, to butcher the old idiom, they fail to realize that expecting perfection can get in the way of progress.
I would certainly say that on social issues I do not believe there has been enough progress, but there absolutely has been a lot of progress.
On the specific issue of bubbles, I have argued for a complex view that the nature of the boundaries of people's social bubbles have changed. As I don't think there's a good way to measure this I take as a baseline that it may have largely stayed the same but the way we experience conflict over it has changed.
Social media I think does, however, represent an exponential growth in how much "outside perspective" people are exposed to, as well as the intrusiveness of those perspectives. All those other communication inventions required filtering perspectives through layers of privilege (media, basically).
On social media though I can post a tweet about my lunch and have someone from across the ocean tell me I deserve to die for who I am in the replies to it. No one in history has ever had to face that level of forced interaction on so mundane a social act until now.
And that's why we put up walls. To get back to where we were 20 years ago. Not because we can't handle "disagreement", but because when I'm eating lunch I don't want to be told I don't deserve to live.
I think where the disagreement may be is that the internet (defined as the applications, not as the infrastructure), and social media in particular, isn't optimized for open communication or sharing different viewpoints. It's optimized for capturing our attention. Unfortunately, the way it often does this is by hijacking our psychology; one way is by confirmation bias and another is by inducing outrage (which strengthens our pre-existing beliefs). The flow of information is not "free"; it's curated to the ends of the attention economy so even while there is a lot more availability of information, it's passing through some filters that may not be the most productive for society. In other words, it's designed to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them.
Those filters become social media's own "layers of privileges" to a certain extent. I think the downside with those compared to previous media is that the new filters are much more difficult to interpret compared with, say, a newspaper's political leanings.
All those characteristics you mentioned are outward and secondary to the one that matters the most - the way you think. The original post said "varying opinions". Your beliefs, character and worldview are far more important than what you look like and you had to actually communicate with people to understand this. This built much better dialogue and interactions.
Now it takes a few taps to block millions based on assumptions and the most tenuous associations, as well as surface attributes like you mentioned. Someone merely liking a post you disagree with is enough to end a relationship. New perspectives being easier to experience also means they're easier to block, and the latter is the issue being discussed.
As far as "right to free speech" is concerned, I don't see what it has to do with this but regardless you also have a right to not participate in any discussion. Nobody is forcing you to talk, and nobody ever could.
My assertion is simple: people have always lived in bubbles (honestly this is so blatantly true it's hilarious anyone even tries to argue against it) and the internet has only strengthened those bubbles in so far as it has forced people to confront the edges of them more readily.
No one ever had to "block millions" until twitter existed. The concept was meaningless. Every day of anyone's life before the internet every single person was ignoring the lives of countless people who had no way to reach them, an effective but implicit block on literally everything uncomfortable in the world.
>the internet has only strengthened those bubbles
I’m having a hard time tracking whether you think things are better or worse now, unless you are asserting the contact hypothesis is wrong
I don't think this speaks specifically to whether or not "things are better/worse now," it's a criticism of a particular pop-psych trope angle of measuring it.
I think the contact hypothesis is correct. People interacting with people they're bigoted against will generally ease or counteract their bigotry.
I also think that people overestimate the degree to which contact happened in the past and mistake modern forms of 'bubble-friction' (for lack of a better term) being more visible than the silent, implicit kinds in the past for it being new.
Middle class and rich white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people. They did this quietly, and they did it in a way that appeared individualistic and rational.
The effect was far more profound than any possible consequence of being blocked on twitter or yelled at on facebook, but it was very easy to ignore happening.
I think some of the work by people like Tristan Harris and Renee Diresta support this. The attention economy works in large part simultaneously on outrage and confirmation bias. To some of the parent comment points, not interacting in the real world may short-circuit the ability for us to confront different views while simultaneously acknowledging others humanity.
>white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people.
White flight is a real thing, but I think the plight of these cities is much more complicated than to be distilled to a single feature like race. As an example, Detroit went from one of the wealthiest cities to bankrupt in a generation. White flight is part of this, as is corruption, as is poor economic diversification, and a host of other issues.
This is, quite literally, what the original poster was saying though. Nobody is arguing that bubbles never existed (again let's please avoid the extremes) but that they were much more permeable before.
Of course you don't interact with those you can't reach. Some barriers, physical or otherwise, will always exist. However people who did reach each other would interact much more freely because you didn't have any other way to know more about them in the first place. Now your social reputation precedes you, even if it's not created by you but rather an amalgamation of data points constructing some skewed halo, and it's used to stop interaction before it can ever start.
That's the fundamental issue raised in this thread. Do you not agree with this premise?
Also, extremes are useful tools for examining assumptions.
As for the rest, in so far as online interactions have different boundaries and background information levels, I think you have to work harder to demonstrate that these interactions aren't (current covid-world aside) in addition to rather than replacing in person interactions people largely had before. Until we're all walking around with google glass to tell us all about everyone we meet, you are still free to go talk to the person on the street corner about their life.
But even then, your social status has always proceeded you to some degree. Again, your race, visible evidence of your wealth (clothes, haircut, etc), visible elements of queerness or lack thereof, and visible gender, your language and speech patterns are all elements of social signalling that have always acted as barriers to communication between in and out groups of those people.
On the internet, some of these can be mitigated or erased. On the street, while dating, in the workplace they cannot. They are data points that tell someone a lot about you (as with social media, within some error bars) before you even interact.
Again, these are changes in the structure of the outer edges of our bubbles and do not argue for a change in the scope or degree of our bubbles on their own.
Most of the people attacking other people online haven't been deeply harmed by anything at all. They're just parroting what they hear in their online echo chambers. The signal to noise ratio in the discussion of issues that really do affect people is moving to mostly noise. Most of the time it's mountains from molehills, just to virtue signal for attention. Nothing constructive is coming from it. In fact, I'd say it's dividing people more than ever.
That most people only express things to people that they thing would be accepting of what they said. Even if they might not agree with it, they'll at least accept that it's okay to hold those opinions.
Once you cross the line into "Expressing this opinion will cause negative social consequences to me" then people start self-censoring.
> In anonymous environments, the spiral of silence can end up reversing itself, making the most fringe views the loudest.
Now in 2020s Gay people are accepted in the mainstream society.
> The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
Anti-war activists are no longer treated as terrorists.
> The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
Segregation has ended.
All of these positive changes have come by "You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions."
If the people were so rigid with their views as assume them to be then these positive changes would have never happened.
Ignoring that your statements are optimistic at best. Some gay people are accepted into mainstream society. Anti-war activists absolutely have recently still been considered terrorists. Hell, anti-RACISM activists are actively being called terrorists by the government right now which goes to the next thing, which is that segregation as a legal concept has ended but turning neighbourhoods white is still absolutely a thing.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
And character limits.
All the obvious "blue check-mark" people have zero insight at best. There is a whole weird world of small follower count people on there. Small communities. People with unique ideas. People that will actually respond to replies.
Again, I don't think it an addiction you should necessarily cultivate, but there is value to be had.
social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list.
I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful.
Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser.
They should bring them back.
The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).
There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron".
https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom...
There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.
I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.
In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ?
If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.
I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
Killer feature
FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.
These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.
https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434
> that's my only way to keep in touch with them
That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.
Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post.
That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.
The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.
These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context.
True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.
This is called "context collapse"
https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse
You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.
The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precar...
I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.
I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
I can see a lot of the parallels there. Precarity and "social cooling" are two very similar perspectives on the consequences of surveillance capitalism. It's still difficult to sell the idea that there is a systemic underpinning for feelings and experiences that, for most people, will only be interpreted as exclusively personal.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/the-facts-on-white-nationa...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/white-national...
We should be very wary of rhetoric that depends on changing definitions of terms without providing precise definitions (see also "racism"). Put differently, everyone's ideas should be criticized on their own terms, but you oughtn't be taken seriously if you don't even define your own terms (and defining them in terms of other poorly defined terms--e.g., "'anti-racism' opposing racism"--doesn't count).
If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.
It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.
A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.
That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
I'm pretty sure that, to a 90%-10% ratio, they hang out with white millionaires, not either of the groups you described.
This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.
Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.
There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
Yes, but that's not our system. Our system doesn't give structural advantages based on race (at least we can hardly measure the extent of any such advantages). It does give structural advantages based on class (and many other variables) which correlates with race; however, correlation and causation are famously different. We don't have a white supremacist system or any kind of racist system, although some are advocating for a racist system so that we can eliminate disparities.
> There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
No one is suggesting an alternate historical timeline; I'm arguing that our system today isn't racist, but that it's very nearly colorblind; however, disparities can result in a perfectly colorblind system because the initial racial distributions were not uniform.
EDIT: Downvoters, do you believe correlation and causation are the same thing in general or only when applied to racial disparities?
I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.
If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?
There are a couple of dynamics at play here:
* The distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. No one disputes that a country can be racially oppressive via de facto discrimination as our country has been in the past.
* Whether any kind of discrimination is a necessary condition for a system to be called "oppressive". Of course a system is oppressive if it discriminates at all, even if the discrimination is only de facto. This is a completely uncontroversial opinion--virtually everyone believes this, so I don't think this is the position that the left is espousing (especially given that prominent left-wing voices like Kendi are pretty explicit that this isn't what they're talking about). Moreover, if leftists are taking the uncontroversial interpretation, then it doesn't make sense to call anyone else a "white supremacist" because at worst they are opposed to discrimination to the extent that they are aware that it exists (and no, pointing to disparities does not constitute compelling evidence of discrimination).
So presumably leftists believe we live under "white supremacy" because there are disparities at all, irrespective of whether those disparities are attributable to racial discrimination. More likely, it seems to me that leftists are conflating "there was a lot of historical discrimination that created different wealth, crime, marriage/family, etc distributions that the present system acts upon" with "the system today is racist and we've made little progress since the legalization of slavery".
If the latter were true then we would indeed be under a 'white supremacist' system, but thankfully it's obviously fallacious. There are certainly still some vestiges of racism that we should continue to work to remove, but we've progressed tremendously--our system is mostly colorblind, everyone of consequence everywhere is in favor of making the system more colorblind (save apparently progressives and a handful of thoroughly marginalized actual white supremacists); however, a perfectly egalitarian (i.e., non-racist) system isn't going to yield equal outcomes.
That said, if we want to address historical racism, then let's talk about it as such and not give the impression that we're solving for extant racism (or that extant racism is a primary driver in various disparities). This is unnecessarily dishonest and divisive. Let's talk about reparations instead of advocating for a racialized society and system (in contrast to a colorblind society and system). Let's dispense with viewpoints of racial primacy and essentialism. Let's dispense with DiAngelo's "whites are inherently racist" (not paraphrasing) and Kendi's "anti-racism requires eternal discrimination" (paraphrasing). All of this is nonsense and a distraction if our goal is to address historical discrimination or decrease injustice or even close racial gaps (defunding police or antagonizing whites are not likely to improve yields for minorities).
> I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
My point didn't depend on the ability or inability of people with those identities to hold white supremacist viewpoints; it was literally parenthetical. I only brought it up because there's a lot of overlap between the people who make broad claims of white supremacy and the people who advocate that whites "shut up and listen" to people with these identities such that, you know, they might shut up and listen before writing these people off as white supremacists.
You raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
I can't defend DiAngelo or Kendi because I'm ignorant of what they have to say.
No doubt, and everyone agrees that this should be fixed to the extent that there is discrimination. It's unclear exactly how to fix this discrimination except to continue to promote a color-blind society (which has been the winning strategy thus far and while it hasn't completely resolved the problem, it's significantly curbed it in a relatively short amount of time).
> If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
Yes. But no one is arguing that we shouldn't change the justice system; there's disagreement about the extent to which it's oppressive with the left arguing that it's "literally slavery" and moderates arguing that it's a problem that needs to be addressed but not a significant driver of the disparities that the left cites and the right arguing that it's an insignificant problem relative to black-on-black crime.
> ou raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
Yes, by definition, something that correlates with some underlying cause else has similar effects.
A good analogy would be the disparate outcomes of the criminal justice system with respect to men and women. As with blacks, the criminal justice system discriminates against men to some extent. However, it more significantly discriminates against violent behavior, which correlates with male gender to the effect that men are disproportionately likely to go to prison, their sentences are disproportionately harsh, etc.
A moderate would say that we should address the discrimination problem, but not try to discriminate against women in order to address the remainder of the gap which is attributable to the correlate: violent behavior.
An ideologically consistent leftist would argue that correlates should be treated as causes in the name of erasing disparities; however, (mysteriously) there are no nation-wide progressive efforts to close this gap. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why progressives are comfortable discriminating against some groups but not others.
EDIT: Even though they have similar results, as with all correlations, the danger of treating correlations as a causation is that you end up treating the symptom and not the problem, and often this just exacerbates the symptom. Eliminating standardized testing in the college admissions process is very likely to result in more discrimination against blacks, but addressing our growing wealth inequality problem will benefit people of all races (and given that blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, it will benefit them disproportionately). Further, this allows us to dispense with the deliberately confusing, divisive "white supremacy", "white fragility", "racism" rhetoric that is in all likelihood only creating more racists.
EDIT2: While we may not disagree, I feel like this conversation is a lot more productive than most race conversations. Thanks for being a good faith participant, sincerely.
1) It begs the question of whether social cooling should be considered a universal ill. After all, white supremacy is bad, and consequences for publicly embracing it are useful.
2) It begs the question of whether the impact of digitally-originated social cooling is particularly relevant if one thought-leader can upend it.
I do think that white supremacy, fascism and nazism was really a lot more fringe even only 10 years ago, it wasn't just under-reported.
In a way your comment which, if I read it correctly, implies "surely you don't think that the rise of nationalism could lead to wars" kind of proves my point. It totally could, and I'd add fairly easily. The peace we have is not as solid as it may seem, especially with dwindling resources and the rise of new superpowers in the East.
I believe the person grandparent is referring to's rise to power was one more symptom in what's been happening, and not a cause in any way. Of course, these things tend to enter a sort of feedback loop. If you'll allow me a parallel with the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the early half of the last century: It was not Nazism that emboldened and bolstered antisemitic feelings across Europe. Nazism was a symptom of the established and pretty mainstream antisemitic current in western society at the time. Even the US was not immune to hating on the Jew.
This rise in far-right political strength is most likely associated with a backlash against the (mostly? totally?) left-wing push for inclusivity and rapid social progressivism. In a way, among those that wouldn't identify themselves as far-right but do manifest ideals associated with the far-right of today, I can identify a certain undercurrent of "we're going too far, we're making too many changes, we need to slow down". Of course, things like "cancel culture", Spotify's staff wanting complete creative control over a 'controversial' podcast, etc., as well as the social bubbles we isolate ourselves in on our chosen social media platforms do not help at all with empathy or viewing others' viewpoints, which greatly exacerbates the issue.
That may be true, but far-left movements are certainly gaining speed as well. And I'm talking about real actual 'cease the means of production'-communists. Politics is certainly getting more polarised.
Ceasing it is merely a consequence of botching the seizing (and the understanding of where that means fit in a post-Industrial-Revolution ecosystem of interlocked systems). ;)
And full agreement; this is a language cobbled together by a chunk of land getting conquered and re-conquered so many times that the locals gave up trying to speak the language of the New King and made up their own from their favorite words in the aggressor cultures and the language they spoke amongst themselves.
How many websites have multiple translations available and put effort into accessibility proportional to the amount of the population that could be helped by it? It's not anywhere near 100%.
For example, SaaS companies aren't going to create white supremacist technology, but they will sell to white supremacists.
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.
It's very hard to support with a straight face that the acceptance of the confederate flag in the south does not have racial overtones.
So if that's your measure, white supremacy is not doing well at all.
As far as I understand it, "white supremacy" for those that desire it is the idealized end result of "white power." Much of the rhetoric from President Trump is to rally support for white power. [1]
Given the most common disagreement in the US is between those who advocate for or oppose President Trump, it makes sense that his followers would be deemed "white supremacists"
I believe the broad awakening among many white people in the US currently is the ambient benefits of invisible white power.
It's of course possible they still are. But it makes this whole discourse pretty weird.
But the Proud Boys absolutely are at the very least adjacent. With a decent dash of misogyny thrown in.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
>The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
Legitimate according to who? Isn't any opposition to a government illegitimate opposition? Or exclusively legitimate, depending on how you feel about the concept of government itself.
I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now. I really like how the information is presented in this SocialCooling site.
As you have pointed out, the effects are good if they lower the voices you disagree with, and raise the ones that represent your views. My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it. Fortunately for us, picking the winners isn't hard.
> I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now
Good! I recommend it. It's a basic skill that is useful when living in a society with other human beings whose situation (social power, emotional state, world view) we must account for. We have entire empathic neurological systems to support that behavior.
> My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it.
My advice is never pick the Nazis.
The original quote which you're abusing begins "first they came for the Communists".
These were Communists in the era of Josef Stalin, to be clear. Mass-murdering totalitarians, exactly the sort of people you wouldn't want taking over your country.
It appears you missed both the lesson of Herr Niemoller, and a key part of the history of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany.
Pity.
In modern Germany, it's still illegal to explicitly disseminate means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations. Is this wrong? I think I'll defer to the modern Germans on that question.
There's also difference of degree. Deplatforming Nazis (which is how parent post bastardized the quote initially) is not the same as incarcerating them. I was playing off the bastardization.
If you want to continue to defend platforming Nazis, be my guest, but I don't have to discuss it with you.
I, too, have negative interest in continuing to speak to an unpleasant person who makes unsupported assumptions about my views on a topic I never addressed.
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
I very much doubt so. The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. If you have data which proves otherwise, please share.
And what of the Kochs and Waltons?
Either way, you're only thinking about the 0.01%. But consider the many many more people in the 1%. Big fish in small pond types that are part of the Old Boy's Club in your local area. People that wouldn't call themselves white supremacists or even racist, but also wouldn't really want Black folks joining their country club.
If you don't think deep-seated racism is profoundly prevalent across large areas of the US, you are probably just in the position of having enough privilege to be oblivious to it. I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere. You just have to scratch the surface a bit to see it.
Or you are biased to see it everywhere.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists, and I did not see any evidence supporting these statements.
Why would I be?
> but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists
In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
But, sure, here you go then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:White_supremacy_in_th...
I don't know. Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind. People tend to have biases and see what they want to see. Some people see white supremacists everywhere. Otheres constantly see examples of inter-racial love and friendship.
> In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
Maybe it is a problem, maybe it is not a problem.
The original statement was not about that. Quoting:
> But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
This is the statement I'm contensting. Because it is unsubstantiated.
Well, I:
* Lived near a sundown town.
* Watched one of my closest friends get recruited by an associate of David Duke and slowly get indoctrinated into white supremacy.
* Had a white kid in high school proudly tell me about the time they "beat the shit out of that nigger" just because they didn't like the way he looked at them.
* Watched half a schoolbus full of elementary school kids joke about "porch monkeys".
* Grew up in a city named after one plantation in a neighborhood named after another one.
But, sure, yeah, I must be imagining it all.
> Because it is unsubstantiated.
I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
No, I'm not saying you are imagining. I suspect (not state) that you are biased, and describe the issue larger than what it is.
> I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
And I can give you a link to Google, when you can find anything.
You just provided a link with the list of white supremacist organisations. Nobody denies these organisation exists.
But there is no proof that "white supremacists" have significant power. They look like small marginal groups with no money and no real power. Like religious sects.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rick-santorum-trump-right-wi...
I have one username for posting, one for applying for Y-combinator jobs.
But you bring up a good point: my online comments are likely to be matched and monetized against me as much as they possibly can - by superintelligences, to boot - iow, in ways we are incapable of imagining, given that we are not AI. And it's no doubt already happening a lot.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882
edit:
The author also replied to some comments in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=socialcooling
Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though.
Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder.
Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
Netflix Trailer https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo
Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes?
Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad?
Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up.
Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted).
As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method.
Break the frame, you will see a lot more options.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
"A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
[citation needed]
One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.
This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines.
What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help.
Perhaps I'll start going to church, god help me.
This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public.
For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list.
Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?
They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump's election.
Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wikileaks-julian-assange...
What are you talking about? There's no source that Assange or WL had any information on Trump, which they held back.
Your cited article only writes about the twitter DMs, in which the WL account asked Trump Jr. to leak his fathers tax returns. It doesn't mean they ever posessed them.
The same Russian hackers who actually hacked both the DNC and RNC, but notably (and impactfully) did not release the RNC data.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russi...
Trump is about to get four more years. If you have dirt on him, there's no better time than now to make it public.
> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.
> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.
I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.
Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?
For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.
Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old.
To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth...
The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc.
I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations.
I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like.
10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them.
Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around.
Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed.
If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap).
If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape.
That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work.
The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
I think the key points are:
- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.
- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.
I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.
Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology.
The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler.
The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive.
In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous.
At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this.
The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made?
Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
Young Pioneer examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440206
am American.
If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!
Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
> People are changing their behavior to get better scores.
> Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
How something could be well utilized, versus how it is utilized, may be two different things.
There's an obvious conflict of interest in reducing another user's karma risks their ability to also downvote. (Of course, just because it's imperfect doesn't mean it's a bad system.) If this is the intended usage then perhaps it would be fair to expand downvoting rights to other users?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
Wow.
My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.
15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.
Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.
But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
I'm nearing 1k karma I'll likely cycle this account soon.
Any other steps you've taken ?
cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64
cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64
I rotate the usernames because you are constantly leaking information, whether it's interests you express, patterns of speech etc.
it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit).
as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
Per the Hawthorne effect, you modify your behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed.
(The placebo effect describes an change based on an inert intervention regardless of observation.)
I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
It seems like very much the opposite to me. There is no chilling effect. It's exactly the reverse.
Suddently, dissenting with the idea makes you feel like a denier. Either clever or mean.
Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
Should we roll back those laws? Fraud is fine as long as the party defrauded can't find out?
I think you're putting words into my mouth.
Anyway, what's extra difficult is that when using data to build an ML model, you can actually throw away the data afterwards, like source code after compiling a program.
I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations.
You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list.
This website captures an element of that very well.
I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
From wikipedia: "I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."
I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages.
I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865
They claim you can ask. Then dang backpedals.
Please tell me what I can DO about it, other than share sites like this while this happens.
My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here.
Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win".
Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views).
Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most).
This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech.
All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!
It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/
And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.
I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
> “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy”
This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.
I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.
I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.
If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?
All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.
That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done.
Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
The very same tools that can enable your utopia can also very quickly turn into a dystopia. As you say, they are a powerful magnifier, transforming this world into a global village where every action has far-reaching unpredictable consequences. This means that we should be incredibly cautious when deploying these tools as they give great power to users and an even greater power to their makers.
Speaking consciously on WeChat means being conscious of all the consequences of your actions including with regard to your relationship as an individual to the state. I'm very happy to adopt that consciously, and have tried to be aware of these things and I have no problem with that at all.
Just like I'm not going to say something to hurt the feelings of and make trouble for the family that's invited me to have dinner at their house, I'm not going to say things to hurt the feelings of a whole people, and double so when I'm a guest. And I'll try considering the unique culture of a place and how appropriate types of criticism, before opening my mouth. And triple so when I'm a guest with a megaphone.
Would you?
I consider doing it in a less considerate way is not very empathetic but also it's not good for me. It's self-destructive so I think people adopting this attitude under some misguided sort of heroic mythology are, stupid.
I'm okay speaking in more critical terms about countries where open criticism of their systems is culture. But even then there are lines. Assange, Snowden, went too far. To me, ignoring for a second the possibility they are limited hangout psyops, they are stupid men. Useful idiots, whose idealism, whether initially designed or not, had been co-opted by the states they posture at critiquing.
And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
But the unexpected benefit of this for me was I actually got a deeper understanding of different places unique ways and thinking, precisely because I deliberately withheld judgement and tried to look at things from multiple perspectives, not just from my inherited Western biases, which I consciously tried to be aware of and see more than.
So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
I don't think it's very empathetic for people to say, well Western culture do it this way therefore we should impose our cultural values on others.
But... these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks you have in Western countries basically equate to the social credit system in China, when you think about job opportunities, freedom of movement, access to capital, freedom from harassment and intimidation.
For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I don't understand what people find so difficult about the level of consideration that is just like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect, who am I to judge others? but I think in the West it harkens back to some sort of anti authoritarian distrust of the state.
Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
If you meant or were trying to confuse it deliberately with the survey tools then they are not what makes the world a village. They just enhance the watchers.
I agree we need to watch for dystopias and avoid them, but are you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
I think we need to watch, and learn from both places. Neither is a dystopia right now. But neither is perfect either. What's important is to learn, improve, and not think you've already achieved the pinnacle of civilization, nor take it for granted that you'll get there. You have to keep learning from what others are doing and inventing improvements. I just don't think framing the debate as privacy versus almost everything else is a very useful way forward.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one even though it's kind of hackneyed. The world really should get more open and connected and I think eventually the relationship between people and their states should become closer. In my intimate relationships I get privacy by what I choose not to disclose. In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. There's still a lot there... I think with the externalization of minds onto devices people are forgetting the power of their own brain and their own emotions.
What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things. But then again maybe I'm wrong and if I was in that situation I'd probably just make the best of it and think well what can I still enjoy and how can I adopt myself to fit in with where I'm at. But I think the reality is that when world Government comes it will be something that is tolerant of regional differences because that will be how a world government has to be introduced that's the only sort of way it's possible.
First, yes the difference between survey tools and communication tools is always confusing for me in the privacy debate. But ultimately, they are deeply linked [2] with many cases that fall in between. In particular, the surveillance of communication tools is incredibly pervasive.
> double so when I'm a guest
Yes, when I was in China, I was more careful to approach discussions with an open mind and cautiousness for the legal repercussions. However, I'm not talking about being a guest, I'm talking about either being a citizen or an outsider. In both cases I think it's very important to think critically and express the potentially resulting criticism. (More below)
> So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
Certainly not the CCP, lol. But seriously, more than WeChat/Tencent, which is just another interesting tech company, I'm judging the state control over it. And more than judging (but which I'm also doing), I'm formulating criticism based on observations of harm to people (I consider it evident that shutting up would be immoral) and (but this is our main point of disagreement) mind control by the state.
> Assange, Snowden, went too far.
It seems your threshold might be the word of law, but in that case they exposed illicit state actions. In any case, they did go far. To say they were co-opted is only partly true if not outright false: thanks to them, a significant portion of the population is defending itself and pushing for more scrutiny and changes.
> And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
States and governments do not have sensitivities. You can not hurt their feelings.
> these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks
I'm using the nazi culture as an experience that enables me to construct criticism of other cultures. Whenever I see something that looks like it, I'm indeed judging it very much.
And yes, credit scores and criminal problems have their own problems, thank you for helpful criticism/judging/insert the word you prefer. You absolutely have the "right" to say it thanks to the millions of people who fought for freedom against kings, tyrannies, authoritarian states and even normal governments. But beyond what the current laws say, the fact that you have functioning brain is enough to justify judging. How and when you express that judgement should reflect the potential negative and positive consequences of that. Here I think that in the long term, censorship has more negative effects than offending, and call me insensitive, but I think that people (including myself) should really get better at receiving criticism and society would be overall better for it.
> Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
Yes, these tools, and I did not say "fold back to isolation", but to be cautious when expanding the existing relative isolation, because we can not foresee all the consequences of doing that. See the increase in mental health problems linked to the use of social networks for example. This, other issues like [1] and higher-level thinking like this very good talk on surveillance capitalism [2] makes me think that no, this is not "already handled and taken care of".
> you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
Nope, absolutely not. We need to watch both and the West has its fair share of issues, see [2] for one of the many examples. However, I do think that China is closer : more outright lies from the government, concentration camps for Uiguhrs and muslims, press controlled and manipulated by the state, systemic censorship, disappearing journalists and whistle-blowers, etc. You can find examples of this in the US (except for concentration camps I guess), but they will be rarer and more subtle, mostly because the system was designed to distribute power more evenly and minimize potential for harm. Which beautifully comes back to my first point: giving more power/communication tools to individuals should not be taken lightly.
> For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I really see that point and myself I can not help but admire some of these aspects of China. However, systematic censorship of alternative views is one of the many other things China is not open about. The reason tracking is "secret" in the west is precisely because the individuals have more power, so saying it tips the scale doesn't really make sense. And because we have more power, we can work towards abolishing it. So if we think it's bad, we should. You aren't explaining why surveillance is good (see [2] on why it's bad), but you are essentially saying we should embrace it and it's not a big deal if we impose it on everyone.
> In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. [..] What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things.
I encourage you to watch the german movie The Lives of Others (2006) for a closer look at what privacy and surveillance mean in an authoritarian state. You can not "change countries": there was a wall in Berlin where people were shot on sight. You start by arguing for more respect and consciousness towards different cultures and ended by saying that it's okay for states to choose what you think and discriminate for thinking differently, because that is what the sentence "In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel" means. Restricting speech restricts what you can hear which restricts what you can think.
[1] https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac72895... > "Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things." I recommend the entire article, it's completely opposite to your point of view and makes a good case in favor of individual discernment followed by actions.
[2] The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4Y-uZG5zk
[3] Documentary on Uiguhrs "thought transformation camps" https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/087898-000-A/china-uyghurs-in-...
(It's linked at the bottom of this one, but I'm sure a lot of people don't get that far)
The inputs and assumptions made by the people selecting the math is the 'morally wrong' part.
Bias is real, like it or not. Your worldview, as a data scientist or programmer or whatever, impacts what you select as important factors in 'algorithm a'. Algorithm a then selects those factors for other people in the system, baking in your biases, but screening them behind math.
Every choice we make is a moral choice. Once we're done modelling and use that model then we make a moral choice.
For example, If you believe that lowering the debt default rates is more important than the fairness to an individual.
Then you make a moral choice. Of you believe it is OK to not give loans to Blacks because there's a largish amount of Blacks defaulting on their loans thats a moral choice.
Further more, Enscribnng truth to models is just an age old human fallacy. The truth can somewhat fit plenty of models. None of the models are truth.
Every company has a predictive algorithm to use on students. Every startup that's stepping into the space is pushing the data and data scientists.
But they all have the same-old, usually decades old, baked in biases. AND they're not doing anything to address it!
Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not biased. I hate it more than anything professionally, right now.
When a model produces an unpalatable result, that doesn't mean it is biased. All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Absolutely, but there is no admission, from what I can tell, from ML or predictive [buzzword here] companies that bias is a thing, or even could be a thing in their systems.
>All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that is not at all what I am saying as an 'algorithmic fairness' person. I am saying that we need to ensure there are strict oversights and controls on the building/execution of algorithms when making substantive decisions about human people.
For example: It's okay if an algorithm predicting student success says that all the minority students on my campus are at a higher risk of dropping out. That is a data point. Historically, minority students drop out at a higher rate. Sure. Not great, but it is factually true.
What is not okay is for the 'predictive analytics' company to sell their product in conjunction with a 'tracking' product that limits minority students' access to selective admissions programs simply because they are selective, more difficult, and, historically, have a higher percent of minority students who drop out.
I guess what I'm saying is that ML models shouldn't lie. But they also shouldn't be seen as the truth above all truths. Because they're not. They're just data, interpreted through the lens of whoever built the models.
Every human carries a bias, everyone. It's how we define ourselves as 'self' and others as 'other' at a basic level.
Therefore, everything we build, especially when it's meant to be intuitive, may carry those biases forward.
I'm only saying we need to be aware of that, acknowledge it, and ensure there are appropriate controls and oversight to ensure the biases aren't exasperated inappropriately.
In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.
Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust"
EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
In the US you mean.
The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).
... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.
I don't think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there's no incentive for them to do so.
If you have an Uber or Airbnb score low enough to get banned from the platform, you're the problem and you'd have a very hard time arguing otherwise once you start revealing the reviews people have left you.
You're probably vomiting in Uber cars every weekend when you get blackout drunk and destroying property on Airbnb.
Maybe other people should know these things about you before they accidentally do business with you. Of course, once I think of actual implementation of such a thing, I only encounter showstoppers and ay, there's the rub. But the goal doesn't seem categorically wrong.
Though I also admit the inability to have a practical implementation that works is a good reason to condemn anything. I'm just radicalized by horrible ex-tenants and like to smile as I ponder the utopia where trashing my place echoes in their lives forever.
It's like... If anyone's been to Disney World, they're familiar with what an all-encompassing experience that is. Now imagine Disney World ran 75% of Florida. And could bar you from the premises for violating its rules...
For example, imagine if you couldn't buy plane tickets because you didn't sit through enough critical race theory white-guilty training.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/uber-vomit-fraud-scam/
And what if Uber is your government-provided method of transportation for health care?
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/uber-healths-non-...
they can restrict access, but not control it, because Airbnb doesn't have a monopoly on safe shelter.
The charity of others isn't enough to fly you around the world and give you beachfront property and iPhone. They'll want something in return so long as they have other aspirations beyond serving you.
For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, 'logically', you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.
And if they don't do this directly, they will do it by proxy in the same way that the insurance industry has been using proxies for race. https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2020/07/23/insurance-re...
It's a sort of insurance-ification of all pricing and permission which this kind of technology is increasingly enabling.