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Comment by publiush | Hacker News Reader

This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts.

The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example.

If information is good and people agree with it, they will consume it and the swarm will be well seeded and public consensus will have spoken. If information is bad and people disagree with it, they won't consume it and the swarm will be sparse at best, at which point, it will be easy for ISPs and others to block access to these swarms.

Torrents have been around for a long time, but terrorists haven't really utilized them much. On the other hand, anime really has to give its thanks to Bram haha.

Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check. The same goes for information or discourse and the 1st amendment. The day we censor ourselves is the day we throw away liberty.

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Personally, I think the right state answer isn't censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have done with unsavory hidden services.

This is sort of the right answer, but it assumes someone is willing to devote as much time to each individual terrorist as the terrorist themselves is willing to spend creating networks and preparing violence, or that there's a well-enough agreed upon set of ideas that a given society can make a mass effort to infiltrate those networks. Usually that happens via government or very rarely journalism; there aren't any great examples of vigilante anti-terror or anti-mafia or anti-pedo infiltration networks I'm aware of. Again, because crime (or you could say, 'evil') is an asymmetrical affair, and it takes full time 100 LEOs to find one kid before he blows up his school. It's not really possible for private vigilante networks to compete with that, even if average people did have as much free time as full-time psychopaths.

Censorship would be shutting things down after the fact.

I think the important question now is whether it's irresponsible to build channels that (A) terrorists will find useful, (B) will allow them to look more savvy and attractive than they actually are, (C) seed their ideas to a wider audience than they have - see [1] - and (D) count on less motivated people with nonviolent ideas and less time on their hands to offer countervailing ideologies and "win" the space. The space you're creating and enabling.

[1] People with more time on their hands and/or a more absolute/violent agenda are more apt to find ways to game a system, whether it's a swarm or a newsfeed. Their time and motivation are asymmetrical to the normal functioning of a marketplace of ideas in which good/logical ideas are supposed to outperform bad/emotional appeals. The true question is not whether this platform can or will be gamed, or trying to guess and preempt how it will be gamed, but deciding whether it's immoral to exert your intellect to give leverage to griefers by giving them more visible surface area. If the result is something that only marginally helps average people but drastically improves the lot of griefers, then the surface area you're providing them to attack everyone else will be exponentially larger than the defensible area of reasonable ideologies you hope to have counter the bad ones.

In other words, all the talk of open ideas is true in a truly open marketplace, but violence tends to fill a vacuum, and in a closed system or especially a new, empty space with experimental tooling, it is entirely possible for bad actors to drive out good ones.

Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding something that I considered a necessary libertarian corrective to the centralized social networking world. I'm not going to post the idea here because I still consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it yet. There came a point deep into the development when I realized that all my arguments to the contrary - arguments which sounded exactly like yours - were wrong. The system I was building to free humanity from centralized, moderated, let's say channeled forms of controversy, would be exploited by the worst, not the best. The fascists and the trolls would absolutely dominate the space, and if they did, the stakes would be life and death. And it would be me who had built that space that they were now using; a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves. This was why I shut the project down. Looking back, I was right. What's happened with FB and Twitter and January 6th was a pale shadow of what my concept might have opened up, in those years, when anyone was looking for any new platform. The sickening thing is that while we're in the business of opening up communication and tell ourselves we're creating liberty, we do have to weigh the question of whether average Joes are ready for it and be honest with ourselves - a lot of times they're not.

> a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves.

It is hubris to think that only you could've conceived this idea. Eventually someone else would.

If you released, and controlled it, at least you have a way to control the spread of misinformation on it.

So far I'm the only one that has conceived of it, but even if it was conceived of by the leaders of the KKK, they wouldn't have as good a chance of building it successfully and making it work to their benefit as if a self-interested techie liberal libertarian did all the hard stuff for them. Pretty much none of the people dumb enough to spend their lives spreading online hate would be capable of building the platforms they use to spread their garbage. Show me a nazi who's using a computer and a network and a website they invented themselves, or could ever invent in a million years if left to their own self-destructive devices. It's not hubris to realize that they lack the intellect and means but are perfectly willing to game the results. Also, to wit, "if you controlled it" is hubris when you're talking about any large online platform, but it makes no sense at all if you're talking about something decentralized.

well put. The things you forgot: 1) trolling is also a type of moderation. It will unmake whatever serious effort if 1-2 persons disagree hard enough. 2) sure, there will be facists but those technically seek is the opposite of the platform. 3) however weird or undesirabe some ideologie is we can give it time to come to its senses before we go full retard enforcing our own. if we cant the other idea deserves to win. its how humanity always did its thing. give us enough time and we the people burn everything to the ground and start fresh. its like a fee we must pay. millions have to die for the eventual idiot ruling class to be at least some what replaced by people with interests beyond their own.

if the facists won the war our ideas would be the ones that desperately need to be silenced by them.

just have the battle royal of weird ideas out in the open. if the muskian forced brain chipians win we do that for a while. it only seems more stupid than say mandatory/forced experimental medication for everyone, putting people in cages for smoking weed, starvation salaries, selling cars that go faster than the speed limit. etc etc

maybe everything i wrote here is the best example of a stupid idea? should we investigate or just press delete?

I mean, on the scale of weirdness is it weird that we sell guns you can't shoot at people, and cars that go faster than the speed limit, while locking people up for inhaling burning weeds? Uh, yeah. The thing is, we did arrive at this set of compromises by something slightly more logical, flexible, and iterable than one group of fanbois just forcibly outnumbering another group of idiots. What millions did die for, in the west, was not a cult leader or a weird set of ideas, but a legal framework. Which, creaky as it is, privileges the right of individuals to be treated as individuals and be innocent until proven guilty. Not perfectly at all. But more individual rights than have ever existed in history, and more than could ever exist under the rule of one depraved ideology or another. What we have, at the moment, is a system that appears to make no sense precisely because it has measures in place to prefer individual rights over ideology. To the extent we have any freedom or happiness at all, it's in contradiction to the ideologies being pushed by people who want to have their turn to rule and rewrite the social contract. A cursory glance at the history of ideological movements shows that western democracy is a total aberration in its ability to hold murderous ideologues slightly at bay.

So. A battle royale of weird ideas is great, but only if it's in a ring where everyone leaves their guns outside, and no one's life hangs in the balance. Otherwise it's a bunch of trolls playing dress up with someone else's clothes, burning someone else's stuff, killing someone else's kids; see Stalinism and Nazism. The current generation is lost for knowledge of history, so they don't understand the fire they're playing with every time they think imposing their correct point of view by force is the only way. It's not their fault; their parents were mostly idiots. But they only exist because some people held the fort for an arena where you could debate without existential peril to yourself or the opposite party. The framework is all. The ideas can come and go within it, and lots of seemingly stupid contradictions or compromises will arise, as you pointed out. But if any side is able to overturn the framework, then there will not be a fair battle of ideas ever again.

Also, it's entirely possible that a lot of other people besides me have conceived of the idea - I'm sure I'm probably not the only one - and maybe all of them discarded it because they realized what it would lead to. I will say that if I ever see it in practice, I'll make it my life's mission to attack it and strangle it in its crib.

This sounds ridiculous.

How could it be "worse" than Freenet or tor, where everything is completely anonymous?

Fascists aren't exactly known for thinking outside of the box, but rather for throwing their very large resources [0] at established methods (eg. militias and propaganda).

Three examples from the tech world of the last two decades:

- indymedia.org has arguably been a serious inspiration for the fachosphere (although they dropped the bottom-up part) in gathering information from many places/topics

- raddle.me newsboard was developed by anarchists but the codebase ended up used by fascists

- Trump's TruthSocial is just a rebranded Mastodon, although they tried to conceal that fact in the initial stages

[0] Fascists of all stripes are famously very well-funded and supported by the industry. This is the case today (Trump, Bolsonaro, Zemmour, Le Pen..) and was the case historically, as portrayed in the "Fascism Inc" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-L5Xlgc8S2Q

I don't think that Facebook and Twitter are a bad thing at all. I think there is confusion as there is a massive power struggle and a lack of information on our side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI).

Also, I don't know what you mean by "average Joes." I don't think any person is less competent than another, and I would rather help to give access to information to the people, frankly, if I thought someone did have less information.

I'm a little confused by your position on people, and afraid of your position on freedom of information and equality.

If you don't think some people are less competent than others, you've never had a serious job. I would just say that competent people need to take responsibility and be held accountable if they create systems that whip up mobs of people less capable of independent thought - which said mobs wouldn't be able to devise on their own. I don't think this point of view is scarier than one in which the loudest mob rules and technicians exist to serve their whims.

> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check

I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st century.

It should be monitored who acquires an assault rifle. Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally[1], because gun owners are either mentally unstable themselves or not capable of preventing a mentally unstable person from getting hold of the rifle due to a lack or knowledge. Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

Which brings me to the division of powers. The constitution balances executive, legislature and judiciary in its three articles. It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction. This has been the concept since the very beginning, as you surely know judging by the gh handle, and you bet the federalist paper authors favored an institutional solution over arming each citizen.

In other words, the second ammendement is just as little of an ultimate for checks and balances as the web 3 is for whistleblowing. We already have securedrop and globalleaks. Going a step further is possible, but not strictly necessary, and should not be treated as such in my opinion.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-sh...

When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard.

This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not have been so kind.

These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems to pick up where other systems fail provides us the ultimate leverage in the end.

Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes fail and always harm those who feel their impact and chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by law" anyway?

> When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government,

I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government.

The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, very easily.

You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you?

I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?

In that case surely the second amendment isn’t necessary, then. You’ve already got the army!

Look to Turkey for a failure of that model.

Although I should say that I am always convinced by those who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan as a pretext.

> The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken,

When the first amendment was written, they only had primitive printing presses. Obviously it does not apply to the internet, electronic printers, etc.

This is quickly devolving into a Facebook "conversation". I'm disappointed.

In any case, there is a very good argument for the first amendment changing in response to today's challenges, culture, and technology.

Why are school shootings the bar here? Do we care about murdered children, or very specifically only murdered children in school by a gun? Certainly the US has tons of room for improvement, but it seems very disingenuous to cherry-pick a subset of what people actually care about just to oversell your point.

It's an example, and a compelling one. That is not the same as cherry picking.

School shooting statistics are a deeply uncompelling example.

Tragedies are often non statistically relevant

Luckily in this case they are.

Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault rifles available on the civilian market are registered pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF and pay a special tax to purchase one.

Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?

An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my home state of California that ban certain cosmetic features on guns. These are completely pointless as an AR-15 is functionally no different from any other semi-automatic firearm.

Examples:

Assault Rifle

https://i.imgur.com/pGnxHRD.jpg

"Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/xhsZ2dK.jpg

Not an "Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/VKtpdSy.jpg

This is the kind of autistic pedantry I come to HN for. I don't know what I was thinking.

thank you

What makes an Armalite Rifle-15 significant to you?

I ask because it isn't actually all that interesting as far as guns go.

It shoots a fairly low-power cartridge, roughly equivalent to 30-30, which means that it isn't powerful enough for deer hunting in some states. That's part of why it's easy to shoot even for XX folks. (Another part is the ergonomics; the stock and hand-grip make it easier to shoot correctly from the shoulder than most rifles.)

It's semi-auto, but so are most guns these days. It doesn't shoot any faster than other semi-autos. Standard capacity magazines aren't any larger.

It is possibly the most popular rifle of all time, certainly in the last 50+ years.

> It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction.

I think, as we have seen over the past ~40 years, it is very easy for either of them to abuse power. On the other hand, it is very difficult for voters to implement legislation that improves the lives of everyday people in any meaningful way. That is really what the Constitution did. It created a complex system of government with veto points around every corner to, in the words of James Madison, "protect the minority of the opulent (wealthy property owners) against the majority (the plebs)". And this is certainly how it is currently functioning. I stopped romanticizing the constitution years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Background

> Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally

The US has a high rate of firearms fatalities. Around two thirds of these are suicides. Around zero thirds of them are school shootings.

School shootings are sufficiently rare that when they happen, they make national news. Which is catastrophic, because studies have shown that media coverage of school shootings induces school shootings. It's attention-seeking behavior by the criminally insane, so if you show them that it generates attention, it increases their attraction to the act. Most US media outlets know this and do it anyway, because it generates a lot of hits. This is the primary reason why the US has relatively more than other countries, including other countries with a high rate of firearms ownership.

> Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

It doesn't work for this. If you have a driver's license and know it will be taken away if you drive drunk, that's an effective deterrent. School shooters tend to be young people with no prior criminal history. They would pass a background check. Having a license to take away after the fact is meaningless when after they fact they're going to prison forever.

In theory where this does something is for criminal gangs, where you say you want to deny people with a criminal history a firearm. Criminal gangs actually are a significant fraction of firearms fatalities. But here's how that works out: People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

Meanwhile, people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life. Laws against this don't deter it when the alternative is getting murdered. Then this otherwise reformed criminal gets caught in possession of a firearm yet not committing any other crime, so they go back to prison and get another chance to get caught up with criminals. A large number of black people are currently in prison for no other crime than "felon in possession of a firearm," and were in possession of it for no other reason than self-defense. Or weren't in possession of it at all but were near enough to one owned by someone else for a bad cop to opportunistically file the charge.

Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

Between 2009 to 2018 there were 288 school shooting incidents in the US. During this time there were a total of 5 similar incidents in the rest of the world. Something is definitely wrong.

> Something is definitely wrong.

Oh absolutely. More than one thing.

The US is structurally messed up in a dozen different ways and it puts people in a corner. People are angry and have no idea what to do about it. Undirected rage because people don't know where to direct it.

Then the media directs it to shooting up schools by plastering that all over the screen. It could just as easily be pipe bombs or political assassinations or riots.

Or something actually constructive. But actually solving the problems that many organizations exist only to mitigate means you have to fight them, and they often win. Especially when people are led to believe that supporting those organizations is the way to eliminate the problems that they now exist to preserve.

> People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

> people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life.

Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

> Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.

> just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

Laws have costs and benefits. When the benefits are not actually realized in practice, that's relevant.

> Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

This is especially relevant for people in bad neighborhoods where the police can't be expected to do this job or provide an effective deterrent, and many of the victims are people who have a criminal history.

An obvious and common case being where you get caught committing a crime, are pressured into testifying against someone else to avoid going to prison for ten years instead of one, and then you get out of prison and they or their people are after you.

> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.

Ban red cars and there may be fewer accidents involving red cars, but is that really the right metric?

Firearms are aggressively prohibited in Mexico and they have an even bigger homicide problem than the US. There is a high rate of firearms ownership in Canada, and they don't. The reason for this difference is where we should direct our attention.

> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.

I notice you haven't answered that part :)

In a country with a low violent crime rate, banning guns has no benefits, because you have a low violent crime rate. All you're doing is inconveniencing honest people using them for recreation or as a bulwark against prospective future government failure.

In a country with a high violent crime rate, victims need weapons for self defense. If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

> If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

Maybe there is a gentleman rule among firearm owners to let the other side the opportunity to shoot first, but there is always the risk of someone not following that rule.

They can try to shoot first. That doesn't mean they always will, or that their first shot won't miss. Or that you won't still manage to shoot them even if they hit you first, the risk of which acts as a deterrent.

I guess criminals in your country use nice low damage weapons, in that case I guess it works.

In my country they seem to use some kind of automatic weapons, where the odds of really missing is low :) (I have seen some cars destroyed by such weapons, I'm not sure high precision is needed to be effective ^^)

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