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> Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.

There is a new meme where people say "X is antifragile" where X is something they like, while having no idea what antifragile actually means.

Taleb himself called large entities, typically considered the most democratic of all, like the EU or USA fragile. He advocates for "city-states" instead of "nation-states":

> The most stable country in the history of mankind, and probably the most boring, by the way, is Switzerland. It’s not even a city-state environment; it’s a municipal state. Most decisions are made at the local level, which allows for distributed errors that don’t adversely affect the wider system. Meanwhile, people want a united Europe, more alignment, and look at the problems. The solution is right in the middle of Europe — Switzerland. It’s not united! It doesn’t have a Brussels! It doesn’t need one.

> We need smaller, more decentralized government. On paper, it might appear much more efficient to be large — to have economies of scale. But in reality, it’s much more efficient to be small.

> The European Union is a horrible, stupid project

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/08/epiphanies-from-nassim-...

I don't think Taleb himself even understands his own concept. Geography alone would make city-states highly fragile in most locations.

> What made Europe great was the diversity

How is Europe not diverse? The EU seems like the perfect combination of uniting nations through trade while maintaining their own cultures. Trade makes it much more valuable to have peace than war.

> I've changed my mind on deplatforming multiple times, but I think this is where I've settled as I've watched everything play out. Democracy, if we let it function, is antifragile.

The catch, I think, is that it has to be both broad and deep democracy. In electoral politics, this means things that narrow the franchise and reduce participation are the danger -- gerrymandering, deliberate stoking of cynicism and apathy, overly bureaucratized processes with too many veto points that break the connection between who wins elections and what effect that actually has on people's lives, etc. All of this means fewer people participating and government being less and less representative of the governed.

In tech, I think the biggest danger is platform concentration. Arguments over, say, kicking someone off of Facebook only really become free speech arguments because of FB's massive market share. To switch out the immunity metaphor for a different one, we've got a problem where the internet's become mainly a bunch of multi-lane freeways, and the solution isn't to try and build competing freeways, it's to rethink the economic models that have led us to decide everyone needs to go in the same direction with as much speed with the most volume as possible. I suppose the analog to my first paragraph on electoral politic is that, just as the nationalization of all politics has eroded deep democracy, the concentration of platform power has eroded some important and essential quality for healthy online community.

We have at least one thing that it might be considered a method of inoculating people with some degree of “mimetic immunity”, teaching them at least the basics of good old classical “critical thinking” skills. You won’t be able to get everyone to the level where they can do meta-analytics or cultural critique based dissection of the memes being pushed at them, but even the basics of critical thinking would help people massively when it comes to not being easily manipulated.

Critical thinking is only applicable when you encounter a right-wing meme (turn to CNN to get the correct view on the topic), but when the government puts out propaganda like "There's no way it was leaked from a lab" when there is a lab next to where the virus leaked, we are not supposed to apply critical thinking and if we do we are banned from social media. We don't need mimetic immunity, we need immunity from just accepting that the media/gov establishment party line and that to call them on their BS is "extremist".

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal government scientists and administrators did highly unethical things to suppress discussion of the lab leak hypothesis.

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...

However the official position of the US federal government is now that a lab leak is possible and hasn't been disproven.

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...

> we are not supposed to apply critical thinking and if we do we are banned from social media

How many people were banned from social media for critical thinking? I'd be willing to bet if anyone was banned, they were actually stating as fact that there was a lab leak and then would bury people with tons of low quality "evidence".

Can you link this exact quote from a source: "There's no way it was leaked from a lab"? I don't think anyone reasonable was absolutely certain. Very early on there was an article in Nature saying they didn't believe it could have come from a lab (which i disagreed with).

I don't have anything handy, and not going to invest time to score internet points. My point isn't who was or was not correct in this instance. My point is that social media making decisions about what is "low quality "evidence"." or making conclusions on who to censor based on "trusted sources" is and labeling everything else as "misinformation" is a terrible precedent and this is just one example of it blowing up in their faces in an obvious way. They are in no better position than me to evaluate what is or is not low quality and I especially don't trust their motives/bias/judgement in the matter. They thing CNN is reliable... I think CNN is garbage. CNN puts out more fake news than anyone. Whether or not it originated out of the lab is almost beside the point, they can't be trusted with this type of universal censorship power because they are often wrong and have an agenda which biases their decisions on the validity of sources.

I'm not convinced critical thinking skills work unless they are practiced. Learning about how to think critically isn't internalized until one has done it a few times in the field.

I'm having trouble squaring the idea that American adults were unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and the way the JFK assassination is talked about. Or Loose Change is more obvious to me as the first Internet-native conspiracy theory to go mainstream.

No, conspiracy theories have always been floating around, and people have always been pushing them. The difference is that the rest of society fought tooth-and-nail to keep them underground.

Nowadays most social media platforms work tirelessly to keep you on a steady drip of whatever content happens to push your buttons the best. So if the system thinks you might buy into a conspiracy theory, it'll keep serving you more and more extreme versions of that meme. This is a necessary side effect of how a recommendation engine works.

One particularly odd bit of misinformation about how misinformation spreads is the idea that otherwise normal people are merely tricked into believing it. In other words, someone says "the moon landing was faked" or "Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" and everyone believes it because monkey reptile brain. This is a very simplified idea of how conspiracy shit spreads. Most people tend to be highly critical of new information and view it in context based on how plausible it seems. Even theories like Jeffrey Epstein being murdered in prison are only believable because it fits in with the already-proven facts, not because we just want the story to be more interesting.[0]

Conspiracy theorists think differently. To put it bluntly, they are extremely gullible. They want to believe information that fits a simplified narrative. And so they tend to disconnect from everyone else and connect to other conspiracy theorists[1]. This has been happening years, decades, arguably centuries prior to today's social media world. It just wasn't nearly as visible. Now, the gullible people group together on social media and plan out how to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Decades ago, you could never imagine organizing the world's moon landing conspiracy theorists to flash-mob Cape Canaveral; because we didn't let these people have a platform. But now we do.

[0] If you're wondering, I actually don't think Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison.

[1] RationalWiki calls this process "crank magnetism"

It is probably worth thinking about how often anti-semitic conspiracy theories have been allowed to spread and have resulted in real activity much more serious than a flash mob

Oh, trust me. I'm well aware. In fact, there's a large subset of conspiracy theories that decompose into "anti-Semitism plus extra steps".

Sorry to hiijack this, but you seemed knowledgeable about a topic we were discussing about. As we don't have DMs in HN, I have to do it like this...

Would you please help me understand better your points about the GPL (linking vs. replacing)?

Thank you!

For those following along, that prior comment is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30429582 and I had to dig it out from a prior HN replies page.

To put it very, very short: maybe you can write proprietary LKMs that replace kernel functions.

The difference between linking and replacing is as follows:

- When I either write a library[0] or use one in my executable[1], I am writing code that is explicitly intended to be joined with someone else's. From a copyright perspective, that constitutes the creation of a derivative work.

- When I want to replace a library, I am writing code that is intended to allow me to stop using someone else's code. The only thing retained is the interface between the library and the executable using it. From a copyright perspective, this is either fair use of the interface's declaring codes in specific cases[2], or the interface itself is uncopyrightable[3].

For the record, this isn't a GPL thing; this is just how copyright law works. In fact, it's evidence that software was ill-fitted for copyright protection. People rarely, if ever, distribute other types of creative works as, say, transparent overlays intended to be placed on top of works they don't own. And the idea of there being some kind of "interface" between the overlay work and the original, where I can then redraw the original to evade the copyright on it, is entirely antithetical to how copyright is supposed to work.[4]

Now, with that out of the way... what you're asking about is linking, because the rest of Linux still remains after you replace the GPL part with your own proprietary code. So the entire GPL still applies to the entire "program", minus Linus's interpretation of being able to host separate programs in one address space as long as they only use symbols equivalent to userspace ABI.

For what it's worth, this is how Nvidia drivers work: they have a proprietary LKM that exposes device nodes that their OpenGL/Vulkan libraries access to control the GPU. However, Nvidia got lucky here in that Linux graphics have traditionally been handed in userspace. If, say, X11 was GPL; then the legal workaround they use wouldn't work.

I have no idea if the Linux network stack is pluggable to the point where you could link in your own. I do know they have to deal with frustratingly-proprietary Wi-Fi drivers, so I'm assuming (without much evidence) that drivers are pluggable and Linus considers the API surface to be OK for non-GPL code to touch.

Most kernel infringements occur because the infringers are incompetent, not malicious.

Anticheat and DRM vendors don't want to touch Linux because it's a small market - not because it's illegal to release LKMs with their code in it.

Also, you didn't ask for this, but I did want to mention that it is possible to "link" in so much code that none of the original remains. This is how BSD came about. However, unlike reimplementation from interfaces, there's no court precedent in favor of "tracing over" a program ship-of-Theseus style. The only reason why this doesn't pose a risk to BSD users is because lawsuits about this already happened in the late 80s, and were settled out of court.

[0] "Library" here is more general than, say, a .dll, .dylib, or .so file. It means any code intended to be used by another program to carry out a function. So things like a BIOS ROM, NPM dependency, or OS kernel would all be "Library" code.

[1] "Executable" here is more general than an .exe or .app bundle. It means any program designed to make use of other code that it does not contain within itself. So things like a console game, Node.js script, or Windows app would all be "Executable" code.

[2] The US 9th Circuit has controlling precedent for fair use in the case of compatibility; and SCOTUS brought in the concept of "programmer convenience" as a fair use justification for copying API declarations.

[3] APIs are not considered copyrightable subject matter in the EU. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit holds that they are. Other US courts have not ruled either way - not even SCOTUS, they just said "if they are copyrightable then Google did a fair use".

[4] In fact, this is the reason why the lawyer that runs the FOSS Patents blog consulted for Oracle in the Android case. As far as he cared, Android was a GPL violation, and damn the entire rest of the software industry for thinking that copyright ended at interfaces.

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, I don't have a very clear understanding (probably nobody does). As far as I understand, when "running two programs in the same address space" (this is, LKMs), it's fine to have non-GPL compatible modules as long as these don't interact with GPL DRMed symbols. You can have self-contained stuff and that won't be an issue. You could also no licensing limitations if you replaced every single module that's GPLed and DRMed with your own isolated modules, but that'd of course break the compatibility with the upstream-based stuff and would only work for very tailored scenarios.

What I'm asking about is not actually linking, right? To link something I'd need to import kernel symbols. I could always create a self-isolated subsystem that just runs in kernelspace but works on its own without importing stuff from the kernel, as long as I'm willing to put the effort.

We don't get to live the counterfactual though - we don't know how much of what feels like immunity as a result of "people coming to their senses" is actually the result of a successful de-platforming effort.

No, but given that the spread of these things through social networks resembles infectious disease we can take an educated guess. I'd propose that deplatforming probably stretched out the curve.

I suppose an argument could still be made from that. Maybe without stretching out the curve we would have seen significant loss of life on January 6th from many more thousands of Q people marching on the capital and eventually being hurt or killed in confrontations with capital police and the national guard. That would not have been good, though it would have in the long term perhaps more deeply discredited the movement.

We can never live the counterfactual with history.

Possibly. Also important to note that by responding improperly to such threats, the institutions themselves end up weakening themselves. For example, instead of being honest about what vaccines can and can't do, they pre-empt the dumbest arguments by pretending vaccines are perfect. Once some (reasonable) limits to efficacy become known, the institutions are completely discredited and the anti-vaxxer meme becomes even more powerful.

For a prime example of what can happen in a population that lacks memetic immunity look Albania in the 1990s. After the communist government collapsed, several large pyramid schemes sprung up and essentially took over the economy with the majority of Albanians participating at some level. When the pyramid schemes collapsed in 1997 it lead to a civil war with people actually shooting each other.

In the US we have a constant low level problem with pyramid schemes but they only suck in a small minority of greedy and gullible people. The majority of Americans know it's a scam and have some level of "herd immunity".

I would argue this is the opposite of true. Most conspiracy theorists believe in many conspiracies. Many of them suffer from paranoia and distrust, and tend to find comfort in conspiracy theories that validate the general sense that people are trying to mislead them, more than the general content of the idea itself. Many (most?) people don't think critically and evaluate ideas, they just evaluate their level of trust with the source and form opinions based on that.

I expect we'll see lots more of Qanon adjacents in america, especially as rural america continues to become less and less important to the global economy.

"they just evaluate their level of trust with the source" — No. They evaluate it but how well it fits with their preconception and other ideas they already hold EVEN if it comes from a completely unknown source. Memes are usually part of a "memeplex" and reinforce one another. And the most powerful memes also undermine competing memes at the same time. (for example, the "don't trust the MSM" meme works well with "the election was rigged" meme.

semantics really. If we need to twist this that its about saying "entity you distrust" is hiding something, that's not all that dissimilar.

imo the concept of memes here is distracting and irrelevant.

"especially as rural america continues to become less and less important to the global economy"

Yeah it should come to no surprise that when people are forced into a globalized system that they don't find representation, comfort or belonging in, that they will become fervently against 'globalists' and 'globalism' and find that the people who are supporting and pushing for it are not doing it from a good place but out of evil to punish them. Also the rhetoric towards those people is antagonistic and feeds their perception of the perpetrators.

True; but simultaneously, globalism is barely a choice. International economic competition is real and unavoidable. Leaders who rile people in rural areas up by claiming otherwise and pretending they will be able to help them without adapting are just lying.

> people are forced into a globalized system

I don't understand this framing. How are people forced?