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Comment by seti0Cha | Hacker News Reader

I can understand calling it foolish, I can understand calling it naive, but why are you calling it cowardice? What fear is he giving in to? He doesn't seem to be avoiding engaging in things he would like to for fear he will be discovered. One might even consider him guilty of foolish bravery in not fearing that he will be condemned for what seems to him as non-controversial.

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I suspect OP meant cowardice in not fighting for what is right and even giving up with tepid resignation before the fight has even begun. Perhaps cowardice is not the best word but the meaning felt immediately intelligible to me.

I think I more or less understand as well, but I have a pet peeve about people using the word "cowardice" for things they think are morally wrong. The classic example was how everyone was calling the 9/11 bombers cowardly, when clearly their actions required a certain amount of bravery. If memory serves, Bill Maher lost his show for pointing out that fact. I think people do this because they don't feel comfortable with a purely moral condemnation, so they reach for something that is also suggests weakness, a more universally despised trait.

The cowardice is in surrendering your moral agency

"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."

There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35493109-bonhoeffer

The next sentence is:

> This corresponded almost exactly with things I shouldn't have been doing anyway, so it wasn't too hard.

The writer appears to be saying that there is no conflict between what he thinks is right and what the general public thinks is right. This is why I suggested naive or foolish might be better terms. I love Bonhoeffer, though!

You're right that that's what the piece says. It's not what I would write now: there definitely are things that I think are right and most people don't. Instead of doing those things secretly, however, I do them and make a public case for them.

Examples, explaining why I:

* Often let my kids do things alone at ages when other people wouldn't: https://www.jefftk.com/p/whats-the-alternative-to-independen...

* Disregard the warning on baby formula that says not to use the microwave: https://www.jefftk.com/p/stop-discouraging-microwave-formula...

* Work(ed) on ads: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads

Interesting, but those aren't very high stakes controversial opinions. People may strongly disagree with them, but they aren't likely to lead to a declined job offer, workplace difficulties or harassment. There are many stances for which making a public case is futile because people have strong emotional commitments around them. Would you still be public about them?

Yes, I would still be public. I think making a case is almost never futile: I don't think I've ever encountered a topic where there weren't some people (often the quieter ones) who cared about the arguments.

It is hard to read this any other way then - you are in a privileged position of having never been personally challenged by a lack of privacy so are fine with privacy not existing. By that reasoning you are also OK with those who are effected being silenced, because they are, for example, not cisgender, white skinned and male and could face attack for random individuals for expressing their views in public.

The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.

> you are fine with privacy not existing

I don't think we'll be able to prevent the disappearance of privacy as technology continues to get cheaper and more widespread. I'm not saying "this is good", I'm saying "this is coming, adapt".

We won't be able to prevent it only if we accept it. The erosion of privacy is self-imposed, so if it brings damage and people consider it important, it will stop.

Our world is non-ideal in many ways, and there are many potential sacrifices one could make to help improve our future. Using more private technology is one of them, but so are things like avoiding flying, going vegan, switching careers to directly work on a problem, or donating to support progress in these or other areas. I think it's pretty hard to make a case that trying to hold back the large decrease in privacy is more altruistically valuable than, say, trying to keep humanity from wiping itself out (nukes, bioengineering, AI, etc).

A primary purpose of propaganda is to undermine one's own independent judgment regarding transpersonal (society at large) issues. [A pyschological phenomena: the individual subconsciously associates the megaphone of 1-n broadcasting with 'social consensus'. It works.]

It takes social courage, and more importantly courage of one's own convictions, to face the tide of conditioned and packaged social truths. "Truths" that will be repeated from friends, family, coworkers, such as "if you have nothing to hide .."

It is so much easier to go with the flow and takes not even a tiny bit of courage to do so.

It sounds like you are saying the courageous path is privately defying the consensus. It seems to me that courage is only involved when you are willing to do so publicly. I'm not saying that one should, but I don't think the cowardice/courage dichotomy is an apt description of keeping controversial opinions private.

I said nothing about "privately". All our actions, private or public, are engendered by the content of our minds.

Ah, so you are saying the mere act of disagreement is an act of courage. I think maybe you mean this in the sense that we fear to be different, that it is our internal condemnation of self we are facing down...a Nietzschian will to power kind of thing?

Disagreement would be the wrong word, since that is the pleasure that drives the contrarian. These acts of courage are not about pleasure, rather about fidelity, the expression of which may in fact entail social pain.

It is difficult (but important) to self examine one's motive to insure it is not pleasure that is motivating one's standing in contradiction to (asserted) social pressures. And after that determination, it takes courage to be true to one's self.

> courage is only involved when you are willing to do so publicly

Just disagreeing with the mainstream view on a topic often requires courage, trusting your reasoning and evidence over external sources. Then it typically requires additional courage to be public in your disagreement, especially in areas where it's common for people to criticize others for diverging from the mainstream view.

Still, I've found it really valuable to disagree publicly and then engage with the criticism, because that reduces the risk that my disagreement was due to a mistake.

> I can understand calling it foolish, I can understand calling it naive, but why are you calling it cowardice?

Because this is often a standard emotional response to very large problems. It's one of the reasons so many people (mainly conservatives) downplayed the risks of COVID. It can be mentally easier to downplay or ignore a scary problem rather than acknowledge it.

But it can also be easy to take tiny steps that don't appreciably improve your position, and then tell yourself you've made things better. In the case of covid, this was all of the surface cleaning; with privacy it's often people picking a few of the standard recommendations but leaving such large remaining gaps that their overall situation is minimally changed.

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