Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false.

That's just the straw man the article is using to claim that it isn't a kill switch. They want the claim to be false so they adopt a version of the claim with a flaw in order to knock it down.

The obvious problem being that the actual implementation is at least as bad. Now you have the law mandating that the car activate the kill switch by itself, with no human in the loop you can even try to reason with.

What happens when you're driving erratically because you're on some dangerous ice road and trigger a false positive that strands you in the wilderness? What happens when you're actually impaired and then turn around to discover a wildfire approaching your location, in which case "don't die in a fire" should override "don't drive impaired" and you should immediately evacuate, but your car won't let you?

It's an ill-conceived and dangerous law and its critics are in the right. The operator should always be able to override the computer.

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing.

If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

(Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time! Valuable criticism that requires nuance is memetically disfavored by comparison!)

> If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

But it's also not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the wrong."

> Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time!

It's hardly a conspiracy to suppose that media outlets choose which claims to fact check based on how they want to influence readers.

> But it's also not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the wrong."

And accordingly, I didn't ever say that this was a good bill or all its critics were in the wrong. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reading that into my comments, but all I did was take issue with a misrepresentation of an article that argued against a specific negative claim about the bill.

Which I think is representative - it's very hard to make a narrow point about specific arguments without people assuming that you're taking a firm stance on one side or the other of a general issue.

> And accordingly, I didn't ever say that this was a good bill or all its critics were in the wrong. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reading that into my comments, but all I did was take issue with a misrepresentation of an article that argued against a specific negative claim about the bill.

You were responding to a criticism of the article. The technology is a kill switch, which critics rightly oppose, whether or not it's a law enforcement kill switch. Here's the specific false claim from the article being criticized:

> experts say that technology doesn’t amount to a “kill switch,”

The authors are laundering the false claim through the mouths of "experts" (by which they apparently mean "proponents of the bill"), but 'that technology doesn't amount to a "kill switch"' is false. The authors then go on to knock down the narrower claim that it's a law enforcement kill switch, which is the straw man.

The article you're defending is doing the thing you're criticizing, i.e. using the narrow point (not a "law enforcement" kill switch) to malign the general point (it's a kill switch). If they were actually trying to be nuanced they'd be admitting that it's a kill switch and only distinguishing what kind of kill switch it is.

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