Comment by smaudet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smaudet | Hacker News Reader

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It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).

So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).

Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.

Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).

I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".

Is that correct?

Not exactly.

Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.

And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.

> Not exactly.

But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.

So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.

> if you disagree with me on the other stuff

This part is too broad.

Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.

For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.

But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."

I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.

I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.

People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.

It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.

A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.

Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.

Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.

By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.

The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.

You are gravely misunderstanding my point.

You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.

Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.

Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.

> So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.

By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly

I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.

Funny, how those in a hierarchical system political system struggle so much to understand, hierarchy.

It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...

I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.

You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.

If people are interpreting this is an analogy, that is probably the issue...

> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy

It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.

> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.

But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.

Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.

It's hard not to see this as you just restating your argument.

If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?

> What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?

I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).

Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).

So your answer is basically just...the EFF's traditional lane. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy. Sure!

>Your beliefs may conflict

Maybe, maybe not. A libertarian, a progressive, and a paranoid business owner can all fight against encryption backdoors for completely different reasons; if they team up, maybe they can all get what they want. If they think their beliefs preclude cooperation, then their chances of getting what they want in this area are...much smaller.

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