131–140 of 181 posts
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No, I really don't know what you mean by "the whole woke thing". Since it's load-bearing in your argument, could you explain it?
No. I already said I wasn’t interested in that debate.
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them? For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks. Wit…
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Be careful. Some actors are deliberately muddying the waters of good and bad. For example, vaccines are pretty good, but some groups want you to be unsure if they're good or bad.
Precisely. Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference. The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy. “Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
This is an extremely dangerous idea without being counterbalanced by fact that reality is often complex and good actors want to be honest about it.
Bad actors desire confusion is closer to being accurate. But bad actors also often oversimplify to rouse people to some politically beneficial but ultimately harmful action.
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This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
Or you lack perspective. Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious. Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views t…
On the other hand, physical abuse of women by men is much more common and dangerous, and there's a utilitarian argument that society should treat it more harshly. Not saying the guys beating up the other guy were moral, but it's easy to argue they were closer.
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This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
Or you lack perspective. Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious. Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views t…
Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.
But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.
Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.
It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…) I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the he…
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice. I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
I think highly-educated people have a tendency to overestimate their expertise outside of their field, and especially in different subfields of the field they're expert in. Many (though certainly not all) low-IQ people tend to delegate to experts; although they often don't know enough to choose the right ones.
Look at HN politics. It's still the same as other kinds of politics, just with the issues swapped. We exchange "they're trying to take away our guns" for "they're trying to take away our root access", with basically the same arguments.
The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context. And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for. In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that pers…
"We wish it could have a better solution, but you all just couldn't behave" is often the argument in these debates. You seem to be dissatisfied with it, but tacitly accept it as the only way. Let me put a finger on why I will never agree with it: 1. The current situation isn't that apocalyptic. 2. The alternative is so much more horrifying. The first is a weaker argument because there is always a bottomless bag for t…
The problem here though, isn't what you or I think. I expressed dislike, as you do. The problem is, what's the average person think? And more importantly, those being elected to legislative bodies? They see this recent change, this change that's really only been around for a few turns of the legislative cycle, as complete lawlessness. And they don't really see or understand issues with tracking.
And when I talk to the average mobile phone owner about tracking, their eyes glaze over. So there will be no help here, either.
So tracking will happen, at least that's the framework I'm talking about. If not, well then this discussion is meaningless. But I have seen courts push back over and over about governmental tracking, about police going too far in their tracking, yet I have seen very little, comparatively, push back about tracking on the corporate side. And we need to be honest here, in both cases private enterprise will manage the infrastructure which handles tracking, it's just who handles the "who is this person" portion. State or corporate.
I know you just want it to remain as it is, but I'm sorry that's over. It's not as if I'm advocating this change, I'm saying it's going to happen. There's a difference. I don't want a tornado to touch down near my house, but I'm not going to close my eyes if it's about to happen.
If you don't want this to happen, you're going to have to engage, or someone is, those two bodies of people I mentioned. Those elected to legislative bodies. And the Average Joe. From what I can see, the first wants this, the second doesn't even understand any part of the discussion.
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Precisely. Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference. The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy. “Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
It can go both ways. Bad actors can simplify because it leads to indifference, by way of generalizations. "black" = "bad", "illegal immigrant" = "gang member". It's how racism works. > The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy. Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
In my experience, the left tends to like simple stories ("we are poor and the capitalists are rich, so just take their money and give it to us", "if people love each other, they should be able to marry, no matter the gender"). The right tends to like complex explanations ("taking money from the rich destroys the incentive structure required for effective resource allocation", "gay marriage makes gay people happy, but destroy the Christian values on which the western society was build, and therefore may have unpredictable consequences").
Neither approach is right or wrong. The left tends to oversimplify and prioritize surface compassion above all else (the communism case), but sometimes the simple argument really is the right argument (the gay marriage case). The right tries to show off how smart and sophisticated their arguments are, and how "it's not that simple". Sometimes they get it right (such as in the communism case), but they very often try to find a "but actually" explanation where one is not warranted (the gay marriage case).
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Political extremes will be extreme. Centrists can hold both.
AFAIK this generally isn't true. About the centrists, I mean. Most self-identified centrists are just moderate right-wingers.