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Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

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Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#651

Post by unethical_ban »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #643
abecedarius wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite…

approval voting would be absolutely massive in impact, i think far beyond what you're imagining.

FWIW that's what I was getting at for "change the voting system". I don't like approval voting because despite every other election system advantage it has, I think most people have preferences in their candidates, and it would be better to allow them to express them.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#652

Post by bcjdjsndon »

shakna wrote: post #342
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it

HN specifically does not. You have to click "more", leading to most people not moving beyond two or three pages, rather than infinite scrolling.

So clicking to the next piece of slop is ok, but scrolling is bad?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#653

Post by abecedarius »

unethical_ban wrote: post #651
ClayShentrup wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

approval voting would be absolutely massive in impact, i think far beyond what you're imagining.

FWIW that's what I was getting at for "change the voting system". I don't like approval voting because despite every other election system advantage it has, I think most people have preferences in their candidates, and it would be better to allow them to express them.

There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)

I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#654

Post by ball_of_lint »

NoPicklez wrote: post #616
ball_of_lint wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you or anyone besides me (and my partner) get to decide what is ok for my kid to see? If you want your kids to not see porn on the internet, cool. Don't give them Internet access. You don't need to make the internet worse for me and my family to make that rule for your family. And maybe if you are parenting your child well, at some point you will be able to trust them to use the internet in a responsible way.

Regulators already decide certain content you can see through age rating restrictions (M15, R18+ etc) and has been the case for decades. Its just that no such ratings has been extended into online content, which is the issue.

Every one of those can be stepped over at the discretion of a parent. I can buy an M rated videogame for them. I can show them an R rated movie in theater. I can let them have wine.

Plus the bulk of what you're referring to (ESRB ratings) are voluntary.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#655

Post by ball_of_lint »

delusional wrote: post #572
ball_of_lint wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. As a key example, look at 4chan - anonymity taken to it's extreme has resulted in on one hand yes a lot of disgusting stuff, but also a cultural hotbed. Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well: > But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal info…

> A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. That's a value judgment. I'm sure it's true for some on this website, and certainly most on 4chan, but I would caution against broadening that into the general public. For my mom, the value of the internet is sharing dog pictures and clubhouse opening hours with people she known in real life. For my dad it's browsing web…

Every argument in this thread comes from a value judgement?

If you don't have personal privacy as a value then the answer is obvious - this is going to save kids from porn for no harm, let's usher it in.

Only if you do value privacy (value judgement), can I start to convince you that this legislation has a strong, negative outcome in that area, and that it isn't effective at 'saving kids'.

---

Online commerce and dog pictures to personal friends are not of significant _cultural_ value. Which is what I was focusing on there. If you want to measure it by economic value that's a whole different ballgame.

I also find 4chan mostly disgusting. But that's the key point and what this cuts to: Is anonymous expression something that should exist?

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#656

Post by Matumio »

hellojesus wrote: post #561
Matumio wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How people play those games has to do with cultural norms and expectations, not just mathematics and logic. Same for age verification.

But shouldn't the extension of logic be the same in either case, even if there is some premature convergence criteria? I have yet to see someone say age verification is okay because the gov ensure X is the maximum use of the tech. If anything, Public Choice Theory compels the grant that the gov will misuse the data given enough time.

Hm, if I query the LLM it tells me about cognitive hierarchy theory, and the Keynesian beauty contest. But my point is, humans are not perfectly rational beings, and sometimes for a reason. (Like assuming that there is more uncertainty than the stated rules imply. Or altruistic behaviour that benefits the group as a whole. And we also have a default to imitate each other, see Joseph Henrich's 2016 Book.) Some of those defaults are culturally learned and leak into pure mathematical games (see e.g. the ultimatum game).

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#657

Post by shakna »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #652
shakna wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN specifically does not. You have to click "more", leading to most people not moving beyond two or three pages, rather than infinite scrolling.

So clicking to the next piece of slop is ok, but scrolling is bad?

Our current research shows that people don't click. But they do scroll. So... Yes.

Infinite scrolling makes it harder to break the feedback loop, and harder to control self-interruption. It also increases the overall dopamine experienced.

Pagination, allows the user to regularly break from the cycle, and most people take advantage to do so. It allows people to notice fatigue. Which is exactly why most social media sites no longer use it.

As the 'inventor' of the infinite scroll said:

> [it is] one of the first products designed to not simply help a user, but to deliberately keep them online for as long as possible - Aza Raskin

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#658

Post by chii »

teiferer wrote: post #648
epihelix wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything , then isn't that what it should be? Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.

If you ask me personally, then no, we don't need to have such a vote. But if the point is that country wide referendums should only be held for important questions but then exclude Brexit because "it's stupid" then that's an inconsistent argument. Surely the question whether the UK should leave the EU was a very important decision to make. That the vote went a certain way which you don't like does not make it less im…

for such a wide ranging effects, brexit's vote had only 2% margin of error, with 48% against.

The people's stupidity is why "important" questions like that should not be put to a vote; they can't be expected to understand the entirety of the outcome and consequences. As the other comment has posted: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#659

Post by DrScientist »

friendzis wrote: post #627
DrScientist wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ). In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their jo…

> Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate. In "the older days" even blatant propaganda used to work so well, because there were very few points of access to information and those could be easily controlled. Very few had access to independent sources of informati…

I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed.

Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century.

I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.

Re: Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

#660

Post by youarenaive343 »

stymaar wrote: post #568
jonathanstrange wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world you describe is not plausible from a technical perspective. Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software. At the very least, you will need to make sure th…

> Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software. Not if they use a credit-card-like ID that embed a side-channel-resistant cryptographic chip like your credit card d…

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