"voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities"

That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article.

"People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.

There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems. Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.

> go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower

That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand programs that let you block specific sites, and block that site. It's completely within your control. It's your responsibility to do it, to control your own actions and to bear the consequences.

You just don't want to bother - you want the Central Committee to take over, so whatever happens if not your responsibility but theirs. It is an extremely infantile approach.

> Nice straw-man that conflates democratic socialism with authoritarian one-party rule.

OK, let it be People's Democratic Central Multi-Party Committee is that makes you feel better. The point is not how the committee is called, the point is that it would decide how resources are allocated, thus eliminating the whole pesky free will issue.

> Don't throw the socialist baby out with the Soviet bathwater.

Somehow socialist babies have been always surrounded by Soviet bathwaters, sooner or later. If one were empirically inclined, one would be tempted to conclude that there is some strong relation between the two. But of course one shouldn't forget that True Socialism (TM) has never been tried.

What do you do then when millions of others fail to take that responsibility? Do we have a responsibility to build a system that encourages people to take responsibility for themselves and others or that eliminates means by which some are led to act irresponsibly?

Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.

At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.

> That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers.

This is simply a fallacy. You can’t decide to switch off selective psychological mechanisms in your brain.

Facebook, Snapchat etc. are weaponizing and exploiting these against us/humanity in ways similar to Vegas casinos.

It is easy to not drive to Vegas, enter a casino and engage in a psychological loop designed to hack my brain.

It is not so easy to escape the all-permeating tentacles of social media and its finely tuned intermittent rewards etc. mechanisms.

Given that willpower is a limited cognitive resource, your proposition is not realistic.

What? It's incredibly easy to avoid social media. If that's the kind of hardship our generation is facing, we're doing pretty good.

Not sure where to go from here. You clearly don't believe that such a thing as structural inequality exists. Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.

> You clearly don't believe that such a thing as structural inequality exists

I have no idea what the thing you call "structural inequality" is, so I can't say whether I believe it exists or not. It could be you call by this term some well-established phenomenon, and then I'd agree it exists, or it could be that you call some imaginary bugaboo like engineers taking your free will with their evil algorithms, and then, absent any empirical evidence of its existence, I do not believe in it. Hard to say without understanding the term.

> Without an acknowledgement of the massive power imbalance between mass media corporations on the one hand and the citizenry on the other, there's no possible discussion here.

I certainly see discussion going on right here, so it is possible, but if you mean by that "without you accepting my point as an axiom without proof, I am not ready to continue because my winning is not guaranteed and I have no means to prove my claims" then I agree that continuing the discussion in this situation is not the best move for you. If, however, you are ready to prove your points, you are welcome to do it anytime you like. Free will, you see :)

As far as I can see, there's no "massive power imbalance", on the contrary - the press is often criticized for catering for the basest instincts of the masses and being too easily swayed by a short-term fads and frivolities of the public. Scandal-of-the-day, however minor and vapid, often supplants more deep and important topics. If this criticism is true - and I believe evidence suggests to a large measure it is - then the public is the one to hold the power. If nobody wants to click on clickbait, if nobody comes to your site to view and click on the ads, if nobody reads whatever content you are providing - where is your power? What is your power? You can publish anything and nobody would even know about it, and pretty soon you couldn't publish anything because your servers will be shut down for the lack of payment.

I would say if we can see anything, it is that media corporations are too timid, foolish and cowardly to do anything but what the lowest common denominator demands from them. Clicks and ad impressions are kings, and who makes those clicks? The citizenry does. Nobody stands with the gun to your head and demands you to click or visit certain site. You decide it on your own power. If you don't like the result - maybe time to think what you can change?

for all your effort to type those words - you forget that people had to be forced to wear seat belts even though their very lives hang in the balance.

Since this is HN I will make an effort to not just make a sharp one liner.

The best version of the OP’s arguing is for individual ability and choice, and the ability of a person to make a difference of their own volition.

This is a fundamentally important right because without it, we are all automatons.

The issue is that in many cases we humans make bad choices, on a truly unimaginable scale.

This is also very much a part of being human - good choices exist only if bad choices exists.

The issue is that sometimes we can agree that people will consistently make poor choices, for a variety of forgiveable reasons.

While we could conceivably go after each individual, explain and educate them in precisely the way required to convince them that they should wear seat belts - it’s is often practically impossible to do so.

Which is why we introduce laws and regulations. All cars must have seat belts - and you must wear them.

Because as a species we are able to make meta cognitive calls or simply- decisions about decisions.

As a species we don’t want our people dying, for something as trivial as not wearing a seat belt.

It causes families to lose parents, parents to lose children - often because they were just at the wrong place and time.

Getting people to wear seat belts causes large scale good, over an individuals choice to put themselves and others at risk.

This kind of attitude from your parent commenter is extremely common, it is an artifact of ideology and the working of technological rationality into the consciousness. While the parent commenter probably believes he or she lives in a post-ideological world in which rationality has been obtained and found to be forever placed somewhere between right and left, a compromise of two extremes in which domination cannot be acknowledged because as Marx put it, Bentham reins, J.S Mill makes a strange comeback in the denial of structural effects and seeing totality. The kind of ignorance or blindness to the totality of society is well captured by P.W Bridman quoted by Marcuse:

>"We evidently know what we mean by length if we can tell what the length of any and every object is, and for the physicist nothing more is required. To find the length of an object, we have to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is measured are fixed: that is, the concept of length involves as much and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations."

>Bridgman has seen the wide implications of this mode of thought for the society at large:

"To adopt the operational point of view involves much more than a mere restriction of the sense in which we understand 'concept,' but means a far-reaching change in all our habits of thought, in that we shall no longer permit ourselves to use as tools in our thinking concepts of which we cannot give an adequate account in terms of operations."

> There is an entire world of alternative possibilities out there for economic and governance systems.

Yeah, and in some way or another, every single one of them seem to end in a bloody dictatorship.

Thanks, but no thanks, please keep your "alternative possibilities" to yourself.

Did they? European social democratic countries (Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germnay), Britain (e.g. the NHS), Costa Rica, Mondragon Spain, etc.

Lots of workers' blood was spilled to ensure the capitalist systems we see in the US and other countries, too. All sides in the history of politics and economic systems are bloody-handed monsters.

It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.

None of these countries implement control over the press you propose. None of them even comes close to "Democratic deployment of capital and technology" - if I understand correctly, by this you mean both allocation of capital and permission to create and use certain type of technology is controlled by government, which is elected democratically (though how you could ensure that it is elected democratically given that it controls all the technology is a mystery to me, but let's say we found the magic way to do it). None of these countries - even one with large amount of governmental redistribution - do it. There's still a huge difference between having unemployment insurance or government-sponsored housing for the poor and government taking over all capital and technology. Like between milking the cow and butchering and barbecuing the cow.

All of those have the same political and economic systems as the US. With minor customizations, but they're all capitalist democracies, with varying levels of government regulation and control.

The world has never been in a better place, and has never improved as fast as in the last 60 years. If that's your argument to try something different, your argument doesn't make any sense.

> It might, just might, be possible to learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes. I sure hope so.

Indeed, let's not try to implement socialism again. Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships. Let's learn from history and not repeat prior mistakes.

>Every single time, over dozens of times, it resulted in bloody dictatorships.

It is very much worth studying why this has happened and what kind of methods can be used to avert it. Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian. Allende, Sankara's Burkina Faso, the Paris Commune, revolutionary Catalonia, and most recently Rojava are examples of the Socialist project experiencing some faults but not nearly as uncharitably as you are painting them here.

> Not only is Marxism-Leninism not the only form of Socialist praxis (neither is Marxism the only Socialist theory for that matter), but it's unwise to dismiss "failures" for the reason that they were authoritarian.

I'm dismissing failures because every single time it ended in bloody dictatorships, but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.

No, it won't. Funny how you talk about learning with the failures of history, but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.

And again, that's when the world has been the best that it has ever been. In 60 years, extreme poverty went from ~60% to <10% of the global population because of free trade and globalization. Free trade was the largest income distribution process in history, shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.

Sure, there is still a lot to be done, but the current system has worked miracles. It can be improved, but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.

Keep your disastrous social and economic experiments to yourself. Socialism has done harm enough.

>but no, This Time It Will Be Different®.

Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.

>but you keep insisting in trying again a system that again and again has proven itself to be horrible.

Not really; have you heard of Badiou's concept of the Communist Hypothesis? His argument is that Socialism, well, Communism has existed as an Idea for centuries, it is always the force to break down the "present state of things", it is the first element of society, the subversive one, to oppose the action of the State. To dismiss thirty years of research into Communism, creating branches such as anarchist Communism, communalism, feminist anarchism, Socialist technocracy and others with faux-empiricism is a little heavy handed in my view.

As for your support of the wonders of capitalism, neither I, nor Marx, Engels or any contemporary Communist denies its push to reduce poverty.

>shifting value from developed countries to developing countries.

"Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.

>but the current system has worked miracles

So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).

>It can be improved

So can Socialism.

>but proposing a dramatic change to a system that ALWAYS results in bloody dictatorships makes no sense.

Capitalism itself was extremely dramatic, it came "soaked from head to toe in blood" as Marx put it. In fact, he dedicates two chapters of his magnum opus to detailing the bloody history of capitalism and the laws passed in Western Europe that allowed it to flourish.

> Why do you think strawman thought-terminating cliches are an acceptable level of discourse? At best they serve to be distracting and needlessly hostile.

But that's the essence of your argument. You are proposing to try again something that 100% of the times led to bloody dictatorships, claiming that this time it will be different due to some vague, hand-wavy reason.

> "Shifting value" is a very strange way of saying that developing countries are being systematically exploited due to the low cost of labour because they have almost no training.

Yeah, millions being moved out of poverty is the same as "exploited".

> So did the feudal system, and in fact so did the Soviet system (which I do not by any means support).

No. Unless one of those systems did something like removing 50% of the world population from extreme poverty in half a century. Neither did. Not only that, the Soviet system purposefully murdered millions. And the key word here is "purposefully". Every system results in deaths, the Soviet (and all socialists) fall into a special category where death is part of the governing process. See Holodomor. Killing Fields. Etc.

> So can Socialism.

I'll say "maybe" to give you the benefit of the doubt, but do we need to kill millions again to find out based on your "hunch"? No, thank you very much.

> as Marx put it

And you keep citing Marx as if he is a reasonable source, that puzzles me. He's long dead, just as his economic theories. Keep them dead.

The criticism is that it leads to "bloody dictatorships", not necessarily that authoritarian systems are bad. Before the 20th century there were many authoritarian systems (empires and monarchies) that oversaw some of the best governed periods of human history.

I'm sure you believe if you controlled a country, you would do a much better job and not make the same mistakes that lead to a bloody dictatorship and worse outcomes for the poor. Excuse us if most of the rest here don't believe that.

So sure, there are a few benevolent dictators here and there... but what's the ratio of benevolent to malevolent dictators/authoritarians? Is there such a a stat?

Do you count Kings as dictators? I don't really (the middle eastern monarchies have weathered the chaos in the region, if Kings were no different from dictators you would expect at least some of them to fall too...) but there is of course such a thing as a 'bad king'. I recalled this simplified analysis of Polish monarchs: https://archive.is/QEY1n tldr 250 out of 835 years of bad monarchs, or a 30% failure ratio by time. 18 individual monarchs out of 48, or a 37.5% failure rate by person. Very few 20th century dictatorships have even survived into the 21st century.

I've seen similar ratings for Roman emperors as well but confess I don't remember the details, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has further compiled information to address exactly this question for other European lines of monarchs, the various Chinese dynasties, Japan's weird history, etc. (https://archive.is/I42xd is a good reminder of the excesses, no form of government is innocent.)

The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it. Sure completely surrendering it is disproportionate, but for me it would be more akin to banning certain toxic substances in food, like too much sugar cause addiction and health problems so consumers lose their ability to make an informed choice. Here we would simply ban certain practices in media.

> The issue is that free will cannot be exercised under certain circumstances because for-profit have found a hack to shutdown it.

No they did not. You don't go to Twitter/Facebook because your free will has been "shut down". You do it because you like it. If you don't want to do it, it is very easy to stop. You won't have excruciating pain and debilitating disease if you don't read what she did next, you heart won't stop and your brain won't shut down if you don't learn one weird trick to burn body fat and make all people of your preferred gender to fall in love with you forever. Literally nothing would happen. You decide whether to do it or not. If you decide to do it, it's ok - it is your time, your life, if you want to spend a little bit of it reading about one weird trick or looking at funny cats, who am I to say no? Go for it. But please stop blaming somebody else for your decision to do it. You have free will. Embrace it.

People have tried the "Well, so stop doing it then" approach to fixing addiction. It doesn't work so well. Self-control is not infinite, and is context-dependent. I can ignore cravings when it comes to dessert, but I do feel a compulsive need to read up on everything about my latest hobby. Our brain is hard wired to be addicted to new/novel/stimulating. Naturally, different things are stimulating to different people. Programmers fall prey to this all the time. We waste countless hours tinkering with the latest shiny tech toy while our hobby projects collect dust. We click on articles detailing what we already know about the latest apple gadget, because we already read the 20 articles detailing the "leaks".

Click-bait is a real thing. It triggers a deep psychological need, varying from "let me read this article and comment on how wrong everyone is" to "this is psychological porn that completely agrees with how I feel". Companies whose business model is based on keeping your attention have gotten really good at keeping your attention. Its a form of break-down of free will. Like getting a whiff of the good stuff, when you really should know better to avoid it. Its not really that hard to understand, and I'm sure you understand it already. Whats unexplained is why you chose to blame the victim when there is an entire industry dedicated to setting up the trap.

> You have free will

What justifies your certainty here? If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable. That’s no surprise: we’re biological machines at the endpoint of eons of evolution. We’re not gods. Of course we can be hacked.

> If history proves anything, it’s that people are eminently manipulable.

Did you write this comment on your own free will or was manipulated into it by an invisible puppet master? If the latter, what would be the point of me trying to convince you of anything - you can't be convinced, since your actions are not sourced in you, but in the will of your puppetmaster! However, somehow you and me are discussing things. By that you prove that you, too, believe in free will - otherwise there would be no point in you discussing anything, after all you are controlled by your puppetmaster, and I am controlled by mine, so what's the point in us puppets exchanging words, if nothing can be ever changed by our will?

The only point of having discussions, views, principles, debates, ideas, politics - is f you have free will. Otherwise this whole thing has no meaning.

> Of course we can be hacked.

Surely. There is lots of ways to subjugate other's will - by violent force, by trickery, by fraud, by lies, we have no shortage of ways developed over thousands of years to do it. That however does not deny the premise there's something to be forced, or tricked, or deceived - and thus also something that can be free from force or deception. You can be deceived, but you can also resist the deception. You will not always win, but you'll never win if you surrender in advance.

If a person (a) has the freedom to act as they will and (b) understands what is in their own best interests, why would they act in a way that is contrary to those interests? When someone says, I really want to stop spending all day on Facebook, but I find it difficult, what do they mean? Where is the difficulty? They aren't confused about what they want. You might say they "like it" too much to stop, but what is liking something in that way if it isn't a constraint on free will.

Besides which, psychology and neurology tell us that most of the time we haven't a clue what our underlying motivations are[0]. We do not have the ability to introspect our unconscious motivations, but that doesn't mean they are immune to external influence and manipulation.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion#Unrel...

Firstly most people here have been pulled by a puppet master. You too are pulled by those same strings, you just are taking the N' position to the position taken by the commenters here.

But a lot of the things people are saying here are the culmination of many other actions which have been repeated over the past many years and are finally coming to a head.

secondly - you continually make an error of generalization.

Yes, one single particular individual may be able to exercise free will. But Most dont even know that their will is being attacked.

Its not like these are telegraphed villains with evil laughs saying "I'm going to take your freedom".

This is candy crush, with its intentionally neutral and happy pictures. Its facebook, with its memmories and your friends.

WHY would anyone stop that?

Sure, someone in this thread, who is a techie and has read the past 2 months of tech news, may have an idea of what to defend.

In that very narrow, individual scenario - yes, he has a choice.

Yours is the craftsmans argument, in a world which has just seen the advent of the assembly line. Certain individuals may well craft their own will.

Those few are considered flaws in the system, and the system itself constantly focuses on those people they CAN get, and who are NOT aware, or have the wherewithal or lack the interest in stopping it.

Hell, people don't want to wear helmets when they ride motorcycles; we couldnt get people to waste less water when they shower, and instead there was an active movement to deny climate change.

Programs which never sleep, eat, and cost tiny amounts of money to execute. So even if you never log in, they just lie in wait.

The armies arrayed against an individual are far greater than what a normal person can hope to deal with - unless they drop everything and focus on beating it.

And why would a normal person do that? SO that he can keep free will? Most people would give up their free will if it would guarantee that their kids have a future, that they get food, and shelter.

Can people be manipulated, or tricked to do things that they would, when sound of mind, otherwise choose not to do?

Let's just assume you answer "yes" (because to answer "no" would be unimaginably absurd)... lets also imagine that billions of dollars are up for grabs to the people/companies who can manipulate/trick sound of mind people better than anyone else... What would that world look like?

Well, we're living in it.

Another stunning victory over the evil straw man that haunts out discussions.