The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have.
Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decreases participation, and generally furthers the problem being bemoaned: lack of attention to citizen desires.
These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.
I’m not sure that’s what is implied; it’s just obvious that publicly proving one’s “true motives” is quite difficult.
When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.
You have world history littered with examples of mass surveillance platforms being used for oppression.
No explanation or justification of why that happens seems necessary! It's a stronger and supported argument to just say "Whatever the cause, when mass surveillance has been implemented historically, it is eventually used to errode civil liberties and increase population control."
Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.
Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?
It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.
There doesn't have to be, but there totally can be.
Which means there could be an untold number of things which they do which are currently secret.
I heard once that things, sometimes shady things, exist outside of the twitterverse.
Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.
or formerly?
Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?
The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power.
Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better.
Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers.
Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said.
etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.
I’m neither American, nor was talking about “left wing” American cabals that control the world.
I’m not sure why this has to be a singular group. It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor. One can clearly observe multiple not-necessarily-colluding but powerful groups globally and locally, who all aim to control and subjugate the rest of us.
This makes no sense to be a semantic debate where you grind an axe that “there is not just one illuminati” and act like that means something impressive.
It's a HN rule for good reason. It makes your own arguments stronger.
Even if your opponent _is_ a shadowy new world order cabal member or supporter, arguing against the best possible interpretation which requires of their stance helps sway random citizen X who may not know of or believe in such a cabal.
Stuff like Google’s CSAM detection really does detect abuse. It also can cause problems for a parent if there’s a false positive.
The reason these things are hard is because it’s a discussion of what’s better on net and it’s not the case that there is no tradeoff.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
If OP can’t acknowledge that he’s just ideologically partisan and won’t be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree. Deeply understanding the opposite position requires accepting that there are smart reasonable people that hold it (for good reasons!), not that they’re all some “shadowy cabal” lying and hiding bad intent.
The same could be said for people who want encryption (and often is by partisans on the other side, “you just want to hide bad behavior and only pretend it’s about general privacy”).
I think strong encryption and user control is important (I work on urbit full time at Tlon and encourage friends to use Signal), but I still recognize there are real tradeoffs that result from empowering individuals this way, I just think on net it’s the right decision even with the often terrible downsides.
It’s easy to pretend there are no downsides and people like to structure policy opinions as if this was the case, but it rarely is.
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> “ Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument.
But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?
Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
Other motives are also suspected among the people and organisations fighting these laws.
The danger is an oportunist individual or group taking advantage of the thing.
Let us play fantasyland and we assume there is one day a pill that feeds you for a day, tastes better than any food, makes you full and beats obesity.
Do you think the ownership of that would not be fiercly fought about and the development should be kept secret?
If it is not secret, anyone could just steal that revolutionary idea.
Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.