Sorry to hear about your 3rd order thinking (or lack thereof, more specifically).

I’ll spell it out for you: it comes across as condescending. Long-term, especially if you do this in real life too, that means people are less likely to listen to what you have to say, and makes you less effective at tasks that require other people’s cooperation.

Systemically, you might be thinking too much about rationalism, and feeling superior, and not enough about how your choices make other people feel. Feelings aren’t rational; in fact, studies of the brain show that feelings come first and the rational explanation comes later. The only way to elicit a rational response from people is to talk in a way that makes them feel interested in what you have to say, at that comes from how you say it as much as what you say.

I didn't "feel superior" when I posted that, but I do now.

This is a forum frequented by VCs, programmers, and other sophisticated people, man. IRL is a totally different thing.

If you're itching to longhouse your intellectual superiors, go to Facebook, a place even yet more distant than IRL in its own twisted ways but that's what that place is for.

-1 it's perhaps offensive but I agree with OP: 3rd order is *very* difficult to reason about, and even really smart, really experienced people have colossal failures at that level of reasoning-depth. It's not just probabilistic (e.g. chess, go), but in addition the way a decision-tree-branch is followed often deeply affects downstream decisions...

See, this is more along what I expect from a place that titles itself "Hacker News".

The reason I mentioned 2nd order and 3rd order cognitive abstraction, is because to fix the web we need to make some tough decisions.

When technical enthusiasts such as people who call themselves "engineer" but aren't real engineers hear these things the response is "nobody is going to do $thing lol". Yet the more big brains are indeed talking about doing thing or lamenting the mal-growth we have collectively experienced, including the recognized inventor of the WWW.

The below is just off the top of my head, "in passing". Some people have done some work on parts of this picture already.

Among those is content-addressing

The major thing is no more untrusted Javascript and no more untrusted WASM unless loaded in a pop-up window as "external program". See the Free Software Foundation's stance on non-free Javascript. This stance isn't so "out there" to legitimate hackers.

Due to decisions made early on with processors and the feedback loop optimizing for certain styles of programming, our CPUs do speculative execution. Some developments have helped, but the only safe option for CPUs people actually use, which are not the second or third latest generation (often for chipset security concerns), require disabling Javascript JIT and WASM or Javascript all together.

Almost all of the widgets and doodads we need for the web have been figured out by now. We need a trusted collection of libraries for these things. This should include all of the extra fonts we want.

Any GPU/canvas stuff needs to be truly deterministic so as to be useless for fingerprinting.

No more User Agent string.

Cookies need to be handled in a way that users can hover over a browser tab and see what cookies are visible to the remote end of that browser tab, and cross-domain cookies must be explicitly allowed by a user.

There are very tough decisions and things that do require serious talent to innovate correctly in a way intuitive to users, that need to happen to eliminate fingerprinting.

It's not those incapable of 3rd order cognitive abstraction who are going to dig us out of this mess. It's people who actually give a shit and think about these things a lot who will quietly implement the fixes and will never be renowned or heard of by the crab bucket mentality monkeys unless someone in authority tells them too.