There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit.
I sense this would have been in the Bill of Rights had the notion been around back then. They knew the government needed to protect property rights as a fundamental principle and that is written throughout the legal code and constitution. So endowing citizens with ownership of the date of where they are, what they’re doing, and how they use sites seem like extensions of the personal property right. In a sane universe, there might only need to be a Supreme Court judgement somehow establishing this from the current legalization, for that matter.
I doubt it. If you ask me "who lives next door" I'll tell you "Oh, the Smith's live next door, John, Jane, Jill, and Jacob. John's a blacksmith, Jane makes the best apple pie, Jill is studying to be a doctor and Jacob just turned 14"
I doubt the forefathers would have thought there needed to be a law against me passing on info.
The US Constitution is around a century too old to care about lists of people, but I think even they would react badly to some powerful organization going around classifying everybody by some random feature.
> The US Constitution is around a century too old to care about lists of people, but I think even they would react badly to some powerful organization going around classifying everybody by some random feature.
Probably not, since it created a new powerful orgabization (the federal government) and mandated it to go around classifying everybody by a particular set of feature (whether they were a “free person”, an “indian not taxed”, or an “other person”.)
Given that when the framers were scared of a powerful organization doing something, their first concern tended to be about government doing it, and their response tended to be to prohibit at least the federal government from doing it, I think the fact that they mandated the federal government to do it indicates that it was neither something they feared nor something they failed to fear out of lack of consideration.
Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising. Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as possible; the more they know about their target demographic, the better able they are to do that.
Good luck. All those so-called hearings with social media companies? Excuses to get those CEO's into the back rooms, where the REAL discussions -- and graft -- sorry, campaign donations -- happened. Our government is completely captured by the organizations that are most-hostile to our long-term well-being.
It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.
It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.
The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.
It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
> It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.
And what do we want to replace targeted ads, surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its users for money while not being held accountable to its users with?
I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.
I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off burning it all down.
Someone else proposed what I consider a very reasonable solution. Just make whatever data they have 100% transparent, and you as the user can choose to offer less (or more) at any point in time. This should be regulated similar to HIPAA with serious penalties for any violations, because it absolutely is about avoiding privacy violations.
And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you should have that option. This is the company's problem, not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world I want to live in.
And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns, and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat needs to be real).
Sure - that's absolutely fair. But with that said, I do think that a lot of people would agree that a lot of the incentives are good (I for one am glad that the government is trying to get people to move to electric cars) and would want to maintain something to keep promoting the same things even if the tax code were restarted from scratch.
I'm surprised you haven't heard it before. "As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create," as one wise man put it.
"Burn it all down" is easy to say. You can apply it to anything, with no further thought. It's precisely what I'd call "lazy".
To avoid being lazy, you'd have to couple it with exactly what you intend to build from scratch, and ideally how you'd go about it. That's a ton of work, not just because you have to have a concrete idea, but because you have something that people can point out the flaws of. Many of whom will say, "It's terrible, burn it down."
I'm also surprised you haven't heard of this before. Every New Year millions make resolutions that are not kept because 'it is easier to start from scratch' or a clean slate, but it is very difficult to actually follow through.
People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20 and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in a week or so.
It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior will change if only one got a clean start. But inevitably you find yourself at a similar point, and a similar result.
In order to start from scratch and make it effective, you should have a reason why things will be different in the future.
"It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly, civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data industry warts and all.
There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.
There are two problems: (1) hardly any History of Art and Architecture people play competitive multiplayer games, which are far and away the gaming zeitgeist, (2) you can't be taken seriously in a History of Art and Architecture program taking a positivist or normatively-positive approach to video games.
There are a million interesting things you can say about architecture in video games! There are more people that can close their eyes and visualize the exact locations of the plants in Counter-Strike's Office map than there are people who can visualize any other building anywhere in the history of the world, other than their own homes. And it would be really interesting to just talk about the design of levels as spaces for killing in a fair way, as opposed to say, architecting a museum or a school.
>taking a positivist [...] approach to video games.
As a member of the Positivist school of video game philosophy, I think that the only valid statements about videogames are those that can be reduced to empirical fact.
860,000 - CS:GO
480,000 - DOTA 2
173,000 - Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer (Mostly a multiplayer GTA mod)
146,000 - Apex: Legends
130,000 - PubG
112,000 - Rust
93,500 - Destiny 2
88,400 - GTA V
76,000 - Rocket League
67,000 - R6:S
62,000 - Football Manager
I think it's pretty clear that competitive multiplayer games are the gaming zeitgeist (On the PC). Rust, Destiny 2, GTA V + mod, and Football Manager are the only titles in this list that are really played in a non-competitive manner.
Now, its true that in terms of copies sold, competitive multiplayer games are not quite as dominant.
Fortnite isn't really comparable to the list of top Steam games in my replies though.
Like Brawl Stars is also super popular, but it isn't exactly a "competitive multiplayer game" like dota. Most people play it casually without a huge care of W/L.
Half of the country thinks the Mueller report exonerated Trump. The body politic has become completely decoupled from reality.
If it's that easy for Russians to influence our politics, why wouldn't the Chinese perceive that there is low-hanging fruit in running general disruption?
This is a stupid trap you're trying. See how they misdirect? I'm not saying d0mine is taking Russian money, I'm saying that the Russian money spent getting hooks into Trump leads inexorably to a bunch of chumps like d0mine trying to murk up the water in a shabby pretense of discourse.
If you constrain 'performance' to things which can be easily measured and then test how multitasking affects those measurements, you can come to some broad conclusions that are also useless.
This privileges confident speakers. (The same way written tests privilege confident readers, and standardized written tests privilege those who have the time and resources to study the standard.)
It certainly could, but it also certainly couldn't. I imagine being confidently incorrect is likely to produce a worse result than being unconfidently(?) incorrect, for example.
Similarly, a less confident speaker may end up spending more effort justifying their answers, which could better expose their knowledge.
I think it would depend quite a bit on the examiner in this case. Some people may even be simply biased against particularly confident speakers, particularly considering the relative positions of the speaker and examiner.
It doesn't if the examiner understands the material. You can't bullshit someone who knows much more about a topic than you do - bullshitting with confidence will only make you sound like a fool.
If the examiner isn't much more knowledgeable about a topic than their students, then something else has gone wrong.
Right, but that's why it takes a bit skill on the part of the examiner - you need to be able to support people through their nerves and lack of confidence.
You aren't being instructed to believe something based on faith. You're encountering evidence you disagree with and making up, which is to say hallucinating, the idea that the evidence of science is something that is like faith.
It is nothing like faith.
Don't make your problem with the available evidence a question of faith or you discredit faith.
Like I said, don't bring faith into politics.
If you believe that people who believe climate change is an emergency are taking part in a faith-based movement that is a huge logical error on your part.
Faith is a personal choice. Examining evidence and coming to a conclusion about what is real is a matter of logic and reasoning. They are completely different, and mixing them is not just poor form, it exposes your motivated reasoning.
No, mostly because you come into topics about serious issues and opine inanely about how science is a religion.
You talk past the topic. You get called out on it. You double down. You loftily say that we're talking past each other, when you're the one who tries to insist we follow you on a journey to how science is a religion.
Naturally your experience must be that people are talking past you. Because you don't know how to engage in the conversation, you just know how to divert.
If you insist on talking past the topic then pointing out that we're talking past each other is your first step to, maybe, perhaps, noticing that your approach to this conversation is the problem.
The voting bloc that considers themselves "climate change skeptics" or whatever label they identify with is neither fictional nor small. I simply pointed out that there are going to be several people who throw this "climate emergency" piece out immediately because this magazine has a history of supporting left-leaning causes. It may or may not be a good strategy. That's it.
Those people are capable of speaking for themselves and don't need your advocacy. Rethink your approach, muddling equivocator.
There is no good strategy to convince the unscientific. Your project of seeking a good strategy is deluded nattering which adds nothing.
Your strategy, in other words, is bad.
To reiterate: Referencing the bad arguments of other people is stupid. Don't do it.
Racists aren't going to be convinced that Black Lives Matter but if I spend my time pointing that out in every topic about a cop killing a human being I'm doing something wrong.
It seems otherwise to me. I don’t read many articles in Scientific American, but I recall they endorsed Joe Biden for president last year (it was posted on HN.) My understanding of American politics is that many Republican voters oppose publications that openly support Democratic candidates. Here we have such a publication making a pronouncement about what could be a bipartisan initiative, and it seems like the publication’s political history could influence Republican voters to dismiss the emergency wording.
Laziness is a problem, but I don’t see a problem with a comment speculating that popular behavior will occur using and using fewer words to explain the potential mechanism than I did.
Happy to accept criticism of this explanation of the user’s opinion, how it could be more clear, etc.
Scientific American didn't merely endorse Joe Biden for president last year, they justified it with a description of the biggest crisis currently facing humanity (the Covid-19 pandemic) that was both nakedly partisan and really obviously contradicted by what was actually happening in the real world but that they declared was pure indisputable Science.
It doesn’t bother me that they endorsed him, nor would it if they hadn’t. I was only interested in the idea proposed by your original respondent that a user on HN can’t in good faith surmise the behavior of a voting population.
