People sometimes argue agains, for example, engaging with the news because its incentives run sufficiently counter to your own. This seems reasonably convincing. But almost everything has incentives that run at least a little counter to my goals. And almost every organisation is made up of people that are overall pretty decent. When does the former overpower the latter such that it’s better to Get Gone.
For now, my partial answer is that if something is existentially incentivized counter to my decision making, then I don’t want any part of it, no matter how noble the individuals producing it may be. If an organisation can only exist by making me forget to choose what I want, then it has either managed to overcome the moralities of those within it, or it doesn’t exist for me to interact with
I’m drawing a bright line around my decision making, because that appears to be fragile and (obviously) important enough to keep. Maybe if I regularly got tricked into spending all my money, my money would also be important enough to keep safe (unlike now)
I think you’re modeling it wrong. Overtheorizing, if I may say.
You need to first judge an offering on its value, and then consider its costs. Among the costs there might be that it tries to trick you. There is nothing special about this particular cost. It might be big for, e.g., Instagram. Then you will naturally reach the conclusion that Instagram is not worth it.
I think the crucial insight is that most of us do not intuitively perceive Instagram as an actively malicious manipulator, because its attack vector is novel and not evolutionarily encountered. Generally, institutions and systems are much stronger now than they were in the past, but our intuitions disregard them. Another example is how people care so much about the object level fact that Facebook built a spying VPN, but not much at all about how Facebook is hoarding power through network effects.
People sometimes argue agains, for example, engaging with the news because its incentives run sufficiently counter to your own. This seems reasonably convincing. But almost everything has incentives that run at least a little counter to my goals. And almost every organisation is made up of people that are overall pretty decent. When does the former overpower the latter such that it’s better to Get Gone.
For now, my partial answer is that if something is existentially incentivized counter to my decision making, then I don’t want any part of it, no matter how noble the individuals producing it may be. If an organisation can only exist by making me forget to choose what I want, then it has either managed to overcome the moralities of those within it, or it doesn’t exist for me to interact with
I’m drawing a bright line around my decision making, because that appears to be fragile and (obviously) important enough to keep. Maybe if I regularly got tricked into spending all my money, my money would also be important enough to keep safe (unlike now)
I think you’re modeling it wrong. Overtheorizing, if I may say.
You need to first judge an offering on its value, and then consider its costs. Among the costs there might be that it tries to trick you. There is nothing special about this particular cost. It might be big for, e.g., Instagram. Then you will naturally reach the conclusion that Instagram is not worth it.
I think the crucial insight is that most of us do not intuitively perceive Instagram as an actively malicious manipulator, because its attack vector is novel and not evolutionarily encountered. Generally, institutions and systems are much stronger now than they were in the past, but our intuitions disregard them. Another example is how people care so much about the object level fact that Facebook built a spying VPN, but not much at all about how Facebook is hoarding power through network effects.