I think this fact is still not priced in, that is, there’s still alpha currently in starting from “assume that nothing is private; what would the world look like?” and building what’s missing. I think we used this to some good effect at Manifold, eg it was quite controversial at first when I took the stance that every trade and trader identity would public data (as this is not the case on most financial markets) but I think it made for quite a unique and good ecosystem.
I’d love to here more thoughts from others on this quote (from Jeff):
Efforts to promote a more private future, through technology or regulation, individual choice or professional work, may or may not be worth it depending on how you view the chances of success and the benefits if successful. I think this is very unlikely to beat work on things like 80k’s most pressing problems, but I expect some people have high enough estimates on the value of privacy work (ex: risk of stable totalitarianism, suppression of important but unpopular ideas) that they’ll disagree.
My guess is that loss of privacy wouldn’t cause too much loss of ideas in liberal democracies. But I really have very little idea how much difference it makes in places where the government is (more) able to punish people for expressing the wrong ideas? To some degree, I kind of suspect that AI slop an “misinformation” are already pushing people towards only trusting sources that can somehow be traced to an identifiable human.
I broadly agree that this is the direction that privacy will go, and like Jeff Kaufman’s related writing on https://www.jefftk.com/p/preparing-for-less-privacy.
I think this fact is still not priced in, that is, there’s still alpha currently in starting from “assume that nothing is private; what would the world look like?” and building what’s missing. I think we used this to some good effect at Manifold, eg it was quite controversial at first when I took the stance that every trade and trader identity would public data (as this is not the case on most financial markets) but I think it made for quite a unique and good ecosystem.
I’d love to here more thoughts from others on this quote (from Jeff):
My guess is that loss of privacy wouldn’t cause too much loss of ideas in liberal democracies. But I really have very little idea how much difference it makes in places where the government is (more) able to punish people for expressing the wrong ideas? To some degree, I kind of suspect that AI slop an “misinformation” are already pushing people towards only trusting sources that can somehow be traced to an identifiable human.