There will be no privacy anymore, because of a simple exploit (or molochian mechanic, if you prefer that framing).
1: The government says “We need more access to information to stop [taboo]. If you disagree then you’re a [taboo] apologist or somebody who supports [taboo]” 2: The public doesn’t dare to call out the government, because anyone who argues the pro-privacy position will be accused of defending [taboo], and merely being accused of immoral behaviour can ruin your life (fired from your job, debanked, blacklisted from flying). It’s socially costly to try to defend privacy, but you can easily virtue signal by looking for those who are brave enough to do so, and accusing them of being evil.
Life is split into two halves, our public lives, and our private lives. The former is fake and performative, the latter is real, and filled with illegal behaviour (almost always benign, acceptable in the context in which it occurs, or occuring around people who understand and accept the risks. Laws apply globally and generally, but context only exists locally and specifically, and if you act appropriately locally you act inappropriately globally, and vice versa)
The only safety which has ever existed is security through obscurity. Every system can be hacked, the attack vector just isn’t known yet. What’s a password except hidden information? What is a public persona except selective hiding of information? What is privacy except the right to hiding information?
Every intelligent people like to say that they’re on the side of truth, but if you think about what that means, and what must result from it, it’s simply a terrible idea. Most parameters become destructive for society when they get too close to either 0 or 1, and the (ignorance)-(total information) gradient is no different. If every action you had ever taken and every thought you had ever thought was exposed for the world to see, your life would be ruined. But this is true for everyone except maybe for extremely boring people. Also, “acting like you’re being watched” is not very healthy, psychologically speaking. The whole virtue signaling tendency might even be a consequence of this psychological pressure to look good at any time, meaning that we could be entering a feedback loop.
Finally, all your moral examples are about things you agree with, and which the majority of people agree to. Discrimination is bad, terrorism is bad, ICE is bad. You’re making it too easy for yourself here. The publicly acceptable opinions that you’re proudly sharing online now might be taboo 15 years from now. By that time, you will either need to change what you believe, or act like your values changed. If you change, then your histoy will be used against you. If you don’t change, then you will be attacked for your “outdated” worldview.
Well said. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I really really don’t trust most governments, and especially not the US government to implement this tech sanely. There are too many short sighted, or flat out unjust laws on the books.
To me, a canary in the coal mine is drug laws. A free society does not outlaw them, at most it limits availability and creates strong incentives to stop using them (incentives like free rehab and a support network, mandatory risk education, etc, not incentives like “we’ll imprison you for having this drug”).
I don’t either. Safety is merely the excuse for grapping more power.
I have to disagree with the drug law example. All kinds of hedonistic behaviour will likely be legal in the future, why wouldn’t it be? The old pressure against things like drugs was downstream of religious morality. That doesn’t exist anymore. The modern morality is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against any groups which hold power. What the media tells you is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against the powerless, but this cannot possibly be true. If a group had no power, then trivially, it would be socially acceptable to harm them. If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.
All super-stimuli and wire-heading you can think of will become legal, and there will only be a pushback if it gets so bad that it starts literally giving people brain damage (we have yet to see just how bad the consequences of giving babies ipads are). If these things are not legalized, people won’t be able to vent their frustrations, and they will instead start fighting back.
The set of things which will become, and are becoming illegal, includes anything which makes you unpreditable, illegible, hard to control, or able to influence people around you in a way that the public consensus does not approve of. I find that freedom of speech is a much stronger canary. Of course, they will argue that it still exists, by changing the definition of it over time “it only applies to the government”, “hate speech is excluded”, “misinformation is excluded”, “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, and other poor arguments.
A thing to keep an eye out for is your ownership over things. It will all turn into subscription services, so that your access can be revoked at any time (for instance, if you oppose somebody in power or engage in behaviour which a company doesn’t like)
“If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.”—that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you’re treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn’t have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn’t mean that other groups don’t have far more power over them through any number of other means.
Power probably ought to be considered multi-dimensional, but don’t let that be an excuse against updating your intuition. Some people think that feminism is the most popular in countries where women are oppressed, but the relationship is the exact opposite. In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn’t succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular. There’s largely no victims of injustice in society who are recognized as such, for those who are recognized as victims already enjoy protection through that recognition. The fact that this is not well known is also a testament to how power allows you to decide what’s true.
In any case, the least misleading definition I can give you is “the most powerful are those who win”, and a good proxy is “those who hold power over you are those you’re not allowed to insult”.
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important? I find that physical power isn’t worth much in the modern world, and that intellectual power can only protect you from individuals. Scott Alexander is smart, but that didn’t save Slate Star Codex. He had to publicly defend his innocence and assure people that he held the same political views as the general public. Despite the right-wing being about as popular as the left (necessarily true since Trump won the election), the social power between being associated with one over the other was enough to terrify Scott. I think it would have gone even worse for him if he didn’t have such standard values and opinions, and if he didn’t have social power himself (famous people speaking out for him and a large count of followers).
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important?
I kind of think the power to actually kill people—legally via state imposition, or illegally, both made far easier with money, etc. matters far more. We’re just not used to worrying about being subject to that power. Correctly, for most of us.
But the implication of “we don’t need to worry about a type of power others won’t / can’t apply” is that excess use of social power is also largely irrelevant for those who don’t fear it. And it’s largely relevant to more socially powerful people—most humans don’t ever need to worry about the NY Times “exposing” them.
What would you categorize such power as? I think it’s in-between social power and good old crime. But the former will be much more terrifying in the future (it’s only slightly scary now), especially for intellectuals who do more than merely read popular research and regurgitate it to less intelligent people. If a truth seeking person never goes outside the overton window, then they’re a fraud.
Manycalled for me to be kicked out of society a few years ago because I refused to take the Covid vaccine, as it wouldn’t prevent me from getting infected (despite the media claiming otherwise), because Fauci kept moving the goalpost on the herd immunity threshold (never getting it right), and because I knew it wasn’t 100% safe.
Kicking people out of society (which effectively kills them) will be possible soon. Maybe “bad people” (non-conformists and those who still use ‘the r-word’) like myself are the first to go, but once it’s in place it will be easy for whoever is in power to use it on whoever is not.
You might have noticed that some people can get fired for what they do or say in their private life, and that you often don’t need to break the rules on a platform to get banned from it, breaking rules off-platform is sufficient. You can even be punished if the people you associate with are unpopular. My point is that norms are changing towards everything getting tied together. Imagine criticizing the government, and then finding that your car won’t start. And that you can’t access your bank account. And that you can’t even leave for another country because you’re on the no-fly list. Even worse, you’re also banned from your local supermarket so you can’t buy food. Where you previously had X things that you could lose access to, with one misstep costing you access to exactly one place, you now have X places in which you can lose access to everything all at once. The merging of different contexts is causing problems like context collapse. What’s acceptable to say traditionally depends on the local environment, but if what you’ve said leaks to another environment, you might be attacked for it (especially if it’s taken out of context maliciously). Everyone breaks the law, but we can still be flexibleabout it locally, being judged only in that local context at that time. This is changing, and it will get worse with the death of hidden information and the forced legibilization of society.
I wouldn’t say social power irrelevant to most. If you Google “Young people don’t dance” you’ll find that cringe culture (fear of being judged) is deemed to be a main cause. Irony and ironic humor is also on the rise (together with Bathos) and that’s actually a defense mechanism against judgement.
I would like to at least say that, although the vaccine was less than perfectly safe, not taking it was (and is) bad risk management: given the likelihood of eventual infection, it’s safer overall to get a vaccine than to risk a COVID infection in an unvaccinated state. And being vaccinated probably at least reduced the amount that an infected person would spread the virus. (Fauci’s “less than honest” communication was still both terrible and morally wrong.)
If you did catch the virus while unvaccinated, though, you’re in roughly the same position as people who got one dose of vaccine anyway.
One also needs to “move fast and break things” when discussing ideas if they want to learn with any efficiency. It’s a waste of both mine and others time to write “I think” and “in my opinion” in front of every statement. Besides, this place claims to be truth-seeking.
I present too many ideas at once, but I’m not exactly wrong. I think people dislike me because I seem to have different values and didn’t use examples which resonated with them (like death of privacy making it easier for ICE to deport people), but I’m getting the disagree downvotes.
To put it more mathematically and thus neutrally, the attack/defence asymmetry is growing, changing the payoff matrix in a undesirable way. To explain how social tyranny is tied to government tyranny, China’s social credit system serves for a good example and aligns with my arguments.
Can you provide more information as to what the problem is? This response only seems to prove my point, but I may actually be overlooking something important.
I’m not talking about a lack of hedging. Being too busy to think through and clearly present your thoughts wastes the time of others. And not following community norms isn’t bravery, nor is your lack of tact.
Frontpage comment guidelines:
Aim to explain, not persuade
Try to offer concrete models and predictions
If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
It’s quite clear to me, I even added links to be transparent about the “background knowledge” I was refering to. Of course, it will be unclear to somebody unfamiliar, but that’s how it’s meant to be. There’s conversations on LW that I can’t engage because I lack familiarity, and explaining something in a way that even children can understand requires about 10-15 times more text.
I’m following those community norms. I explain myself, make predictions about the future, offer concrete models (physical, intellectual and social power as categories), and asked what category he’d put murder in. The overton window statement is an unpleasant truth at worst, but this is a website where we frequently discuss the end of humanity.
It wasn’t snark to call myself a non-conformist, I was essentially saying “even if my examples are all about people getting punished in ways that you agree with, the mechanics behind are neutral and may be used against you all the same”. I could just have quoted that poem “First they came for the X, but I did not speak up, for I was not an X” but that has been done to death. I have to disagree both that I lack tact, and that the topics warrants it. And a topic being taboo only results in public opinion being stuck in the stone age in regards to their understanding of it anyway (like mental health in the early 1900s).
When I get a response which is entirely incompatible with my own message, like the one by David above, I tend to guess at what they mean, and to present every conflict between our models, and this is probably a bad habit. Even here, I have to guess which parts of my messages people might have a problem with
I think there’s value in phrasing some statements as “I think X” instead of just “X” because “I think X”, in practice, is a less confident assertion that doesn’t imply “and I expect you to also believe X” nearly as strongly. 🤷♂️
I think the main reason for the decrease of personal privacy is technological progress. There have been more back-steps (wiretapping, movement of communications onto the internet, ability for private messages to be screenshotted, normalization of video recording in public places) than forward steps (the Fourth Amendment in the United States, secrecy of voting). The main thing is that corporations and the government both want to enforce more surveillance policies now. I think it’s important to think about what that means and what consequences (if any) that would have on the general populace.
I think private messages should be able to be screenshot (because the user should control their phones and its apps. Any inversion of control seems wrong from a software development perspective)
I agree that corporations and the government are on the same side, so to speak. I think the media is more aligned with these than against. But I also think public opinion is being manipulated with tactics which make people distrust on another. Snowden was labeled a traitor following the leak of NSA papers, and this label made people reluctant to defend him.
If we assume that 40% of America thought of him as a traitor, then the media could have made it seem like 70% of people thought of him as a traitor. This could, through conformity effects, make people update their stance towards the perceived majority opinion, so that the rate of people who thought of him as a traitor actually became 70%. I believe there’s a lot of exploits similar to this, and that many people overlook them (or consider the change to be organic)
There will be no privacy anymore, because of a simple exploit (or molochian mechanic, if you prefer that framing).
1: The government says “We need more access to information to stop [taboo]. If you disagree then you’re a [taboo] apologist or somebody who supports [taboo]”
2: The public doesn’t dare to call out the government, because anyone who argues the pro-privacy position will be accused of defending [taboo], and merely being accused of immoral behaviour can ruin your life (fired from your job, debanked, blacklisted from flying). It’s socially costly to try to defend privacy, but you can easily virtue signal by looking for those who are brave enough to do so, and accusing them of being evil.
Life is split into two halves, our public lives, and our private lives. The former is fake and performative, the latter is real, and filled with illegal behaviour (almost always benign, acceptable in the context in which it occurs, or occuring around people who understand and accept the risks. Laws apply globally and generally, but context only exists locally and specifically, and if you act appropriately locally you act inappropriately globally, and vice versa)
The only safety which has ever existed is security through obscurity. Every system can be hacked, the attack vector just isn’t known yet. What’s a password except hidden information? What is a public persona except selective hiding of information? What is privacy except the right to hiding information?
Every intelligent people like to say that they’re on the side of truth, but if you think about what that means, and what must result from it, it’s simply a terrible idea. Most parameters become destructive for society when they get too close to either 0 or 1, and the (ignorance)-(total information) gradient is no different. If every action you had ever taken and every thought you had ever thought was exposed for the world to see, your life would be ruined. But this is true for everyone except maybe for extremely boring people. Also, “acting like you’re being watched” is not very healthy, psychologically speaking. The whole virtue signaling tendency might even be a consequence of this psychological pressure to look good at any time, meaning that we could be entering a feedback loop.
Finally, all your moral examples are about things you agree with, and which the majority of people agree to. Discrimination is bad, terrorism is bad, ICE is bad. You’re making it too easy for yourself here. The publicly acceptable opinions that you’re proudly sharing online now might be taboo 15 years from now. By that time, you will either need to change what you believe, or act like your values changed. If you change, then your histoy will be used against you. If you don’t change, then you will be attacked for your “outdated” worldview.
Well said. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I really really don’t trust most governments, and especially not the US government to implement this tech sanely. There are too many short sighted, or flat out unjust laws on the books.
To me, a canary in the coal mine is drug laws. A free society does not outlaw them, at most it limits availability and creates strong incentives to stop using them (incentives like free rehab and a support network, mandatory risk education, etc, not incentives like “we’ll imprison you for having this drug”).
I don’t either. Safety is merely the excuse for grapping more power.
I have to disagree with the drug law example. All kinds of hedonistic behaviour will likely be legal in the future, why wouldn’t it be? The old pressure against things like drugs was downstream of religious morality. That doesn’t exist anymore. The modern morality is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against any groups which hold power. What the media tells you is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against the powerless, but this cannot possibly be true. If a group had no power, then trivially, it would be socially acceptable to harm them. If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.
All super-stimuli and wire-heading you can think of will become legal, and there will only be a pushback if it gets so bad that it starts literally giving people brain damage (we have yet to see just how bad the consequences of giving babies ipads are). If these things are not legalized, people won’t be able to vent their frustrations, and they will instead start fighting back.
The set of things which will become, and are becoming illegal, includes anything which makes you unpreditable, illegible, hard to control, or able to influence people around you in a way that the public consensus does not approve of. I find that freedom of speech is a much stronger canary. Of course, they will argue that it still exists, by changing the definition of it over time “it only applies to the government”, “hate speech is excluded”, “misinformation is excluded”, “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, and other poor arguments.
A thing to keep an eye out for is your ownership over things. It will all turn into subscription services, so that your access can be revoked at any time (for instance, if you oppose somebody in power or engage in behaviour which a company doesn’t like)
“If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.”—that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you’re treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn’t have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn’t mean that other groups don’t have far more power over them through any number of other means.
Power probably ought to be considered multi-dimensional, but don’t let that be an excuse against updating your intuition. Some people think that feminism is the most popular in countries where women are oppressed, but the relationship is the exact opposite. In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn’t succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular. There’s largely no victims of injustice in society who are recognized as such, for those who are recognized as victims already enjoy protection through that recognition. The fact that this is not well known is also a testament to how power allows you to decide what’s true.
In any case, the least misleading definition I can give you is “the most powerful are those who win”, and a good proxy is “those who hold power over you are those you’re not allowed to insult”.
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important? I find that physical power isn’t worth much in the modern world, and that intellectual power can only protect you from individuals. Scott Alexander is smart, but that didn’t save Slate Star Codex. He had to publicly defend his innocence and assure people that he held the same political views as the general public. Despite the right-wing being about as popular as the left (necessarily true since Trump won the election), the social power between being associated with one over the other was enough to terrify Scott. I think it would have gone even worse for him if he didn’t have such standard values and opinions, and if he didn’t have social power himself (famous people speaking out for him and a large count of followers).
I kind of think the power to actually kill people—legally via state imposition, or illegally, both made far easier with money, etc. matters far more. We’re just not used to worrying about being subject to that power. Correctly, for most of us.
But the implication of “we don’t need to worry about a type of power others won’t / can’t apply” is that excess use of social power is also largely irrelevant for those who don’t fear it. And it’s largely relevant to more socially powerful people—most humans don’t ever need to worry about the NY Times “exposing” them.
What would you categorize such power as? I think it’s in-between social power and good old crime. But the former will be much more terrifying in the future (it’s only slightly scary now), especially for intellectuals who do more than merely read popular research and regurgitate it to less intelligent people. If a truth seeking person never goes outside the overton window, then they’re a fraud.
Many called for me to be kicked out of society a few years ago because I refused to take the Covid vaccine, as it wouldn’t prevent me from getting infected (despite the media claiming otherwise), because Fauci kept moving the goalpost on the herd immunity threshold (never getting it right), and because I knew it wasn’t 100% safe.
Kicking people out of society (which effectively kills them) will be possible soon. Maybe “bad people” (non-conformists and those who still use ‘the r-word’) like myself are the first to go, but once it’s in place it will be easy for whoever is in power to use it on whoever is not.
You might have noticed that some people can get fired for what they do or say in their private life, and that you often don’t need to break the rules on a platform to get banned from it, breaking rules off-platform is sufficient. You can even be punished if the people you associate with are unpopular. My point is that norms are changing towards everything getting tied together. Imagine criticizing the government, and then finding that your car won’t start. And that you can’t access your bank account. And that you can’t even leave for another country because you’re on the no-fly list. Even worse, you’re also banned from your local supermarket so you can’t buy food. Where you previously had X things that you could lose access to, with one misstep costing you access to exactly one place, you now have X places in which you can lose access to everything all at once. The merging of different contexts is causing problems like context collapse. What’s acceptable to say traditionally depends on the local environment, but if what you’ve said leaks to another environment, you might be attacked for it (especially if it’s taken out of context maliciously). Everyone breaks the law, but we can still be flexible about it locally, being judged only in that local context at that time. This is changing, and it will get worse with the death of hidden information and the forced legibilization of society.
I wouldn’t say social power irrelevant to most. If you Google “Young people don’t dance” you’ll find that cringe culture (fear of being judged) is deemed to be a main cause. Irony and ironic humor is also on the rise (together with Bathos) and that’s actually a defense mechanism against judgement.
I would like to at least say that, although the vaccine was less than perfectly safe, not taking it was (and is) bad risk management: given the likelihood of eventual infection, it’s safer overall to get a vaccine than to risk a COVID infection in an unvaccinated state. And being vaccinated probably at least reduced the amount that an infected person would spread the virus. (Fauci’s “less than honest” communication was still both terrible and morally wrong.)
If you did catch the virus while unvaccinated, though, you’re in roughly the same position as people who got one dose of vaccine anyway.
Your profile says “My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.”
I’m sure there are places that would work for you, and you should probably go to those places, instead of here.
One also needs to “move fast and break things” when discussing ideas if they want to learn with any efficiency. It’s a waste of both mine and others time to write “I think” and “in my opinion” in front of every statement. Besides, this place claims to be truth-seeking.
I present too many ideas at once, but I’m not exactly wrong. I think people dislike me because I seem to have different values and didn’t use examples which resonated with them (like death of privacy making it easier for ICE to deport people), but I’m getting the disagree downvotes.
To put it more mathematically and thus neutrally, the attack/defence asymmetry is growing, changing the payoff matrix in a undesirable way. To explain how social tyranny is tied to government tyranny, China’s social credit system serves for a good example and aligns with my arguments.
Can you provide more information as to what the problem is? This response only seems to prove my point, but I may actually be overlooking something important.
I’m not talking about a lack of hedging. Being too busy to think through and clearly present your thoughts wastes the time of others. And not following community norms isn’t bravery, nor is your lack of tact.
Frontpage comment guidelines:
Aim to explain, not persuade
Try to offer concrete models and predictions
If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
It’s quite clear to me, I even added links to be transparent about the “background knowledge” I was refering to. Of course, it will be unclear to somebody unfamiliar, but that’s how it’s meant to be. There’s conversations on LW that I can’t engage because I lack familiarity, and explaining something in a way that even children can understand requires about 10-15 times more text.
I’m following those community norms. I explain myself, make predictions about the future, offer concrete models (physical, intellectual and social power as categories), and asked what category he’d put murder in. The overton window statement is an unpleasant truth at worst, but this is a website where we frequently discuss the end of humanity.
It wasn’t snark to call myself a non-conformist, I was essentially saying “even if my examples are all about people getting punished in ways that you agree with, the mechanics behind are neutral and may be used against you all the same”. I could just have quoted that poem “First they came for the X, but I did not speak up, for I was not an X” but that has been done to death. I have to disagree both that I lack tact, and that the topics warrants it. And a topic being taboo only results in public opinion being stuck in the stone age in regards to their understanding of it anyway (like mental health in the early 1900s).
When I get a response which is entirely incompatible with my own message, like the one by David above, I tend to guess at what they mean, and to present every conflict between our models, and this is probably a bad habit. Even here, I have to guess which parts of my messages people might have a problem with
I think there’s value in phrasing some statements as “I think X” instead of just “X” because “I think X”, in practice, is a less confident assertion that doesn’t imply “and I expect you to also believe X” nearly as strongly. 🤷♂️
I think the main reason for the decrease of personal privacy is technological progress. There have been more back-steps (wiretapping, movement of communications onto the internet, ability for private messages to be screenshotted, normalization of video recording in public places) than forward steps (the Fourth Amendment in the United States, secrecy of voting). The main thing is that corporations and the government both want to enforce more surveillance policies now. I think it’s important to think about what that means and what consequences (if any) that would have on the general populace.
I agree entirely with that reason.
I think private messages should be able to be screenshot (because the user should control their phones and its apps. Any inversion of control seems wrong from a software development perspective)
I agree that corporations and the government are on the same side, so to speak. I think the media is more aligned with these than against. But I also think public opinion is being manipulated with tactics which make people distrust on another. Snowden was labeled a traitor following the leak of NSA papers, and this label made people reluctant to defend him.
If we assume that 40% of America thought of him as a traitor, then the media could have made it seem like 70% of people thought of him as a traitor. This could, through conformity effects, make people update their stance towards the perceived majority opinion, so that the rate of people who thought of him as a traitor actually became 70%. I believe there’s a lot of exploits similar to this, and that many people overlook them (or consider the change to be organic)