StartAtTheEnd

Karma: 406

Crocker’s rules.
I’m nobody special, and I wouldn’t like the responsibility which comes with being ‘someone’ anyway.
Reading incorrect information can be frustrating, and correcting it can be fun.

My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.
I may write like a psychopath, but that’s what it takes to write without bias, consider that an argument against rationality.

Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Whoever claims to be fully truth-seeking is not entirely honest.

StartAtTheEnd 7 Jun 2026 15:37 UTC
2 points
0
on: Against Corrigibility
I agree with most of your insights. I’ve said this before, and I hope it’s worth saying again: We have two alignment problems on our hands, and one of them is the alignment between humans. We need to win both fights, and they’re both very difficult.
There’s also game theory, the mathematics of dilemmas, and Molochian mechanics to worry about. They’re meta problems which we need to deal with at the same time, rather than seperate worries.
I also believe that the problems you’re finding generalize even further. If you teach a model how to protect against criminals you will also teach it how to be criminal. If you make it easier to use LLMs on your system, you make it easier for LLMs to use your system. Doing X for the sake of Y doesn’t limit the consequences of X to only Y, so we need to make sure that the sum of consequences of X remains positive. But I’m afraid that the playing-board can only be neutral or hypocritic, meaning that there may exist no set of principles which solves all problems. What I said above, that we need to “win against ourselves”, evaluates to nonsense. But all theoritic things I know about seem to eventually evaluate to nonsense (infinite regress, contradictions, paradoxes, etc). Theory itself seems like a mistake

StartAtTheEnd 1 Jun 2026 10:45 UTC
3 points
2
on: “This Hypothetical is Unrealistic” is not a Valid Objection
My biggest objection is that a hypothetical is not restrained by reality. You can say “oh, but what if X?” where X is not just absurd but impossible. A general rule only has to work in all cases which can possibly be relevant at any point in time. It’s unfair to expect it to hold up to any imaginary cases, even those including logic errors and contradictions—the hypothetical could even change the premises which caused the conclusion in the first place. For instance, here, I could say “What if the laws of logic didn’t apply?”, “What if the person who had 1 second left to live actually had 100 years?”, or “What if being murdered was a blissful experience?”.
The only thing which are always true are necessarily true. People do not break the laws of physics because they can’t. But in the social realm, we create artifical limitations on top of those of physics.
People will say that X is right or wrong, but that’s not what we actually mean by the words. These are sometimes moral terms, not mathematical ones.
Principles are something like globally optimal heuristics. The majority of murder is unjustified, and because we cannot trust one another to judge the edge cases correctly, it’s optimal to say that murder is always bad. There’s a value judgement here, too: “Preventing an unreasonable murder is higher value than a reasonable murder not happening”.
“Murder is always wrong” is a false statement, but “it’s optimal to act as if murder is always wrong” might be true under some set of environments. I dislike Kant’s categorical imperative because simple general(global) rules fail in specific(local) edge cases. It’s a form of tyranny, really. The no free lunch theorem makes general rules have trade-offs.
Finally, there’s no universal principles, meaning, there’s no principles which are not bound to a context/sphere/region. There exists universal rules, but only because the universe is something specific and finite. The mental model of an objective correctness which is unbounded is a wrong mental model. This is my own discovery, but mathematicians should already have a sense for it (that all statements have implicit restrictions like “Under set theory” or “According to current models”)
My conclusion is that the title of your post isn’t correct in all cases, but only in most cases. I think you put too much faith into logic and the solvability of reality.

StartAtTheEnd 25 May 2026 21:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Belief as Psychosis
I think you will continue to have negative experiences, even if you go elsewhere, as you derive value from things than we do. Your approach to knowledge is rather recreational rather than practical. Even if you were correct and we were wrong, the conclusion about bad experiences won’t change. You’re lucky if you’re incorrect, for it means that you’re in a position to have better experiences in the future. Being correct means finding yourself in a stupid world which cannot appreciate what’s valuable, and that’s a very painful experience.
I think you will have more success around less educated people, who haven’t thought about these things, and who can still perceive depth in the unknowns (and value in the explorations of these unknowns. The value doesn’t actually exist in the information itself, but in the perceived possibilities. But the more you learn, the less possibilities remain, as logic allows you to prune more false conclusions). You may also have a better time around people who appreciate the irony of your accusations

StartAtTheEnd 25 May 2026 14:24 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Belief as Psychosis
That I’m “the first”?
Yes, in one of your comments you wrote: “Well, sadly, what I’m getting is pretty much what I always get when I present ideas that: 1. No one has thought about before.”
I already have my own understanding about beliefs and psychosis, and it depends on a lot of knowledge which you’re likely unfamiliar with. If you were to say that belief is mostly guesswork, or that inflexible beliefs prevents growth, most people here would agree. By the way, are you familiar with Bayesian inference or the free energy principle? Beliefs have utility, and even if it was possible to get rid of beliefs, I don’t think it would benefit us. So it wouldn’t really change anything even if beliefs were a sort of delusion.
In order to understand our stance to your question, you’ll need to be familiar with our understanding of the subject, and in order for you to come up with something better than the current concensus, you’ll need to know what the current consensus is (and understand why it’s like that). This requires a few years worth of knowledge about psychology, neuroscience, and theoretical frameworks about the nature of learning (as beliefs form a sort of schema about the environment). This is incredibly boring as it requires you to learn not only what interests you, but also to catch up with most of humanities collective knowledge about a subject (even if that information is wrong!).
It appears intellectually lazy when people spread their own ideas without trying to understand others ideas, and it’s sadly the case that a lot of ideas are mundane and boring to learn. I’d say it’s very hard to contribute to LessWrong unless your intelligence is more than 2 standard deviations above that of an average person (with conscientiousness as a second factor worth about half of that of intelligence).
Lesswrong gets a lot of LLM posts, written by people who aren’t qualified to talk about the topic they’re interested in. They can’t tell when the LLM makes an error, and they can’t answer peoples questions about the topics without relying on LLMs. It’s like if a high school student came to me with a university level book that they barely understand. The book may have value, but the student cannot add to it. They become superfluous the second the book has been shared. We all have access to LLMs, and we also have access to thousands of research papers, blog posts and books which the authors put actual effort and years of studies into writing.

StartAtTheEnd 25 May 2026 0:29 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MillardJMelnyk’s comment on: Belief as Psychosis
You’ve been working on this since 2008, but it’s still so much in the idea phase that you haven’t arrived at any conclusions that you can stand by? Lesswrong posts are usually created after a problem has been at least partial solved, and they usually have practical value on top of being interesting/amusing.
Anyway, you say that belief might be a defense against the dread of dealing with the unknown. But evolution gave us both the ability to believe in things and the tendency to feel dread in face of the unknown. Why would evolution come up with two things which cancel each other out and offers no additional benefits?
You might be the first to consider belief as psychosis under these precise terms, but plenty of books have similar ideas, for instance: “Short history of decay” which argues that beliefs are basically self-deception to add substance to our lives, and memetic infections which makes us wage war on one another. There’s also “The book of EST” which argues that beliefs are little more than trauma and that we should live in the realm of experience instead. There’s also the whole war on the ego—and ego is basically belief in oneself. And some, like the Buddhists, consider the self a delusion at best, and the ego as something sickly.
Finally—you ask us to put effort into our thinking, but rely on LLMs yourself. I personally don’t think LLMs are very competent. You may disagree, in which case, why not send the Claude output to another Claude instance and ask it to engage with and criticize the theory?

StartAtTheEnd 14 May 2026 13:09 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
Sorry for the slow response. In order to prevent evil, we form giant entities and grant them the power to regulate society. These entities then turn evil, and fail to regulate themselves. Since they’re huge and powerful, we cannot stop them, either. More of the problem (more regulation, more people, more power to some agency) will necessarily fail at making things better.
I’m conceding because the status quo is terrible, and because I don’t think it can be made not-terrible. I give up on fixing it, and propose a re-design which prioritizes local (or at least local-first) solutions.
I do not think that this problem is in the domain of the WHO. In software engineering, each module does one job, and it has one responsibility. It’s considered bad design to have “god-classes” which are tied to too many things. We could keep working with spaghetti code, and trying to improve it, but I think it’s better to realize that the entire approach is bad in a way which is mathematically impossible to solve for good.
Individuals should keep themselves and others safe. Failing that, the local population should help eachother out. Failing that, the local power should do something, failing that, the state itself should be ordering a quarantine. If the WHO needs to step in, and use force at that, several things have already gone entirely wrong: If invidiuals don’t keep themselves safe, that’s a failure of education, or too much regulation preventing local solutions (similar to how it’s illegal to feed the homeless in many places). If the local population fails at helping one another out, that’s a lack of community and perhaps also a result of too many rules and a tendency to rely on authorities for problems that one could solve themselves. Etc.
In your next example, I think the problem might be cross-module failures. If a problem is a responsibility of more than one person, it often goes unfixed. Perhaps a single person does not have the authority to fix it (that is, they’d have to step outside of their usual scope of work and take responsibility for the consequences), or a single person cannot fix it without the help of others, leading to coordination issues.
This problem is less common when people have an investment in the thing at hand, and when they dare to actually act. But the modern world punishes agency, you’re rarely rewarded for competence, and you’re easily punished for not delegating the task to an authority (e.g. in Switzerland and a bunch of other countries, if you’re renting, you’re not allowed to install a dishwasher by yourself. You need to call a “professional”). These asymmetrical incentives force people to be passive, incompetent, reliant on authorities, and ignorant of the world around them. The solution is to allow people local freedom to fix local problems, and rewarding them if they succeed.
I’d like to see a world where anyone can do anything they want, as long as they’re the most competent person available for fixing that problem at that time, and in which they’re given freedom according to their level of competence. The company is like a program coded by somebody incompetent, nested inside a larger structure (society) which also has poorly thought out incentives (that is, it punishes good design principles)

StartAtTheEnd 12 May 2026 14:07 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
The period is not so long. It’s enough that if you were to implement 10 years of change in a single day, you’d have mass protests or a civil war on your hand. Culturally, the world is currently changing very fast, since we can only compare to the past, which changed much more slowly.
A gradual decrease in freedom over time is a really bad sign, for the same reason that a gradual increase in temperature, and a gradual decrease in birth rates are really bad signs. The media attacks the social status of those who don’t panic enough about global warming, and it attacks the social status of those who panic too much about privacy, and then people compete in showing how good and proper they are (by signaling that they do not belong to the group which is being criticized). It’s a waste of time to argue against common opinion, even when one is correct and in possession of good arguments. Disagreements about facts play out as if they’re power and value conflicts

StartAtTheEnd 12 May 2026 4:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Some posts and comments are not for all people, and I think that’s alright. There’s a somewhat controversial quote which goes “no meaningful communication is possible among people not sharing a common window of 30 IQ points”, and I think it’s more true than false in intellectual contexts. Also, I just remembered—I got into the habit of writing in a way that stupid people cannot understand doing my time on Reddit. Precisely by filtering stupid people, do I avoid offending them, and entering into discussions with people who weren’t meant for the information at hand.
I also think it’s enought that my comments hold no malice or hostility. Information-seeking is inherently perverted, so it’s hard to do in a tasteful way. And navigating around all peoples insecurities is frankly not possible. I could claim that your comment is offensive to me, and that would be totally unfalsifiable, you’d have no defense other than asserting that I’m being unreasonable.
And in a sense, I think it’s rude for people who cannot handle reality to enter into intellectual discussions, since they cannot provide any value, and because they have a tendency to attack the people who can. Your own perception of reality is your own responsibility, this was the cultural norm around 40 years ago, and things steadly get worse as this norm fades further.

StartAtTheEnd 11 May 2026 12:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
No, but I don’t like to be in a system which has exploits without defenses. At the very least, it should be a costly action to screw people over. That way, it will only happen rarely, and when there’s a good reason for it (and one can thus avoid creating that reason).
I do not want to be in a situation in which somebody could kill me on a whim without suffering consequences for it, nor do I want to be in a situation which allows me to easily kill another person and get away with it (because I become aware that other people could exploit this as well).
I might rate above average in neuroticism, but I feel less safe as a result of more knowledge. Most people feel safe because they’re ignorant, not because they’re safe. Experts tend to be cynical because naivety is the inverse of understanding

StartAtTheEnd 11 May 2026 12:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Well, can you point out an instance in which I’ve lacked tact? And why would this not be a virtue on LW? Truth doesn’t care about our feelings nor our morals, it’s brutal and it’s also ugly (with the exception of the beauty in mathematics).
One can talk with the goal of socializing, or with the goal of learning the truth, the two approaches are in conflict. If you attempt to do both at once, your efficiency will be terrible.

StartAtTheEnd 11 May 2026 11:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Either the restrictive law itself, or a close equivalent, yes. But the reason is that tyranny is an attractor state in many systems.
Revolutions, civil wars and other strong disruption such can reset a tyrannical state into a more free state, but that seems to happen less recently due to globalism, and there’s a sort of meta-progress of away from freedom which is not reset, so the baseline of privacy and freedom is approximately the inverse of technological achievement.
Now, you might want proof of this, or stronger arguments than what I have. In the hard sciences, which society regards as the most difficult intellectual work, proofs are possible. But every day life is actually much more complicated than the hard sciences are, and too many things depend on eachother for us to be able to isolate anything as a cause. Some people, myself included, are good with more complex systems, and we’re no worse predictors than those who specialize in just one thing and get renown for that. Academia is rather hostile to those who don’t commit the McNamara fallacy, as them commiting the fallacy makes them unsympathetic towards people who make claims which are difficult to verify. Nassim Taleb has pretty good takes on complex systems which I recommend

StartAtTheEnd 9 May 2026 15:21 UTC
1 point
0
on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
I think that sometimes, a problem is the optimal solution. A lot of rules are trade-offs between things, and it doesn’t help anyone to complain about the negatives of the trade-off which was made, as “fixing” it merely pushes the problem elsewhere. (Or alternatively, it requires a higher granularity of laws and regulations)
I could complain about criminals getting away with their crimes, but fixing that would require lowering the threshold of evidence, which would mean that more innocent people were unfairly punished. And if this ‘solution’ is implemented, then we’d hear complains about that.
Better solutions exist, but they require context-dependent judgement. A lot of the laws and regulations we follow are too general. In most contexts, it’s probably good that the WHO can’t enforce quarantines on sovereign states, and this just happened to be an exception.
I don’t know what to call this problem, bias variance tradeoff maybe?

StartAtTheEnd 8 May 2026 9:15 UTC
−1 points
−2
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 21:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ari S’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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)

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 20:51 UTC
−7 points
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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.

StartAtTheEnd 7 May 2026 15:26 UTC
1 point
−9
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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.

StartAtTheEnd 4 May 2026 7:51 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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).

StartAtTheEnd 4 May 2026 7:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Roger Scott’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this

StartAtTheEnd 3 May 2026 13:35 UTC
8 points
1
in reply to: HoVY’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
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)

StartAtTheEnd 3 May 2026 11:12 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rahul N’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.