This article makes the mistake of assuming that things like the national debate of encryption and privacy sparked by e.g. the San Bernadino iPhone ordeal are ac

This article makes the mistake of assuming that things like the national debate of encryption and privacy sparked by e.g. the San Bernadino iPhone ordeal are actually about the moral themes they are characterized by. They are not about those moral themes. They are just status and in-group vs. out-group games like everything else. We don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants. With encryption, immigration, climate change, finance reform, etc. etc., you pick a side of the debate and that identifies Who You Are and What Team You Are On for purposes of letting other people know that you're either their implicit ally or implicit enemy, that you would submit to them or resist them, that you intrinsically respect their credential or that you treat their credential with skepticism. I was hoping this article might be about scope insensitivity and would speak about how we have to intelligently use legislation and law enforcement to protect human rights because, even for the best of us, it's not cognitively feasible to feel the morality you would wish upon others. Instead it seems like a meandering groan that we aren't more data driven -- but of course we aren't! And even when we are "data driven" it's generally just an excuse to use politically manipulated notions of data-based reasoning to only enhance the degree of coalition politics, not to defeat it. Take software for example. We claim that systematic hiring via commoditized task examinations (like IKM or HackerRank), or the use of dumb shit process management like Agile/Scrum, are supposed to represent a shift into "objective" and "data-driven" evaluation. But it's unequivocally not. These are just ways of letting middle management and political gatekeepers engineer whatever subjective metrics they prefer, while being shielded from complaints that they are not being objective. If we can't even get this right for something as small as project management or software hiring, it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.