5 ms·

Our entire idea of "agency", "individuality" and even "freedom" needs to be re-thinked. Basically all of what we have built resides in one way or another on the

Our entire idea of "agency", "individuality" and even "freedom" needs to be re-thinked. Basically all of what we have built resides in one way or another on the idea that individuals bar exceptions such as with physical drugs have some sort of inalienable agency to them. That entire rockbed is simply not really true, and more like highly idealized thoughts from thinkers of the 1800's Policy makers and politicians have been struggling with these problems for the last +150 years, and increasingly so in the last 30 ever since the creation of political microtargetting and the perfection of advertising, cambridge analytica and digital microtargetting+psychographics is just the cherry on top Planet Money released an episode touching on all of these subjects "Ep 915 How to meddle in an election" https://www.npr.org/2019/05/24/726536757/episode-915-how-to-meddle-in-an-election https://www.npr.org/2019/05/24/726536757/episode-915-how-to-... Also, anybody that hasn't should absolutely watch "Century of the self" by Adam Curtis

otabdeveloper1 7y ago
> trying to dehumanize whole swathes of humanity > trying to tie this travesty somehow to good ol' Trump Man, you're a caricature of yourself.
microcolonel 7y ago
Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're right up your alley! People are actively opting out of advertising, which is why major advertising businesses are pulling out all the stops (see Google's recent announcement that they will restrict advertisement and tracking blockers); these businesses will suffer with the new generation of "consumers".
- bittercynic 7y ago
  >Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. I didn't read that in GP. Currently we seem to be very reluctant to admit that we're all vulnerable to being manipulated, and it might actually increase the total amount of agency available to individuals if we could restrict the ways we're allowed to manipulate each other.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    The problem is the line between preventing manipulation, and imposing on people's private thoughts. Poorly-conducted industry-funded research? That's pretty straightforward; and in some sense it is not that different from other forms of fraud. I'm okay with punishing people for acting with intent to knowingly mislead. On the other hand, you look at lending, and it becomes a little bit difficult. There are illegal interest rates in many places, and for setting an upper bound, that works fine; but people throw around a lot of dubious allegations about lenders. At some point, if you deny the existence of agency, you end up telling people things you can't know, because you don't have the imagination to consider that they might know what they're doing. That is tyrannical.
    - bittercynic 7y ago
      I didn't intend to deny the existence of agency, only to point out that it's often unclear exactly how much agency we have in different situations, and it could be useful to acknowledge that this is a thorny subject.
- api 7y ago
  This is exactly the problem: the fallacy of self exclusion on the part of those who would rule or otherwise think for us. If humans are all vulnerable to all these manipulative tactics, where are we supposed to get humans who are not? There is another alternative: reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. We already do this with deception in certain areas like con artistry, giving false testimony, bad faith in business, etc. Maybe we need to vastly expand our notion of tortious or civilly actionable deception to include clear use of dark patterns. The idea that we are perfectly rational and can deal with any form of deception is perhaps the intangible analog of saying we are impervious to bullets. If that's not true, then it is the responsibility of law enforcement to protect us. This is kind of radical of course. It would lead to regulations on speech that classify certain kinds of speech as assault. The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > ...reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. Yeah, I think there's some room for that, and the law (as you point out) is already somewhat headed that way. I think we need to be careful also not to write laws we can't afford to enforce fairly, or read too much into people's private interactions. I remember having to help my employer prove that they were not the reason I wasn't in school when I was 17; and I think even with that they were still at my mercy. As a result of this, and a pretty large number of other experiences, I'm very very sensitive to the unintended outcomes of the law, and the limits of legislators' ability to understand what precisely they are doing.
  - CyanBird 7y ago
    >The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions. You should 100% see the adamn Curtis documentary I mentioned above and read up on manufacture of consent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU What you mention is already the case, it is fully within the interest of the decentralized power holders and policy makers for them to control the population via the information that's fed to them, that's why the Iraq invasion happened in the first place, that's why the US continues to try spread fear about Iran or China. There is no way to destroy that machinery, only repurpose it for different means
- GavinMcG 7y ago
  But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    The end stage of "having others think for us" is indentured servitude. Should we pass a Constitutional amendment to legalize that, too? Should we go back to the deeply repugnant idea that there are "natural" masters, and "natural" serfs? This makes no sense whatsoever. Freedom is an end, not just a means to something else. We are not made better off by having our freedoms restrained in arbitrary ways.
    - CyanBird 7y ago
      I think that what you are missing is that this is not an option, this is a reality, Cambridge analytica already happened and since then they have moved into manufacturing consent in many other countries elections For a long time, marketing and political propaganda have gone hand in hand Manufacture of consent is something that has been happening for a long time now https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU The difference now is that it can be done far cheaper, and on a bigger scale and more effectively than ever before, I would indeed recommend you to check out the planet money podcast at the least Lastly, just because you see the value of mental agency and thought liberty, it doesn't mean that other people will value it the same way you do, or as much as you do. Psychographics is also a thing, and used to great effect when it come to manipulating people this way
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. Those are always the same: boring and leading to worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - danShumway 7y ago
- CyanBird 7y ago
  >Agency is the only option. This is the problem, agency is dead, or at least in the grand scales, manufacture of consent has been a thing for a long, long, long time now and it won't go away simply because some people are afraid of looking into the reality of things https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU Also, not sure if you saw the provided podcast, but most of the things you mention are addressed there
- jaggednad 7y ago
  You’re presenting a false choice here. Either we live with free market limbic capitalism, or we live with a totalitarian PRC like state. There are other options that mitigate some of the issues with limbic capitalism without being totalitarian
gtfratteus 7y ago
This is probably the most alarming post I've seen in HN in a while. Are you seriously arguing against freedom right now? Worse yet, you're not calling it freedom, you're calling it "agency." Likely because you know this opinion is utterly despicable, so you're trying to deceive people into agreeing with it by using coded language.
hsitz 7y ago
Yuval Noah Harari has thought this through pretty well, it seems to me. At least about why it is a problem, not necessarily with the answer. He talks about this in all his books. For intro on his thinking on this issue, see this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-har...
- sasaf5 7y ago
  With all due respect to Harari's historical analysis, he seems to make some logic jumps that are unacceptable in a serious philosophical discussion. From the article you cited: "'free will' isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology." This is a false dichotomy. Free will is still a deep philosophical question. When I read his "Homo Deus", the lack of soundness of his challenge on liberalism seemed to contrast with the quality of the rest of the book.
  - 9000 7y ago
    I'm not so sure that's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of elements of Christian myths that are considered 'scientific reality', such as people and fruits and the fact that the Romans crucified people. There are also elements that are not. However, there are also influences on our culture that originate neither in science nor in Christian theology. I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists. You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.
    - sasaf5 7y ago

otabdeveloper1 7y ago

> trying to dehumanize whole swathes of humanity > trying to tie this travesty somehow to good ol' Trump Man, you're a caricature of yourself.

microcolonel 7y ago

Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. Agency is the only option. It's not like the concept of agency was thought up in a society with no dumb people. If you want to live in a society where the state doesn't believe in agency, and where your difficult decisions will be made by people who are (on average) more intelligent than you, go ahead and move to the PRC, they're right up your alley! People are actively opting out of advertising, which is why major advertising businesses are pulling out all the stops (see Google's recent announcement that they will restrict advertisement and tracking blockers); these businesses will suffer with the new generation of "consumers".

bittercynic 7y ago
>Now imagine for a moment that you're not better than everyone else at thinking for them. I didn't read that in GP. Currently we seem to be very reluctant to admit that we're all vulnerable to being manipulated, and it might actually increase the total amount of agency available to individuals if we could restrict the ways we're allowed to manipulate each other.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  The problem is the line between preventing manipulation, and imposing on people's private thoughts. Poorly-conducted industry-funded research? That's pretty straightforward; and in some sense it is not that different from other forms of fraud. I'm okay with punishing people for acting with intent to knowingly mislead. On the other hand, you look at lending, and it becomes a little bit difficult. There are illegal interest rates in many places, and for setting an upper bound, that works fine; but people throw around a lot of dubious allegations about lenders. At some point, if you deny the existence of agency, you end up telling people things you can't know, because you don't have the imagination to consider that they might know what they're doing. That is tyrannical.
  - bittercynic 7y ago
    I didn't intend to deny the existence of agency, only to point out that it's often unclear exactly how much agency we have in different situations, and it could be useful to acknowledge that this is a thorny subject.
api 7y ago
This is exactly the problem: the fallacy of self exclusion on the part of those who would rule or otherwise think for us. If humans are all vulnerable to all these manipulative tactics, where are we supposed to get humans who are not? There is another alternative: reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. We already do this with deception in certain areas like con artistry, giving false testimony, bad faith in business, etc. Maybe we need to vastly expand our notion of tortious or civilly actionable deception to include clear use of dark patterns. The idea that we are perfectly rational and can deal with any form of deception is perhaps the intangible analog of saying we are impervious to bullets. If that's not true, then it is the responsibility of law enforcement to protect us. This is kind of radical of course. It would lead to regulations on speech that classify certain kinds of speech as assault. The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > ...reclassify exploitation of cognitive failure modes as a type of initiation of force. Yeah, I think there's some room for that, and the law (as you point out) is already somewhat headed that way. I think we need to be careful also not to write laws we can't afford to enforce fairly, or read too much into people's private interactions. I remember having to help my employer prove that they were not the reason I wasn't in school when I was 17; and I think even with that they were still at my mercy. As a result of this, and a pretty large number of other experiences, I'm very very sensitive to the unintended outcomes of the law, and the limits of legislators' ability to understand what precisely they are doing.
- CyanBird 7y ago
  >The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions. You should 100% see the adamn Curtis documentary I mentioned above and read up on manufacture of consent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU What you mention is already the case, it is fully within the interest of the decentralized power holders and policy makers for them to control the population via the information that's fed to them, that's why the Iraq invasion happened in the first place, that's why the US continues to try spread fear about Iran or China. There is no way to destroy that machinery, only repurpose it for different means
GavinMcG 7y ago
But we frequently are better off having others think for us. There are a broad spectrum of examples, from research that we don't have the time or resources to accomplish, to, say, getting advice from a friend, while in a crisis, that we fail to follow even though we would give that same advice.
- 0815test 7y ago
  The end stage of "having others think for us" is indentured servitude. Should we pass a Constitutional amendment to legalize that, too? Should we go back to the deeply repugnant idea that there are "natural" masters, and "natural" serfs? This makes no sense whatsoever. Freedom is an end, not just a means to something else. We are not made better off by having our freedoms restrained in arbitrary ways.
  - CyanBird 7y ago
    I think that what you are missing is that this is not an option, this is a reality, Cambridge analytica already happened and since then they have moved into manufacturing consent in many other countries elections For a long time, marketing and political propaganda have gone hand in hand Manufacture of consent is something that has been happening for a long time now https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU The difference now is that it can be done far cheaper, and on a bigger scale and more effectively than ever before, I would indeed recommend you to check out the planet money podcast at the least Lastly, just because you see the value of mental agency and thought liberty, it doesn't mean that other people will value it the same way you do, or as much as you do. Psychographics is also a thing, and used to great effect when it come to manipulating people this way
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. Those are always the same: boring and leading to worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- danShumway 7y ago
CyanBird 7y ago
>Agency is the only option. This is the problem, agency is dead, or at least in the grand scales, manufacture of consent has been a thing for a long, long, long time now and it won't go away simply because some people are afraid of looking into the reality of things https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBWfkE7BXU Also, not sure if you saw the provided podcast, but most of the things you mention are addressed there
jaggednad 7y ago
You’re presenting a false choice here. Either we live with free market limbic capitalism, or we live with a totalitarian PRC like state. There are other options that mitigate some of the issues with limbic capitalism without being totalitarian

gtfratteus 7y ago

This is probably the most alarming post I've seen in HN in a while. Are you seriously arguing against freedom right now? Worse yet, you're not calling it freedom, you're calling it "agency." Likely because you know this opinion is utterly despicable, so you're trying to deceive people into agreeing with it by using coded language.

hsitz 7y ago

Yuval Noah Harari has thought this through pretty well, it seems to me. At least about why it is a problem, not necessarily with the answer. He talks about this in all his books. For intro on his thinking on this issue, see this article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-har...

sasaf5 7y ago
With all due respect to Harari's historical analysis, he seems to make some logic jumps that are unacceptable in a serious philosophical discussion. From the article you cited: "'free will' isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology." This is a false dichotomy. Free will is still a deep philosophical question. When I read his "Homo Deus", the lack of soundness of his challenge on liberalism seemed to contrast with the quality of the rest of the book.
- 9000 7y ago
  I'm not so sure that's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of elements of Christian myths that are considered 'scientific reality', such as people and fruits and the fact that the Romans crucified people. There are also elements that are not. However, there are also influences on our culture that originate neither in science nor in Christian theology. I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists. You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.
  - sasaf5 7y ago