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Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation. This is a hard thing for people to get over, and I don't really understand why. As an analogy, t

Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation. This is a hard thing for people to get over, and I don't really understand why. As an analogy, think about Right to Repair: I can simultaneously say that I want consumers to have the ability to control their devices, install custom firmware, and crack them open to repair them if they break, without making an assertion that every single consumer is qualified to do so. With Right to Repair, I don't lose the ability to let someone qualified make decisions about my device, or to set device policies. It doesn't require a massive amount of faith in ordinary people, just an acknowledgement that a single company making those decisions for everyone is overall bad for the market. And the fact that some individuals will make bad decisions and hand their iPad to Uncle Joe to fix with his power tools is an acceptable tradeoff, given that it means we're not forced to solve the much harder problem of deciding for everyone which modifications and usage is "correct" for every device. The reason people go in so hard on individual freedom isn't because individuals are amazing -- individuals are flawed as heck. It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power, and that getting it wrong comes with massive risks. Given that we don't have an easy formula to tell when delegation is the right choice, or even to define what happiness is, or even to define whether or not happiness should be a universal goal, we (when possible) leave it up to individuals to make their own decisions or voluntarily delegate their decisions to another person. Individual freedoms allow us to practice Defense in Depth on a societal level, at the cost of making us more vulnerable to some manipulations and allowing individuals to make some bad decisions about who they delegate their thinking to. It's not perfect, but it is terribly practical, and nobody that I know of has come up with a better scheme yet.

crdoconnor 7y ago
>It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power "It's difficult" doesn't mean it's a task that should be completely abandoned because of some ideological notion.
- danShumway 7y ago
  But it's not just a hard problem we can solve once, it's a wildly difficult problem that we haven't been able to solve for thousands of years. I brought up the Defense in Depth angle because I think it's kind of the same category of problem. Why do we need multiple layers of security on our devices -- why shouldn't Apple just validate the code on everything that gets submitted to the store? Why shouldn't developers just write code that's bug free? Because they just can't. It's not that everyone has stopped trying to answer questions like "what is the purpose of society?". Nobody's talking about abandoning anything. If you think the problem is solveable, you're welcome to jump into philosophical circles right now and solve it. And once you've solved it, I promise I will happily move over to a totalitarian system where a perfectly informed formula decides what my life should be. In the meantime, we need a pragmatic solution, and individual freedom is the best one I've seen proposed.
  - crdoconnor 7y ago
    It's really not wildly difficult to discourage smoking by, e.g. putting a tax on it.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Okay, sure. But what does the difficulty of taxing something have to do with the difficulty of building a single central authority that makes good decisions for a population without their consent? Passing laws is not the difficult part, any government can do that :)
      - crdoconnor 7y ago
        ...and that's a good example of a good decision made on behalf of the population that lots of countries (maybe most?) have made. The difficult part was browbeating the cigarette companies.
        danShumway 7y ago
CyanBird 7y ago
>Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. That is what's happening right now, it had been the case that groups were using mass media to manufacture consent, but this new machinery is far more efficient and less expensive than previous systems The defense in depth analogy is indeed very good, yet the agency of a critical amount of people has been compromised by this new machinery, and this machinery preys on people's unconscious instincts, fears and epigenetic predispositions. Those are things which simply can't really be postdoc taught to hundreds of millions of people at a whim
- danShumway 7y ago
  > this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. Yeah, very good point. What we're trying to get at is this idea that some of the voluntary decisions people make aren't really voluntary. What's (sometimes) proposed though is that this somehow invalidates the idea that people should be able to make their own decisions at all -- that they're incapable of it. To go back to the idea of people controlling their devices, a hacker might trick me into giving device permissions for something I don't want -- because I misunderstand the permissions, or because they have some kind of leverage over me, or because they convince me that the permissions are no big deal. I'm all for efforts to address 'Limbic Capitalism' that involve educating consumers and trying to plug those kinds of holes and giving people ways to interact with brands where brands can't sidestep informed decision-making processes. I disagree with someone who looks at those holes and says, "well clearly freedom isn't working", for the same reasons I disagree with someone who looks at Android's horrible permissions system and says, "well, clearly users shouldn't be able to decide whether or not an app gets location privileges, clearly only the smart people at Google should." On the software side of things, we've learned that things like upfront permission prompts on app installation circumvent user agency, and we've started to move more towards forcing apps to only ask for permissions at the moment they need them. We've also given users tools like the ability to grant a permission temporarily rather than permanently. Those kinds of solutions help defend against exploitative behavior without robbing users of agency.

crdoconnor 7y ago

>It's that it is extremely difficult to figure out when someone is fit to take over someone else's decision power "It's difficult" doesn't mean it's a task that should be completely abandoned because of some ideological notion.

danShumway 7y ago
But it's not just a hard problem we can solve once, it's a wildly difficult problem that we haven't been able to solve for thousands of years. I brought up the Defense in Depth angle because I think it's kind of the same category of problem. Why do we need multiple layers of security on our devices -- why shouldn't Apple just validate the code on everything that gets submitted to the store? Why shouldn't developers just write code that's bug free? Because they just can't. It's not that everyone has stopped trying to answer questions like "what is the purpose of society?". Nobody's talking about abandoning anything. If you think the problem is solveable, you're welcome to jump into philosophical circles right now and solve it. And once you've solved it, I promise I will happily move over to a totalitarian system where a perfectly informed formula decides what my life should be. In the meantime, we need a pragmatic solution, and individual freedom is the best one I've seen proposed.
- crdoconnor 7y ago
  It's really not wildly difficult to discourage smoking by, e.g. putting a tax on it.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Okay, sure. But what does the difficulty of taxing something have to do with the difficulty of building a single central authority that makes good decisions for a population without their consent? Passing laws is not the difficult part, any government can do that :)
    - crdoconnor 7y ago
      ...and that's a good example of a good decision made on behalf of the population that lots of countries (maybe most?) have made. The difficult part was browbeating the cigarette companies.
      - danShumway 7y ago

CyanBird 7y ago

>Voluntary delegation is different than involuntary delegation I mean, this is 100% correct, yet that's not quite the problem, and stating it that way leads to overall confusion, the issue is that policy makers, companies and other profit motivated groups found ways to get inside the root unconscious mental proceses which lead to concious decision making, this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. That is what's happening right now, it had been the case that groups were using mass media to manufacture consent, but this new machinery is far more efficient and less expensive than previous systems The defense in depth analogy is indeed very good, yet the agency of a critical amount of people has been compromised by this new machinery, and this machinery preys on people's unconscious instincts, fears and epigenetic predispositions. Those are things which simply can't really be postdoc taught to hundreds of millions of people at a whim

danShumway 7y ago
> this just means that said groups can hijack the agency of thousands of people at the same time with the same set of tools. Yeah, very good point. What we're trying to get at is this idea that some of the voluntary decisions people make aren't really voluntary. What's (sometimes) proposed though is that this somehow invalidates the idea that people should be able to make their own decisions at all -- that they're incapable of it. To go back to the idea of people controlling their devices, a hacker might trick me into giving device permissions for something I don't want -- because I misunderstand the permissions, or because they have some kind of leverage over me, or because they convince me that the permissions are no big deal. I'm all for efforts to address 'Limbic Capitalism' that involve educating consumers and trying to plug those kinds of holes and giving people ways to interact with brands where brands can't sidestep informed decision-making processes. I disagree with someone who looks at those holes and says, "well clearly freedom isn't working", for the same reasons I disagree with someone who looks at Android's horrible permissions system and says, "well, clearly users shouldn't be able to decide whether or not an app gets location privileges, clearly only the smart people at Google should." On the software side of things, we've learned that things like upfront permission prompts on app installation circumvent user agency, and we've started to move more towards forcing apps to only ask for permissions at the moment they need them. We've also given users tools like the ability to grant a permission temporarily rather than permanently. Those kinds of solutions help defend against exploitative behavior without robbing users of agency.