3 ms·

And let's get real here about how we solve problems with decreased privacy. Good luck ever getting an official to do anything for you. If it does not benefit t

And let's get real here about how we solve problems with decreased privacy. Good luck ever getting an official to do anything for you. If it does not benefit them or the system, they never have the time or authority to do it. The surveillance is to benefit the state, not the surveilled.

skybrian 7y ago
This is abstraction. How do you apply that to the case of a teacher sending misbehaving kids to the principal's office, and what would you want instead?
- behringer 7y ago
  We've never required surveillance to send kids to the office before...
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Having a teacher in the room has the same "you're being watched" effect as a camera, it's just less efficient at watching. I want to highlight the tension between liberty & socialization here, because I think it's getting glossed over. Public education is a huge infringement on individual liberty - it's basically mandatory brainwashing of kids for 6-8 hours/day, 180 days/year, for 12 years. Nobody would realistically suggest getting rid of it, because we all grew up with it. Taking it back a step, parenting is also an infringement on individual liberty - a child is totally dependent upon a parent, and oftentimes exposed to nothing other than the parent's views, and is biologically hard-wired to pick up on a parent's emotions and mirror them. Can't really blame society for that, though, evolution did it. People who worry about the slippery slope are right to worry. But it's been going on for centuries. We think that our particular point on it is natural and right because that's what we grew up with, just as our kids might think pervasive surveillance is natural and right because that's what they grew up with - which is exactly what we're justifiably afraid of. If we lived on individual farming homesteads and someone proposed taking our kids away from us for the majority of their waking childhood, we'd probably be even more upset. Probably the endgame is like the Matrix, where humans are confined to individual pods with no agency of their own, except that instead of being tapped for bio-energy we'll end up being used to train machine-learning algorithms.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      Your analysis has an underlying assumption of individualism. That is, the ideology (quite common in the U.S.) that each person is competent to make their own decisions and has the right to do so independently of what anyone else might want. Having kids or taking care of mentally declining parents tends to put a big dent in that. Or working in other situations where you commonly interact with people who are clearly no good on their own. However much lip service we might pay to it, respect for Autonomy and Individual Agency only goes so far when people are doing what's Clearly The Wrong Thing, then you have to decide when to step in. Group decision-making is messier but in many ways more realistic. It isn't necessarily dystopian, though someone thinking in purely individualistic terms might see at as such.
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        That's my point, but I'm not taking a position on it (at least within this comment thread - I've got plenty of personal views on it that I apply to my personal life). I'm pointing out that there's a continuum between total individual liberty, where everybody does exactly what they want, and living in a larger society of people, where your actions affect others and there need to be some sort of constraints on them. We've been picking points along this continuum for centuries, and sliding slowly towards more restrictions on individual liberty for the benefit of society simply because population density is higher now. The point we're at now, where we accept that giving your children over to an institution to be raised for half their waking childhood is normal but cameras in the classroom are abhorrent, is an arbitrary artifact of what we grew up with in our own childhoods. In the next generation, perhaps they'll view cameras in the classroom as normal but Matrix-style pods as abhorrent. Someday perhaps they just won't think, the same way a mitochondria (once an independent organism!) doesn't think too much about being a component of our cellular makeup.

skybrian 7y ago

This is abstraction. How do you apply that to the case of a teacher sending misbehaving kids to the principal's office, and what would you want instead?

behringer 7y ago
We've never required surveillance to send kids to the office before...
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Having a teacher in the room has the same "you're being watched" effect as a camera, it's just less efficient at watching. I want to highlight the tension between liberty & socialization here, because I think it's getting glossed over. Public education is a huge infringement on individual liberty - it's basically mandatory brainwashing of kids for 6-8 hours/day, 180 days/year, for 12 years. Nobody would realistically suggest getting rid of it, because we all grew up with it. Taking it back a step, parenting is also an infringement on individual liberty - a child is totally dependent upon a parent, and oftentimes exposed to nothing other than the parent's views, and is biologically hard-wired to pick up on a parent's emotions and mirror them. Can't really blame society for that, though, evolution did it. People who worry about the slippery slope are right to worry. But it's been going on for centuries. We think that our particular point on it is natural and right because that's what we grew up with, just as our kids might think pervasive surveillance is natural and right because that's what they grew up with - which is exactly what we're justifiably afraid of. If we lived on individual farming homesteads and someone proposed taking our kids away from us for the majority of their waking childhood, we'd probably be even more upset. Probably the endgame is like the Matrix, where humans are confined to individual pods with no agency of their own, except that instead of being tapped for bio-energy we'll end up being used to train machine-learning algorithms.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Your analysis has an underlying assumption of individualism. That is, the ideology (quite common in the U.S.) that each person is competent to make their own decisions and has the right to do so independently of what anyone else might want. Having kids or taking care of mentally declining parents tends to put a big dent in that. Or working in other situations where you commonly interact with people who are clearly no good on their own. However much lip service we might pay to it, respect for Autonomy and Individual Agency only goes so far when people are doing what's Clearly The Wrong Thing, then you have to decide when to step in. Group decision-making is messier but in many ways more realistic. It isn't necessarily dystopian, though someone thinking in purely individualistic terms might see at as such.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      That's my point, but I'm not taking a position on it (at least within this comment thread - I've got plenty of personal views on it that I apply to my personal life). I'm pointing out that there's a continuum between total individual liberty, where everybody does exactly what they want, and living in a larger society of people, where your actions affect others and there need to be some sort of constraints on them. We've been picking points along this continuum for centuries, and sliding slowly towards more restrictions on individual liberty for the benefit of society simply because population density is higher now. The point we're at now, where we accept that giving your children over to an institution to be raised for half their waking childhood is normal but cameras in the classroom are abhorrent, is an arbitrary artifact of what we grew up with in our own childhoods. In the next generation, perhaps they'll view cameras in the classroom as normal but Matrix-style pods as abhorrent. Someday perhaps they just won't think, the same way a mitochondria (once an independent organism!) doesn't think too much about being a component of our cellular makeup.