7 ms·

Not really off tangent: I won't be surprised if this attracts lots of comments along the lines "US/ WESTERN COUNTRIES did this before too and therefore no bette

Not really off tangent: I won't be surprised if this attracts lots of comments along the lines "US/ WESTERN COUNTRIES did this before too and therefore no better than China". I just can't understand why when it comes to geopolitics, HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? Somehow US/ western countries have to enter the discussion as a bad benchmark...

OwlsParlay 6y ago
I do find it funny how HN used to really bemoan the strict IP laws of the US, especially when it comes to software or medicine.... but if it's China getting around those laws then boo them.
- dccoolgai 6y ago
  Strong arming a high school kid for pointing out an obvious security flaw is a little different than "disappearing" millions of uighur people. You probably aren't even allowed to read that.
rayuela 6y ago
Nationalism, Identity Politics, and don't forget the paid shills. It's the same problems you see in any large public online forum. I think addressing this issue is actually something for a very interesting discussion.
mattmanser 6y ago
No-one has yet, but what's the problem with it? America stole Britain's intellectual property for a leg up a century or two ago, now a different country is doing it to them. It's just the normal cycle, and America have long had a lot of artificial legal protections in place to try and stop it and limit the rest of the world's prosperity. The harsh copyright laws and IP agreements they've bullied the rest of the world into accepting are beginning to fail, and these sort of articles are a direct consequence of that, why wouldn't we discuss it? It's an intellectually interesting effect. There's also the other question of is it really stealing? America still has the knowledge, after all. Copyright laws were supposed to encourage innovation, but as many here have argued, have gone too far, what's the surprise now a country has enough power to say No to America, they're saying No.
- rayuela 6y ago
  Were you trying to be ironic? You have presented exactly the problem OP is complaining about...
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    I'm explicitly saying it's not a problem as he claims and should be discussed, and deliberately gave the reasons why it's an interesting discussion. That's not irony. Not interested in that discussion? You can collapse the thread using the [-] button.
- kiba 6y ago
  America stole Britain's intellectual property for a leg up a century or two ago, now a different country is doing it to them. There's a difference between copying from open source patent database and reverse engineering versus blatantly engaging in industrial espionage, which is a whole another kettle of fish. Or claiming to be playing by the same set of rules but blatantly violating them. The harsh copyright laws and IP agreements they've bullied the rest of the world into accepting are beginning to fail, and these sort of articles are a direct consequence of that, why wouldn't we discuss it? It's an intellectually interesting effect. Patent systems should be considered harmful to nations that enforce or implement them, but that's another story for another day.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    I think you need to read up on your history. Here's an easy place to start. https://www.google.com/search?q=america+stole+britain+intellectual+property https://www.google.com/search?q=america+stole+britain+intell... There's plenty of documented evidence that America illegally stole tons of IP, often paid for by the state no less, otherwise known as industrial espionage. I'm sure they did it to all the European powers of the time too, probably plenty of examples of stolen tech from Spain, the Dutch, etc. As I'm sure Britain, etc. did to the civilizations more advanced to them in the centuries before too, you can bet there were proclamations about not taking technology out of the cities that had monopolies on them, and were smuggled out illegally or simply attacked for them.
dccoolgai 6y ago
Or there are agents from those places with paid motives to post those things. I've noticed whenever a China topic comes up, there are a suspicious number of apologist/whataboutist comments beyond even the normal HN-kneejerk-contrarianism.
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  Wumao.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Your comment is 28 mins old and there are so many anti-China comments in this thread that are downvoted into grayness. Something is definitely odd. This is an American forum, 7:27am on Saturday morning.
    - Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
      I assure you, any high-traffic website with commentary that touches on economic or geostrategic interests of China will have wumao on the prowl. I have never seen posts get such quick and consistent downvoting as those that deal with China in a critical manner.
      - dccoolgai 6y ago
        Yeah, this is a big problem. I just searched "uighur" on comments... Some pretty appalling stuff, including stuff that seems to justify their genocide by accusing them of terrorism. Clearly something is wrong. Hopefully @dang will look at this at some point. We make a sport of busting FBs chops over policing disinfo, etc. And it looks like there are brazen actors on HN doing worse and we're ignoring it.
    - shalmanese 6y ago
      Because it's an intellectually lazy assertion that's never made with any sort of backing evidence and forstalls debate by preemptively painting any opinion you don't agree with as the work of paid shills. China sending wumao onto Hacker News would go against the vast majority of precedent we've been able to establish about Chinese disinformation campaigns. Overwhelmingly, active Chinese disinformation is produced in Chinese for a ethnic Chinese overseas audience with English only ever being provided as an afterthought. The Chinese strategy for shaping English debate about China has always involved economic punishment for powerful entities that broadcast "unacceptable" opinions like the NBA with HK or US airlines labelling Taiwan as a country on their websites. However, such pressures scale directly to the amount of financial stakes an entity has in China which means it has effectively no power in anonymous social forums. This can be evidenced by issues such as Hong Kong where, not only was Western opinion not receptive to the Chinese arguments on the issue, there wasn't even any form of broad awareness of what the Chinese arguments even were. To the extent that the Chinese narrative even made it over to the West (such as claims that the protestors were being paid by the CIA), they were overwhelmingly conveyed via Western media that only described them in order to debunk them. Like so much other disinformation about China, the whole wumao conspiracy is a bunch of lazy nonsense that is spewed by people with no real knowledge of China nor a desire for accuracy and thus gets reflexively downvoted on HN by people who are sick of lazy, bad arguments made against China when there are so many legitimate, good arguments that fail to be made because they don't fit neatly into a narrative.
adventured 6y ago
> I just can't understand why when it comes to geopolitics, HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? It's not HN, it's human nature, that's why whataboutism is universal. In most cases whataboutism is a nearly uncontrollable impulse, it's a mental sensation the person can barely contain. Whataboutism is used either to relieve anguish that the person feels, or to outlet hatred/rage. They're compelled by the stress they feel to outlet it. In the case of anguish, it's caused when the subject of a negative story - eg China - is being hit, the person desperately needs to redirect fire off of it, because it feels personal, they feel actual mental anguish from the story and need to make it stop. One way to lighten that anguish is to spread it around, try to normalize the negative (by trying to show that other countries are guilty too). Whataboutism out of hatred/dislike is a case where the person literally hates the redirect subject - eg the US - and looks for any excuse at any time to focus their rage onto it; in that case it's not about the focus subject, it's primarily about the redirect subject (the initial focus subject is merely the opportunity provider).
ckocagil 6y ago
I don't understand how this is surprising or why this is a bad thing. Comparing a country's actions to ethical ideals is great, but it is subjective and does not achieve much. The only realistic benchmark is to compare one country to another. There is also the aspect of hypocrisy that leaves a bad taste. Putin criticizing the lack of black rights in the US is just as hypocritical as the US claiming to take military action to promote democracy.
jmnicolas 6y ago
Because before giving lessons to others you should be irreproachable. What would you think of Dijkstra if you suddenly discovered that he still wrote goto infested spaghetti code after his notorious "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" paper ? So yes we should criticize China as the bad actor that it is, but let's not forget that the western world is hardly an example (a good one I mean ;)
- klyrs 6y ago
  Underneath any high-level programming language is a layer of goto-infested spaghetti code. Dijkstra lost the stomach for low level optimization and convinced generations of programmers that easy is better than efficient.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    I think you missed my point : it was about hypocrisy not about gotos ;) Anyway in my usecase, easy is better than efficient : I'm in my 12th year of coding desktop and backend apps in C# and my first time having to rethink my code because it was too slow was only last year where I had to use dictionaries instead of Linq for a project that manipulates a lot of data (yes using dictionaries instead of Linq is the extent of my "optimization" and it's enough). In those 12 years I never thought "if only I had a lower level, more efficient language than C#" (quite the opposite in fact). So IMO it all depends on what you do : of course if your code is deployed to something less powerful than an Arduino I understand that efficiency is paramount !
magicsmoke 6y ago
Because there's context around these topics beyond just China did something bad or the US did something bad, which is that China and the US are locked in a competition. In a competition, if you hobble yourself and your opponent doesn't, you lose. Not comparing the actions of both sides and only focusing on the actions of one is like judging a race by scrutinizing every detail of one racer while ignoring the other one doping himself either now or in the past and getting a major lead. It offends the fundamental human instinct for fairness. I'm reminded of this article that was posted a while ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-... TLDR: Everyone has an innate sense of justice and fairness, which drives us to engage in cooperative behavior and punish self-serving behavior and allows us to cooperate. However, we also tend to weigh our own good behavior more heavily and downplay our bad behaviors, and we do the opposite for others. This is necessary for us to push for harder bargains when cooperation is over and it's time to split the spoils. Claiming whataboutism seems like a major case of downplaying bad and unfair behavior when it is pointed out by brushing it off as nonexistent or not relevant to the debate over spoils.
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
I believe there can be different intentions of invoking whataboutism, and under certain context, it can be a perfectly valid informal argument in a debate. The intentions of invoking whataboutism can be 1. Denial of criticism or shifting blame. "Because you had wrongdongs of a similar nature, your criticism of my wrongdoing is null and void." This is the original form of whataboutism, and it's not a legitimate argument. 2. Attack the opponent's double-standard and its authority on being the judge. "Because you had wrongdongs of a similar nature, you are not quantified for judging my wrongdoing." Often the discussion degrades to case (1) and becomes invalid. However, if the existence of wrongdoing is not denied, it can be valid in some cases. 3. Showing additional background of a problem. "Yes, I have wrongdoings. However, you have wrongdoings too, and social studies finds this type of wrongdings is a global problem and widespread in the modern world." This discussion argues the given problem must be examined at a broader context, not as an isolated evil by a single actor. This is a valid argument. 4. Treating the original problem from a different perspective. "If I have wrongdoings and you have wrongdoings, then can it be a possibility that (a) it isn't wrongdoing to begin with, or (b) it's inevitable, or (c) that it's an necessary evil?" Depending on the motivation of the speaker, it can be the same as (1) for denying criticism, but in a honest discussion, this can be valid too. The "wrongdoings" can be mass surveillance, war crimes, human right abuses, IP theif, and so on. For example, here are some applications of valid "whataboutism" argument. Using mass surveillance as an example. - "The NSA argues that Government X's foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. But what about the NSA?! As you see, this is not a real problem but only an excuse for discrediting others politically, and Government X's doing totally fine." This is an invalid argument and should be frowned upon. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? Thus, the problem of the privacy and freedom of Americans can never be resolved unless both harmful foreign and domestic surveillance have been removed or reformed. If the NSA is only focusing on the first issue, then it's not acting as a fair judge on this problem, and there are reasons to believe the NSA is only acting for its self-interest, not the actual problem." This can be a valid argument. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? The surveillance capabilities of the NSA is an order of magnitude greater than Foreign Nation X, hence, the threat from the NSA is greater and should be an issue of higher priority." This is valid argument. Whether the facts and its conclusion is true or false, can be subjected to further debates. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? In addition, the clear evidence showed most liberal democracy governments have unchecked mass surveillance powers on citizens. Hence, it's only a symptom and ultimately, the real problem is ..." - Liberals: "Unchecked growth of power by secret services authorized by the President, and fueled by its war on terror." - Libertarian: "Ever-expanding state power in the modern age. " - Tech-critics: "Dangers enabled by omnipresence of computing and the Internet." - Infosec researchers: "Disregard of security and privacy in system designs." These are obviously valid arguments. -- In conclusion, under certain context, whataboutism can be a perfectly valid informal argument in a debate. > US/ WESTERN COUNTRIES did this before too and therefore no better than China I honestly believe this can possibly be a valid argument from some perspectives. But I don't want to start any argument, as I'm not interested in this particular debate. > Somehow US/western countries have to enter the discussion as a bad benchmark... In some cases, they are good benchmarks. For example, the legal protection of free speech in the United States has flaws, but arguably it's still one of the best in existence globally. Unfortunately, in other cases, they are a bad benchmark, and it's extremely problematic. For example, the government of the USA historically have a record of conduct illegal experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent, tries to persuade minority leaders to commit suicide, blatantly lies to Congress about the scope of their illegal programs, and works to overthrow democratically elected governments of other sovereign nations. Then why should a citizen of any nation-state have faith on the United States to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The argument above is invalid if I'm using it to shift blame. But it can be valid if it's meant to point out an inadequacy of the US Government or relying superpowers to ensure justice by enforcing International Laws. A hypothetical argument can follow it: If LessWrong's "friendly AI" is feasible and AGI is only 30 years away, it should take control of the world, at least on human rights issues, as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the scenario is unlikely.
yibg 6y ago
Stealing from a thief is still wrong, but a thief complaining about someone stealing their stuff loses a bit of punch.
hacker_newz 6y ago
How does preempting a hypothetical add to the conversation?
- chillacy 6y ago
  > Not really off tangent, > I just can't understand why... HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? I personally enjoy meta conversations but I hope OP realizes the irony of this comment.

OwlsParlay 6y ago

I do find it funny how HN used to really bemoan the strict IP laws of the US, especially when it comes to software or medicine.... but if it's China getting around those laws then boo them.

dccoolgai 6y ago
Strong arming a high school kid for pointing out an obvious security flaw is a little different than "disappearing" millions of uighur people. You probably aren't even allowed to read that.

rayuela 6y ago

Nationalism, Identity Politics, and don't forget the paid shills. It's the same problems you see in any large public online forum. I think addressing this issue is actually something for a very interesting discussion.

mattmanser 6y ago

No-one has yet, but what's the problem with it? America stole Britain's intellectual property for a leg up a century or two ago, now a different country is doing it to them. It's just the normal cycle, and America have long had a lot of artificial legal protections in place to try and stop it and limit the rest of the world's prosperity. The harsh copyright laws and IP agreements they've bullied the rest of the world into accepting are beginning to fail, and these sort of articles are a direct consequence of that, why wouldn't we discuss it? It's an intellectually interesting effect. There's also the other question of is it really stealing? America still has the knowledge, after all. Copyright laws were supposed to encourage innovation, but as many here have argued, have gone too far, what's the surprise now a country has enough power to say No to America, they're saying No.

rayuela 6y ago
Were you trying to be ironic? You have presented exactly the problem OP is complaining about...
- mattmanser 6y ago
  I'm explicitly saying it's not a problem as he claims and should be discussed, and deliberately gave the reasons why it's an interesting discussion. That's not irony. Not interested in that discussion? You can collapse the thread using the [-] button.
kiba 6y ago
America stole Britain's intellectual property for a leg up a century or two ago, now a different country is doing it to them. There's a difference between copying from open source patent database and reverse engineering versus blatantly engaging in industrial espionage, which is a whole another kettle of fish. Or claiming to be playing by the same set of rules but blatantly violating them. The harsh copyright laws and IP agreements they've bullied the rest of the world into accepting are beginning to fail, and these sort of articles are a direct consequence of that, why wouldn't we discuss it? It's an intellectually interesting effect. Patent systems should be considered harmful to nations that enforce or implement them, but that's another story for another day.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  I think you need to read up on your history. Here's an easy place to start. https://www.google.com/search?q=america+stole+britain+intellectual+property https://www.google.com/search?q=america+stole+britain+intell... There's plenty of documented evidence that America illegally stole tons of IP, often paid for by the state no less, otherwise known as industrial espionage. I'm sure they did it to all the European powers of the time too, probably plenty of examples of stolen tech from Spain, the Dutch, etc. As I'm sure Britain, etc. did to the civilizations more advanced to them in the centuries before too, you can bet there were proclamations about not taking technology out of the cities that had monopolies on them, and were smuggled out illegally or simply attacked for them.

dccoolgai 6y ago

Or there are agents from those places with paid motives to post those things. I've noticed whenever a China topic comes up, there are a suspicious number of apologist/whataboutist comments beyond even the normal HN-kneejerk-contrarianism.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Wumao.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  Your comment is 28 mins old and there are so many anti-China comments in this thread that are downvoted into grayness. Something is definitely odd. This is an American forum, 7:27am on Saturday morning.
  - Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
    I assure you, any high-traffic website with commentary that touches on economic or geostrategic interests of China will have wumao on the prowl. I have never seen posts get such quick and consistent downvoting as those that deal with China in a critical manner.
    - dccoolgai 6y ago
      Yeah, this is a big problem. I just searched "uighur" on comments... Some pretty appalling stuff, including stuff that seems to justify their genocide by accusing them of terrorism. Clearly something is wrong. Hopefully @dang will look at this at some point. We make a sport of busting FBs chops over policing disinfo, etc. And it looks like there are brazen actors on HN doing worse and we're ignoring it.
  - shalmanese 6y ago
    Because it's an intellectually lazy assertion that's never made with any sort of backing evidence and forstalls debate by preemptively painting any opinion you don't agree with as the work of paid shills. China sending wumao onto Hacker News would go against the vast majority of precedent we've been able to establish about Chinese disinformation campaigns. Overwhelmingly, active Chinese disinformation is produced in Chinese for a ethnic Chinese overseas audience with English only ever being provided as an afterthought. The Chinese strategy for shaping English debate about China has always involved economic punishment for powerful entities that broadcast "unacceptable" opinions like the NBA with HK or US airlines labelling Taiwan as a country on their websites. However, such pressures scale directly to the amount of financial stakes an entity has in China which means it has effectively no power in anonymous social forums. This can be evidenced by issues such as Hong Kong where, not only was Western opinion not receptive to the Chinese arguments on the issue, there wasn't even any form of broad awareness of what the Chinese arguments even were. To the extent that the Chinese narrative even made it over to the West (such as claims that the protestors were being paid by the CIA), they were overwhelmingly conveyed via Western media that only described them in order to debunk them. Like so much other disinformation about China, the whole wumao conspiracy is a bunch of lazy nonsense that is spewed by people with no real knowledge of China nor a desire for accuracy and thus gets reflexively downvoted on HN by people who are sick of lazy, bad arguments made against China when there are so many legitimate, good arguments that fail to be made because they don't fit neatly into a narrative.

adventured 6y ago

> I just can't understand why when it comes to geopolitics, HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? It's not HN, it's human nature, that's why whataboutism is universal. In most cases whataboutism is a nearly uncontrollable impulse, it's a mental sensation the person can barely contain. Whataboutism is used either to relieve anguish that the person feels, or to outlet hatred/rage. They're compelled by the stress they feel to outlet it. In the case of anguish, it's caused when the subject of a negative story - eg China - is being hit, the person desperately needs to redirect fire off of it, because it feels personal, they feel actual mental anguish from the story and need to make it stop. One way to lighten that anguish is to spread it around, try to normalize the negative (by trying to show that other countries are guilty too). Whataboutism out of hatred/dislike is a case where the person literally hates the redirect subject - eg the US - and looks for any excuse at any time to focus their rage onto it; in that case it's not about the focus subject, it's primarily about the redirect subject (the initial focus subject is merely the opportunity provider).

ckocagil 6y ago

I don't understand how this is surprising or why this is a bad thing. Comparing a country's actions to ethical ideals is great, but it is subjective and does not achieve much. The only realistic benchmark is to compare one country to another. There is also the aspect of hypocrisy that leaves a bad taste. Putin criticizing the lack of black rights in the US is just as hypocritical as the US claiming to take military action to promote democracy.

jmnicolas 6y ago

Because before giving lessons to others you should be irreproachable. What would you think of Dijkstra if you suddenly discovered that he still wrote goto infested spaghetti code after his notorious "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" paper ? So yes we should criticize China as the bad actor that it is, but let's not forget that the western world is hardly an example (a good one I mean ;)

klyrs 6y ago
Underneath any high-level programming language is a layer of goto-infested spaghetti code. Dijkstra lost the stomach for low level optimization and convinced generations of programmers that easy is better than efficient.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  I think you missed my point : it was about hypocrisy not about gotos ;) Anyway in my usecase, easy is better than efficient : I'm in my 12th year of coding desktop and backend apps in C# and my first time having to rethink my code because it was too slow was only last year where I had to use dictionaries instead of Linq for a project that manipulates a lot of data (yes using dictionaries instead of Linq is the extent of my "optimization" and it's enough). In those 12 years I never thought "if only I had a lower level, more efficient language than C#" (quite the opposite in fact). So IMO it all depends on what you do : of course if your code is deployed to something less powerful than an Arduino I understand that efficiency is paramount !

magicsmoke 6y ago

Because there's context around these topics beyond just China did something bad or the US did something bad, which is that China and the US are locked in a competition. In a competition, if you hobble yourself and your opponent doesn't, you lose. Not comparing the actions of both sides and only focusing on the actions of one is like judging a race by scrutinizing every detail of one racer while ignoring the other one doping himself either now or in the past and getting a major lead. It offends the fundamental human instinct for fairness. I'm reminded of this article that was posted a while ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-... TLDR: Everyone has an innate sense of justice and fairness, which drives us to engage in cooperative behavior and punish self-serving behavior and allows us to cooperate. However, we also tend to weigh our own good behavior more heavily and downplay our bad behaviors, and we do the opposite for others. This is necessary for us to push for harder bargains when cooperation is over and it's time to split the spoils. Claiming whataboutism seems like a major case of downplaying bad and unfair behavior when it is pointed out by brushing it off as nonexistent or not relevant to the debate over spoils.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

I believe there can be different intentions of invoking whataboutism, and under certain context, it can be a perfectly valid informal argument in a debate. The intentions of invoking whataboutism can be 1. Denial of criticism or shifting blame. "Because you had wrongdongs of a similar nature, your criticism of my wrongdoing is null and void." This is the original form of whataboutism, and it's not a legitimate argument. 2. Attack the opponent's double-standard and its authority on being the judge. "Because you had wrongdongs of a similar nature, you are not quantified for judging my wrongdoing." Often the discussion degrades to case (1) and becomes invalid. However, if the existence of wrongdoing is not denied, it can be valid in some cases. 3. Showing additional background of a problem. "Yes, I have wrongdoings. However, you have wrongdoings too, and social studies finds this type of wrongdings is a global problem and widespread in the modern world." This discussion argues the given problem must be examined at a broader context, not as an isolated evil by a single actor. This is a valid argument. 4. Treating the original problem from a different perspective. "If I have wrongdoings and you have wrongdoings, then can it be a possibility that (a) it isn't wrongdoing to begin with, or (b) it's inevitable, or (c) that it's an necessary evil?" Depending on the motivation of the speaker, it can be the same as (1) for denying criticism, but in a honest discussion, this can be valid too. The "wrongdoings" can be mass surveillance, war crimes, human right abuses, IP theif, and so on. For example, here are some applications of valid "whataboutism" argument. Using mass surveillance as an example. - "The NSA argues that Government X's foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. But what about the NSA?! As you see, this is not a real problem but only an excuse for discrediting others politically, and Government X's doing totally fine." This is an invalid argument and should be frowned upon. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? Thus, the problem of the privacy and freedom of Americans can never be resolved unless both harmful foreign and domestic surveillance have been removed or reformed. If the NSA is only focusing on the first issue, then it's not acting as a fair judge on this problem, and there are reasons to believe the NSA is only acting for its self-interest, not the actual problem." This can be a valid argument. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? The surveillance capabilities of the NSA is an order of magnitude greater than Foreign Nation X, hence, the threat from the NSA is greater and should be an issue of higher priority." This is valid argument. Whether the facts and its conclusion is true or false, can be subjected to further debates. - "The NSA argues that foreign surveillance is a threat to the privacy and freedom of Americans. While it's true, what about the NSA's domestic surveillance that was never really reformed? In addition, the clear evidence showed most liberal democracy governments have unchecked mass surveillance powers on citizens. Hence, it's only a symptom and ultimately, the real problem is ..." - Liberals: "Unchecked growth of power by secret services authorized by the President, and fueled by its war on terror." - Libertarian: "Ever-expanding state power in the modern age. " - Tech-critics: "Dangers enabled by omnipresence of computing and the Internet." - Infosec researchers: "Disregard of security and privacy in system designs." These are obviously valid arguments. -- In conclusion, under certain context, whataboutism can be a perfectly valid informal argument in a debate. > US/ WESTERN COUNTRIES did this before too and therefore no better than China I honestly believe this can possibly be a valid argument from some perspectives. But I don't want to start any argument, as I'm not interested in this particular debate. > Somehow US/western countries have to enter the discussion as a bad benchmark... In some cases, they are good benchmarks. For example, the legal protection of free speech in the United States has flaws, but arguably it's still one of the best in existence globally. Unfortunately, in other cases, they are a bad benchmark, and it's extremely problematic. For example, the government of the USA historically have a record of conduct illegal experiments on human subjects without their knowledge or consent, tries to persuade minority leaders to commit suicide, blatantly lies to Congress about the scope of their illegal programs, and works to overthrow democratically elected governments of other sovereign nations. Then why should a citizen of any nation-state have faith on the United States to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The argument above is invalid if I'm using it to shift blame. But it can be valid if it's meant to point out an inadequacy of the US Government or relying superpowers to ensure justice by enforcing International Laws. A hypothetical argument can follow it: If LessWrong's "friendly AI" is feasible and AGI is only 30 years away, it should take control of the world, at least on human rights issues, as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the scenario is unlikely.

yibg 6y ago

Stealing from a thief is still wrong, but a thief complaining about someone stealing their stuff loses a bit of punch.

hacker_newz 6y ago

How does preempting a hypothetical add to the conversation?

chillacy 6y ago
> Not really off tangent, > I just can't understand why... HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? I personally enjoy meta conversations but I hope OP realizes the irony of this comment.