7 ms·

The model I apply to, basically, everything about the past twenty years, is to compare it to the Industrial Revolution. I believe we're in the midst of the Info

The model I apply to, basically, everything about the past twenty years, is to compare it to the Industrial Revolution. I believe we're in the midst of the Information Revolution now and while history doesn't map to the present 1-1, it comes pretty close. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited. But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else. I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is. Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.

helloworld11 4y ago
You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective. It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time. We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier. Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily. It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.
digdugdirk 4y ago
There actually was another Information Revolution we can draw historical comparisons to - the printing press. The Lutheran Church is a direct outcome from that, as were some much more interesting and exciting events - check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for an entertaining overview. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophets-of-doom/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophe...
- Floegipoky 4y ago
  This is actually a great comparison, and we can look at the proliferation of anti-witchcraft propaganda leading to the brutal murders of thousands of women and queer people for a prototypical example of the very real damage caused by disinformation.
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    > and queer people Got a source for this?
    - dylan604 4y ago
      persecution of non-straight people is not new. are you wanting a source for linking queer and witchcraft specifically as one, as I'm not sure that's what the GP was intended even if the wording leans that way.
      - MonkeyClub 4y ago
        IMHO queer there meant non-conforming (“weird”), which would make sense: eccentric-looking people would draw the label of witchcraft.
      - CWuestefeld 4y ago
        It's hard to see what else might have been intended, since this phrase seems to be linked to the "anti-witchcraft propaganda" phrase, with nothing else dangling there to apply it to.
      - 4y ago
brnaftr361 4y ago
The problem is the law, the nation, the state. That is the exclusive attack surface. It has nothing to do with information.
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
An old idea that internet access should require certification like a car.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  It's possible to exist in modern society without a drivers's license. I'm not sure the same is true for the internet anymore.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Drivers find it quite uncomfortable to be without a car. If they don't use internet from birth, they shouldn't miss it. Or it can be an internet cafe or ATM/kiosk (for a public transport system).
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Too many institutions now presume internet access for that to be true, even here in Germany, despite many of the people around me with the meme that German bureaucracy is pre-digital. And I have a driving licence, but have had no need to drive since moving to Berlin.
      - MonkeyClub 4y ago
        > Too many institutions now presume internet access That should be (more of) a cause for concern, imho.
      - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        ATMs use internet, but don't give too much control to the user.
        ben_w 4y ago
        I'm not talking about ATMs. I'm taking about government functions, banking (can't invest shares on an ATM), taxation, how to find out which services can be accessed where and when, what schedule changes are planned for public transport, collecting parcels that have been redirected and finding out where they were redirected to, doctor appointments, and so on. Sometimes these things can be done without internet, but not always, and the current trend is moving more things online-only.
eternalban 4y ago
Just charge for tweets and posts, & like everything else the rich will do as they please and the rest of us will obey the law. I'm pretty sure that arrangement will quickly put an end to fears of "disinformation!" > to cause large-scale pollution Be Exxon and have expensive lawyers and you'll be fine. https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/exxon-valdez https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/exxon-valdez https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/News/Newsroom/News-releases/2022/0201_ExxonMobil-earns-23-billion-in-2021_initiates-10-billion-share-repurchase-program https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/News/Newsroom/News-releases... p.s. Looked at from another angle, I guess I'm proposing a thought experiment: Imagine if only billionaires, celebrities, or "papers of record" were permitted to opine. Would we be discussing the problem of disinformation and how to institutionally address it using police powers?
awb 4y ago
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. What about a private sector solution? We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time. It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria. It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think the private sector solution is currently being applied to junk mail, and the Republican party is suing Google over this? In general, even if it works, it risks becoming captured by the same interests as direct government censorship.
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    >it risks becoming captured by the same interests as direct government censorship It already is. >At least 51 senior officials worked with Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple or Google. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericfan/2022/03/07/beltway-big-tech-former-silicon-valley-execs-in-the-biden-administration/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericfan/2022/03/07/beltway-big-...
    - ben_w 4y ago
      That's neither necessary nor sufficient for government capture. It's also the wrong direction, as those are going from Big Tech to the government.
      - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
        The capture and revolving door definitely goes both ways. Although my comment may not be sufficient to prove anything, there's a lot to explore with this topic. For instance, here's an example in the other direction: >more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms. And Schumer's two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram. https://www.newsweek.com/why-chuck-schumer-trying-stop-antitrust-reform-opinion-1712773 https://www.newsweek.com/why-chuck-schumer-trying-stop-antit... This article is only about the one direction, but you can be sure the revolving door goes both ways in big-tech. Just look at all the ex-NATO officers currently wor
tbrownaw 4y ago
> We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is. This is contradictory. > We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?
- govg 4y ago
  It isn't in the parallel they are drawing - right now you have free permission to visit public property and forests and national parks but you still can't cause harm to others or the property (set fires). So while there is personal freedom, it is not at the cost of other people's freedom.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Obviously it’s contradictory, that’s the point. As to your second point, what about social networks not showing content that they believe to be objectionable. Does that count as “not forcing someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don’t want to?”
- munificent 4y ago
  No, it's opposing, not contradictory. "Contradictory" presumes that a given property is Boolean and thus if it isn't one value, it must be the other. Very few useful properties outside of the artificial worlds of logic and computing are Boolean. Most properties we are trying to design systems for out in the real world continuously varying and often multi-dimensional. That's why optimizing them requires difficult trade-offs.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    I think disinformation is not as a significant problem as it is often made out to be. It would not need immediate attention. It is the individual decision of some people to listen to it. Many of them know better, but they have a conflict with those that want to set themselves up to discern truth and wrong. Especially with topics like the pandemic I see no authority that could help here and maybe that isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.
bheadmaster 4y ago
Pollution is well-defined and easy to detect. "Information" and "misinformation" is not. The problem of "truth" is a philosophical one - how do you know that a particular claim is, indeed, true? Very few things in the world are directly provable. Even judges and juries get it wrong a lot, even when human lives - apparently the most valued things in society - are at stake. Your model has a fatal flaw in its assumption that "the truth" is something obvious that we all agree upon. It's not - it's subjective and complicated.
- govg 4y ago
  Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment. And even then we learn new things and have to revise opinions on what we define as "pollution" and what not. See the history of Asbestos, or of CFCs for examples of things we didn't think of as "polluting" initially or assumed the tradeoffs were worth it, only to later realize that they aren't.
  - CWuestefeld 4y ago
    We've been trying to find ways to discover truth for much much longer than we've been looking for pollution. I think consensus is that there are some things that are unprovable - e.g., the existence of a god. We know with a high degree of certainty, thanks to Kurt Godel and others, that there are things that cannot be proven.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    > Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment We also have centuries (even millennia) of experience studying the truth. Yet the problem of truth is still as hard as always. I don't see how could any amount of experience solve such fundamental problems.
    - fshr 4y ago
      I don't think the issue at hand is truths and lies, it's the ability to both communicate with hundreds of millions of people easily while at the same time also being able to create smaller silos of group think with no restriction on geography.
Amezarak 4y ago
There is nothing new about this. Mobs, riots, and mass unrest have occurred as a result of rumors, conspiracies, and "disinformation" since the beginning of human civilization. It was a major concern during the Constitutional Convention that: > In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men. What's different is we're coming out of a time when a very small class of people had near-total functional control (or so they thought) over mainstream media, so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable. The arguments you're making are not new arguments. They're the exact same arguments made by authoritarian regimes for millenia. From the article: > In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. The problem is dissent. Much of the government is run and controlled by a class of people whose beliefs and values are becoming increasingly divorced from other segments of the population. And rather than re-adjusting their policies and goals in line with a democratic consensus, they want to stay their course and tighten control of speech and even thought in the name of social order and harmony. None of this is new at all. 200 years ago, everyone had about the same power to reach people. Oh, sure, it was easier the richer you were, but the difference was not dramatic and wealth inequality was not as dramatic a factor. Then in the 20th to early 21st centuries, broadcast television and media consolidation put a lot of one-way power into the hands of a very small set of hands. Now everyone is on the same playing field once again.
- rnk 4y ago
  The issue is not the strawman you put up, where you mention it is scary to the leaders that people are getting access to information and making choices. The issue is that people are riling up large groups of people based on lies and making deadly threats (like Trump's "beat up the people in the crowd who are protesting"), leading to threats, attacks on govt - these attacks are based on absolute lies, and deadly threats of violence and some of them end up happening. Also your broad arguments about "authoritarian regimes did things, so they are bad". It's the specifics that matter. Dictators who controlled everything in say Russia also controlled the production of milk, that doesn't mean milk deliveries are authoritarian and bad. Everyone is not on the same level now. Some are willing to make incredibly outlandish claims about stolen elections, and make personal threats to others, they are fine with that and they have enough power to make it hard to stop them or counter their reach.
d23 4y ago
I wish HN had a way to bubble up or highlight comments from particular people on an opt-in basis. Your comments are always insightful and high quality.
- munificent 4y ago
  Thank you! It's a really nice community here and I get a lot out of participating.
- ilamont 4y ago
  I bookmark some of the outstanding contributors on this forum, usually because of regular insights or domain expertise. It’s quite amazing to read comments from deeply knowledgeable people, who in some cases have even been witnesses to history or inventors.
- perihelions 4y ago
  - "highlight comments from particular people" Would client-side uBlock work? ycombinator.com##:xpath(//a[@href="user?id=d23"]/parent::span[@class="comhead"]):style(background: linear-gradient(to right, darkorange, gold, #f6f6ef, 50%, #f6f6ef) !important)
thephyber 4y ago
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. We already have laws which provide penalties for 8+ categories of illegal speech: {Obscenity, Fighting words, Defamation, Child pornography, Perjury, Blackmail, Incitement to imminent lawless action, True threats, fraud, conspiracy to commit a felony, etc}. My assessment is the tools of the law (police departments, prosecutors, courts, and tort litigation) don't move at the scale of internet posters/commenters. How long did it take for Alex Jones to build a theory about the Newtown School Shooting kids' parents/families/investigators? He probably just remixed some 4Chan theory in a few minutes then went onto his show unscripted. How long (and how many resources) did it take the plaintiffs and their lawyers to gather evidence, do discovery, fight AJones's legal motions to delay the case? Literally years. The first case was finally settled 10 years after the shooting. The law doesn't move fast enough because of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[1]. New laws are unlikely to solve that problem. IMHO only very consistent prosecution of people that do violate the law would dissuade law breakers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- nradov 4y ago
  The law moves reasonably fast on criminal cases. The lawsuit against Alex Jones was a civil case, which are inherently less urgent. Many cases were also delayed due to the recent pandemic.
  - thephyber 4y ago
    Nope. I was almost on a jury involving a man that allegedly stole low value items. The case was tried 18 months after the crime. I might agree that the arrest typically happens quickly (if it happens at all) in violent crimes, but it is extremely slow for white collar crimes.
    - nradov 4y ago
      What's your point? 18 months to resolve a criminal case seems reasonable. There's no particular need to move faster. Delays in criminal cases usually happen with the consent of the defendant since they consider it advantageous to have more time, especially if they're not being held in jail. Defendants can usually accelerate the process if they insist on maximally exercising their 6th Amendment rights but most don't.
nradov 4y ago
No we don't need any more legislation to restrict or suppress freedom of expression. Our current laws are working fine. Today's "disinformation" occasionally becomes tomorrow's historical fact or accepted scientific theory. If, as a consequence, some people suffer incidental harm or take offense then that is a completely acceptable outcome.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else. From past research into the history of the Industrial Revolution where it comes to pollution, I've seen that there were many court cases brought up to oppose industrial pollution from factories on farmers and others' land. What happened in these cases is that contrary to all past legal precedent of landowners' property rights, the rulings went in favor of industry because it was seen to be in the collective good to see progress and that superseded the individual rights of the landowners to not have their land damaged by pollution. The lesson I see from the Industrial Revolution isn't one of dangerous force multipliers, but that ignoring individual rights always comes back to bite you. > We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. I think we all (or most of us) agree that individual rights exist. But what is this collective rights you're mentioning? How are rights possessed by a group that aren't possessed by individuals? And if so, which rights and which groups? And if collective rights exist and if they're ever in conflict with individual rights, why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
- munificent 4y ago
  > why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual? Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on? One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on? A simple answer about legality might be: "You can kill all of the fish in a lake that you own just as you can kill all of the fish in your fish tank, but not your neighbor's fish tank". The legal cases in the Industrial Revolution that cropped up were the equivalent of a factory owner dumping poison in a farmer's lake and a judge merely saying to the farmer, "That's progress, sucks to be you". A strict adherence to property rights could have prevented many environmental problems. PS: I'm obviously not familiar with your life experience and background, but for some reason it doesn't seem like you've encountered much in the way of libertarian style arguments on this before. I'm not here to do the proselytization thing (and I don't even think I'm a libertarian), but for the sake of enhancing your own arguments, I'd highly recommend looking into some libertarian-style environmentalist discussions on Reddit, looking into searches like "free-market environmentalism", or looking into libertarian-esque environmental think tanks like https://www.perc.org/ https://www.perc.org/ to gain a better understanding of what you're arguing against. > One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement. If you can come up with a better definition, I'd be open to hear it and noodle it over, but it sounds like there's no objective standard. I'm sure your intentions are good here, but a hypothetical imaginary person's rights could always end up trumping an actual person's rights. Think about what happened in much of history. There was no objective code of laws and if there was some judge like a king or tribe leader or high priest or something, he just based his decisions on whatever he felt might have been reasonable. It was always seen as a great civilizational progress for humanity to try and codify all laws into a legal system that could be objectively understood. Not sure that what you're arguing for, based on how you described it, is anything but a step backwards.

helloworld11 4y ago

You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective. It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time. We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier. Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily. It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.

digdugdirk 4y ago

There actually was another Information Revolution we can draw historical comparisons to - the printing press. The Lutheran Church is a direct outcome from that, as were some much more interesting and exciting events - check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for an entertaining overview. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophets-of-doom/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophe...

Floegipoky 4y ago
This is actually a great comparison, and we can look at the proliferation of anti-witchcraft propaganda leading to the brutal murders of thousands of women and queer people for a prototypical example of the very real damage caused by disinformation.
- Thorentis 4y ago
  > and queer people Got a source for this?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    persecution of non-straight people is not new. are you wanting a source for linking queer and witchcraft specifically as one, as I'm not sure that's what the GP was intended even if the wording leans that way.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      IMHO queer there meant non-conforming (“weird”), which would make sense: eccentric-looking people would draw the label of witchcraft.
    - CWuestefeld 4y ago
      It's hard to see what else might have been intended, since this phrase seems to be linked to the "anti-witchcraft propaganda" phrase, with nothing else dangling there to apply it to.
    - 4y ago

brnaftr361 4y ago

The problem is the law, the nation, the state. That is the exclusive attack surface. It has nothing to do with information.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

An old idea that internet access should require certification like a car.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
It's possible to exist in modern society without a drivers's license. I'm not sure the same is true for the internet anymore.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Drivers find it quite uncomfortable to be without a car. If they don't use internet from birth, they shouldn't miss it. Or it can be an internet cafe or ATM/kiosk (for a public transport system).
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Too many institutions now presume internet access for that to be true, even here in Germany, despite many of the people around me with the meme that German bureaucracy is pre-digital. And I have a driving licence, but have had no need to drive since moving to Berlin.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      > Too many institutions now presume internet access That should be (more of) a cause for concern, imho.
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      ATMs use internet, but don't give too much control to the user.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        I'm not talking about ATMs. I'm taking about government functions, banking (can't invest shares on an ATM), taxation, how to find out which services can be accessed where and when, what schedule changes are planned for public transport, collecting parcels that have been redirected and finding out where they were redirected to, doctor appointments, and so on. Sometimes these things can be done without internet, but not always, and the current trend is moving more things online-only.

eternalban 4y ago

Just charge for tweets and posts, & like everything else the rich will do as they please and the rest of us will obey the law. I'm pretty sure that arrangement will quickly put an end to fears of "disinformation!" > to cause large-scale pollution Be Exxon and have expensive lawyers and you'll be fine. https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/exxon-valdez https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/exxon-valdez https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/News/Newsroom/News-releases/2022/0201_ExxonMobil-earns-23-billion-in-2021_initiates-10-billion-share-repurchase-program https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/News/Newsroom/News-releases... p.s. Looked at from another angle, I guess I'm proposing a thought experiment: Imagine if only billionaires, celebrities, or "papers of record" were permitted to opine. Would we be discussing the problem of disinformation and how to institutionally address it using police powers?

awb 4y ago

> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. What about a private sector solution? We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time. It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria. It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.

ben_w 4y ago
I think the private sector solution is currently being applied to junk mail, and the Republican party is suing Google over this? In general, even if it works, it risks becoming captured by the same interests as direct government censorship.
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  >it risks becoming captured by the same interests as direct government censorship It already is. >At least 51 senior officials worked with Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple or Google. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericfan/2022/03/07/beltway-big-tech-former-silicon-valley-execs-in-the-biden-administration/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericfan/2022/03/07/beltway-big-...
  - ben_w 4y ago
    That's neither necessary nor sufficient for government capture. It's also the wrong direction, as those are going from Big Tech to the government.
    - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
      The capture and revolving door definitely goes both ways. Although my comment may not be sufficient to prove anything, there's a lot to explore with this topic. For instance, here's an example in the other direction: >more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms. And Schumer's two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram. https://www.newsweek.com/why-chuck-schumer-trying-stop-antitrust-reform-opinion-1712773 https://www.newsweek.com/why-chuck-schumer-trying-stop-antit... This article is only about the one direction, but you can be sure the revolving door goes both ways in big-tech. Just look at all the ex-NATO officers currently wor

tbrownaw 4y ago

> We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is. This is contradictory. > We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?

govg 4y ago
It isn't in the parallel they are drawing - right now you have free permission to visit public property and forests and national parks but you still can't cause harm to others or the property (set fires). So while there is personal freedom, it is not at the cost of other people's freedom.
colinmhayes 4y ago
Obviously it’s contradictory, that’s the point. As to your second point, what about social networks not showing content that they believe to be objectionable. Does that count as “not forcing someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don’t want to?”
munificent 4y ago
No, it's opposing, not contradictory. "Contradictory" presumes that a given property is Boolean and thus if it isn't one value, it must be the other. Very few useful properties outside of the artificial worlds of logic and computing are Boolean. Most properties we are trying to design systems for out in the real world continuously varying and often multi-dimensional. That's why optimizing them requires difficult trade-offs.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I think disinformation is not as a significant problem as it is often made out to be. It would not need immediate attention. It is the individual decision of some people to listen to it. Many of them know better, but they have a conflict with those that want to set themselves up to discern truth and wrong. Especially with topics like the pandemic I see no authority that could help here and maybe that isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.

bheadmaster 4y ago

Pollution is well-defined and easy to detect. "Information" and "misinformation" is not. The problem of "truth" is a philosophical one - how do you know that a particular claim is, indeed, true? Very few things in the world are directly provable. Even judges and juries get it wrong a lot, even when human lives - apparently the most valued things in society - are at stake. Your model has a fatal flaw in its assumption that "the truth" is something obvious that we all agree upon. It's not - it's subjective and complicated.

govg 4y ago
Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment. And even then we learn new things and have to revise opinions on what we define as "pollution" and what not. See the history of Asbestos, or of CFCs for examples of things we didn't think of as "polluting" initially or assumed the tradeoffs were worth it, only to later realize that they aren't.
- CWuestefeld 4y ago
  We've been trying to find ways to discover truth for much much longer than we've been looking for pollution. I think consensus is that there are some things that are unprovable - e.g., the existence of a god. We know with a high degree of certainty, thanks to Kurt Godel and others, that there are things that cannot be proven.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment We also have centuries (even millennia) of experience studying the truth. Yet the problem of truth is still as hard as always. I don't see how could any amount of experience solve such fundamental problems.
  - fshr 4y ago
    I don't think the issue at hand is truths and lies, it's the ability to both communicate with hundreds of millions of people easily while at the same time also being able to create smaller silos of group think with no restriction on geography.

Amezarak 4y ago

There is nothing new about this. Mobs, riots, and mass unrest have occurred as a result of rumors, conspiracies, and "disinformation" since the beginning of human civilization. It was a major concern during the Constitutional Convention that: > In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men. What's different is we're coming out of a time when a very small class of people had near-total functional control (or so they thought) over mainstream media, so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable. The arguments you're making are not new arguments. They're the exact same arguments made by authoritarian regimes for millenia. From the article: > In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. The problem is dissent. Much of the government is run and controlled by a class of people whose beliefs and values are becoming increasingly divorced from other segments of the population. And rather than re-adjusting their policies and goals in line with a democratic consensus, they want to stay their course and tighten control of speech and even thought in the name of social order and harmony. None of this is new at all. 200 years ago, everyone had about the same power to reach people. Oh, sure, it was easier the richer you were, but the difference was not dramatic and wealth inequality was not as dramatic a factor. Then in the 20th to early 21st centuries, broadcast television and media consolidation put a lot of one-way power into the hands of a very small set of hands. Now everyone is on the same playing field once again.

rnk 4y ago
The issue is not the strawman you put up, where you mention it is scary to the leaders that people are getting access to information and making choices. The issue is that people are riling up large groups of people based on lies and making deadly threats (like Trump's "beat up the people in the crowd who are protesting"), leading to threats, attacks on govt - these attacks are based on absolute lies, and deadly threats of violence and some of them end up happening. Also your broad arguments about "authoritarian regimes did things, so they are bad". It's the specifics that matter. Dictators who controlled everything in say Russia also controlled the production of milk, that doesn't mean milk deliveries are authoritarian and bad. Everyone is not on the same level now. Some are willing to make incredibly outlandish claims about stolen elections, and make personal threats to others, they are fine with that and they have enough power to make it hard to stop them or counter their reach.

d23 4y ago

I wish HN had a way to bubble up or highlight comments from particular people on an opt-in basis. Your comments are always insightful and high quality.

munificent 4y ago
Thank you! It's a really nice community here and I get a lot out of participating.
ilamont 4y ago
I bookmark some of the outstanding contributors on this forum, usually because of regular insights or domain expertise. It’s quite amazing to read comments from deeply knowledgeable people, who in some cases have even been witnesses to history or inventors.
perihelions 4y ago
- "highlight comments from particular people" Would client-side uBlock work? ycombinator.com##:xpath(//a[@href="user?id=d23"]/parent::span[@class="comhead"]):style(background: linear-gradient(to right, darkorange, gold, #f6f6ef, 50%, #f6f6ef) !important)

thephyber 4y ago

> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. We already have laws which provide penalties for 8+ categories of illegal speech: {Obscenity, Fighting words, Defamation, Child pornography, Perjury, Blackmail, Incitement to imminent lawless action, True threats, fraud, conspiracy to commit a felony, etc}. My assessment is the tools of the law (police departments, prosecutors, courts, and tort litigation) don't move at the scale of internet posters/commenters. How long did it take for Alex Jones to build a theory about the Newtown School Shooting kids' parents/families/investigators? He probably just remixed some 4Chan theory in a few minutes then went onto his show unscripted. How long (and how many resources) did it take the plaintiffs and their lawyers to gather evidence, do discovery, fight AJones's legal motions to delay the case? Literally years. The first case was finally settled 10 years after the shooting. The law doesn't move fast enough because of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[1]. New laws are unlikely to solve that problem. IMHO only very consistent prosecution of people that do violate the law would dissuade law breakers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

nradov 4y ago
The law moves reasonably fast on criminal cases. The lawsuit against Alex Jones was a civil case, which are inherently less urgent. Many cases were also delayed due to the recent pandemic.
- thephyber 4y ago
  Nope. I was almost on a jury involving a man that allegedly stole low value items. The case was tried 18 months after the crime. I might agree that the arrest typically happens quickly (if it happens at all) in violent crimes, but it is extremely slow for white collar crimes.
  - nradov 4y ago
    What's your point? 18 months to resolve a criminal case seems reasonable. There's no particular need to move faster. Delays in criminal cases usually happen with the consent of the defendant since they consider it advantageous to have more time, especially if they're not being held in jail. Defendants can usually accelerate the process if they insist on maximally exercising their 6th Amendment rights but most don't.

nradov 4y ago

No we don't need any more legislation to restrict or suppress freedom of expression. Our current laws are working fine. Today's "disinformation" occasionally becomes tomorrow's historical fact or accepted scientific theory. If, as a consequence, some people suffer incidental harm or take offense then that is a completely acceptable outcome.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else. From past research into the history of the Industrial Revolution where it comes to pollution, I've seen that there were many court cases brought up to oppose industrial pollution from factories on farmers and others' land. What happened in these cases is that contrary to all past legal precedent of landowners' property rights, the rulings went in favor of industry because it was seen to be in the collective good to see progress and that superseded the individual rights of the landowners to not have their land damaged by pollution. The lesson I see from the Industrial Revolution isn't one of dangerous force multipliers, but that ignoring individual rights always comes back to bite you. > We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights. I think we all (or most of us) agree that individual rights exist. But what is this collective rights you're mentioning? How are rights possessed by a group that aren't possessed by individuals? And if so, which rights and which groups? And if collective rights exist and if they're ever in conflict with individual rights, why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?

munificent 4y ago
> why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual? Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on? One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on? A simple answer about legality might be: "You can kill all of the fish in a lake that you own just as you can kill all of the fish in your fish tank, but not your neighbor's fish tank". The legal cases in the Industrial Revolution that cropped up were the equivalent of a factory owner dumping poison in a farmer's lake and a judge merely saying to the farmer, "That's progress, sucks to be you". A strict adherence to property rights could have prevented many environmental problems. PS: I'm obviously not familiar with your life experience and background, but for some reason it doesn't seem like you've encountered much in the way of libertarian style arguments on this before. I'm not here to do the proselytization thing (and I don't even think I'm a libertarian), but for the sake of enhancing your own arguments, I'd highly recommend looking into some libertarian-style environmentalist discussions on Reddit, looking into searches like "free-market environmentalism", or looking into libertarian-esque environmental think tanks like https://www.perc.org/ https://www.perc.org/ to gain a better understanding of what you're arguing against. > One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement. If you can come up with a better definition, I'd be open to hear it and noodle it over, but it sounds like there's no objective standard. I'm sure your intentions are good here, but a hypothetical imaginary person's rights could always end up trumping an actual person's rights. Think about what happened in much of history. There was no objective code of laws and if there was some judge like a king or tribe leader or high priest or something, he just based his decisions on whatever he felt might have been reasonable. It was always seen as a great civilizational progress for humanity to try and codify all laws into a legal system that could be objectively understood. Not sure that what you're arguing for, based on how you described it, is anything but a step backwards.