4 ms·

It's sad how much human effort is spend in creating obfuscation schemes, and then in analyzing them. Or creating proprietary things and then reverse engineering

It's sad how much human effort is spend in creating obfuscation schemes, and then in analyzing them. Or creating proprietary things and then reverse engineering them. Sometimes I wonder if we could just make everything open. No obfuscation, no captchas, just a neat API for everything. Of course that wouldn't work ceteris paribus, everything else unchanged, due to bad actors, spam, or just competitors who want to take your work. But if you'd change the incentives - make society non-adversarial, non-profit oriented - then all that gating and obfuscation would become unneccessary.

PradeetPatel 4y ago
Sadly we do not live in a post-scarcity world, competiting for resources in an adversarial manner is the driving force behind most individuals, corporations, and on a larger scale - nation states.
- gleenn 4y ago
  Also, in a slightly better light, people don't actually know what "best" is. Sure, there is a ton of ugly competition, but there is also some good forced exploration out of that to try alternatives which frequently can arrive at higher global maxima.
PUSH_AX 4y ago
This actually branches into a fascinating discussion about privacy. Arguably the world would be a much better place if corporations, governments and people were both unable and unwilling to keep secrets. Although, again, with all things being equal, good luck finding people to "go first".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
vasco 4y ago
You could say the same thing about locks, police, military. Those are way more wasteful and also just exist due to bad actors. I don't think there's a way around this, it'd be like wishing for no predators in nature so that natural evolution could just do the "good parts" and not have to optimise for survival.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "police, military. Those are way more wasteful and also just exist due to bad actors" I agree to your main point, but I would like to point out, that the definition of "bad actor" can be different, including "they are bad because they have something we want, so we need to deploy our military towards them"
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Earth is a PvP server.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stareatgoats 4y ago
> But if you'd change the incentives - make society non-adversarial, No. It is far better to recognize that there is atm no simple way we can rid the world of bad actors, i.e. not naïvely hope that some rather simple technical adjustment would somehow make society non-adversarial. Having fallen into that trap at least once I for one has come to realize the profound wisdom that the founding fathers possessed: the best we can do at this point and in the foreseeable future is to create checks and balances. Which in this case means making it difficult for bots and other bad actors.
- captainmuon 4y ago
  I agree that there is no simple technical solution, but I would argue that we need a social breakthough rather than technological advancement. Our economical and political system has been roughly the same for the last two or three centuries: Nation states, representative democracy, an economy based on wage labor. And although not every country is democratic, some variation of this system has spread almost everywhere. In the meanwhile we had incredible technological advancements. Electrification, modern chemistry, computers, the internet. What was the last comparable political and social disruption? I'd say the civil rights movement (1960s), or women's suffrage (1920s) were very important. But apart from that, we are mostly running the same social OS since the industrial revolution and the birth of modern nation states. The ideas of the founding fathers of the US and other thinkers of that era were great in their time - republicanism and a bourgeois revolution - compared to the absolutism that came before. But were are new ideas of this caliber? What is going to be the disrupting new 'tech' in politcal theory? (I realize it seems silly to jump from TikTok to systemic criticism, but I think in the fringes of the tech sector is a really good place where you can see fast moving technology chafing against fossilized society. And a lot of people here have the desire to make the world a better place - my point is that the way to go is not to invent radical new technology, but maybe by inventing new political ideas.)
  - stareatgoats 4y ago
    Ok this got deep quickly, but fine by me. I agree there are plenty of things to criticize with our present systems, be they democratic or autocratic. I mention "autocratic" only to show that one can't easily dispel that latter form of government yet (on a global scale it is verily on the rise again). Wage labor economy: yes, true representative democracy: no. That ideal only exists to a some degree in a relative few countries that have no beef with the current sole superpower. As for disruptions in social/technological matters, there is no denying that we live in interesting times, but as always it is perilous to ascertain if most relevant things are the same, or some things are the same, or no such things are the same as before (sameness is notoriously difficult to assess, at the extreme one might argue that all discernible things are ultimately if not categorically different). We can however unequivocally state that the argument (that things are now categorically different) has been heard before, many times, and has always turned out to be largely false - self interested deceptions even. Recent history has the "new economy" around the turn of the century claiming that everyone would from now be rich because internet, even more recently the crypto currency claims of a new social order. Going back a few hundred years we had the emerging laissez faire economists claiming that a totally free economy without state interventions would lead to world peace, a claim parroted by the socialists (socialism would lead to peace). Later the women's rights movement made the same claim - if only women would be in charge then ... Make what one will out of this, to me it is but one long list of falsehoods and half truths, and I've personally swiveled back to a position which is close to that of classical economy: humans are essentially (in a statistical mean sense) self interested, and will from that simple fact come into conflict with both other humans, the environment and the common good - and will skew everything in their perceived favor unless there are appropriate checks and balances. This is the ultimate factual circumstance that I see no sign of changing in the foreseeable future - through technological breakthroughs or anything else. We are still essentially in the age of the founding fathers in that regard. As for peace, the only path that has proven to be successful is the ad hoc and "organic" creation of ever larger political units: neighboring villages that were at each others throats during prehistory made friends under the rule of warlords, warlords became friends under the rule of a feudal power, feudal powers became friends after the conquest by empires, empires morphed into global trade organizations that requires global legal frameworks to work efficiently. That in my mind is incidentally the breakthrough for global peace that one might hope for in the next few hundred years - if we can keep the belligerents on all sides in sufficient check while global inequalities in power and wealth are evened out through ever more trade and international cooperation. But right now the odds seem to be that we blow everything up before that TBH.
contrapunctus 4y ago
I often wonder the same thing. A similar aim was expressed in at least one of RMS' essays. The other comments here remind me of how pessimistic and lacking in imagination the tech crowd tends to be. Because earlier attempts failed, does that make an endeavor "impossible"/"naive"? People cite "human nature", but forget that there exist and have existed systems of living, radically different from what they are used to, which gave rise to completely different "human nature" - or perhaps merely gave it a healthier environment, so it manifested very differently. (This "problem" is frequently refuted in anarchist texts.) I'll leave some links which I think are relevant to this quest. I hope they provide some answers, or at least provoke further searching. 1. https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t... 2. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed... 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching I hope we find a way. And for those looking and trying to move beyond the status quo, I supply a maxim to bear in mind when facing the unimaginative and the complacent - "It's always impossible until it's done."

PradeetPatel 4y ago

Sadly we do not live in a post-scarcity world, competiting for resources in an adversarial manner is the driving force behind most individuals, corporations, and on a larger scale - nation states.

gleenn 4y ago
Also, in a slightly better light, people don't actually know what "best" is. Sure, there is a ton of ugly competition, but there is also some good forced exploration out of that to try alternatives which frequently can arrive at higher global maxima.

PUSH_AX 4y ago

This actually branches into a fascinating discussion about privacy. Arguably the world would be a much better place if corporations, governments and people were both unable and unwilling to keep secrets. Although, again, with all things being equal, good luck finding people to "go first".

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

vasco 4y ago

You could say the same thing about locks, police, military. Those are way more wasteful and also just exist due to bad actors. I don't think there's a way around this, it'd be like wishing for no predators in nature so that natural evolution could just do the "good parts" and not have to optimise for survival.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"police, military. Those are way more wasteful and also just exist due to bad actors" I agree to your main point, but I would like to point out, that the definition of "bad actor" can be different, including "they are bad because they have something we want, so we need to deploy our military towards them"
HPsquared 4y ago
Earth is a PvP server.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stareatgoats 4y ago

> But if you'd change the incentives - make society non-adversarial, No. It is far better to recognize that there is atm no simple way we can rid the world of bad actors, i.e. not naïvely hope that some rather simple technical adjustment would somehow make society non-adversarial. Having fallen into that trap at least once I for one has come to realize the profound wisdom that the founding fathers possessed: the best we can do at this point and in the foreseeable future is to create checks and balances. Which in this case means making it difficult for bots and other bad actors.

captainmuon 4y ago
I agree that there is no simple technical solution, but I would argue that we need a social breakthough rather than technological advancement. Our economical and political system has been roughly the same for the last two or three centuries: Nation states, representative democracy, an economy based on wage labor. And although not every country is democratic, some variation of this system has spread almost everywhere. In the meanwhile we had incredible technological advancements. Electrification, modern chemistry, computers, the internet. What was the last comparable political and social disruption? I'd say the civil rights movement (1960s), or women's suffrage (1920s) were very important. But apart from that, we are mostly running the same social OS since the industrial revolution and the birth of modern nation states. The ideas of the founding fathers of the US and other thinkers of that era were great in their time - republicanism and a bourgeois revolution - compared to the absolutism that came before. But were are new ideas of this caliber? What is going to be the disrupting new 'tech' in politcal theory? (I realize it seems silly to jump from TikTok to systemic criticism, but I think in the fringes of the tech sector is a really good place where you can see fast moving technology chafing against fossilized society. And a lot of people here have the desire to make the world a better place - my point is that the way to go is not to invent radical new technology, but maybe by inventing new political ideas.)
- stareatgoats 4y ago
  Ok this got deep quickly, but fine by me. I agree there are plenty of things to criticize with our present systems, be they democratic or autocratic. I mention "autocratic" only to show that one can't easily dispel that latter form of government yet (on a global scale it is verily on the rise again). Wage labor economy: yes, true representative democracy: no. That ideal only exists to a some degree in a relative few countries that have no beef with the current sole superpower. As for disruptions in social/technological matters, there is no denying that we live in interesting times, but as always it is perilous to ascertain if most relevant things are the same, or some things are the same, or no such things are the same as before (sameness is notoriously difficult to assess, at the extreme one might argue that all discernible things are ultimately if not categorically different). We can however unequivocally state that the argument (that things are now categorically different) has been heard before, many times, and has always turned out to be largely false - self interested deceptions even. Recent history has the "new economy" around the turn of the century claiming that everyone would from now be rich because internet, even more recently the crypto currency claims of a new social order. Going back a few hundred years we had the emerging laissez faire economists claiming that a totally free economy without state interventions would lead to world peace, a claim parroted by the socialists (socialism would lead to peace). Later the women's rights movement made the same claim - if only women would be in charge then ... Make what one will out of this, to me it is but one long list of falsehoods and half truths, and I've personally swiveled back to a position which is close to that of classical economy: humans are essentially (in a statistical mean sense) self interested, and will from that simple fact come into conflict with both other humans, the environment and the common good - and will skew everything in their perceived favor unless there are appropriate checks and balances. This is the ultimate factual circumstance that I see no sign of changing in the foreseeable future - through technological breakthroughs or anything else. We are still essentially in the age of the founding fathers in that regard. As for peace, the only path that has proven to be successful is the ad hoc and "organic" creation of ever larger political units: neighboring villages that were at each others throats during prehistory made friends under the rule of warlords, warlords became friends under the rule of a feudal power, feudal powers became friends after the conquest by empires, empires morphed into global trade organizations that requires global legal frameworks to work efficiently. That in my mind is incidentally the breakthrough for global peace that one might hope for in the next few hundred years - if we can keep the belligerents on all sides in sufficient check while global inequalities in power and wealth are evened out through ever more trade and international cooperation. But right now the odds seem to be that we blow everything up before that TBH.

contrapunctus 4y ago

I often wonder the same thing. A similar aim was expressed in at least one of RMS' essays. The other comments here remind me of how pessimistic and lacking in imagination the tech crowd tends to be. Because earlier attempts failed, does that make an endeavor "impossible"/"naive"? People cite "human nature", but forget that there exist and have existed systems of living, radically different from what they are used to, which gave rise to completely different "human nature" - or perhaps merely gave it a healthier environment, so it manifested very differently. (This "problem" is frequently refuted in anarchist texts.) I'll leave some links which I think are relevant to this quest. I hope they provide some answers, or at least provoke further searching. 1. https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t... 2. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed... 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching I hope we find a way. And for those looking and trying to move beyond the status quo, I supply a maxim to bear in mind when facing the unimaginative and the complacent - "It's always impossible until it's done."