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> I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to coop

> I have an intuition that personal privacy is important in maintaining democracy. I don't think this is true. People need social pressure of some kind to cooperate. It could be positive pressures like getting positive feedback from peers, or negative feedback in the form of shame from peers. Authenticity is important here, to ensure that one's peers can provide accurate feedback (both positive and negative). Anonymity breaks this model, allowing people to pretend to have one viewpoint in order to reap the positive rewards, while simultaneously allowing them to dodge the negative feedback for antisocial behaviors. You needn't look further than the behavior of pseudonymous commenters on the Internet to see this play out. So many "normal" people are capable of being complete assholes online because they're able to hide those actions from those who can impose social consequences. I mean, if I found out a close friend was the kind of person who demonstrates the kind of casual cruelty that online trolls exude, I might stop being their friend. That's not too say that the benefits of privacy are all bad. Vulnerable people certainly benefit greatly from privacy, especially in adversarial environments... But perhaps the answer in less adversarial environments (i.e. direct/indirect democracies) more often isn't "more privacy", but "less judgement"? The other framing for this question involves trust. Anonymity undermines trust, but trust is _required_ for coordinated action. From this perspective isn't pretty obvious that democracies and privacy pursue opposing goals. Put differently, when it comes to voting, I don't think it's a good idea to incentivize lying--or worse still, actively promote it as a positive. If making votes public causes negative externalities, perhaps there are solutions other than "let people lie about how they vote"?

freeopinion 3y ago
Not all anonymous behavior is antisocial. Take, for example, people who sheltered Jews during WWII. I suppose by some definition this is antisocial if you define "antisocial" as bucking local society. But by that definition democracy always leads to antisocial outcomes. This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable. If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy. I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?

freeopinion 3y ago

Not all anonymous behavior is antisocial. Take, for example, people who sheltered Jews during WWII. I suppose by some definition this is antisocial if you define "antisocial" as bucking local society. But by that definition democracy always leads to antisocial outcomes. This quote from George Bernard Shaw highlights the value of some "antisocial" behavior and seems like a rather democratic ideal: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Some people can be publicly unreasonable. We have unpleasant names and consequences for such people, as you demonstrate. Other people can be privately unreasonable. If all progress depends on the unreasonable man, isn't there value in facilitating cowards to be unreasonable? Obviously a great deal of damage is also done by unreasonable people. But I suspect that the balance of a few heros outweighs the many villains and it is better to err on the side of individual privacy. I just wonder why I promote individual privacy while discouraging government privacy. What arguments can be made for or against that seeming contradiction?