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Its possible for young people to make these mistakes. My wife is not an old man and her default position is not to defend e2e encryption. So all it takes is a s

Its possible for young people to make these mistakes. My wife is not an old man and her default position is not to defend e2e encryption. So all it takes is a spurious argument against it (think of the children!) and without skin in the game she is happy to go along. The argument is about proportional gain vs proportional loss and she is not aware of the devastating loss of privacy that would come from banning strong safe encryption.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
You could prevent this by teaching rational thinking and cognitive biases at the school level, but I assume the reason that hasn’t happened yet because said students would start calling out the hyperbole that politicians and business people often like to employ.
- gryn 3y ago
  It Would not be enough. Good unbiased Thinking requires effort. To optimize this there are caching mechanisms at multiple levels, from inside your brain to the societal level to save the energy required to do the thinking. If you deem that cache and all future ones to be invalid(untrustworthy) you'll have to do a lot of thinking from scratch. If you want to practically brick such agent you'll just need to do a denial of service by bringing a huge deluge of claims that they have to spend more than their lifetime thinking through all of them critically.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I am not going to jump to the bait of defending my own wife as a rational person. Instead I'll just point out that difference in information is not difference in ability. She just wasn't aware encryption was used basically everywhere, and so could be forgiven for not having at hand the information to refute the assertion that some back doors in one algorithm or system is harmless. Only an education in these subjects will help, or a widespread awareness campaign by educated folks. Or even a law protecting it as a fundamental right. Just as I criticize her field all the time, and am quickly embarrassed by my presumption of hyper rational super powers. Or at least I was for years.. I'm getting better.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

You could prevent this by teaching rational thinking and cognitive biases at the school level, but I assume the reason that hasn’t happened yet because said students would start calling out the hyperbole that politicians and business people often like to employ.

gryn 3y ago
It Would not be enough. Good unbiased Thinking requires effort. To optimize this there are caching mechanisms at multiple levels, from inside your brain to the societal level to save the energy required to do the thinking. If you deem that cache and all future ones to be invalid(untrustworthy) you'll have to do a lot of thinking from scratch. If you want to practically brick such agent you'll just need to do a denial of service by bringing a huge deluge of claims that they have to spend more than their lifetime thinking through all of them critically.
jvanderbot 3y ago
I am not going to jump to the bait of defending my own wife as a rational person. Instead I'll just point out that difference in information is not difference in ability. She just wasn't aware encryption was used basically everywhere, and so could be forgiven for not having at hand the information to refute the assertion that some back doors in one algorithm or system is harmless. Only an education in these subjects will help, or a widespread awareness campaign by educated folks. Or even a law protecting it as a fundamental right. Just as I criticize her field all the time, and am quickly embarrassed by my presumption of hyper rational super powers. Or at least I was for years.. I'm getting better.