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Do you think Obama is appealing to non subject matter experts because they're reasonable, or ignorant?

by smokeyj 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
comex 13y ago
I'd say the difference in view between subject matter experts and others has a number of causes. Some are pure ignorance: for example, most people do not know how tenuous the security of the Internet already is, and thus how harmful it is to try to actively subvert it. But those can only really be part of the story; security protocols seemingly haven't been affected all that much in practice (c.f. Dual EC's brokenness in OpenSSL), and the core question of whether it is acceptable to spy on private communications doesn't really depend on technical details (indeed, there was plenty of anger over just spying on plain-old-telephone-service records, which most of the people here don't know those details about). So I would also nominate... - More technically inclined people have more (for some, I'd say an order of magnitude more, however you want to define that) of their life online, so they (a) have more data online and thus more to lose, and (b) tend to care much more about anything which affects their activities, since it is more important to them. - Having a connection, direct or broad, with the technologies and the people responsible for securing things can make their subversion feel more violating; so can knowing that many things (email, Google's backend) could have been secured better but weren't, partially due to a false belief that the US Internet didn't need to be treated as an adversary. - Connections in the "tech community" causing a bandwagon effect in topics that spread well beyond technology itself. In the context of one forum, such as this one, this is quite clear (the political norm here is very far from the mainstream in areas that have nothing to do with tech); less so the more broadly you define the community, but I think there is some group bias to be found even if you include every programmer in the US.
res0nat0r 13y ago
The people he's appealing to are the majority, SME's or not.

Do you think Obama is appealing to non subject matter experts because they're reasonable, or ignorant?

by smokeyj 13y ago

Do you think Obama is appealing to non subject matter experts because they're reasonable, or ignorant?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

comex 13y ago

I'd say the difference in view between subject matter experts and others has a number of causes. Some are pure ignorance: for example, most people do not know how tenuous the security of the Internet already is, and thus how harmful it is to try to actively subvert it. But those can only really be part of the story; security protocols seemingly haven't been affected all that much in practice (c.f. Dual EC's brokenness in OpenSSL), and the core question of whether it is acceptable to spy on private communications doesn't really depend on technical details (indeed, there was plenty of anger over just spying on plain-old-telephone-service records, which most of the people here don't know those details about). So I would also nominate... - More technically inclined people have more (for some, I'd say an order of magnitude more, however you want to define that) of their life online, so they (a) have more data online and thus more to lose, and (b) tend to care much more about anything which affects their activities, since it is more important to them. - Having a connection, direct or broad, with the technologies and the people responsible for securing things can make their subversion feel more violating; so can knowing that many things (email, Google's backend) could have been secured better but weren't, partially due to a false belief that the US Internet didn't need to be treated as an adversary. - Connections in the "tech community" causing a bandwagon effect in topics that spread well beyond technology itself. In the context of one forum, such as this one, this is quite clear (the political norm here is very far from the mainstream in areas that have nothing to do with tech); less so the more broadly you define the community, but I think there is some group bias to be found even if you include every programmer in the US.

res0nat0r 13y ago

The people he's appealing to are the majority, SME's or not.