I think it’ll help this discussion if you sketch an alternate trajectory for the future that you actually believe is possible to achieve with non-trivial likelihood.
Can you convert all 8 billion people to Buddhism?
Can you convince all 8 billion people to stop using information technology?
Can you convince all people who have surveillance powers to not use them, and find some alternate method of reducing their anxiety?
(This is assuming anxiety is what is driving them to use the power in the first place, which is already a shaky assumption IMO)
My research does contain implicit assumptions such as “I don’t know how to convert all 8 billion people to any single value system, and I’m not seriously trying to do this because I don’t know how to do it.”
But what future do you value? Personally, I don’t want to decrease the variances of life, but I do want to increase the stability.
In either case, I think my answer is “Invest in the growth and maturation of the individual, not in the external structures that we crudely use to keep people in check”
Can you convince all people who have surveillance powers to not use them
No, but we can create systems in which surveillance is impossible from an information-theoritic perspective. Web 3.0 will likely do this unless somebody stops it, and there’s ways to stop it too (you could for instance argue that whoever create these systems are aiding criminals and terrorists)
Anxiety seems to be why individual people prefer transparency of information, but it’s not why the system prefers it. The system merely exploits the weakness of the population to legitimize its own growth and to further its control of society.
Converting everyone to a single value system is not easy. But we can improve the average person and thus improve society in that way, or we can start teaching people various important things so that they don’t have to learn them the hard way. One thing I’d like to see improved in society is parenting, it seems to have gotten worse lately, and it’s leading to deterioration of the average person and thus a general worsening of society.
A society of weak people leads to fear, and fear leads to mistrust which leads to low-trust societies. By weak, I mean people who run away from trauma rather than overcoming it. You simply just need to process uncomfortable information successfully to grow, it’s not even that difficult, it just requires a bunch of courage. We’re all going to die sometime, but not all of us suffer from this idea and seek to run away by drinking or distracting ourselves with entertainment. Sometimes, it’s even possible to turn unpleasant realities into optimism and hope, and this is basically what maturity and development is
I think my answer is “Invest in the growth and maturation of the individual, not in the external structures that we crudely use to keep people in check”
This sounds good as an ideal, it is one way to go about it. If you know of any high-leverage ways for a few people to push society in this direction, I’d be interested in hearing about them.
One thing I’d like to see improved in society is parenting
Agreed! And there are likely high-leverage ways to work on this (such as making youtube videos about it for future parents).
I liked your writeup on how emotional growth of individuals helps society.
No, but we can create systems in which surveillance is impossible from an information-theoritic perspective. Web 3.0 will likely do this unless somebody stops it
As someone who used to work in the cryptocurrency space, I’m quite pessimistic on most people from that space solving this. The incentives are not in favour of it (privacy projects don’t make as much revenue as other projects, and making meme coins can be even more profitable than aiming for revenue). And the culture is only mildly in favour of it (most people in cryptocurrency space don’t seem to deeply understand software or cybersecurity, or why our current internet lacks privacy in the first place).
A few rare individuals from the space could still make advances in privacy (my blog has some ideas how), I’d be happy to connect with anyone making that happen.
“The problems is that people don’t do X, how do we make them?”
“Just do Y”
“The problem is that people don’t do Y, how do we make them?”
“Just do Z”
...
To name some power upstream factors, I’d say “Increase the social value of growth and maturity”. I guess this is what we did in the past, actually. Then people started complaining that our standards were harsh because it made losers low value, and then they gave power and benefits to the status of victim, and then people started competing in playing the victim rather than in improving their character to something worthy of respect.
By the way, another powerful influence in the worsening of society seems to be large companies who play on social norms, personal needs, and social perception in order to make money. “Real men do ___”, “___ is pretentious”, “Doing ___ is cringe”. Statements like this influence how people behave and what they strive for, since the vast majority of people want to appear in a way that others approve of. We must have fallen a long way as a society, for the only positive pressure I can think of is neo-nazis who encourage others to improve themselves (to read old books and lift weights)
Let’s see .. People are doing away with family core values, claiming that it’s getting in their way of freedom (but I think that it’s an immature dislike of responsibility and obligation, with a dash of narcissism which makes people avoid actions which do not benefit them personally). Family bonds also seem to be weakning because of politics, some families split apart because of disagreements on who to vote for, and this is a new problem to me, I don’t recall hearing of such things before 2016.
Another factor making things worse is that the media reports on the absolutely stupidest people that they can find, in order to make the “political enemy” look as bad as possible. But this has the side-effect of people overestimating themselves. If somebody felt they were a math genius for knowing basic trig functions, they’d walk around feeling smug, never pushing themselves into university-level maths.
Here’s a quote from a book from 2005 (it’s a book on dating by the way):
“TO GIVE you an impression of how much things have been dumbed down, consider the Lord of the Rings. Today, people treat it as an epic adult story that is a bit ‘too long’. When it was published, it was a simple children’s story. A simple children’s story is now an adult epic! And is Alice in Wonderland now considered ‘literature’? Perish the thought.”
Youtube videos is not a bad idea, by the way!
The incentives are not in favour of it
That’s a shame. When I search “web 3.0” the results seem to hint that people understand the problem they’re trying to fix, and fixing the problem leads to structures which are resistant against giant companies, and this must improve privacy (if it doesn’t, then the design will be the same as what it’s replacing, just with somebody else in charge. So over time, corruption will kick in, and we’ll be back where we started. The structure itself must be corruption-resistant)
There are people in the world who enjoy privacy and freedom and such, and it’s not just criminals. But their products are not as mainsteam as they used to be, the only privacy-oriented one I frequently hear about is protonmail. Mega.io also claims to be pro-privacy… But somehow piracy is against its rules? If it can detect if I upload copyrighted content to my private storage, then it’s not a private storage. I’m not sure how that works. Many services who claim to be secure and pro-privacy seem to be lying, or at least using these words loosely or in a relative rather than absolute sense.
To name some power upstream factors, I’d say “Increase the social value of growth and maturity”
How to actually do this?
It’s easy to say “I wish XYZ were high status in society”. I’m interested in concrete steps a few individuals like you or me can take. Ultimately all this world building has to translate it decisions and actions taken by you and me and other people listening to us, not a hypothetical member of society.
I agree you are pointing at real problems mostly.
When I search “web 3.0” the results seem to hint that people understand the problem they’re trying to fix, and fixing the problem leads to structures which are resistant against giant companies, and this must improve privacy (if it doesn’t, then the design will be the same as what it’s replacing, just with somebody else in charge. So over time, corruption will kick in, and we’ll be back where we started. The structure itself must be corruption-resistant)
I agree we need to think systemically about incentives.
People in web3 often understand that deteriorating user privacy means more money than protecting it. They tend to not ask deeper questions like:
why does cybersecurity favour offence over defence? (If it favoured defence instead, it might be possible for offence to be more profitable and yet lose) Software complexity is a reason cybersecurity is hard.
why does violating user privacy make so much money? why does Google’s ad model make more money than any of the other business models? Why did Apple escape this trap so far?
why does Tor not scale? In general most people in Web3 don’t talk about privacy at IP address and packet level, they often talk about just ensuring blockchain transactions aren’t doxxable
Well, we somehow changed smoking from being cool to being a stupid, expensive and unhealthy addiction. I think the method is about the same here. But the steps an individual can take are very limited. In politics, you have millons of people trying to convert other people into their own ideology, so if it was easy for an individual to change the values of society, we’d have extremists all over.
Anyway, you’d probably need to start a Youtube channel or something. Combining competence and simplicity, you could make content that most people could understand, and become popular doing that. “Hoe math” comes to mind as an example. Jordan Peterson and other such people are a little more intellectual, but there’s also a large amount of people who do not understand them. Plus, if you don’t run the account anonymously, you’d take some risks to your reputation proportional to how controversial your message is.
People in web3 often understand that deteriorating user privacy means more money than protecting it
That’s a shame. Why are they in web3 in the first place, then? The only difference is the design, and from what I’ve seen, designs which give power to the users rather than some centralized mega-corporation.
Why does cybersecurity favour offence over defence?
I think this is due to attack-defense asymmetry. Attackers have to find just one vulnerability, defenders have to stop all attacks. I do however agree that very few people ask these questions.
I think Tor would scale no problem if more people used it, but it has the same problem has 8chan and the privacy-focused products and websites have: All the bad people (and those who were banned on most other sites) flock there first, and they create a scary environment or reputation, and that makes normal people not want to go there/use the service. Many privacy-oriented apps have the reputation of being used by criminals and pedophiles.
This problem would go away if there was more places where privacy was valued, since the “bad people” density would go down as the thing in question became more popular.
But I’ve noticed that everything gets worse over time. In order to have good products, we need new ones to be made. Skype sucked, then people jumped to Discord. Now Discord sucks, so people might soon jump to something new. It’s both “enshittification” and incentives.
Taxes go up over time. We get more laws, more rules, more regulations, more advertisement, more ads. The more power a structure has, the worse it seems to treat those inside of it, and the less fair it becomes. Check out this 1999 ad for Google it’s a process similar to corruption, and the only solution seems to be revolutions or collective agreements to seek out alternatives when things get bad enough. Replacing things is less costly than fixing them, which is probably why deaths and births exist. Nature just starts over in cycles, with the length of each cycle being inversely proportional to the size of the structure (average life span of companies in America seem to be 15 years, and the average life span of nations seem to be about 150 years, the average life span of a civilization seems to be 336 years)
So, in my mental model of the world, corruption and DNA damage is the same thing, enshittification is similar to cancer, and nothing lives forever because bloat/complexity/damage accumulates until the structure dies. But I can only explain how things are, coming up with solution is much more difficult.
I don’t think Tor scales in current form because it relies on altruistic donors to provide bandwidth. I agree there may be a way to scale it that doesn’t rely on altruism.
I agree you’re pointing at an important problem. Namely when there’s a large structure aimed at achieving some task for users, and it deliberately does it poorly, some of our best solutions are to ensure low cost-of-exit for users and allow for competing alternatives.
This can be slow and wasteful as millions of people need to be fired, billions of dollars of equipment lost etc everytime a large company dies and is outcompeted. In the worst case this is entire countries and continents dying a slow death while their citizens are poached by other countries or left with an inferior quality of life.
If there were incentives to fix large structures from the inside or alternatively, a way solve large tasks without requiring large top-down structures, that might improve the status quo.
Sorry for delay in reply.
I think it’ll help this discussion if you sketch an alternate trajectory for the future that you actually believe is possible to achieve with non-trivial likelihood.
Can you convert all 8 billion people to Buddhism?
Can you convince all 8 billion people to stop using information technology?
Can you convince all people who have surveillance powers to not use them, and find some alternate method of reducing their anxiety?
(This is assuming anxiety is what is driving them to use the power in the first place, which is already a shaky assumption IMO)
My research does contain implicit assumptions such as “I don’t know how to convert all 8 billion people to any single value system, and I’m not seriously trying to do this because I don’t know how to do it.”
All good! I wrote a long response after all.
But what future do you value? Personally, I don’t want to decrease the variances of life, but I do want to increase the stability.
In either case, I think my answer is “Invest in the growth and maturation of the individual, not in the external structures that we crudely use to keep people in check”
No, but we can create systems in which surveillance is impossible from an information-theoritic perspective. Web 3.0 will likely do this unless somebody stops it, and there’s ways to stop it too (you could for instance argue that whoever create these systems are aiding criminals and terrorists)
Anxiety seems to be why individual people prefer transparency of information, but it’s not why the system prefers it. The system merely exploits the weakness of the population to legitimize its own growth and to further its control of society.
Converting everyone to a single value system is not easy. But we can improve the average person and thus improve society in that way, or we can start teaching people various important things so that they don’t have to learn them the hard way. One thing I’d like to see improved in society is parenting, it seems to have gotten worse lately, and it’s leading to deterioration of the average person and thus a general worsening of society.
A society of weak people leads to fear, and fear leads to mistrust which leads to low-trust societies. By weak, I mean people who run away from trauma rather than overcoming it. You simply just need to process uncomfortable information successfully to grow, it’s not even that difficult, it just requires a bunch of courage. We’re all going to die sometime, but not all of us suffer from this idea and seek to run away by drinking or distracting ourselves with entertainment. Sometimes, it’s even possible to turn unpleasant realities into optimism and hope, and this is basically what maturity and development is
Thanks for answering.
This sounds good as an ideal, it is one way to go about it. If you know of any high-leverage ways for a few people to push society in this direction, I’d be interested in hearing about them.
Agreed! And there are likely high-leverage ways to work on this (such as making youtube videos about it for future parents).
I liked your writeup on how emotional growth of individuals helps society.
As someone who used to work in the cryptocurrency space, I’m quite pessimistic on most people from that space solving this. The incentives are not in favour of it (privacy projects don’t make as much revenue as other projects, and making meme coins can be even more profitable than aiming for revenue). And the culture is only mildly in favour of it (most people in cryptocurrency space don’t seem to deeply understand software or cybersecurity, or why our current internet lacks privacy in the first place).
A few rare individuals from the space could still make advances in privacy (my blog has some ideas how), I’d be happy to connect with anyone making that happen.
This seems like a problem of infinite regress.
“Solving it is easy, just do X”
“The problems is that people don’t do X, how do we make them?”
“Just do Y”
“The problem is that people don’t do Y, how do we make them?”
“Just do Z”
...
To name some power upstream factors, I’d say “Increase the social value of growth and maturity”. I guess this is what we did in the past, actually. Then people started complaining that our standards were harsh because it made losers low value, and then they gave power and benefits to the status of victim, and then people started competing in playing the victim rather than in improving their character to something worthy of respect.
By the way, another powerful influence in the worsening of society seems to be large companies who play on social norms, personal needs, and social perception in order to make money. “Real men do ___”, “___ is pretentious”, “Doing ___ is cringe”. Statements like this influence how people behave and what they strive for, since the vast majority of people want to appear in a way that others approve of. We must have fallen a long way as a society, for the only positive pressure I can think of is neo-nazis who encourage others to improve themselves (to read old books and lift weights)
Let’s see .. People are doing away with family core values, claiming that it’s getting in their way of freedom (but I think that it’s an immature dislike of responsibility and obligation, with a dash of narcissism which makes people avoid actions which do not benefit them personally). Family bonds also seem to be weakning because of politics, some families split apart because of disagreements on who to vote for, and this is a new problem to me, I don’t recall hearing of such things before 2016.
Another factor making things worse is that the media reports on the absolutely stupidest people that they can find, in order to make the “political enemy” look as bad as possible. But this has the side-effect of people overestimating themselves. If somebody felt they were a math genius for knowing basic trig functions, they’d walk around feeling smug, never pushing themselves into university-level maths.
Here’s a quote from a book from 2005 (it’s a book on dating by the way):
“TO GIVE you an impression of how much things have been dumbed down, consider the Lord of the Rings. Today, people treat it as an epic adult story that is a bit ‘too long’. When it was published, it was a simple children’s story. A simple children’s story is now an adult epic! And is Alice in Wonderland now considered ‘literature’? Perish the thought.”
Youtube videos is not a bad idea, by the way!
That’s a shame. When I search “web 3.0” the results seem to hint that people understand the problem they’re trying to fix, and fixing the problem leads to structures which are resistant against giant companies, and this must improve privacy (if it doesn’t, then the design will be the same as what it’s replacing, just with somebody else in charge. So over time, corruption will kick in, and we’ll be back where we started. The structure itself must be corruption-resistant)
There are people in the world who enjoy privacy and freedom and such, and it’s not just criminals. But their products are not as mainsteam as they used to be, the only privacy-oriented one I frequently hear about is protonmail. Mega.io also claims to be pro-privacy… But somehow piracy is against its rules? If it can detect if I upload copyrighted content to my private storage, then it’s not a private storage. I’m not sure how that works. Many services who claim to be secure and pro-privacy seem to be lying, or at least using these words loosely or in a relative rather than absolute sense.
How to actually do this?
It’s easy to say “I wish XYZ were high status in society”. I’m interested in concrete steps a few individuals like you or me can take. Ultimately all this world building has to translate it decisions and actions taken by you and me and other people listening to us, not a hypothetical member of society.
I agree you are pointing at real problems mostly.
I agree we need to think systemically about incentives.
People in web3 often understand that deteriorating user privacy means more money than protecting it. They tend to not ask deeper questions like:
why does cybersecurity favour offence over defence? (If it favoured defence instead, it might be possible for offence to be more profitable and yet lose) Software complexity is a reason cybersecurity is hard.
why does violating user privacy make so much money? why does Google’s ad model make more money than any of the other business models? Why did Apple escape this trap so far?
why does Tor not scale? In general most people in Web3 don’t talk about privacy at IP address and packet level, they often talk about just ensuring blockchain transactions aren’t doxxable
Well, we somehow changed smoking from being cool to being a stupid, expensive and unhealthy addiction. I think the method is about the same here. But the steps an individual can take are very limited. In politics, you have millons of people trying to convert other people into their own ideology, so if it was easy for an individual to change the values of society, we’d have extremists all over.
Anyway, you’d probably need to start a Youtube channel or something. Combining competence and simplicity, you could make content that most people could understand, and become popular doing that. “Hoe math” comes to mind as an example. Jordan Peterson and other such people are a little more intellectual, but there’s also a large amount of people who do not understand them. Plus, if you don’t run the account anonymously, you’d take some risks to your reputation proportional to how controversial your message is.
That’s a shame. Why are they in web3 in the first place, then? The only difference is the design, and from what I’ve seen, designs which give power to the users rather than some centralized mega-corporation.
I think this is due to attack-defense asymmetry. Attackers have to find just one vulnerability, defenders have to stop all attacks. I do however agree that very few people ask these questions.
I think Tor would scale no problem if more people used it, but it has the same problem has 8chan and the privacy-focused products and websites have: All the bad people (and those who were banned on most other sites) flock there first, and they create a scary environment or reputation, and that makes normal people not want to go there/use the service. Many privacy-oriented apps have the reputation of being used by criminals and pedophiles.
This problem would go away if there was more places where privacy was valued, since the “bad people” density would go down as the thing in question became more popular.
But I’ve noticed that everything gets worse over time. In order to have good products, we need new ones to be made. Skype sucked, then people jumped to Discord. Now Discord sucks, so people might soon jump to something new. It’s both “enshittification” and incentives.
Taxes go up over time. We get more laws, more rules, more regulations, more advertisement, more ads. The more power a structure has, the worse it seems to treat those inside of it, and the less fair it becomes. Check out this 1999 ad for Google it’s a process similar to corruption, and the only solution seems to be revolutions or collective agreements to seek out alternatives when things get bad enough. Replacing things is less costly than fixing them, which is probably why deaths and births exist. Nature just starts over in cycles, with the length of each cycle being inversely proportional to the size of the structure (average life span of companies in America seem to be 15 years, and the average life span of nations seem to be about 150 years, the average life span of a civilization seems to be 336 years)
So, in my mental model of the world, corruption and DNA damage is the same thing, enshittification is similar to cancer, and nothing lives forever because bloat/complexity/damage accumulates until the structure dies. But I can only explain how things are, coming up with solution is much more difficult.
Thanks!
Your write up was useful to me.
I don’t think Tor scales in current form because it relies on altruistic donors to provide bandwidth. I agree there may be a way to scale it that doesn’t rely on altruism.
I agree you’re pointing at an important problem. Namely when there’s a large structure aimed at achieving some task for users, and it deliberately does it poorly, some of our best solutions are to ensure low cost-of-exit for users and allow for competing alternatives.
This can be slow and wasteful as millions of people need to be fired, billions of dollars of equipment lost etc everytime a large company dies and is outcompeted. In the worst case this is entire countries and continents dying a slow death while their citizens are poached by other countries or left with an inferior quality of life.
If there were incentives to fix large structures from the inside or alternatively, a way solve large tasks without requiring large top-down structures, that might improve the status quo.