Nobody special, nor any desire to be. Just sharing my ideas when I appear to know better than the person I’m responding to, or when I believe I have something interesting to share/add. I’m not a serious nor a formal person, and if you’re more knowledgeable than intelligent, you probably won’t like me as I lack academic rigor.
Feel free to correct me when I make mistakes. I’m too certain of myself as my ideas are rarely challenged. Crocker’s rules are fine! When playing intellectual (I do on here) I find that social things only get in the way, and when I socialize I find that intellectual things get in the way, so I separate them.
Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Those who have had similar experiences and thoughts already will recognize what I say, and those who don’t will mostly perceive noise.
Predict and control… I’m not sure about that, actually. The world seems to be a complex system, which means that naive attempts at manipulating it often fail. I don’t think we’re using technology to control others in the manner that we can choose their actions for them, but we are decreasing the diversity of actions that one can take (for instance, anything which can be misunderstood seems to be no go now, as strangers will jump in to make sure that nothing bad is going on, as if it was their business to get involved in other peoples affairs). So our range of motion is reduced, but it’s not locked to a specific direction which results in virtue or something.
I don’t think that the world can be controlled, but I also think that attempts at controlling by force mistaken, as there’s more upstream factors which influence most of society. For instance, if your population is buddhist, they will believe that treating others well is the best thing to do, which I think is a superior solution to placing CCTVs everywhere. The best solutions don’t need force, and the one which use force never seem optimal (consider the war on drugs, the taboo on sexuality, attempts at stopping piracy, etc). I think the correct set of values is enough (but again, the receiver needs to agree that they’re correct voluntarily). If everyone can agree on what’s good, they will do what’s good, even if you don’t pressure them into doing so.
I’m also keeping extinction events in mind and trying to combat them, I just do so from a value perspective instead. I’m opposed to creating AGIs, and we wouldn’t have them if everyone else were opposed as well. Some people naively believe that AGIs will solve all their problems, and many don’t place any special value on humanity (meaning that they don’t resist being replaced by robots). But there’s also many people like me who enjoy humanity itself, even in its imperfection.
This is likely possible, yeah. But you can design things in such a way that they’re simply secure—as it’s impossible for them not to be. How do you prevent a lock from being hacked? You keep it mechanical rather than digital. I don’t trust websites which promise to keep my password safe, but I trust websites which don’t store my password in the first place (they could run it through a one-way hash). Great design makes failure impossible (e.g. atomic operations in banking transfers)
This would likely result in security, but it comes at a huge cost as well. I feel like there’s better solutions, and not just for a specific organization, but for everyone. You could speak freely on the internet just 20 years ago (freely enough that you could tell the nuclear launch codes to strangers if you wanted to), so such a state is still near in a sense. Not only was it harder to spy on people back then, less people even wanted to do such a thing, and this change in mentality is important as well. I’m not trying to solve the problem in our current environment, I want to manipulate our environment to one in which the problem doesn’t exist in the first place. We just have to resist the urge to collect and record everything (this collection is mainly done by malicious actors anyway, and mainly because they want to advertise to you so that you buy their products). You could go on vacation in a country which considers it bad taste to pry on others affairs and be more or less immune thanks to that alone, so you don’t even need to learn opsec, you just need to be around people who don’t know what that word means. You could also use VPNs which have no logs (if they’re not lying of course) as nothing can be leaked if nothing is recorded. Sadly, the same forces which destroyed privacy are trying to destroy these methods, it’s the common belief that we need to be safe, and that in order to be safe we need certaincy and control. I don’t even think this is purely ideology, I think it’s a psychological consequence of anxiety (consider ‘control freaks’ in relationships as well). Society is dealing with a lot of problems right now which didn’t exist in the past not because they didn’t happen, but because they weren’t considered as problems. And if we don’t consider things to be problems, then we don’t suffer from them, so the people who are resonsible for creating the most suffering in life are those who point at imperfections (like discrimination and strict beauty standards) and convince everyone that life is not worth living until they’re fixed.
Finally, people can leak information, but the human memory is not perfect, and people tend to paraphrase eachother, so “he said she said” situations are inherently difficult to judge. You have plausible deniability since nobody can prove what was actually said. I think all ambiguity translates into deniability, which is also why you can sometimes get away with threatening people—“It would be terrible if something bad happened to your family” is a threat, but you haven’t actually shown any intent to break the law. Ambiguity is actually what makes flirting fun (and perhaps even possible), but systematizers and people in the autistism-cluster tend to dislike ambiguity, it never occurs to them that both ambiguity and certainty have pros and cons.
Politics is a terrible game. If possible, I’d like to return society to the state it had before everyone cared too much about political issues. Since this is not an area where reasonable ideas work, I suggest just telling people that dictators love surveillance (depending on the ideology of the person you’re talking to, make up an argument for how surveillance is harmful). The consensus on things like censorship and surveillance seems to depend on the ideology one perceives it to support. Some people will say “We need to get rid of anonymity so that we can shame all these nazis!” but that same sort of person was strongly against censorship 13 years ago, because back then censorship was though to be what the evil elite used to oppress the common man. So the desire to protect the weak resulted in both “censorship is bad” and “censorship is good” being common beliefs, and it’s quite easy for the media to force a new interpretation since people are easily manipulated.
By the way, I think “culture war” topics are against the rules, so I can only talk about them in a superficial and detached manner. Viligantes in the UK are destroying cameras meant to automate fining people, and as long as mentalities/attitudes like this dominate (rather than the belief that total surveillance somehow benefits us and makes us safe) I think we’ll be alright. But thanks to technological development, I expect us to lose our privacy in the long run, and for the simple reason that people will beg the government to take away their rights.