Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about intentions, seems like the intention behind a ton of this stuff is to "protect the children", or "fix a problem" etc etc, but there just isn't enough awareness of possible side effects - not unique to tech legislation - just look at the policy ratchet of "you can always run by being tougher on crime, very hard to run on being not as tough"

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and arguably there is also some interaction with tech companies doing malicious compliance as well which generally means that the original intent of the legislation gets lost and user experience further degrades (cookie popups anyone?)

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I think it's too simplistic to make this a "politicians want to control the discourse" - there's always a bunch of tradeoffs in these things, and arguably the edge cases /are/ the base case (anyone that has done content moderation for a reasonably large community knows that it is very hard to make any sort of blanket rule, even if you have blanket rules)

It's a good mental practice to always be aware that stated intentions and actual reasons are entirely separate things.

They do sometimes, mostly by chance, coincide.

The advanced level of this is to be aware this applies even to your own actions.

The super advanced level is to realize it applies to all of your /thoughts/ which is mostly a pattern matching brain and personality built around the ways it found to make sense of some things justifying the chaos in retrospect :D

Correct but this is a different phenomenon. You are talking about post hoc justification for your behavior, where your brain is very good at making up stories that have nothing to do with the original motivation.

I believe GP is referring to the fact that the true aim of much of this legislation had nothing to do with protecting kids from the beginning. They use that rhetoric because it's easy to get people on board and much more difficult to explain the real world implications for security.

I didn’t get that impression. You’re not wrong that something can be justified “for the children” but have an ulterior motive. But I think what’s being argued is that the initial motive is actually honestly for the children and that that goal blinds people to the reality of how bad or pointless or even perversely harmful the proposed solution is.

I think it's a mix of cynical PR campaigns and honest activism, and I'm not smart enough to say which is the biggest factor in each instance.

Separately, the honest activists are often lying to themselves, in the sense that their real motives are not what the they tell themselves and others.

A great book to realize that the reasons people give for what they do are not the real reasons is Elephant in the Brain

https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves

https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...

Yes, I learned much of this from Elephant In The Brain. Biggest shock to my belief systems this century.

May have to read Strangers to Ourselves as well.

That's not intent, that's pretext. Pretext is the justification you tell people to get them to agree with your plan. Intent is the effect you actually want it to achieve, which you don't tell people. It is important to distinguish between the two. I think the intent of most laws is "Get me reelected," and that is where we need to discuss Perverse Incentives of professional politicians. Reelection pressure is clearly not working as an incentive for keeping politicians focused on the public good.

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