Comment by wicknicks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wicknicks | Hacker News Reader

Fun science fact: Fear causes people to think irrationally.

I find it hard to believe that so many people have jumped out of their wits over this NSA news. After all, there are so many more harder and pressing problems in the world. Global Warming, Child Slavery, Drugs, overpriced health care, mortgage and education loans? But on HN, the most intellectual community I am part of (imo) is so worried about automated programs parsing through their mails and tweets, its surprising. Dude, wake up! Your content is NOT so cool. Its like everybody else's -- emails from mom telling you missed on events, defaulting on payments, failures in relationships, failure in school. Everybody goes through those things, and have records to show it.

When I see an article with the title that makes me believe that a bunch of scared folks are now going to set decision making processes for the future, it makes me worried. Very worried. Such community moods have been known to make the worst choices (always conservative than progressive) for the future generations. Today, people complain about the war US took to Iraq, and what a bad decision that was. Five years from now, it will be privacy policies that were set in, after "57% FEARED NSA will misuse their personal info."

Is privacy important -- yes, it is. But should we blow things out of proportion? No. That's never going to lead to a better world.

Fear causes people to think irrationally.

this is the most amazing thing I've read all day. someone using the argument that 'fear causes people to think irrationally' to justify government snooping.

Let's step back to base principles. What's the claimed reason for snooping? To stop terrorists.

How much of a threat are terrorists? If you think about it rationally, not very much.

10K per year die from drunk driving. That's three 9/11's per year. You wouldn't consider allowing the government to filter your facebook and email for strings like 'i've been drinking, now I'm driving', so why would you allow that for a much smaller problem?

Here's something else to think about rationally. Stop and look around the world and history. Have terrorists caused more deaths and taken away more individual rights than governments? I'd say its governments by an enormous margin (I'm not talking about the US govt by itself, although I bet if you dug up all the stuff like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment you might get close even in the US).

We're graced with relatively good government in the US but you don't have to look too hard around the world (Iran, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Afganistan pre-9/11, Rwanda, Bosnia) to see that it's perfectly rational to be wary of government power (its even more obvious if you consider historic examples like the Soviet Union, Nazis, Armenian).

tl;dr it's irrational to fear terrorists, ergo no need to sacrifice your civil liberties

(I'm not talking about the US govt by itself, although I bet if you dug up all the stuff like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment you might get close even in the US).

You don't even need to look into the past in the US - as far as I know the war on drug users continues.

You are taking my statements out of context. Almost all my comment talks about HN's reaction to the NSA news. Did I support collecting data from social media websites? No. In fact, if you look at my reply to @Uhhrrr on this thread, you will notice that I mentioned that no org (political or business) should misuse personal information.

I despise arguments like yours, which logically lead to the claim that only the most important problem in the world should be worried about until it is solved, and then the new most important problem, etc. Not only is it ridiculous on its own, it also requires the arguer to break the very rule he or she is proposing, by spending time worrying about what other people are worrying about, instead of whatever the most important problem in the world is.

I can't remember who said this, but my response to your comment can be best articulated with this quote "all philosophical arguments root from grammatical inconsistencies".

So, I apologize if I made you feel that way. That was not my intent. The only other time I remember such an outcry here at HN was when Steve Jobs passed. A big and depressing event, indeed. I just don't understand why we complain so sparsely about "bigger" problems as we are doing about these privacy issues. There have been some discussions about education policies, but they come and go. Privacy issues have been lurking around ever since social media emerged, and as I said, I am worried that this event makes it go overboard.

If you genuinely do not understand why humans almost universally do this, I can offer some ideas. One is temporal proximity. The NSA leaks are very recent in time, while other arguably more important problems have been around forever. There's also physical proximity (people aren't dying of hunger much in the Western world), likelihood of affecting change (people may think that political action right now can help with the NSA issues, but probably gave up on protesting foreign policy or the drug war years ago), topicality (Jobs' death may not be more important than world hunger, but it's proportionally more directly relevant to this community), etc.

More important problems such as that Google, a publically-traded for-profit company having the very data that NSA seeks to obtain, and yet very few so much as bat an eye at that, but instead say that it's OK for Google and their advertisers and 3rd parties to have access to the data and for them to change the privacy policy at will, as long as the gub'mint doesn't have that data.

You are right, of course: The leaks are more recent in time than the people pointing that out about Google/Facebook/etc., so I'm not that surprised at the difference in reaction.

Solving the privacy issues is easily solvable. It just requires the people in power to change policy, perhaps sit down and write a law or two. Simply, it is easily do-able, right now. We can get this done.

Solving the huge things like global warming, cancer, poverty, starvation, cancer, etc, are a little bit more involved, and will probably take a while, no matter what the motivation.

You might be too young to remember why laws like FISA exist. The government really has abused its wiretapping capabilities for political ends in the past. So the fear is not irrational at all. You seem to care about a lot of political issues. Do you think the government is always going to be on your side?

Yes, I tend to be optimistic about what big corporations and governments can do. After all, they are the people with the resources to change the world if they wanted to. Call me naive.

I remember the Bush Wiretapping Laws (seems like a successor to FISA).

After saying that, I am not "for" any organization (political or business) to misuse personal information. Personal info is personal, and it should stay that way. But the fear some people are portraying seems irrational and overblown, and this will lead the tech community to self-impose some harsh "laws", which will not play out well.

> "After all, there are so many more harder and pressing problems in the world. Global Warming, Child Slavery, Drugs, overpriced health care, mortgage and education loans?"

What do these problems have in common? That's right, every single one is a produce of extreme imbalances in power. Every. Single. One. And what does a program like PRISM undermine? Exactly, the democratic structures that can successfully challenge an abusive status quo.

Larry Lessig is fond of pointing out that his chosen problem (campaign finance) may not be the biggest problem in the world, or the most serious, but it is the first in that it addresses a fundamental dysfunction that prevents the us from responding to a constellation of concerns in a meaningful, socially beneficial way.

The development of a authoritarian surveillance state falls into a similar category, in that its mere existence frustrates a broad range of social development goals. Because it is absolutely guaranteed to be used against civilians who are attempting to steer government state power towards healthy ends, and away from abusive, toxic ones, it should be treats as an intrinsic part of any problem that benefits a small but entrenched status quo. Indeed, that's the whole point of structures like these. They actively undermine the ability of people to organize themselves in opposition to established interests that profit from extraordinary and otherwise unsustainable levels of abuse.

And no, this isn't speculation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun...

Reads a bit like:

If we are told to be afraid, we are supposed to be afraid. But, if we our selves become afraid, we are not allowed to be afraid.

So, the gov tell us to fear drugs, immigrants and terrorists, then we should say, "Sure, we agree, have all the powers you need and take all the freedoms you like." However, when we fear surveillance and invasions of privacy as a result of our own base level sense of survival, we are stupid treasonous, un-patriotic plebs and should have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide....because the government, with a nice smile and sharp suit, says so.

>I find it hard to believe that so many people have jumped out of their wits over this NSA news.

I've been waiting for years for this discussion to take place. I opposed PATRIOT as an irrational overreaction from the beginning. It's taken this long for the opposition to get any traction. Don't be so surprised that it has support now that people who oppose the surveillance state don't have to endure being called crazy unpatriotic paranoid loons.

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