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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed something strange: no one who recommends that article wants to put the core argument in their own words.

Edit: never mind, I missed the second link, whose first comment has a good one (assuming it's faithful to the paper):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4958033

Well, I've tried to make the argument several times, but I usually only hit several aspects of privacy. One of the reasons why I do recommend that paper is it (in my mind) sufficiently breaks down and refutes the 'nothing to hide' argument from multiple angles and exposes the fallacy for what it is, rather than resorting to emotional appeal like, "show me your email"

I don't think it's strange at all, if you find something that you completely agree with and is articulated better than you could phrase it yourself, why go through the work of making the same argument with the same reasoning but in a poorer form?

I don't claim to understand anything until I can put it in my own words. Even if you could only reveal something about the core argument, that would be 100x better than "go here to find an awesome argument".

I'm pretty sure the core argument doesn't take several pages to simply express. (The abstract fails too in that it says basically "I'm gonna make an argument" instead of the actual argument.) One paragraph vs 50, times how many people?

Naturally, a paragraph can't capture the full original, but it can tell people whether the point is worthy enough to justify reading the whole thing.

> I'm pretty sure the core argument doesn't take several pages to simply express.

It doesn't, but to support it with evidence and examples, it does. That is what makes an argument/position robust and harder to discredit/disprove.

You don't need to give all the evidence and examples to convey what the argument actually is. That's why it's a summary: you don't have to be as thorough as the original.

Once someone knows what the argument is, they can decide whether it's something they've heard before, or already agree with, or want to know this or that point is supported. You don't get that from "he rips apart that argument, trust me".

Well, this discussion is just not going to go anywhere since you're ignoring the context of it.

It was me linking to my friends in my sign-off post on social network accounts and I was informing friends that if they wanted a summary of what I thought without having to contact me or listen to me rant for 30+ minutes, they could read a paper I agreed with or talk to me directly.

Have a good day :-)

You make your friends go through 30 pages to learn of an idea they could get from a paragraph?

Have a good day :-)

> I don't claim to understand anything until I can put it in my own words.

Are you implying that the previous poster does not understand the issue if they chose not to state it in their own words? If not, this sentence seems out of place.

I'm saying it's very rude to "choose not to state it" in your own words if you already understand it, since it would be a trivial step to write a few sentences and save thousands of people from reading 30 pages just learn what the core argument is and whether the it's worth reading further.

Given that "90% of everything is crap", people need a little more to go on than "Cool new argument that demolishes the nothing-to-hide point. The NSA hates it!"

That is an interesting point of view. My friends often send me links to articles, without writing summaries and for me, the recommendation alone is enough to get me to at least glance at the article. I know that they would not send me the link if the article was not interesting and well reasoned. I guess it all depends on how much you respect your friends.

This wasn't a recommendation to a specific friend with a track record, but thousands of random people.

> This wasn't a recommendation to a specific friend with a track record, but thousands of random people.

Really? None of my Facebook friends are random people to me. Nor did I have thousands of people on my Facebook account. Please quote the exact number of friends I had on my profile, as well as the full-text of my sign-off message. I'll wait patiently.

> I linked my friends to his paper "I’ve Got Nothing To Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy" [1] when I was closing down my Facebook and other social network sites;

Weird how my HN account is not closed and I never told anyone on HN that they should read it.

It's almost like I made a comment that was relevant to the author of the linked article (a paper by the same author that expands upon the limited scope of the article) that concerned something between my friends and I and included the link to the paper that I had also mentioned.

But thank you for being so invested and concerned about what happens between my friends and I. Have a good day :-)

Slow down. I was talking about your implicit recommendation of the article here. And yes, what you said counts as such. (Of course, if never tell my friends to read 30 pages without some idea of what they'd be getting but whatever.)

If you really understand the core argument, what is so hard about giving a short summary?

> If you really understand the core argument, what is so hard about giving a short summary?

Because this was never about me wanting or offering to give a summary, just an anecdote that the author of the article had also written something I had linked my friends to, nothing more. It was the responses that made me dig my heels in and be stubborn/pedantic.

Depending on the person I'm talking to, I have two approaches.

1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers. 2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.

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