Because "just say it" doesn't work on many sites. I don't know about this site but anecdotally, I've seen that when I use certain words / phrases / names on YouTube or Reddit subreddits, those comments are either not shown at all (not shown even to me) or shadow-banned (not shown to others).
Another reason I don't just say it sometimes is to avoid trolling by fans of whatever or whoever I criticized.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Apple and Google managements don't like Trump's ICE policies and are doing all this under duress.
But is this a valid assumption? Or is it mere wishful thinking?
If almost half the US population revoted Trump into power, it's logical to assume the same proportions apply to the managements and employees of A and G too.
I'm against granting any management any benefit of the doubt without solid proof they deserve it.
For sure, that's what I implied in that "corporations and fascism" line. If they wanted to make a stand, I believe they could. But as history tells us, businesses are a fascist's biggest allies, so they won't.
Is CSA really that widespread in Europe that everyone's chat messages have to be monitored? And if it is that widespread, shouldn't they try to address it socially to prevent CSA as much as possible rather than try to catch just the subset of tech-savvy abusers, that too after they've already committed CSA?
It’s not about CSA, it’s about illegal content. And laws change all the time.
For example, an individual can generate AI images of Hollywood actors using Stable Diffusion and a decently powerful computer. Said individual had the right to share those images online with a community.
Now however the sharing and distribution of said images is considered illegal in my USA state.
So, are the images said individual created and shared three years ago subject to prosecution? Even if the law went into effect 3 months ago?
No. The right not to be tried for actions that weren't crimes at the time is pretty universally applied in the west (I am not aware of the legal situation in other parts of the world, but I imagine it's honored there too). (Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights for the EU, Article I, Section 9 & 10 of the constitution for the US)
> So, are the images said individual created and shared three years ago subject to prosecution?
Generally, criminal acts are judged according to the rules of the jurisdiction where they happened, so I wouldn't be too worried about this. This isn't a universal rule though, so you won't find it enshrined in constitutions or treaties.
Of course not, it's just a pretense for passing this law because its political suicide to instead say "We don't want to do any actual police work and instead want to create a massive surveillance state and monitor everything you say and do so we can better control our populations."
CSAM is just the excuse, as it is with any other laws of this nature in the past.
Everyone in this debate understands that CSA is a pretext. Nothing is going to make any sense to you if you think ChatControl is an earnest and sincere to fight CSA in particular.
The ultimate goal is for computers to run only authorized programs and to license and monitor development tools like the Soviets monitored typewriters.
Agree completely. These laws are either a wedge for broader surveillance or a massive compromise on everyone else’s rights to catch a subset of a subset of users.
I have a friend who performs court-ordered treatments of people convicted of sexual crimes. She frequently sees cases like this. Young teens sexting, parents of one of them find out, the other one gets in legal trouble. It is absolutely insane to see perfectly normal behaviour ruining lives because of misinterpreted laws and overbearing parents.
Chat Control would only make this sort of thing more frequent.
The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
> It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities
Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place.
I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both:
1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice)
2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility.
Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action.
IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one.
To me the more problematic part is anchoring the discussion into rejecting a specific extreme (malice) when there will be a lot of behavior either milder, or neither incompetence nor malice. For instance is greed, opportunism or apathy malice ?
That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.
> Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.
Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.
Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.
> That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people,
Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.
As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.
> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.
Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?
Such reports should drop the idea of ranking countries and instead focus on the rise or fall in per-country scores relative to their previous scores.
Whenever countries are ranked against each other, discussions inevitably focus on the relative ranks and ignore the underlying causes of any drop in scores.
When a country moves up in rank mostly because some other countries moved down, it feels odd to the people there who wonder why they ranked higher without any improvements on the ground. Nationalist governments tend to claim the higher rank is because of their policies, knowing that their people most likely won't study the changes in score components of previous years.
And adding to that, at minimum countries need to be evaluated by their parts. In most of the countries currently at war there are parts were it is relatively safe (but still worse than at peace time), and some parts where it is literally hell. Averaging them all doesn't make sense really.
As someone who has been fascinated by the universe and galaxies from a young age, I too thought interstellar was the way to go. Nowadays, however, I've started to feel that we've been wrongly conditioned by science fiction to see interstellar exploration as the next logical step for humanity.
Our species is still very immature ethically, socially, and politically. We haven't even learned to accept each other and co-exist happily on Earth. Our distant hominin ancestors crossed entire continents but today we set up physical borders and cultural barriers to prevent even neighborly visits. We certainly won't become the broad-minded united ethical species that Star Trek TOS/TNG portrayed within the next 2-3 centuries.
Gradual spatial expansion, and through that, gradual cognitive and worldview expansion, has been our track record. Whenever things got hairy for someone in our hominin tree at any time, they moved just a little bit more to survive.
So, I feel exploring and settling other solar system bodies should be our next logical step. There are 4 solid planets, 5 dwarf planets, and as per Gemini, ~40 moons, ~3000 asteroid belt objects, and 200000+ Kuiper belt objects, all above 10 km radius. That's a lot of nearby space to explore and more practical than interstellar. Some of them will become the solutions or refuges from our current social and political problems on Earth.
It'll take us 1000s of years more, maybe even 100s of 1000s, to do all this. Including a lot of violence, conflicts and injustice. But eventually, we will learn to develop the cooperative institutions and cognitive/ethical frameworks we currently lack to become a multi-planet species. Interplanetary cooperative institutions and technologies will emerge eventually, just like today we have airplanes, the Internet, UN, WHO, EU - institutions and technologies that, while far from perfect, seemed downright unlikely for 100s of 1000s of years of our hominin history.
Applying FT to images is a great way to see the world very differently, as if through an alien's eyes (or Geordi's visor from ST TNG!). A kind of stimulated out-of-the-box thinking. Dense features like fur or hair manifest as high-frequency components and eventually you start to develop an intuition for their patterns in the magnitude / power spectrums.
I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.
There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.
I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.
Another reason I don't just say it sometimes is to avoid trolling by fans of whatever or whoever I criticized.