Seems like a rare backpedal by Apple, which I'm happy with. Also happy with them doing more for right-to-repair. It's very unbecoming of a 2T company to punish suppliers for leaking a chip.
Still, seems like the internal Apple culture still has a long way to go on addressing its customer base specifically for Mac - 2021 and I still can't get focus-follows-mouse-without-raise to work on MacOS, even if I'm willing to pay for it. For now, I'm just way more productive (and energy efficient) on KDE.
Yes - something like providing data on people's heart rates, shopping lists (eating habits) and medical records to NHS epidemiologists. I can imagine some interesting double blind experiments to come out of that. Do randomised controlled trial on middle ages men who eat grapefruits and take beta blockers - I mean how did they spot that one?
But I dont believe the good of society outweighs the good of the individual - simply because society is made up of individuals- so we do need to keep individual rights and protections at the top.
Why exactly? Information is good - if you were a single organism you'd want as much information at your disposal as possible. Indeed that's why we wear fitness trackers, we don't think our legs have privacy rights.
The problem is indeed consequences, most privacy warriors assume mishandling of data, i.e. bad consequences.
In a world with more data we wouldn't have any preventable disease. Like at all.
It's not only about personal consequences. I just don't want companies I don't trust to own my data. Because their goals are totally not aligned with my own, at all.
In a perfect world this wouldn't be necessary. In the real world we have Cambridge Analytica manipulating elections. Volkswagen cheating regulators. Boeing deciding their bottom line is more important than lives.
And you can't prevent all disease with data alone. Most of us have some vices that we know are bad for our health but we do them anyway. And sometimes rightly so. Physical health isn't the only thing that matters in life. We make trade-offs and there's more than just data driving them. We're creatures of emotion :)
I definitely wouldn't trade off perfect health for having no privacy.
>>> I definitely wouldn't trade off perfect health for having no privacy.
I suspect that makes you a tiny tiny majority.
>>> I just don't want companies I don't trust to own my data.
Neither do I. So i can have a world where my data is secret so companies do not have your data (not sure this is possible)
or we force the companies to be trustworthy (perhaps almost as hard but we do have many examples of doing this.)
Imagine a world where handling private data requires a professional qualification and membership, like say a banking license.
Regulations require that the location data tracking you and your family (ie Life360) is provided to the NHS researchers via encrypted file transfer, you cannot support your business with targeted advertising.
Imagine I can have my family's screentime data sent for analysis and a weekly review video is sent back to me suggesting my recent videos have been veering towards the usual QAnon gateway path and perhaps I should be careful.
My super market purchase history and credit card use at the takeaway suggests I am eating less healthily than my previously agreed limits - would Inlike to start the middle aged man Supermarket order list which gets me ingredients and recipies that might achieve my goals
I know this sounds dystopian- and I need to spend some time writing it up - but frankly I need help with life, and I think most people who evolved for chasing antelope and intellectually wrestling with a tribe / family no bigger than a wedding guest list need help handling the modern world.
We should have the modern world set to good defaults (why not have every salary drop 5% into a index fund from age 18) - and this sort of "intrusive" data management is one way to scale that
How many people go to McDonalds despite knowing it's basically poison?
How many people do drugs or cigarettes or even alcohol knowing it's bad?
I don't think this is a minority at all. A lot of people just don't care enough.
> Imagine I can have my family's screentime data sent for analysis and a weekly review video is sent back to me suggesting my recent videos have been veering towards the usual QAnon gateway path and perhaps I should be careful.
Lol I always disable screentime as I view it as solving a non-isue. But what will you do if the user ignores the "perhaps you should be careful". The news already advises us that QAnon ideas are factually incorrect. This doesn't stop people, it almost feels like it does the opposite (QAnon supporters will view this as confirmation that the state is against them).
So this is not very effective. It won't actually work without mandating it. Meaning complete state control and censorships. Which means no freedom anymore. Also, it will even reinforce the QAnon narrative of "big state forcing ideas into our heads". Because, really, that is exactly what you will be doing. You will basically be fighting them by making them right. Does that really make sense?
> My super market purchase history and credit card use at the takeaway suggests I am eating less healthily than my previously agreed limits - would Inlike to start the middle aged man Supermarket order list which gets me ingredients and recipies that might achieve my goals
Again, most people that are overweight know they're eating wrong. Including myself. It does not stop them.
What I do wish is more availability of good food for takeaway. Living alone it's a major bore having to cook and all the takeaway choices are bad. But that's beside the point. Informing people does not help and we're doing this already. Forcing them takes away all their freedoms. They will rally against it. Would you like to live in a prison where someone else decides what you're going to eat?
> We should have the modern world set to good defaults (why not have every salary drop 5% into a index fund from age 18) - and this sort of "intrusive" data management is one way to scale that
We're already doing that. It's called "taxes". The government doesn't "index fund" it but funds are a speculative thing. They have no return if they are ubiquitous. Besides, our governments prefer borrowing instead. Good or bad, they're so far into that rabbit hole they're never going to get out.
> I know this sounds dystopian- and I need to spend some time writing it up - but frankly I need help with life, and I think most people who evolved for chasing antelope and intellectually wrestling with a tribe / family no bigger than a wedding guest list need help handling the modern world.
Yes it sounds very dystopian. And don't take the "Chinese model" for something that has come as a response to modern society. On the contrary, it's based on Confucianism which predates our western society and religions (he died about 500 years BCE). Personally I think his ideas about servitude to the state might have worked back then but they are not working today. It's something that was useful when life was hanging by a thread. It's not for solving first world problems :)
Do many people need help? Sure. But I'm sure many people needed help too during the industrial revolution or middle ages. In fact they needed a lot more help. They were dropping like flies back then. I agree our minds are not made for connecting the world on a global scale. But we deal with that already. Think about your Whatsapp list (or whatever IM you use). You don't have everyone in the world in that. Just your buddies. You find circles on the web with people with common interests. Such as here. We're recreating our own comfortable little villages. We already make a huge difference in people "we know" and that we don't. Again this predates the internet and started being a thing from the time we started living in cities.
I'm sorry you need help. Go look for it, you will find it! But I don't think building the society you intend will really solve any issues. It will just brush them under the carpet, just like it does in China.
Also, if you really want this... I'm sure the Chinese government will let you move there :)
All of our governments are simply playing catch-up at this point. Unless the western-influenced can prove their superiority with growth and progress, I think everyone here has to acknowledge they have a better overall governance model (elections are a small but significant part of this)
If their governance model was so good, they wouldn't have to oppress their population so much. The fact that Western governments are adopting some of the same techniques is a sign that either technology makes it too easy/cheap to implement these systems without thinking, or that Western governments are becoming less representative and thus need to rely on systems of oppression more to maintain their grip on power.
To give some possible examples of what I mean by "less representative", let me suggest that growing wealth inequality makes the poor realise they are not being heard by the rich; that communication technology allow niche ideas to spread causing the balkanisation of reality (which causes cracks that governments can't easily paper over); and that in some countries the voting system doesn't allow the healthy evolution of parties to respond to the new realities (exacerbating "future shock").
But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.
From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.
Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.
Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).
You mistake the way western governments are structured with "governance of a society". The CCP is far more than the traditional there branches of the western democratic government.
Societies self-govern and create structures. Some of those structures are companies, some are government. Sometimes the government regulates companies, and sometimes companies regulate the government.
Edit: even in the US for example, ONLY the judiciary is concerned with defending individual liberties. If that's all that's necessary then we wouldn't need elections, just a military and that's that.
You seem to heavily discount the amount of work it takes to become post-scarcity - most societies in the world fail to achieve this, even for simple things like cell phones in 2021.
That the CCP is far more is clear indication that it is too much.
(In the US) The judiciary is very obviously not the only branch concerned with protecting individual liberties. Law makers pass laws with the intent to do so and the President can command the military to do so if necessary.
The world is on track to completely eliminate starvation and abject poverty in a few years, maybe a decade or two.
Projected life span and quality of life is at an all time high on average, and crime is overall down which is another indicator of plenty rather than lack. It is utopian minded idealism that everyone should have everything they want (including cell phones) and the world should become 'post-scarcity' (whatever that means). I have found utopian minded idealists to be the least experienced with regards work.
Yes, but prioritization is everywhere - maybe the EU finds that their ideals and principles were an instance of the XY problem, and privacy doesn't matter at all.
I'm not saying they're right, I'm saying they're "right". I'm redefining "right" as "long term success".
It's like everyone uses mobile phones now and the luddites who don't are simply irrelevant. Maybe the anti-tech folks are actually right in terms of harm it causes, but because of the other party's success, there's they're not relevant. The right-ness is not relevant for this case.
Similar to how you might do pagans-vs-christians. Maybe we as a society will evolve to support and encourage pagans and diversity and stop encouraging supremacist religions like Christianity, BUT - they've "won" against all the pagan religions in the middle east and europe. With Islam, against everything all the way up to central asia and SEA, down into Africa. Maybe the holdouts like the Hindus in India will ultimately build better and more resilient societies (they haven't been converted yet, unlike many others) but so far, nothing.
The question requires time and more data to resolve - but the tentative resolution is that people don't care about privacy. So societies don't care either.
That said, I'm a huge privacy/crypto nerd - I even think privacy-vs-security is a false dichotomy. THEY don't. Apple doesn't. Most VCs and Google thing privacy and valuable insights from data are dichotomies and mutually exclusive too, but they're mathematically provably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption
My metric here is "grabby success" or growth. I alluded to this in my comment but essentially, if you have a society, civilization, entity, species, w.e., it's almost guaranteed to be different in some way to other such entities.
And because effective resources are generally limited, these differences will lead to relative difference in market share, like maybe how many people one entity can sustain.
From there, it might lead to differences in how productive each person and the entity itself is, which leads to a spread of that productivity to other entities. The US has generally enjoyed the crown here for at least a hundred years - even now, cutting edge research is still in the US. The US "culture" is essentially internet culture and it will rub off on everyone who uses most US services (even innocuous ones like Google).
In sum, I'm equating long-term relative growth rate to societal/governance success. China isn't a great comparison to the US, but it's a very good comparison to, say, India (with caveats).
Over the next 50 years, I think it's a decent comparison to the US/EU as well, as the populations are now more similar (with immigration).
Our tooling for communicating ideas and finding good ones is equivalent to mob rule, same as a hundred years ago, just amplified. More at my older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178
> Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.
I've actually done this - it's far easier than you make it seem. I haven't really started collecting metrics on success, but that's kinda what we're missing - messengers who construct a pyramid of truthy statements and go back up the chain to whoever convinced THEM to a particular viewpoint when they find resistance to change from the opposite side. We're missing tech that incentivizes such behavior.
Of course this requires that everyone has a set for themselves a threshold for when they would change their mind about a topic - which I find is far more prevalent among US conservatives (at least online, as they behave to me), than when you try to establish the same among US liberals. Of course, ignoring the obvious field that doesn't have a threshold by design - supremacist religion.
My working theory is that supremacist religionists who converted out of it simply replaced it with liberal ideas (and were being supremacist about those), while there are both religionists and non-religionists among the conservatives.
You're missing an important point here, that Eric Weinstein brings up a lot. The goal of science is finding truth, but the mechanism of how it happens right now is very tied to the "goal" of each study. Goal-less data collection is apparently impossible to certify and "be acknowledged".
>no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination
Researchers might have hypotheses they want to test, and any hypothesis that's not "good" is not explored. Because
1. real identities and careers are affected
2. collected data isn't good enough for journals
The core problem here is that our technology for discourse is basically twitter and "voting with likes". The algorithms are optimized for attention and likes, so the mob wins - not the best argument.
IF we fixed THAT problem (with new technology, an early one is https://www.kialo.com/tour, but it's not good enough), we can have what you want.
Right now, we're effectively the same tech level as the 1900s (perhaps in a more dangerous way) w.r.t finding truth or the "right" arguments
I’ve never been a fan of voting with likes either. I’d be all in for legislatively banning up and down vote systems. You will get minimal traction here though as the political left use these content voting systems to focus effort and gamify division.
I think it's a fairly well-understood causal inference problem to figure out how much effort (money) needs to be spent on other people for GDP growth from that one person to offset the money spent on them by society.
We just need someone to step up and collect the data.
Still, seems like the internal Apple culture still has a long way to go on addressing its customer base specifically for Mac - 2021 and I still can't get focus-follows-mouse-without-raise to work on MacOS, even if I'm willing to pay for it. For now, I'm just way more productive (and energy efficient) on KDE.