Comment by teddyh
6 years ago
Who said anything about “their” or “them”? I spoke about people, and I meant everybody, including myself. We, human beings, can’t make logical decisions. The most we can hope for is to stop ourselves from making illogical ones, by forcing ourselves to logically rationalize our decisions after the fact. However, rationalizations are tricky things, and almost anything can be rationalized to seem reasonable. But it’s the best we have.
I just want a phone that functions without me thinking about it. I don't care about much else, I don't want to care. Yes I know security or freedom or whatever but I have a higher risk of dying in an airplane to be honest.
What does the Purism give me? None of my existing apps work with it.
Spending zero brain cells on which computer junk to buy and getting on with my life is the most rational choice imo.
Your comment is a perfect example of what rationalization looks like. You’re exactly like all humans (including me); closed to logical argument, because you don’t want to have to care about it, since it would be hard work to change. You just want to get on with your life, just like everybody else (including me). Note: I’m not saying that this is wrong; everybody does it, and we can’t change it, so calling it “wrong” would be pointless. It’s not my intention to disparage you.
But you would probably benefit by recognizing that nothing about this is logical. There are some logical arguments why one ought to use (for instance) the Librem 5 phone as a phone and forgo the additional features present on mainstream smartphones. But you (or me) can’t be open to those logical arguments unless we’re already ready to change; i.e. when we already (irrationally) want to find a reason to do it. Then, logical arguments can be effective. But not otherwise.
I have reasonable logical arguments for not wanting a Purism phone: namely, it's an expensive piece of plastic that doesn't run my apps, which I would like to run on a phone that I buy, and the problems it supposedly solves are problems I do not have. Your disdain for "mainstream apps" seems to forget that I buy a phone not because it exists, but because it's a tool I use to get through my job and my day.
Trying to go "the obvious logical conclusion is this Purism phone, but your irrational monkey brain is too idiotic to see that (no offense intended)" is somewhere between ridiculous and insufferable. If you want to evangelize Linux, you're doing it wrong.
2 replies →
> I just want a phone that functions without me thinking about it.
Me too, which is why I'm interested in the Librem 5 (and the Pinephone).
I don't have the energy to constantly be fighting my phone's attempts to trick me into surrendering all my data to various corporations.
We're still talking about phones, right? Putting aside the hypothesis that humans are incapable of logical decisions(?), I feel that you're drawing some fundamental psychological truth when there's much more realistic factors that are don't rely on assuming we are unable to fight our monkey brains to change our nature.
For most people on the street, this phone:
* Doesn't have a bunch of things you're used to in a smartphone
* Has stuff that you don't understand the value of
* From some company you've never heard of
* For $700
That's not some post facto breakdown. I commend their efforts, truly, sincerely, but to be blunt, they made a phone for Ed Snowden.
Those are all true facts, but if someone wants a smart non-Apple/Android phone for whatever reason, there are equally convincing logical reasons for why, for that person, your listed facts are irrelevant and why other facts would be more compelling. Note that I’m not arguing that you are wrong; I make the same argument to a person on the other side who would be listing facts about why getting a Librem 5 phone is the best thing ever, and those would all be true facts, too.
Your facts are the most compelling for you, since you’ve decided not to get a Librem 5 phone. If it were otherwise, you would have listed different facts.
Facts do not make people change their opinion.
There's a plethora of statistical methods you can apply when pondering a purchase. At least, the same methods used to give said product the specific price. For instance, modern CPUs and GPUs are laughably overpriced for the amount of improvements each generation receives compared to the 80s and 90s. Rational choice: buy second hand.
Why is buying an iPhone or Pixel not logical? They work great and they are affordable (if you keep it 3 years they will cost you about $1 / day for the hardware).
If you want to run software that is only on Android or iOS, then buying a Linux phone would be illogical, no?
> Why is buying an iPhone or Pixel not logical?
You seem to misunderstand me. No decision we make is made logically – not a decision to buy a Librem 5, nor a decision to buy an iPhone or an Android-based phone. There may be one or several logical reasons for one or the other decision, but this is at most a tiny factor.