Comment by grandempire
2 months ago
Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.
2 months ago
Did you see which comment this is in reply to? It’s about your general description of people in tech to be hesitant and skeptical when it comes to banning things.
I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.
> "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is
You are describing the ability of good engineers to deal with vague and ill defined problems.
> "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway..
Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> It's so transparent to me now
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
> "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization"
I am not - and did not make the claim. I am explaining why you are seeing engineers care more about vagueness in one context than another.
I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
I don't claim to know the answer here, but I hope you can see some irony in saying:
> As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
When the thing up for discussion is the hacking of our psyche to impose a will - ads - onto others, at a scale and persistence hereto unimaginable by the worst tyrants in history.
> Your assumption is that the challenge or concern about regulation is the difficulty of dealing with vagueness. As I pointed out, this is not the case, but the hesitancy and destructive power of imposing your will on others.
> […]
> I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation.
Very well said across the board.
My stance is that any time—literally any time—someone is proposing and/or promoting a policy that can stifle, chill, and/or suppress free speech in any way, even if indirectly, the bar for justifying such a policy must necessarily be extremely high.
In theory, I actually agree with many of the arguments against advertising, but there’s a clear slippery slope with this “let’s ban advertising” line of thinking, so yes, the bare minimum is being able to concretely define what advertising even is in such a context.
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Someone with your eye for detail would probably be embarrassed to learn that while their entire argument rests on me referring to "engineers" I never wrote the word once.
It seems like you're one of those HN people who thinks they'll convince people scrolling by with petty semantic arguments and snark. Maybe that's true! But it doesn't work on me. For example, if you're gonna make a claim like "I think a judge would also demand a consistent principle and definition to guide regulation", I'd want to see evidence that deals with the fact that the courts have come up with their own standards for their own review (rational basis, strict scrutiny) and indeed have formulated their own standards for evaluating legislation entirely on their own (undue burden, imminent lawless action, etc). From your comments in this thread, I'd guess you don't know anything about laws, legislation, judicial review, and the like. But hey, don't let that stop you from warning about the dangers of "destructive power of imposing your will on others".