Comment by onion2k
15 hours ago
If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything so asking them to consider what else might happen if we bring in laws and technical mechanisms to 'protect the children' is unfortunately too a big leap for a lot of them. Most people are bad at spotting causal links between parts of a system, and people who are good at it exploit that.
In fairness, the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea. I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal. It takes repeated pushes by the authoritarians looking for an opportunity to get things like speech controls or privacy violations through and the politicians mysteriously give up trying to roll it back no matter what the public pressure might be.
That being said, any expectation of thoughtfulness at all makes politics frustrating. Even basic things like why people keep making small random changes when most of these problems and solutions haven't changed in more than 2 millennia. And there is a pretty easy consensus to come to about what works. The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever.
Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:
> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
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Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first.
The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch.
Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
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I remember the patriot act.
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I emailed my local TD minister in Ireland about the inherent dangers of chat control. They had some lacky respond with an email that framed the conversation in a way that made it look like I was interested in the illegal content and not privacy/control or nefarious future governments.
This is what I fear the most. It is gas lighting and just manipulation. The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.
Further down the line technical solutions that are private will become illegal and in general not being pro survailance will get you in trouble
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Respond and ask them directly if they're accusing you of a crime, or if they intend to address the point of your message rather than making libelous statements that they may later be forced to explain should they persist.
When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
In this day and age, probably with a relatively tiny investment into public access points, we could very reasonably have a technically functional direct democracy. The legislative cycle is already authenticated so there's no need to solve "authenticated anonymous vote" problem, European countries already have functional eIDAS systems to back the authentication part and the legislative systems are already to some degree digitized.
On one hand, the problem "what if someone sells their vote" is already present and unsolved, in the shape of lobbying. What's interesting, though, that we have built entire systems to shape public opinion and entrenched them into our daily lives, which are used by corporations and politicians alike.
This begs a question: is there such a thing as unbiased public opinion without authenticated internet access?
inb4: direct democracy does not mean parliamentary systems could be abolished altogether, central spaces for debate would still help solve discussion exchange problems
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
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> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
I think there is more to it. A large part of democracy is delegating decision making to people with time and expertise to investigate issues more thoroughly than most individuals can or want to.
I have some broad opinions about the environment etc. but I am by no means an expert in the details, so I am happy to delegate day to day decision making to someone with more expertise who's opinions broadly align with my own.
I'd agree that referendums do make more sense on "issues of conscience" though, like whether to have a death penalty, voting reform etc.
If you make it legal to sell your vote, it’d become very obvious very quickly how much money is in politics.
I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting
Representative democracy is rooted in the idea that the average person is kind of a moron. Just look at states where it's incredibly easy to get state-wide referendums on basically anything on the ballot and you'll see the legal landscape there quickly becomes a mess.
> idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy
In the US at least, no it is not. The founders were incredibly concerned about the ‘passions of the mob’ and deliberately built a system that they hoped would temper the excesses of the public.
And after seeing the wacko stuff going on in California, I can’t blame them!
Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though? The memetic effects of language and communication means propaganda and similar tools of rhetoric and leveraged communication will always work, with or without an internet. There's no "solution", only "good enoughs".
Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"? How do we make sure we're directly voting in things relevant to our lives? What if "relevant to our lives" is unrelated to our geographic location and is very interests based? If anyone can vote for anything, but most folks don't ever vote for most things, how do you prevent brigading of votes via coordination by groups who see that their group alone can swing what would be a small local vote whatever way they want by virtue of sheer numbers? How do you prevent trolls from going through every vote and just voting no on every "community center paper-and-ink budget" across the entire country?
There are so many questions I have about direct democracy systems! Do you have more information?
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2 ideas about direct democracy.
Selling your vote becomes a nonissue when everybody is doing it.
An LLM informed by a reddit-style discussion tree might be a good way to implement the policy-creating part of a direct democracy.
> When you think about it, the idea of a representative democracy is rooted in the technical difficulties of implementing a direct democracy: both spread of information/discussion to the masses and organizing the votes.
REPLACE FED CHAIR WITH DOVE OR HAWK?
BUILD NEW STRATEGIC BOMBERS?
START A WAR WITH IRAN?
VOTE NOW!
Imagine the chaos. Imagine all the ads.
Stupid things like brexit was put to a vote, but really important things such as age verification and mass surveillance are never put to any vote.
In what way was Brexit a stupid thing? It was an extemely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything then isn't that what it should be? You might not like the outcome (I don't) but I consider the question of Brexit important.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE
But Brexit was a vote, by the people. Yes, the pro-leave campaign lied to no ends, but people still made a choice on their own and the majority for leave was quite slim.
This is very different to age sniffing here. Age sniffing is not being queried via public votum - lobbyists push it through without any resistance. It's amazing how this works.
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> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control
I'm not sure about that at all. All my normies friends have no problem immediately submitting their documents to any KYC service that requests it. And talking about chat control they happily parrot the propaganda points, which is something very normal given that they have no insight as we do.
So unfortunately I believe that the laymen are all in favor of chat control.
I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing
I’m not in favour of Chat Control;
> the evidence is that people already pretty firmly against things like chat control and the will to push it through tends to come from the political circles more than popular belief it is a good idea.
This is quite the statement. What evidence do you have that of this? Here in the UK, the equivalent bills are pretty widely supported across he board.
> I expect that if the measure itself went to a general vote, the majority would be against it once they have to deal with a specific proposal
This is likely true of pretty much anything, though. Imagine suggesting that people collectively fund a national road network by paying 20% of their income to the government (or whatever number your state/country/municipality chooses). All of a sudden it’s a terrible idea!
> the evidence is
I don't believe this. I believe us more tech oriented people live in a dangerous bubble that reassures us that obviously people are against it. But that's very likely not true.
I disagree, if anything the last 12 years or so have shown that there are groups on both sides of the political spectrum that are quite willing to engage and justify censorship.
From "Muh freeze peach" to the actual government requested censorship during COVID everyone is rushing to get a new shiny stick they can use to beat their political opponents with.
> The repeated failures of authoritarianism to get to a good place are so consistent it is wild that people keep trying it.
Lee Kuan Yew would like a word.
The world is complicated. There may be more than one way to get to a good place, if we can even agree on what good looks like. Most people, even libertarians, think that some kind and degree of authoritarianism is beneficial in a government, we just disagree on the details.
But it’s not about critical thinking or governing well it’s about getting re-elected.
So the argument will go to “think of the children” which is a guise for more control and then pretty soon we are living in the dystopian future of 1984 or the UK where the film V for Vendetta took place.
This same kind of thinking gets idiots like Trump elected because people don’t have any sense of the commons and become single issue voters (sic). “Oh just reduce my taxes on my carried interest… reduce my taxes… I’m a xenophobe I hate immigrants let’s not do anything systematic let’s just hard close the border or the world is flat America only exists we don’t need allies or trading partners (JD Vance) … and so on”
Devil's advocate - what's the nth-order effect of the current internet / social media setup that we currently have? How much damage is it causing? Who did the analysis on that and decided what ended up with today is the best setup?
I think there are many arguments for and against this type of regulation. Good arguments on both sides take into account nth-order effects. But both sides have different priorities, and have different weighing of the trade-offs. Calling one side effectively "thick" isn't really taking part in the debate.
(And cause and effect are taught pretty early on in school; not sure you need to learn "systems thinking" to understand nth-order effects.)
What are the nth-order effects that you think are not being considered or weighted accordingly by proponents of this regulation?
There are no good arguments for this type of regulation, but there are some very good arguments to not let kids to use proprietary software. You know, nothing is worse than a half-truth.
Violation of rights to privacy — age verification ties an identity to the request, so if you’re surfing porn or browsing controversial threads, you could be flagged by law enforcement or the other third parties that the state might be sharing data with, such as insurance companies that might infer the wrong things about you. You could be blackmailed, too.
And then there’s also the leakage of those data points to rival nation states, in case of a security breach.
Plenty of bad nth order effects if you just think about it
What right to privacy do you have online? For the record, I am fully against this but people just throw the word "right" around. In another thread here people had a "right" to Anthropic's latest model. It almost becomes a joke. You have a right not to use the internet, but if you do the government can make laws, however shitty, if they want to. Relying on "rights" as an argument fails quickly in my opinion. You have a right to buy a gun, but a lot of places require verification. You have the right to be alcohol or porn, but that requires age verification. What right do you have to go online without providing verification? If you can't provide a legal basis, come up with a better argument because yours is easily dismissed.
This is Whataboutism. Maybe the wolf has good reasons for leaving the stockyards gates open, it is a different perspective, yeah, but for the stock it is pretty clear good vs death.
Now of course, no one is going to “directly” dir from these laws but so much meaning that comes with freedom will be lost, but maybe the wolfs see it under a different light.
I agree with your broader point but I'm always skeptical of the claim "we should teach xyz in schools!" Because, well, choose your least favourite subject at school. A language, history or geography, mathematics perhaps. How much do you remember? The reason you don't remember is because you weren't motivated to learn, since you didn't, at the time, think it worth learning. If you think kids are champing at the bit to learn systems thinking, or how to file taxes, or law or anything else really then you are unfortunately wrong.
And I agree with the commenter’s well-meaning, but we are technically teaching systems theory already in schools. If you’ve had classes in any of the natural sciences, you’ve had systems thinking. If you don’t remember a whit, well then, proves your point—it’s probably not that great of an idea afterall.
The question however is if students are ever challenged or encouraged to apply their learnings beyond the classroom and in daily life. In my experience, the answer is usually “no”.
To me classes being boring and forgettable has more to do with the method of teaching than the subject. Just about anything can be made interesting with the right approach, and often that approach isn’t the typical textbooks, tests, and rote memorization.
Perhaps I’m biased, though. I learn best when provided with working practical examples and hands-on exercises that allow me to develop my own internal models. They can make a concept “click” where I’d be beating my head against a wall with traditional methods for a much longer period of time to achieve the same revelation.
I've long held that Logic should be a part of the core high school curriculum. Understanding basic if/then propositions and a handful of axioms form a robust foundation for reasoning in any domain.
Having grown up through the early-ish days of the web, I'm still surprised the internet in general didn't get an 18+ age rating almost immediately.
Though I suppose that may have something to do with households in the early days having at most one internet connected device even if they were well off, so society could get away with blaming parents for not monitoring kids' use.
Don’t underestimate the impact of AOL - the main experience boomers and greatest generation had of the early internet was moderated and mediated. My parents were not on IRC.
Well we teach people the health benefits of physical activity school but many don't continue with it.
Sorry, this is going to be a rant. :)
Admittedly it's a long time since I was in school, but when I was there the notion of teaching the benefits of physical activity was limited to being told to run about for some 'sport', and absolutely nothing about why that's a good idea. Everyone was expected to do the same thing with no consideration for ability, disability, or motivation. Kids were punished with detentions for refusing to endure painful exercise that they couldn't do as well as their more capable peers.
The very obvious second order effect of poor physical education is fat unmotivated adults who don't exercise. Maybe educators need some systems thinking training too.
I'd add that not only were we not taught about health benefits in PE classes, the punishment for non-participation was not only detention but also potentially failing the entire grade. I ended up dropping out in my first year of high school due to a culmination of similar issues. I loved and still love learning, but my school was not an environment for learning. It was an environment for teaching rigid obedience to authority, and nothing more.
My particular favorite thing to rant about is how, on the first day, I was held in detention for the entire day and made to skip the introduction to my classes because I unknowingly wore the wrong shade of blue for the dress code. Like the middle school in the same district, the dress code required a white, red, or blue polo (FUCK YEAH AMERICA!!!!), but the shade of blue from the middle school uniforms was not allowed, something I was never aware of but instead got arbitrarily punished for along with dozens of others, with my parent being made to buy a new set of uniform shirts after school.
It is no wonder that the US is in a state of decline given how horrid the schooling is. I can't imagine a worse environment for stifling intellectual curiosity than the one I was in.
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I was in school for 12 years and for 11 of those years I was told I was bad at sports. It was only in the last year of high-school that I finally had a PE teacher that actually tried to teach us that sports is about doing what we like and moving our bodies. I had top grades that year and finally learned that I liked (some) sports. Turns out I was just bad at football (soccer) which was what we were forced to do 90% of the time.
It’s been 25 years since I was in school and this was my experience. Unsure if it’s changed…
Ironically when I was in high school I was fat and hated pe but biked about 20 minutes to school every day. Now in middle age I still bike everywhere and am in better shape than most of my peers..
Turns out I just really really hate running.
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I was asking the Google llm search about why iterative games don't reach their competitive equilibrium the round after revealing the theory. In my example, it was the "guess 2/3 the average game", and I asked it why my class didn't immediately converge to zero after it was explained. The llm said people are lazy and I have autism because I couldn't identify or understand the stopping criteria used by my classmates. I'm still confused.
How people play those games has to do with cultural norms and expectations, not just mathematics and logic. Same for age verification.
But shouldn't the extension of logic be the same in either case, even if there is some premature convergence criteria? I have yet to see someone say age verification is okay because the gov ensure X is the maximum use of the tech. If anything, Public Choice Theory compels the grant that the gov will misuse the data given enough time.
A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent
carefully crafted stated intent
No, not everyone exploits that. But those that reject these controls are often ridiculed because the thought about any side effect is too alien.
Yet I don't think age verification will work with national IDs for that matter. I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
But yes, the normal insta/tiktok user will be affected and not think too much about it. Others will have true freedom of speech.
> I generally use social media sites that won't implement it.
Which social media sites won't implement it?
Most of them are more insignificant than Twitter, Insta, TikTok. And while they do employ advertising here and there, profit is only interesting for keeping up with server costs.
Unfortunately, I don't think systems thinking alone would help much.
One could present the case in favor of Internet age verification to the nth-order effects, while downplaying the effects in the case against.
So, in addition to presenting the cases with foreseeable effects, we need ways to compare the impact of worst-case scenarios in the two cases, and make a decision or compromise based on that.
Concur.
Systems thinking is one thing. One sided systems thinking is another.
If you disregard the challenges kids and their parents, or adults as a whole, are facing with just social media, you can easily make a case against age verification.
Yet, the whole reason we are at this juncture, is because there are actual injuries being felt by people. Not because privacy isn’t valued or hasn’t been defended regularly.
This is an excellent point. I'm self educated while my wife holds multiple degrees and a masters. Yet when she saw a news article about age verification (something I've been following for years thanks to HN) she was like "this is good" and I'm like "why" and the ensuing discussion made it clear that she didn't really think about the repercussions of age verification, just that seemingly smart people in positions of power seemed to think it was a good idea.
And I think this is dangerous. We have smart people like my wife who would probably vote Yes on this if it came to our ballot, because the smart people who wrote the measure were able to control the narrative.
Not that I'm so smart, mind you. I just follow HN and EFF so I'm exposed to this kind of stuff. I'd probably be blind to such things outside of the tech world. I'd love to say that I'd think of nth order effects when at the ballot but honestly maybe I won't.
> "If we taught systems thinking in schools"
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
I mean, not surprisingly, this is entirely geographic and system dependent. Do your high school teachers (or elementary) have to wear body cameras, practice administering narcan, and how to clear the chamber of a discovered gun, or do they get to 3D print parts for their classroom and go on field trips?
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If we taught systems thinking in any educational setting, and it took hold for a significant portion of the population, we would have already transcended into immortal thinking energy beings and age verification debates would be irrelevant....
most people simply dont care to control for higher order effects. they enjoy doing things on principle and then dealing with the effects seperately.
the principle of protecting children is strong. the solution of verification, no matter how poorly implemented, cannot be struck down while people are interested in persuing the principle it claims to represent.
the only other way around it is to come up with another solution that supports the principle and hope it gains more traction. but when the powers at be putting forth the verification may have ulterior motives to begin with, alternative solutions have a way of losing traction
Well people that have been hearing of the slippery slope fallacy their whole life might end up biased against such an approach
it's not that they're bad at logic in general, it's that the "protecting the children" part gets them emotionally reactive, which bypasses logic. same thing happens when you tell a man who's emotionally reactive about his masculinity that soy will give him tits, just those words are enough to shut down his thinking.
people are plenty good at systems thinking. if we made them better at it, their emotional immaturity would still bypass it.
No, we have any number of social constructs around 'age and responsibility' - driving, alcohol, pubs, porn, excessive violence and so much more.
It's bereft to suggest that we wouldn't nominally have those in the digital world.
And, people are concerned about nth order effects, it's a huge point of debate.
Yes - there is a huge slippery slope argument to be made, but it's an argument ... to be made. There are all sorts of ways of doing this.
Social media age verification is like none of those - social media is the modern public square and age verification is asking everybody to show their papers before participating in free speech in the public. It will have a chilling effect on free speech and will be a tool for authoritarian control
Social media, as we have it today, has nothing to do with a public square.
A public square does not have trolls and bots from across the globe teleporting in and out. A public square does not amplify the most divisive comments and drown out your friends's holiday photos because the former makes the ad space more profitable.
A poor analogy.
The public square has never been properly anonymous. If you start saying things which contravene laws or the rights of others, the police have been able to capture you and unmask your identity, if concealed.
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Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)
The public square was in communities small enough where townspeople knew each other, and so speech was not anonymous besides those who penned (but not those who distributed) unattributed pamphlets. Moreover, if the speech you were pronouncing was beyond the pale of the community’s values, you could face retribution for it, whether judicial or extra-judicial like tarring and feathering. Even in the nascent USA whose political elite was high on Lockean ideas of natural rights and freedom of speech, the public square was never a free-for-all.
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Social media as it has become now is a shitshow where a minority of angry and/or disingenuous posters dominate discourse.
Twitter (X) was never the public square, and now it's little more than a playground for propagandists. The rest of us do well to ignore it, and it seems that even the 'legacy' media are starting to realise the days of breathlessly reporting on tweet-storms weren't great for anyone.
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Your local library has age and ID requirements.
Your local 'town square' has 'some rules'.
Parents are entirely able to overcome any of this if they so choose - including feeding their kids alcohol, guns etc. - and so the freedom does materially exist.
Social Media isn't a place for free expression - it's mostly toxic - like exposing your children to the most vile, inauthentic people.
The more genteel places, frankly, won't have much in the way of age restrictions.
Entire nations are banning social media for kids because it's just not healthy - the teachers want it, the parents want it, the data seems to support it.
I think you're right to be (very concerned) but this is a necessary discussion. As a teacher.
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“Age verification” isn't a problem in itself, the problem is how it's done. They could issue a physical id card with a cryptographic chip and do the age verification in a zero-knowledge fashion and it would be perfectly fine.
The problem is the lack of thinking about the solution and just handwaving “age verification” as a political posture, which is why we end up with half-baked systems.
I strongly disagree.
You're framing this as some desirable thing that could be good except that a bad implementation erodes privacy. That's wrong at every step. These bills originate from big tech such as Meta that literally profit from collecting as much personal info from you as possible. https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rsn1tm/it_a...
But even beyond their tainted origins, you can't implement your way out of something badly formed in the first place. You handwave "zero knowledge" but that doesn't do for your privacy what you're hoping it will. That id card will still have a serial number and CCTV of you purchasing it and you will de facto end up trusting some government binary blob to implement this cryptography correctly without backdoors. Snowden was a decade ago. This will have a backdoor. This will be used for surveillance, tomorrow even if by some miracle not today.
And finally, this makes the internet worse. There will be a section of people who are, for one reason or another, not able to pass this bar. Much of the goodness of the internet comes from being able to interact with anyone on it.
That Reddit post is feeding more conspiracy thinking than helping.
The facts listed also match the actions of a firm aiming to ensure that the burden of verification does not fall on it, for a legislative process that they know is coming.
Red flag after red flag has been raised on child outcomes and social media, for a decade.
The internet is great for people here on HN, who know enough to avoid getting screwed.
The internet is a grotesque horror show for anyone who is stuck on the wrong side of a customer support system. Plus, most people here are thinking from the perspective of someone in the US or EU. They actually get better support than the rest of the world gets.
Let me be clear - I hate that we are at this juncture. However willful ignorance of the harms being inflicted on users is palliative care for our feelings. It means that one day, there is going to be a confrontation between a techie advocating for privacy and the people whose lives are being upended by tech.
Privacy has to be protected effectively, which means acknowledging the hurt and providing solutions for that.
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People fall through the cracks of the system. You suddenly can't use a digital service any more, because it requires you to use a specific technology that you can't obtain, even though you are old enough. You might be a refugee, you might be someone with special characters in their name or you might be someone from a country that simply doesn't provide recognized digital certifications. Or you might want to run a rooted operating system on your phone or computer.
This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
Also age verification is still a problem in itself. Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents. Even if the card couldn't be misused by others - you give platforms the knowledge of whom is a minor, which means they can be targeted better.
Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.
All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.
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> This assumes good faith, which doesn't match reality. It's about control, not protecting children.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
> Given your idea of a physical card, kids will find a way to use the card of their parents.
Sure there are kids who have access to their parents credit card with the PIN, but how frequent is that? In every system, fraud will exist, but that doesn't mean the system is worthless. “The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
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But to be effective you need to prove that the person presenting the ID is the person the ID belongs to.
In person that falls to a human being, and it's an easy and intuitive task that takes seconds.
On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes. They'll be tempted to store this for auditing purposes... they'll also be tempted to store correlation IDs etc if the architecture allows.
The issue is trust. You just can't trust these first and third parties not to collaborate for commercial gain or at government demand or request.
And ultimately you're still exchanging verification at registration for a shareable credentials: I could use my ID to sign up to pornhub premium and then sell the username and password to a 16 year old if I wished, just like those buying alcohol can go and give it to the underage. A black market for digital credentials is even easier to establish than material goods
> On the internet this involves some kind of video recording being sent to some agency somewhere being paid a fee, who may later be asked to prove the efficacy of their service. This agency needs a digital copy of the photo from your ID for matching purposes.
That's why I'm talking about an “Id card” using Zero-knowledge proofs in a cryptographic chip, not using a paper ID with your picture on top…
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It is a problem in itself. First they want to know your age (they're pretending: of course they want to know your identity, but let's leave that for a moment).
What's next? Your US legal status as determined by your ethnicity? Scan your face to prove you're white? Yeah, that sounds absolutely ridiculous but so did the age verification with KYC just a few years ago.
Why are those things naturally "whats next"?
We allow bars and car companies to verify age before conducting business. Does that in itself lead to racial discrimination? I think not.
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"Age verification" is designed to attribute your identity to your online presence. As such, it's done just right.
> and it would be perfectly fine
Unless a tiny chance exists that some system in the middle is not secure. Then you have the problem of those who orient their acceptance to the "oh well" shrug, and then systemic faults get downplayed by default. (Edit: I re-read and notice 'half-baked systems': seemingly, we agree.)
> as a political posture
Which is the core problem of masses accepting pseudo-heartly and not-brainy unacceptable figures. And again, systemic faults incarnated as administrations get downplayed by default.
And it is focussed on social networks, which require an email address, which usually implies a device.
But instead of inserting controls around email addresses (as with paid services) or devices (as with contraband), the requirement is pushed to the application layer. It really makes no sense from a technical POV.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools ...
This plus methods of narrative steering and psychological manipulation in general.
Though I can't see this happenning while the transnational cartel is still at the helm.
Do you (or anyone else) have a good resource for learning systems thinking? I might have some from working in SE and just observing the world, but I've never studied it
What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?
Parents who wish to have both the child and themselves remain sane are already watching over the way their offspring uses the internet.
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
Is this even a problem?
I mean its been what three decades of internet without age verification and people can't really point to specific issues with it, just sort of gesticulates that they must be there despite the millenial generation being about as well adjusted as any other. I would say seeing a pulverized squirrel on the road with the brains scattered about in real life is far more traumatizing for a child than seeing even human on human violence and gore on the internet. Movies have done a lot to desensitize that sort of thing when it is served on a screen versus in real life where you can smell it and walk all around it.
We should assign one or two adults to children who provide for them, and prevent various dangers, including online ones, from reaching them. It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is also the most important task on the planet.
A generation of kids have grown up with just such assigned adults, who overwhelmingly did not apply sufficient oversight to the kids' use of social media.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
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So do we get rid of all laws which distinguish children? Why bother with limiting selling alcohol to children if we can just let the parents do it?
My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.
It isn’t working, and the assigned adults are asking for these changes.
What is the next step?
Ok, that sounds snarky, but this is where we are. Parents are asking for age controls, and governments are happy to give them what they want, with them getting an added level over privacy.
The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.
Journalists are supposed to be helping the people by doing it.
Most people just want to blame someone else of their problems
And those that are keen to make some noise about it are labelled as being conspiracy minded or against the safety of children.
It causes a situation where because of the potential backlash, even if they are right, few people will come to the defense for fear of being ostracized as well.
Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball. Witness: your comment makes a bunch of predictions that are very unlikely to be true.
Nth order effects are unpredictable. You can only observe them after the fact. Systems thinking is a debugging methodology, not at all a crystal ball.
Look, this is just a baseless opinion because we restrict things from various groups all the time. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, firearms, pornography, voting, driver’s licenses, classified material, the list goes on.
Yet people will employ lazy slappery slope fallacies for this one issue in particular.
You can exploit both ways.
Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies
have you considered that maybe the "elites/beneficiaries of such laws" - would find it disadvantageous to teach systems thinking to the unwashed masses. an example look at how slavery is taught in the southern united states.
most people that learn systems thinking is coz life forces them to.
Classic STEM guy thinking that STEM is the cure for everything
In other words, without a solid, fundamental, national level of education, democracy just will not work. And any democratic institution which does not codify the right to education in very specific terms is inherently weak to degradation over time due to subverted interests in the ruling class.
How do we solve this problem? I wish I readily had an answer. But as we witness our democratic institutions crumble in real time, it's hard to imagine the average voter becoming more educated in our lifetime.
>> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin. People struggle to consider the second-, third-, and nth-order effects of anything
Does this not imply we also wouldn't get the internet because people would have considered the damage it would also cause?
That's by design. Bringing up any kind of systemic issues, or applying a materialist reasoning to anything will get you taxed with communism. This is a classic strategy of the capital class, and is at the foundation of neoliberalism. In Thatcher's own words:
> There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
They have to keep the population blind to any kind of systemic thinking to rob them blind.
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That page says most kids can barely read. Are you a kid?
> Across student groups, average fourth-grade reading scores in 2022 were lower for the following student groups:
> [..] > male and female students;
So reading scores were lower for everyone? Why single out groups?
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I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.
The only reasonable solution shape I've seen is the one that trusts the parents to set an operating system setting that says whether or not the user is allowed to access adult content. And so it doesn't actually verify age, it just verifies parental intent.
The argument usually is that it is a slippery slope. Something that is introduced in the name of virtue ends up being co-opted into a system of control as those in power and peoples attitudes change with subsequent layers of normalization.
A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression. As a key example, look at 4chan - anonymity taken to it's extreme has resulted in on one hand yes a lot of disgusting stuff, but also a cultural hotbed.
Age verification is de facto identity verification. Eff says it well:
> But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
Tying every action taken online to the user's real identity will have a deep and catastrophic chilling effect, destroying those very places that are creating our culture.
Almost anything can be a slippery slope to almost anything. We'd never get anything done.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
What about climate change and the current mass extinction?
Yes those might be slightly more iimportant.
> If we taught systems thinking in schools things like internet age verification would never get past being an idea on the back of a napkin.
But why would we do that?
If we taught people how to think, they wouldn't sit their toddlers down in front an iPad for 8+ hours a day to entertain (read: keep them occupied and quiet) them with YouTube videos, sign them up for a Facebook account before they could wipe their own butts, etc.
The sad irony of this age verification thing is that if we had a decent society and parents with common sense, age verification wouldn't even be a topic.
Parents with common sense comes from teaching children common sense. You have to fix the child education issue first, a lot of adults are too far gone to educate at this point.
How can you fix the child education problem without fixing the parent education? School is but a few hours a day, and kids spend more time with parents and learn from them. I was lucky that my parents liked to read and encouraged me to read, but my friends didn't have the same exposure that I did and never liked to read books.
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I don't get why you would start there. Their parents probably didn't have youtube or ipads and they and/or their parents are the ones pushing it.
Uhh imagine you know about countries other than the US that implement age verification. Like the UK, Brazil, Australia, France, Spain, Italy and dozens of other countries with vastly different educational systems. Then perhaps you could begin to understand the magnitude of your own ignorance of actual power and political ideology. Instead of embarrassingly trying to reason yourself a political education from first principle.
Uh dumb law I don't like. Cause people dumb. If people not dumb, no dumb law. Uhh I am very smart. "Systems thinking" oh fucking hell stfu