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Unsupervised Learning: No. 173

Unsupervised Learning is my weekly show that provides collection, summarization, and analysis in the realms of Security, Technology, and Humans.

It’s Content Curation as a Service…

I spend between five and twenty hours a week consuming articles, books, and podcasts—so you don’t have to—and each episode is either a curated summary of what I’ve found in the past week, or a standalone essay that hopefully gives you something to think about.

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The Difference Between Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism

I recently wrote a well-received piece about the political positions of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), and a ferocious discussion erupted in the comments regarding Dave Rubin‘s political philosophy.

To a modern liberal, Libertarian basically means someone who cares only about themselves.

Rubin calls himself a Classical Liberal, but it turns out that people on Twitter and Reddit aren’t sure exactly what that means. Rubin himself says he’s undergone a Conservative Transformation lately, leading many liberals to claim he’s simply become a Libertarian. Meanwhile, Libertarians are saying those are completely different things.

I was confused myself.

A cursory look at the definitions of Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism had them looking nearly identical. So I decided to do a deep dive on the differences. Here’s what I found, combined with my analysis of the situation.

Classical Liberalism was a strong counter to previous political movements that placed authority in the hands of churches, monarchs, or governments. Its central theme was the freedom of individuals rather than central authorities, and the idea was spawned by a number of original thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke, and others as a response to the industrial revolution and population growth in the late 1800s.
Social Liberalism and Conservatism emerged from Classical Liberalism in the early 20th century.

Classical liberalism is the philosophy of political liberty from the perspective of a vast history of thought. Libertarianism is the philosophy of liberty from the perspective of its modern revival from the late sixties-early seventies on.

Mario Rizzo

Social Liberalism focused on having the government still manage much of the economy, but with more social freedoms.

Conservatism focused on the government still upholding traditional social norms, but allowing economic freedoms—especially regarding the use of free markets.
Libertarianism is a strong form of Classical Liberalism that argues that individuals should be left alone—without much influence from central government, and that personal responsibility is the most powerful ingredient of success. Pure Libertarians believe the government should stay out of both social and economic issues, meaning they tend to offend both Social Liberals and Conservatives, for opposite reasons.


My analysis within today’s context

Over the last week or so I watched a ton of Dave Rubin videos, and what I found will likely upset readers both on the left and the right.

First, I don’t think Rubin is being academically or politically accurate in branding himself as a Classical Liberal. And from what I’ve seen, he isn’t actually claiming this.

Dave is a bit confused right now, but you probably would be too if you were gay, Jewish, previously liberal, and were currently going through a conservative awakening.

He’s not a Conservative in the common use of the word, and he doesn’t want to use the term Libertarian because it has negative connotations. So I think he’s reached back into history for a loftier-sounding synonym that doesn’t make him feel as uncomfortable.

I make an argument here that the IDW is basically a collection of upset liberals looking for honest conversation.

If you think it’s not possible for a Trump supporter to be confused rather than evil, then you’re not listening closely enough.

That’s the part that will upset readers on the right. The part that will upset readers on the left is that I’ve yet to find evidence of actual hatred or malice in his videos. Yes, he gives props to Trump—who I cannot stand—and yes, he’s all over the place on healthcare and climate change. But to me he is behaving exactly like a liberal with a severe case of PTSD—not like an evil or hateful person. I see him as good-natured and wrong, which is much different than someone like Rush Limbaugh or Trump.

Rubin is using “Classical Liberalism” because it gives liberals a tiny moment of confusion before they attack, but it’s really just new packaging for his individual—and very fluid—brand of Libertarianism.

In short, “Classical Liberalism” is being used by some on the right today as a somewhat pseudo-intellectual way of claiming that their unwillingness to use government and shared resources to help the ailing and unfortunate masses is somehow a superior policy because 1), the phrase is old, 2) because the “liber” in Classical Liberalism (insert Kung-fu here) means freedom.

(eagle sound)

So it’s not that they’re selfish—it’s just that they value freedom from government more than they value helping people they don’t know (and who should be helping themselves anyway).

But don’t call them Libertarians.

Summary


Classical Liberalism was originally a break away from churches, monarchies, and powerful and prescriptive governments—with a counter-focus on freedom of the individual.
Both Liberalism (social freedoms and equality) and Conservatism (economic freedoms and free markets) came from Classical Liberalism.
Libertarianism—in its pure form—is about freedoms from any sort of central authority, and thus goes against both conservatives and liberals.
In some universe, there might be a difference in Rubin’s Classical Liberalism and today’s Libertarianism, but in 2019 in this universe—there isn’t one.


Notes


I created the diagram myself using my own hybrid paraphrasings of multiple definitions across multiple sources. Because meanings change so quickly, and because we’re in the midst of such a quick change right now, I felt I needed to take that (ahem) liberty. When I tried to use more formal definitions they lacked clarity, concision, and/or context. If you’re a Political Science expert (I’m not) and I’ve offended your profession, please tell me how I can tweak them to be more accurate.
For the record, I know many good-hearted Libertarians and Conservatives. Just because I think this particular strain of wordsmithing is bankrupt doesn’t mean I think there’s no merit to any of these anti-government arguments.
Don’t start with the anti-progressive/modern liberal stuff here. That’s a separate argument to be had in a separate thread. This one is just about the definition of Classical Liberalism.
SOURCE: https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/cl...
SOURCE: https://thinkmarkets.wordpress.com/20...

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 172 (Member Edition)

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A Visual Breakdown of Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) Political Positions

I realized recently that I had no idea where many people in the Intellectual Dark Web actually stood on key positions. I thought I knew—sort of—but it turns out that most of what I knew was coming from a shoddy skyscraper of misconceptions.

I was being attacked by alt-right types saying DiResta part of a pro-Clinton conspiracy.

I did a post recently about Renée DiResta being on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and in the comments I learned that she was evidently some sort of shill for…I’m not sure who. I guess for the Democrats? I also learned recently from other readers that Joe Rogan was alt-right.

Really? Joe Rogan? A conservative? The mediation, cannabis, commedian who’s for gay marriage and pro-choice, and income equality? I then made the mistake of thinking Dave Rubin was conservative as well, since he’s often labeled that by the extreme left. I’m an MMA fan, and I have followed Sam Harris since the very beginning, so Rogan and Harris were already in my awareness and thus I could tell when they were being maligned fairly easily. But when it came time for me to describe people like Rubin, I realized I was committing the same errors as everyone else.

If you’ve not listened to a large body of someone’s work—both in good faith and over a long period of time—you can’t hope to understand them.

Sam is half Jewish.

So I decided this weekend to do the research to figure out what these people believed on all the major issues, and that’s the spreadsheet you see above.

During the research I started noticing some weird stuff about this supposedly hateful IDW group of Harris, Weinstein, Rubin, and Shapiro. Namely, they’re all Jewish, and yet a number of them are often labeled as white supremacists and even neo-Nazis. That completely breaks the supidmeter.

Ben Shapiro—yes, the conservative one—actually needs private security because of his open criticism of the alt-right. Shapiro has also been in very aggressive debates with Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a vocal proponent of the alt-right, and that public disagreement has become quite ugly.

Then I watched Dave Rubin, who a bunch of my liberal friends told me was this crazy right-wing guy, have Shapiro on to debate the top liberal vs. conservative issues. And Rubin (a gay Jew, by the way), was the one defending the liberal side.

And just yesterday I heard one of the most encouraging and heart-warming discussions I’ve heard in a long time between Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro, where Rogan (gasp) takes the liberal positions and Ben debates from the conservative side. And in both cases (Rubin and Rogan) the conversation was civil and productive.

Peterson is something of an exception here.

If you look at the chart I made at the top of this piece, you can see that almost everyone is extremely liberal—including people like Rogan.

Their binding factor—which is what brings Shapiro into the mix—is that they’re willing to have good faith conversations with people they disagree with.

And I think that’s glorious. You really should watch the recent podcast with Joe and Ben. It’s an unbelievably refreshing conversation between two people who greatly disagree about fundamental things.

Summary and takeaway

I can’t quite figure Peterson out, so I’m withholding judgment on that one.

With the exception of Ben Shapiro, who is super libertarian and doesn’t want to impose his religious ideas upon you through government—and Jordan Peterson, who seems to constantly send mixed signals to me, the vast majority of people in the IDW are extremely liberal on all of the core issues like abortion, climate change, gay marriage, etc.

They’re not neocons, they’re not alt-right, and they’re not racists. They’re the opposite of that, actually, and the main thing they have in common is the desire to preserve and amplify good-faith conversation.

Rather than bash them due to something you heard from this one place—or that one friend—take the time to actually listen. Most of them are progressive just like you and me. And if you’re not liberal that’s fine too—listening will show you that true discussion is still possible.

Either way, I urge you to join us in resisting the urge to shut down difficult conversation, because that’s precisely what creates the empty stage that empowers the alt-right.

Notes


Apr 6, 2019 — I reached out to Sam and updated the sheet to mark him as fully pro on single-payer healthcare. He also suggested adding Wealth Inequality as a topic, which I did.
Apr 6, 2019 — I corrected Eric’s name, where I had Bret initially. Although Bret is also a member as well as far as I can tell.
Apr 6, 2019 — It seems Rubin has/is shifting ever more right, so it’s hard to know how much of his liberal stances remain, but as of the publish date this is what I still have for his positions on these topics. And that still puts him quite liberal.
Here is Ben Shapiro heavily criticising the alt-right. Link
For the table at the top I basically spent many hours going to find where each person stood on those key issues. It really needs to be sourced to be most useful, so I’m going to be collecting each source in the Google Spreadsheet I used for collection. If anyone wants to help collect, or even add more positions to make the chart better, here’s the sheet. Link

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 171

Unsupervised Learning is my weekly show that provides collection, summarization, and analysis in the realms of Security, Technology, and Humans.

It’s Content Curation as a Service…

I spend between five and twenty hours a week consuming articles, books, and podcasts—so you don’t have to—and each episode is either a curated summary of what I’ve found in the past week, or a standalone essay that hopefully gives you something to think about.

Subscribe to the Newsletter or Podcast

Become a member to get every episode

 Security News





Mastercard is looking to create a Digital ID service that can bind your digital presence to your mobile device, which will be able to verify you to various services. Link



Palantir has won an $800 million contract to build the next combat intelligence system (to replace DCGS-A) for the Army. Link



Putin appears to be causing brain drain in Russia. Link



Dropbox has an interesting proposal for improving vendor security assessments. TL;DR: They turned their requirements into contractual points. LOVE IT. Link



The US Military is working on software to detect “micro changes” in people with top security clearances, and many think it’s the future of employee monitoring as well. Link



Airbnb says it’s going after hosts that record their guests, but what about guests who drop cameras in host properties? Seems like people with nice places would be more lucrative for blackmail and such. I wonder if this is part of threat model. Link



Verizon has opened access to the free version of its spam and robocall blocking tool based on STIR/SHAKEN. I can’t wait for the other carriers to get this. Link



The Air Force is working on unmanned AI combat drones, in a project called Skyborg. Link



The BSidesSF 2019 Videos Playlist Link



Advisories: Cisco IOS XE , Cisco WebEx Browser Extension



Breaches: Toyota





⚙️ Technology News





Amazon has released S3 Glacier Deep Archive, which is rare-access data storage for just $1/TB/month. Link



Daimler is investing heavily in a self-driving tech company focused on Level 4 Self-driving Trucks. Link



RSS and The Matrix were born 20 years ago, in the same month. Link

Defining the Values of the Intellectual Dark Web

The gravity around the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) continues to build, with the New York Times doing a piece on it recently, and many other publications coming out to attack its members as either saviors or villains.

The term was coined by Eric Weinstein on Sam’s podcast.

In no particular order, the top echelon of members include Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson, but the exact membership is neither clearly defined nor restricted.

I’ve listened extensively to the work of all these core members—with the exception of the conservative Ben Shapiro who I’ve only watched as a guest with Sam Harris—and in my view the unifying characteristic was the willingness to honestly discuss controversial topics in Good Faith™. The New York Times piece had a different take, saying it was about going against your own in-group.

Good Faith™ here means assuming your discussion partner fundamentally has good intentions.

There is no direct route into the Intellectual Dark Web. But the quickest path is to demonstrate that you aren’t afraid to confront your own tribe.

The New York Times Piece

That doesn’t quite fit for me, because I don’t see people like Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin angering their fans with their rhetoric. I see them saying exactly what their fans already agree with, but perhaps I’m wrong and they are being criticized for being too friendly with liberal types like Sam and Eric.

I’d almost characterize the IDW as Radical Centrists—which alloys ideas from both liberals and conservatives into a kind, practical, and unconventional middle.

This is what separates people like Rubin and Shapiro.

If we were to take the top issues that define one as a liberal or conservative, such as abortion, healthcare, drug laws, gun control, climate change, LGBT rights, dislike of Trump, etc.—I’m pretty sure Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Steven Pinker, and even Jordan Peterson would score extremely liberal (as would I).

Even Jordan Peterson feels to me like a disgruntled progressive that’s upset the left won’t harvest good ideas from tradition.

It’s perplexing to me that people like Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, and Steven Pinker are commonly called out as right-wingers when they extremely liberal by most standards.

The dangers of undefined membership

To me the IDW becomes troubling when the extreme right starts using it as a platform for racism, fascism, and nationalism.

“We’re just having honest conversation”, they’ll say. “We’re not racist! We’re part of the IDW”, they’ll say. That makes it difficult to know what the group truly stands for—especially when there are no official membership boundaries.

To a liberal outside this IDW conversation, it’s to see the difference between someone who says that we’re going to have to look hard at the immigration topic in Western Europe and the United States—for various liberal reasons—and someone who says that they believe Jews or Muslims are the problem, and the world would be better off if white people were in charge.

The second position does not represent openness, or honesty, or arguing in good faith—that’s racism. Full stop. Same with the white separatists, ethno-nationalists, and all their various incarnations.

There’s a difference between wanting to have a good-faith conversation about a controversial topic in order to further humanist ideals, and wanting to use a guise of openness to spread racism, sexism, and nationalism.

Defining values

This is why I think if the IDW wants to survive—and not be hijacked by extremists on the right—it needs a set of values. I’d propose something like the following.

The pursuit of a humanist ideal that emphasizes the well-being of all humans, individually and collectively, and that prefers critical thinking and evidence over dogma or superstition.
The belief that Good Faith conversation—including on sensitive or controversial topics—is critical to making progress towards #1.

Some may balk at the humanist and “well-being” pieces, or even the “all humans” part. Perhaps they’ll say it sounds too liberal. Good. That sounds to me like a great way to scare away the racists, sexists, and xenophobes.

I have a few conservative friends and most would agree with these two tenets.

These tenets allow for us to harvest truth and beauty and utility from religious traditions, but to also criticize such traditions where they are out of line with the core values.

These tenets allow us to talk about race, gender, class, and culture—openly, and without fear—but also to reject people who conjure and wield hatred around these topics.

And most importantly, these tenets allow us to unify good people who happen to call themselves, for whatever reason, conservatives, liberals, or libertarians.

If we can unify kind and thoughtful people, who genuinely want to make the world better for everyone, and who believe strongly that the way to do that is by talking to each other, then this IDW might be just what we need to survive 2020.

If so, I’m in.

Notes


Mar 31, 2019 — A reader corrected me that Dave Rubin is actually much more like Sam and Eric in that he has always been liberal, and isn’t a conservative like Ben Shapiro.

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Four Components of Free Speech Risk — Analysis of Sam Harris’ Podcast With Roger McNamee

I just finished listening to an extraordinary episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris, where Roger McNamee was the featured guest. He is a long-time tech analyst and investor, and actually used to be an advisor for Facebook before becoming an outspoken critic.

Roger’s points were legion, and covered the now familiar ground regarding the collection of our data by Facebook, Google, and the hordes of data brokers who assemble and sell curated profiles on all of us. It was a good summary of the scope and impact, but it was covered territory for anyone in infosec or privacy.

I’m not sure he was correct about Google’s malicious motives in creating GMail, but it sure was an interesting narrative. I took it with a bit of skepticism, though.

He talked about how Google had search, but realized they needed to know more about the people searching—so they invented GMail and scanned every email for data about you and your preferences. He says they then realized they needed your location too, so they created Google Maps. It was quite a Mr. Burns-esque picture he painted.

To me, the most interesting point he made was how strange it was that nobody is challenging these companies for doing what they’re doing. He asked how it was that this became their data in the first place. Who gave all these data brokers authorization to sell your data? How did it become theirs somehow? When we never entered into an agreement with them. It was a fascinating question.

“Data is the new oil.” is a popular sentiment in tech right now.

His argument reminded me of oil. Oil comes from the sun’s energy stored in dinosaur bones and other organic material. Who owns the sun’s energy? Well—according to current laws—whoever has the resources to find it first, and to claim ownership of a location and method of extraction.

What if I told you that the vast majority of your privacy risk comes not from the seedy darkweb, but from completely legal data brokers?

— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) March 4, 2019

That’s precisely what Google, Facebook, and all these various data brokers have done with our data. They’ve taken our collective sun—which is the fundamental data about our lives—and claimed it as their own.

With the first-hop services like Google and Facebook you probably sign away your rights in the agreement, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read it. And neither have you.

They own it. They can sell it. And they can do so without us even knowing. If you want recourse, sure—take some time off of work and they’ll show up with 37 lawyers prepared to battle you for 20 years if necessary, which would cost you thousands of dollars a month.

The point isn’t that we can’t fight big companies—the point is that we’re not even realizing it’s profoundly strange for someone to own sunlight, or the personal data about billions of humans.

The (destructive) power of free speech

Anyway, all this was interesting, but Sam (thankfully) kept pulling Roger out of the weeds and back to the important questions. Namely, what went wrong in 2016? What is wrong with Facebook claiming it’s a platform and not a media company?

Sam was operating with his default state of Good Faith to both sides, even though only one was present. He could see—as can I and many others—that there’s a difference between being a platform for conversation and being a media company, and he was reluctant to blame the platforms fully for the misinformation campaigns that have become so common.

The real question that Sam was asking was excellent, which is basically:

This was specifically his question for Twitter.

Why not draw the line at the First Amendment and be done with it? Why contort yourself into knots over infinite nuance and interpretation when there’s already a (somewhat) clear backstop in the form of the Constitution?

I think that’s brilliant, and I think the answer is obvious from the way Twitter is handling these issues. They see the impact of not taking action against harmful memes and viral hate speech as being far worse than taking action, and I have to say that in many of the cases I’ve heard about, I agree.

What this highlights is simply that things have changed. It reminds me a lot of Sam’s recent conversation with Nick Bostrom, actually. These platforms might end up being the first black ball that we pull from the urn, and it might require that we get a whole lot more controlling over what can be said. That frightens me greatly as well, since I think we’re equally unready to exert that level of protective control without it becoming more of a threat than dangerous speech.

The Four Components of Free Speech Risk

So that brings me to the idea that I had when walking for 45-minutes and listening to the podcast.

I think that law like the First Amendment might have to change based on the evolution of human society and technology. It’s depressing in a similar way to what Yuval Harari talks about in some of his work, i.e, that religion and Capitalism and all these various ideas that have served us in the past might eventually become outdated to the point of becoming useless. And at that point we’ll need something new.

That isn’t to say that it’s time to discard the First Amendment, but rather that it’s possible for something so sacred and so pure as the First Amendment—or Capitalism, or fill_in_the_blank that we’ve always loved—to become such a bad fit with our current reality that we have to modify it to survive.

The way I tried to capture this was to look for elements of risk in free speech, and imagine those element values at various stages of human history. I think the components might look something like:

Platform Reach
Audience Gullibility
Mob Potential
Harm Potential

Platform Reach is how many people can hear you when you pronounce a bit of free speech. Audience Gullibility is how resistant people are to bullshit. Mob Potential is the ability to get others to agree quickly to a given argument or sentiment. And Harm Potential is how bad it could be if one’s free speech were to be harmful or malicious.

I’m not a historian, so apologies if I’m being sloppy here.

In the late 1700’s the platform was the voice, the letter, and the book, which are either small, slow, or limited in penetration. And even though people were far less educated in the past, they were also more indoctrinated with a government or relgion’s dogma—which likely immunized them to other brands of mental debris. And the harm potential back then of a dangerous stump speech or a letter or a book was definitely significant at the top end, but in modern times the potential to change voting patterns, cause social strife, and disrupt herd immunity are arguably even more severe.

Really, check out the Nick Bostrom podcast with Sam.

The point here is that we may be at an inflection point where ideas can be weaponized in a way that’s so bad we need regulation to assist. I’m not saying I want this to happen—I’m saying it might be happening regardless of what we want.

The Supreme Court has also recognized that the government may prohibit some speech that may cause a breach of the peace or cause violence.

Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

We have to think about all the various combinations of these four variables, and imagine worst-case combinations.

In the worst case, you have maximally gullible people, who are most open to believing a new narrative, who are being force-fed a false truth, on a platform that reaches hundreds of millions, where it’s trivially easy to form a mob, where it’s relatively easy to cause significant harm either in the short or long-term.

That’s kind of where we are.

Never before have we had this specific combination of these risk variables. And that might mean it’s time to start adjusting how we think about ideas.

Of course, if we can improve any of these variables it greatly reduces the risk. If we have a smarter population, if nobody’s able to be malicious on the platform, or if viral movements get shut down quickly, or if it’s somehow not easy to cause true harm to people—all those factors can make things better.

But I don’t see how we’re going to fix any of them, let alone all of them.

Analysis

I think what will end up happening is that either Twitter is going to move towards the Constitution—since they can’t possibly police everything without some major breakthroughs in ML—or the Constitution (and similar law elsewhere) is going to have to move towards Twitter.

That means instead of having a specific list of things you can’t say within the protection of free speech, the scope of what’s considered dangerous (like yelling fire in a theater) will expand greatly.

Such laws might say something like:

People who act in bad faith, with the intent to harm either individuals or groups, and use platforms designed to reach over 1,000 people, where the outcomes can conceivably result in harm—will be in violation of the Conscious Harm and Communication Act (CHACA).

A thing that we hopefully won’t need

Imagine how much interpretation there will be in there. Imagine how much controversy there will be about what applies and what doesn’t.

We don’t really have to imagine. Just look at Twitter.

Summary


Listen to the podcast.
The coolest point from Roger was the fact that we’re passively accepting the ownership of our data, and we shouldn’t.
Sam’s point was that we already have a line in the sand in the form of the Constitution, so why not use that?
I think Harari’s point is salient here, i.e., that we might have simply evolved past that being a useful protection anymore. Ideas + Maliciousness + Gullibility + Global Tech Platforms might be our first Black Bostrom’s Ball.
What will laws look like that protect global health in this realm? I think we can expect them to be broad and open to interpretation—much like we see today with Twitter.

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Four Components of Free Speech Risk — Analysis of Sam Harris’ Conversation With Roger McNamee

I just finished listening to an extraordinary episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris, where Roger McNamee was the featured guest. He is a long-time tech analyst and investor, and actually used to be an advisor for Facebook before becoming an outspoken critic.

Roger’s points were legion, and covered the now familiar ground regarding the collection of our data by Facebook, Google, and the hordes of data brokers who assemble and sell curated profiles on all of us. It was a good summary of the scope and impact, but it was covered territory for anyone in infosec or privacy.

I’m not sure he was correct about Google’s malicious motives in creating GMail, but it sure was an interesting narrative. I took it with a bit of skepticism, though.

He talked about how Google had search, but realized they needed to know more about the people searching—so they invented GMail and scanned every email for data about you and your preferences. He says they then realized they needed your location too, so they created Google Maps. It was quite a Mr. Burns-esque picture he painted.

To me, the most interesting point he made was how strange it was that nobody is challenging these companies for doing what they’re doing. He asked how it was that this became their data in the first place. Who gave all these data brokers authorization to sell your data? How did it become theirs somehow? When we never entered into an agreement with them. It was a fascinating question.

“Data is the new oil.” is a popular sentiment in tech right now.

His argument reminded me of oil. Oil comes from the sun’s energy stored in dinosaur bones and other organic material. Who owns the sun’s energy? Well—according to current laws—whoever has the resources to find it first, and to claim ownership of a location and method of extraction.

What if I told you that the vast majority of your privacy risk comes not from the seedy darkweb, but from completely legal data brokers?

— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) March 4, 2019

That’s precisely what Google, Facebook, and all these various data brokers have done with our data. They’ve taken our collective sun—which is the fundamental data about our lives—and claimed it as their own.

With the first-hop services like Google and Facebook you probably sign away your rights in the agreement, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read it. And neither have you.

They own it. They can sell it. And they can do so without us even knowing. If you want recourse, sure—take some time off of work and they’ll show up with 37 lawyers prepared to battle you for 20 years if necessary, which would cost you thousands of dollars a month.

The point isn’t that we can’t fight big companies—the point is that we’re not even realizing it’s profoundly strange for someone to own sunlight, or the personal data about billions of humans.

The (destructive) power of free speech

Anyway, all this was interesting, but Sam (thankfully) kept pulling Roger out of the weeds and back to the important questions. Namely, what went wrong in 2016? What is wrong with Facebook claiming it’s a platform and not a media company?

Sam was operating with his default state of Good Faith to both sides, even though only one was present. He could see—as can I and many others—that there’s a difference between being a platform for conversation and being a media company, and he was reluctant to blame the platforms fully for the misinformation campaigns that have become so common.

The real question that Sam was asking was excellent, which is basically:

This was specifically his question for Twitter.

Why not draw the line at the First Amendment and be done with it? Why contort yourself into knots over infinite nuance and interpretation when there’s already a (somewhat) clear backstop in the form of the Constitution?

I think that’s brilliant, and I think the answer is obvious from the way Twitter is handling these issues. They see the impact of not taking action against harmful memes and viral hate speech as being far worse than taking action, and I have to say that in many of the cases I’ve heard about, I agree.

What this highlights is simply that things have changed. It reminds me a lot of Sam’s recent conversation with Nick Bostrom, actually. These platforms might end up being the first black ball that we pull from the urn, and it might require that we get a whole lot more controlling over what can be said. That frightens me greatly as well, since I think we’re equally unready to exert that level of protective control without it becoming more of a threat than dangerous speech.

The Four Components of Free Speech Risk

So that brings me to the idea that I had when walking for 45-minutes and listening to the podcast.

I think that law like the First Amendment might have to change based on the evolution of human society and technology. It’s depressing in a similar way to what Yuval Harari talks about in some of his work, i.e, that religion and Capitalism and all these various ideas that have served us in the past might eventually become outdated to the point of becoming useless. And at that point we’ll need something new.

That isn’t to say that it’s time to discard the First Amendment, but rather that it’s possible for something so sacred and so pure as the First Amendment—or Capitalism, or fill_in_the_blank that we’ve always loved—to become such a bad fit with our current reality that we have to modify it to survive.

The way I tried to capture this was to look for elements of risk in free speech, and imagine those element values at various stages of human history. I think the components might look something like:

Platform Reach
Audience Gullibility
Mob Potential
Harm Potential

Platform Reach is how many people can hear you when you pronounce a bit of free speech. Audience Gullibility is how resistant people are to bullshit. Mob Potential is the ability to get others to agree quickly to a given argument or sentiment. And Harm Potential is how bad it could be if one’s free speech were to be harmful or malicious.

I’m not a historian, so apologies if I’m being sloppy here.

In the late 1700’s the platform was the voice, the letter, and the book, which are either small, slow, or limited in penetration. And even though people were far less educated in the past, they were also more indoctrinated with a government or relgion’s dogma—which likely immunized them to other brands of mental debris. And the harm potential back then of a dangerous stump speech or a letter or a book was definitely significant at the top end, but in modern times the potential to change voting patterns, cause social strife, and disrupt herd immunity are arguably even more severe.

Really, check out the Nick Bostrom podcast with Sam.

The point here is that we may be at an inflection point where ideas can be weaponized in a way that’s so bad we need regulation to assist. I’m not saying I want this to happen—I’m saying it might be happening regardless of what we want.

The Supreme Court has also recognized that the government may prohibit some speech that may cause a breach of the peace or cause violence.

Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

We have to think about all the various combinations of these four variables, and imagine worst-case combinations.

In the worst case, you have maximally gullible people, who are most open to believing a new narrative, who are being force-fed a false truth, on a platform that reaches hundreds of millions, where it’s trivially easy to form a mob, where it’s relatively easy to cause significant harm either in the short or long-term.

That’s kind of where we are.

Never before have we had this specific combination of these risk variables. And that might mean it’s time to start adjusting how we think about ideas.

Of course, if we can improve any of these variables it greatly reduces the risk. If we have a smarter population, if nobody’s able to be malicious on the platform, or if viral movements get shut down quickly, or if it’s somehow not easy to cause true harm to people—all those factors can make things better.

But I don’t see how we’re going to fix any of them, let alone all of them.

Analysis

I think what will end up happening is that either Twitter is going to move towards the Constitution—since they can’t possibly police everything without some major breakthroughs in ML—or the Constitution (and similar law elsewhere) is going to have to move towards Twitter.

That means instead of having a specific list of things you can’t say within the protection of free speech, the scope of what’s considered dangerous (like yelling fire in a theater) will expand greatly.

Such laws might say something like:

People who act in bad faith, with the intent to harm either individuals or groups, and use platforms designed to reach over 1,000 people, where the outcomes can conceivably result in harm—will be in violation of the Conscious Harm and Communication Act (CHACA).

A thing that we hopefully won’t need

Imagine how much interpretation there will be in there. Imagine how much controversy there will be about what applies and what doesn’t.

We don’t really have to imagine. Just look at Twitter.

Summary


Listen to the podcast.
The coolest point from Roger was the fact that we’re passively accepting the ownership of our data, and we shouldn’t.
Sam’s point was that we already have a line in the sand in the form of the Constitution, so why not use that?
I think Harari’s point is salient here, i.e., that we might have simply evolved past that being a useful protection anymore. Ideas + Maliciousness + Gullibility + Global Tech Platforms might be our first Black Bostrom’s Ball.
What will laws look like that protect global health in this realm? I think we can expect them to be broad and open to interpretation—much like we see today with Twitter.

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The Insane Reaction to Renée DiResta on the Joe Rogan Podcast

I heard Renée DiResta on the Sam Harris podcast a while back, and was excited to learn that she just appeared on Joe Rogan as well.

Her work is focused on misinformation campaigns, and she works at a place that tries to combat the problem.

Anyway, I was listening to her and Joe talking, and I somehow started reading some YouTube comments, which I took a screenshot of above.

What in the actual fuck.

I’m completely blown away. I’ve been reading about misinformation campaigns, and specifically the efforts by the Russians, since 2015 or so, and she’s been focused on it full-time for even longer. I’ve also read several books on the topic. I also have a military background with some dabbling in intelligence work during that time.

Some of the campaigns launched against us during the 2016 election.

Every fiber of my being tells me that the misinformation threat from Russia is absolutely real, and the research that’s documented this fact is overwhelming.

So that raises the question: why is almost every single comment on Joe Rogan’s podcast talking about Renée as if she’s the Clinton-Email-Antichrist? And why is it that every time I talk to my conservative friends about Russian influence, they downplay it massively and claim it’s fake news?

Why? What’s the unifying thread?

Especially when they went out of their way to say not everything is Russian influence, there are real people just being idiots, etc. Their discussion was remarkably measured and cautious, actually. It in no way matched the commentary about it.

The simplest solution might be the best one

One of the most powerful dialectic lessons I learned in the last 10 years was that people reject what they don’t want to accept the implications of.

If liberals were shown evidence that concealed carry made places safe, they would reject that evidence because they wouldn’t want to see more guns. Conservatives deny climate change data because they don’t want climate change regulations pushed down from a bloated, untrustworthy government.

And it looks like we have the same thing here.

Another option is that these comments are from a bunch of actual trolls as well, and are therefore not representative of his actual audience.

It appears that conservatives (which Rogan’s YouTube is evidently full of) hate the Russian Influence narrative because it implies that an enemy exists that’s more dangerous than the liberals. Or, put another way, if they accepted that Russia really was actively tampering with us in a very Cold War type of way, they’d have to shift their focus off of Clinton’s emails. Or maybe become concerned with whether Trump has some unsavory entanglements with the same people.

Just as with Climate Change, that natural result is too much to handle for them, so their move is to reject the evidence as fake news.

That’s the world we live in—a world where smart people deny obvious truth because they don’t like what they think the implications are of accepting it.

And the right isn’t the only side doing this. The left is being devoured by this as well.

The only possible escape is something like the Intellectual Dark Web, which is mostly progressive people who are willing to talk about uncomfortable topics, accept truth, interact with one another in good faith, and then come together to pursue solutions.

You’d think that Rogan’s fans would be into that, but their position on the Russia stuff (again, the comments could be misleading) is telling me they’re just blindly following their own religion without doing any independent thinking.

It’s becoming so strange for me at this point. All I can do is read books and listen to people who have IDW mindsets, because everyone else seems horribly lost on either the left or right.

The center is gone. Nuance is gone. Good faith is gone. And pressure is only increasing.

As I said before, this is taking us towards dangerous territory for 2020 and beyond.

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