It's a really great read and did a lot to inform my approach to writing all kinds of software. It's a shame that I cringe to recommend in now due to the politics of its author.
I don't think jumblesale is arguing that his writings are incorrect or not useful, just that he doesn't like popularizing his works because of the authors political views.
It's still a shame. I certainly don't feel like I have to love everything a person does in order to learn something from them, or even respect some of their work. Likewise, I don't require everyone to agree with my personal opinions in order to pass my courses. Things would really become cumbersome were I to ever change my mind about something.
I agree. Seriously, who gives a toss about what anyone's opinions are on subjects unrelated to what you're reading by them? And even if they do creep in, what's to say you're right or they're wrong? I thought this was part of being an adult but I see it all too often: "so-and-so wrote an excellent technical manual on X but he's right wing so I won't buy it!"
I don't understand that way of thinking since no human being will ever 100% agree with any other on everything.
If someone writes something, it's "true" or "false" regardless of their political opinions.
On the other hand, someone's political opinions change what they're likely to write, so if you don't know whether it's "true" or not, knowing their political opinions can justifiably alter your beliefs about the text.
I think people tend to overweight the second consideration, and it seems particularly irrelevant in this case.
(Scare quotes because it's rarely as simple as true-or-false, e.g. "literally true but horribly misleading".)
Further, I suspect the main reason there's any concern at all about recommending ESR's writings due to his politics is because he bothers to write a lot about his political views in the first place, presenting something to potentially disagree with.
Many programmers / writers / programmer-writers may well have equally strong political views in one direction or another, with which others may strongly agree or disagree, but they just don't say much about them in public.
Undoubtably a deep philosophical argument, but brighter minds than ours have written at length about it both in science and jurisprudence. "Research ethics" and "Exclusionary rule" would be good illustrating Wikipedia articles.
Research ethics forbids you from doing certain things when performing research, but it doesn't say anything about the political opinions of researchers.
The exclusionary rule says that if evidence is obtained by breaking the rules, it can't be used in court. But again, it doesn't say anything about the political opinions of the person obtaining the evidence.
Both are cases where the truth of the situation is put aside from a moral standpoint, which is analogous to suggesting that someone's political views could influence the reception of their engineering views.
Both exist mostly to disincentivize people from doing something immoral and/or unwanted, not to give light on the truth or false value of observations/evidence.
So the question is, should one really refuse to read/recommend ESR's book because of his opinions? Frankly, this smells to me like Index Librorum Prohibitorum all over again.
Unfortunately, you can't neatly compartmentalise one aspect of an individual's life and totally separate it from the others. Sometimes, the aspects with which you happen to agree might be used to indirectly (even invisibly) support the aspects you don't. Although it's difficult to judge that, it seems a reasonable condition for exercising caution. I say this as a huge fan of TAOUP.
None of these seem even remotely relevant to engineering. Moreover, research, discovery and innovation requires letting people having freedom to think. That includes holding unpopular, controversial or politically incorrect opinions.
We are so worried about Evil Government dictating what we can and cannot think that we haven't noticed the current organic trend to prosecute every other person for thoughtcrimes. It's not the jackboot that keeps us on the ground, it's social media, and the public outrage you get when you disagree with whatever's the most popular opinion on a topic this week.
ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so.
That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard frames which no longer fit.
My own work and research of the past several years puts a very high significance on both frames (or more generally, models), and on the psychology of interacting with those, with strong emphasis on denial in various forms.
ESR's political views call much of his work into question. I say that as someone who was strongly influenced by much of what he said, and enjoyed a fair bit of it. He's become a tremendous disappointment.
TAOUP has its merits. It's rather like recommending Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto a a social-technological critique. It's got some really solid points (see what Bill Joy's had to say on it: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html). But damned if the rest of the author's views and actions don't muddy the waters a tad.
ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so.
That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard frames which no longer fit.
"Engineering validity"? This is just a dressed up ad hominem. If some technical argument ESR has made is inconsistent or doesn't match up with empirical evidence, criticize away, but his positions on what exactly the Second Amendment means or what the best role of government is can't possibly inform that criticism. It could, perhaps, explain why he's made an error, but it can't identify the error for us.
ESR's political views call much of his work into question.
Which questions about what work? If you're going to cast aspersions like this, you'd probably best be specific.
No, it's explicitly and purposefully ad-hominem, suggesting that a person's lack of judgement in one area leads to questions about his judgement in a related one.
Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".
This is calling into question ESR's general credibility, based on his record. That's a character judgement.
I'm also not saying ESR is wrong in all things -- a consistently wrong indicator is useful (read the opposite of what it says). An inconsistently wrong one is maddening: you've got to pay close attention to what its doing and determine the pattern to its errors. That's the taxing part.
I suppose the fallacy is where the attributes are irrelevant to the argument.
There's a somewhat related comment I'd seen recently which I've found useful:
Nota bene: a fallacious ad hominem only occurs when an accusation against the person serves as a premise to the conclusion. An attack upon that person as a further conclusion isn't fallacious and may, in fact, be morally mandatory.
That's not quite what I'm doing here: I'm leveraging the attack on credibility to discount further statements from ESR. But for numerous reasons of psychology and general reputation, if not a strict formal logic sense, there's a strong rationale to this.
Traditionally, modern, credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise, which both have objective and subjective components. Trustworthiness is based more on subjective factors, but can include objective measurements such as established reliability.
> Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".
Since you actually wrote this sentence 9 hours ago, it is safe to infer that you really don't know anything about logical fallacies or what you're talking about in general, since you can't possibly have learned all you need to know about them in 9 hours. Given this level of confidence in something that is both wrong and easily checked, why should we trust any of your claims at all?
Or... should we trust you? But not ESR? Would that not be hypocrisy?
"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."
"Ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." The ad hominem fallacy occurs when one asserts that somebody's claim is wrong because of something about the person making the claim. The ad hominem fallacy is often confused with the legitimate provision of evidence that a person is not to be trusted. Calling into question the reliability of a witness is relevant when the issue is whether to trust the witness. It is irrelevant, however, to call into question the reliability or morality or anything else about a person when the issue is whether that person's reasons for making a claim are good enough reasons to support the claim."
"It is important to note that the label “ad hominem” is ambiguous, and that not every kind of ad hominem argument is fallacious. In one sense, an ad hominem argument is an argument in which you offer premises that you the arguer don’t accept, but which you know the listener does accept, in order to show that his position is incoherent (as in, for example, the Euthyphro dilemma). There is nothing wrong with this type of argument ad hominem."
"An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:
"Of course he would say that. He's a senator.
"This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case."
Many (most) people, including many highly respected scientists and engineers, are fully capable of displaying incredible judgment in their discipline yet awful judgment in other aspects of their lives. Should we put an asterisk on papers published by researchers in the middle of messy divorces?
There are some flagrant examples. Peter Duesberg, the UC Berkely molecular biologist prof who thinks that the HIV/AIDS link is bogus, comes to mind.
There are also those who tend to know their limits and note when they're out of their depth or area(s) of expertise. So no, that's not a universal guide either.
His making up shit (or buying in to others' made-up shit) to justify them does, as does his ignoring contradictory evidence and record..
Which questions about what work?
The problem is one of an unreliable narrator. If you cannot trust someone's judgement, and they spew crap, repeatedly, then the odds that they're blowing smoke elsewhere increase.
It's the same reason that lawyers seek to impugn witnesses or call into question credibility. Or, to pick another hobby horse of mine, there are news and media organizations which spew crap. Fox News gets a lot of much-deserved scorn for this, but they're not the only one. Bullshit in media (in the most general meaning of the word: any information delivery system) is something I've been paying a lot of attention to, and I'm rather sensitive to it.
Case in point recently involves a 123 year old quote I'd seen attributed to J. P. Morgan, the Gilded Age banker. It struck me as curious, and I dug into it. My conclusion: it's a hoax.
The item in question is referred to as the Banker's Manifesto of 1892, or as the Wall Street Manifesto. Almost certainly the fabrication of one Thomas Westlake Gilruth, lawyer, real estate agent, community activist, and some-time speaker and writer for People's Party causes in the 1890s and 1900s. (Pardon the digression: there is a point, it happens to be both fresh in my mind and sufficiently detached from contemporary affairs to be a fair foil.)
Among the evidence I turned up, several contemporaneous newspapermen who'd drawn the same conclusion. Mind that this was a time of highly partisan press, but these were editors of People's Party papers in various locales.
From The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 7 & 14 Sept. 1892:
The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.
The following week's issue corected the typo with a emphasis on why naming and shaming mattered:
We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.
From the Barbour County index., July 06, 1892, p. 1
If the genuineness of this dispatch cannot be established, it should be taken in at once. If reform writers put it alongside the Huscard and Buell circulars and various other documents of like character, the public faith in the genuineness of all may be shaken. We cannot afford to father any fakes.
(My own analysis turned up other internal inconsistencies within the documents as well, detailed at the reddit link above.)
Much as those late 19th century editors, a hueristic I've increasingly taken to applying is looking at what sources (publications, companies, politicians, authors, online commentators, monitoring systems) do and don't provide reliable information. There's also a distinction I draw between occasionally being wrong (errors happen), and systematic bias. As the Tribune and Index called out, Gilruth was being systematically misleading. And apparently intentionally.
My issue with ESR isn't that I know he's bullshitting on any one point or antoher, it's that I don't know when he is, and, as with other unreliable data streams, sussing out the truth is a lot of work for low reward. He's like an unreliable gauage or monitoring system that sends off false alerts when it shouldn't ,stays silent when it should alert, and highlights the wrong areas of trouble when it does manage to go off at the right time. You simply start to lose your faith in it.
I can't help but notice you managed to write something approximating the length of a short essay without once pointing out any "bullshit" in ESR's technical writing, let alone explaining how said "bullshit" must derive from his wrongthink.
I'm afraid I must apologize for failing to make myself clear: it's that his practices call into question his statements in other areas.
I have to confess that I don't have specific instances at hand, for two reasons. One is that much of his more technical writing on programming is outside my own area of expertise. The other is that, given his tendencies, I largely ignore him.
My point, however, wasn't where he is specifically mistaken, but why the traits he exhibits in his rantings on other topics do have a bearing on his engineering judgement.
Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.
I continue to take everything ESR says about technology seriously. His opinions on everything else ... are an instructive example in the non-transferable nature of expertise.
> ESR's political views call much of his work into question.
Presumably this question, whatever it is, can be answered by looking at his work. Do you think ESR's technical work and technical writings fail to stand up to scrutiny?
It definitely gives me pause. ESR clearly doesn't know when he's out of his depth (classic Dunning-Krueger).
I'm not enough of a programmer to judge his programming texts, though I am enough of a sysamdin to find his Unixy sysadminish stuff generally valid.
I've found CatB itself aging poorly and question a number of the assumptions behind it, particularly as concerns anthropology. It seems shaky. Though I think the general principles behind Free Software and the open source model have their merits. Just, possibly, not quite those ESR describes.
ESR expressed views on all sorts of items which are unknowable and much debated; programmers cling to this idea that there's a right and a wrong (protobuffers not JSON! One True Way vs TMTOWTDI! Emacs vs Vi! JavaScript is a reasonable choice etc etc). Generally there's not, there are just ideas and opinions without hard data. Systemd contradicts pieces of the original article.
So you tell me: how would we know if his technical work stood up to scrutiny? If I have experience that agrees, does that mean it does? What if my experience contradicts IT?
Indeed, this is the critical question. If L. Ron Hubbard secretly but accurately predicted the lottery numbers for last week, it doesn't mean we have to go back and change them. Things can seem wrong/impossible/against your worldview, but that sense doesn't help quite so much as _just looking_.
Fundamentally, calling things into question has little value until we generate an answer to the question it was called into. Considering it's relatively easy to judge him on the technical work, why not?
You say you distrust the author's views and opinions because of his politics.
I say: good! You should never take an author's work at face value. Every bit of nonfiction you read should be read critically. Nobody's judgment is infallible – not even Nobel prizewinners.
No, not because of his politics, but because of (among other elements) his political argument methods.
If ESR would pose credible arguments and facts, exhibit critical thinking facility, not stoop to denigrating his counterparts, etc., I'd find his points of view more substantive.
But he does none of that, and, rather, the opposite.
I do seek out contradicting evidence, among my mantras (and a conspicuous posted note to myself) is "seek to disprove". I've changed my mind and/or views on a number of significant points and in some cases major views over the past few years. I do that based on evidence and argument, though. It's not a casual process, and doesn't happen easily.
But being able to admit I'm wrong is a large part of it. Also: not insisting on being wrong (valuing belief consistency with time over consistency with observed reality).
Questioning everything is, however, rather exhausting. Developing heuristics for when to start digging in to apparent bullshit claims helps a lot.
It's disingenuous to equate huge numbers of people disagreeing with you on the internet to the government suppressing you with law or force.
ESR is free to speak his beliefs in public, and in return people are free to criticize him, not recommend his books, refuse to invite him to conferences, etc.
Freedom of speech is about prior restraint, not immunity from consequences.
Is it now? When you can get fired from your job over your private beliefs, when even a Nobel prize winner can have his (and her - completely innocent - wife's) career ended on the spot, when you can lose your home over disagreeing with "status quo", I say something is wrong.
Maybe this is how democratic - as opposed to totalitarian - oppression looks like. When you have to avoid discussions out of fear you'll get fired and blacklisted in the industry, this suddenly doesn't look so different than what refusal to government "truth" looked like several decades ago.
> None of these seem even remotely relevant to engineering.
Believing things that have no scientific merit in favour of things that have plenty of scientific evidence would be a huge concern in an engineer.
Given is (mostly memory-holed) mysogyny, racism, and homophobia that leads him to discard the views of people in a most un-meritocratic fashion and I think you have another concern.
That's a surprise to me, I hadn't heard any of that. Not that I've followed things that closely.
What I found so far is [1], in which he seems to just be doing a bit of a "show me the data" thing wrt global warming (its fairly old I guess in defense). In [2] he's definitely saying IQ is race-related, and gender related to a lesser extent, in my quick readings.
I quite like that he doesn't mince his words, sugar coat things or seem to take any notice of popular opinion/political correctness. Not agreeing with him, but I find that refreshing.
Regarding [2]. So I guess this quote is the problem:
> And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather than nurturance effects.
So is the problem with him saying this that (a) this is factually false or (b) that it's an inconvenient fact that should be glossed over? He seems to be saying that it's factually true since he obviously read it in some or other study. If it is factually true it's disingenuous to label him as a racist.
I guess everyone and every group finds certain truths uncomfortable. It's especially sad that the theory of evolution seems to make literally everyone uncomfortable.
"Of course humans and chimps have a common ancestor! We have looked at the genetic code, and found that more than 95% is shared. Give up, it's over." The right will hate you for saying that.
"Of course there is inherited variation in intelligence, no matter how you define it! Otherwise evolution, in particular evolution of intelligence, could not possibly work. Give up, it's over." The left will hate you for saying that.
"Of course our moral intuitions come from game theory, not apriori reasoning!" And now everyone hates you, both the left and the right.
> I guess everyone and every group finds certain truths uncomfortable. It's especially sad that the theory of evolution seems to make literally everyone uncomfortable.
In context, this is a claim that race and IQ is a consequence of the theory of evolution. If you don't see this, then you don't understand communication with humans, or are being disingenuous.
Evolution doesn't necessarily have a direct link with intelligence; nor even does natural selection which is the theory that, I think, you're basing your argument on.
I think the problem is, its a bit more complicated than that.
There are a myriad of factors that might influence that IQ score, and I haven't looked at the studies. Lack of wealth/opportunity I think is definitely a factor in the healthy development of the grey matter, as is access to good education.
Long/short, not sure. I'd be surprised if the colour of your skin objectively made a difference in IQ. Same with gender. Though, if the latter is true, I would probably use it with great exuberance on certain people I know e.g. my ex.
I wouldn't be surprised if skin colour made a difference to IQ. But I wouldn't be surprised for social and political reasons, not genetic ones.
It's actually not possible to make a genetic argument, because genetically there are no non-trivial markers that robustly correlate with "black" or "white."
"heritable" is the weasel word here. It is applied when the kid matches the parents - but the leap from there to "genetic" is unwarranted, because parents and their children tend to be in the same social circumstances.
For comparison, the Flynn effect demonstrates you can get 20-30 points difference in the same gene pool, with the difference being social circumstances. So any difference under 30 points doesn't necessitate invoking genetics.
"One was: their skin color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion; my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies."
To clarify, I was careful not to call ESR a racist. (I was attempting to describe his positions in terms that I think he'd agree with.) And I haven't seen anyone else explicitly do so on this thread, which is good going for HN.
"If it is factually true it's disingenuous to label him as a racist."
Not true. Something can be factually true but uninteresting or of no consequence; pushing that 'truth' forward as something that other should acknowledge betrays an agenda beyond just 'the search for truth'. (Note that this is not a judgement on ESR per se, just a comment on your specific point)
But it is interesting and of consequence. Especially as it highlights how truth ever becomes the slave of fashion. If it it is demonstrably true that race and IQ is linked then stating that as a fact does not make one a racist.
"g is 85% heritable" does not actually mean, imply, or even give strong evidence for the likelihood that "racially-linked genes cause the racially-correlated outcome differences in IQ tests." A trait that's 85% heritable is actually a complicated mix of many different biological factors, whose various causal powers (abilities to cause a specific outcome if interfered-with) we simply don't know, except that 15% of them don't seem to pass from parent to child in twin-studies (and I would certainly hope that separated-twin studies were actually done at all, because that's Genetic Causality 101 stuff).
Thus, if someone wants to claim that "black people have lower IQs because they are black", they need to dissolve the concept of race entirely and not only find much broader evidence than studies on African Americans who are, after all, something like half "white", but in fact just cut to the fucking chase and locate the relevant genes.
But of course, if you located the genes and alleles that make some ethnic groups smarter or stupider, you could invent a gene therapy that would make everyone as smart as the smartest ethnic groups, or at least understand what sort of trade-offs are involved in genetic treatments of that sort (ie: Africans often carry a gene that helps them resist malaria but can cause sickle-cell anemia if you get two copies of the recessive allele). If you located the genes and alleles, then within 10 +/- 5 years (depending on how quickly your treatment gets funded) we could eliminate all genetically-caused racial gaps in intelligence.
This, of course, would greatly displease the racists, who don't actually want people to get smarter; they want to justify a peculiar social hierarchy. This is why you always see certain people waving their hands at "racial IQ gaps" and "heritability" but not funding research into intelligence-enhancing gene therapies.
>Let's say that some kind of link between race and intelligence were proved and universally acknowledged, what possible positive outcome could entail?
Intelligence enhancement would become a cheap, simple, universally-available gene therapy, since we would have found that it only relies on a few alleles of a tiny number of genes, so simple that it can differ significantly between ethnic groups that can still interbreed, rather than being a complex, many-gene feature that evolved chiefly among the species as a whole.
Political in the sense that they have been politicized. And in the sense that a lot of people seem to believe the questions are Settled For Good, and anyone who disagrees with them is Just Plain Ignorant and/or Lying For Personal Benefit.
They are scientific questions if ESR publishes or attempts to publish scientific papers to support his opinions, or otherwise attempts to represent himself as a scientist.
It's unclear whether you're suggesting his views are not sufficiently objectionable, or you're suggesting he has other views that are very objectionable that weren't enumerated above.
> ESR denies AGW, believes that race and IQ are correlated, and was strongly in favor of the Iraq war
The first two are healthy amounts of scientific doubt and the third is a political opinion. (Though it could be highly dependent on how these views are expressed.)
I was expecting hate speech or Nazism, instead I see overreactions to opposing opinions people confuse with moral failings.
What's wrong with this? Being completely serious here, what is wrong with citizens owning firearms?
I am all about reducing gun violence, but if you want to do that you have to do something to stem the tide of illegally acquired handguns in areas of concentrated poverty. That's where a lot of your gun violence comes from.
The recent happenings in Charleston are unicorns. Unpredictable and very rare events that you can't actually make a special law for, without the G-men physically going to every household in America and confiscating firearms. That is a policy I assure you you don't actually want.
Because guns scare people. Why do they scare people? Because mostly they're just seen either in the hands of cops, grunts, or criminals. Most folks (especially here) aren't hunters, or are so far removed from rural life that they have no experience of firearm-as-tool.
On top of that, there is big business in demonizing guns--related to the big business (I suspect) in demonizing fighting, aggression, machismo, independence, or what have you.
I'll be the first to admit that there is no peaceful practical purpose outside of sport or investment for owning firearms in an urban area.
That said, it never ceases to amaze me that in an age of such universal and pervasive surveillance--an age of such unaccountability of authority figures in the .gov and .mil--that folks here are still more than happy to trash on the final safeguard they've got if things get too bad.
Private gun ownership isn't a safeguard against "if things get too bad".
Really? Because it caused us a lot of trouble during our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, that pretty much proves it as a check on US doctrine.
It's also unrealistic and implausible to imagine that the .gov and .mil are going to make "things get too bad".
Fifteen years ago, even in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco, I might've been tempted to agree with you. Unfortunately, there's been a whole lot of history since then, yeah?
return to some sort of monarchy
What are your betting odds on Bush III, or Clinton II, again? Your countrymen are apathetic and easily-manipulated when it comes to politics.
It doesn't make sense to me to compare the military occupation of those countries with the paranoid proposal that things "could get too bad" in the U.S. Too much seems too different about those two to be meaningful; I could point to the strict gun laws in most of the western nations and ask, "why haven't they degenerated into `could get too bad'?"
About the "whole lot of history since Ruby Ridge and Waco," well, I don't see any specific pattern of things getting "too bad". I'm not seeing the history you apparently are.
About the 2016 presidential election, couple of things: the presidency's just a job, and a short-term one at that, and the president doesn't have much power. Presidents run the country, they don't rule it.
What other countries are doing/not doing is a red herring--their people are not ours, their demographics are certainly not ours, their pain points are not our pain points. They additionally don't have the same political foundations and history that we do.
We have seen a continual increase in the militarization of police, the surveillance and fining of private citizens, the violation of privacy, and the bullying and exploitation of the poor.
If you're not seeing the history that I'm looking at, we're considering different news sources. I'm thinking of the Snowden leaks, the killings of citizens by police without cause (some in my own city, sadly), and so forth. I'm thinking of the delightful interplay of the prison-industrial complex with the justice system.
As for the presidency--we've seen pretty much directly the actual effectiveness of the executive branch in causing shenanigans, both in George Bush's administration and Obama's.
~
We're simply going to have to agree to disagree on this.
"What other countries are doing/not doing is a red herring" ..... but you brought up Iraq and Afghanistan.
I agree about the bullying and exploitation of the poor, I just don't think that's anything new.
I think what's new is that now, techie types like you and me are learning about the police-based murders of black people, and how hard life is for the poor. That stuff's always been going on, it just didn't make it onto our radar until very recently.
Note that example was done specifically as a study of armed irregulars vs the US--your examples of other Western states were in a very different vein. :)
No, I'm (foolishly) responding to an Onion article of all things. The claim is being made that the U.S. is the only place where mass killings with firearms happen. I'm merely stating this isn't true.
> “For each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership,” Siegel et al. found, “firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9″ percent.
I'm not sure I can say there's something absolutely wrong with it, but my opinion is that citizens shouldn't be allowed to own firearms. I live somewhere (UK) where they can't, and there is very little gun violence. That's not to say, of course, there aren't problems, but I just think - on balance - the world would be better off with fewer killing machines in it.
I'm not pro gun but many countries like Canada have pretty high gun ownership yet have low gun violence numbers. I think there is more to the problem then just disallowing private gun ownership would solve. It's a band aid fix in my view.
Its kind of like prisoners' dilemma. Who loses their firearms first, citizens or criminals? They lose.
I'd also like to say something about societies with ubiquitous government public and private surveillance, chilling of freedom of speech and repressive cultures, but I live in the USA so I can't throw stones.
When they constantly mix technology and politics, yes it does matter. Open Source is a political movement, and that requires taking ESR's version of it with a grain of salt.
Except if he writes anything about politics, economics, society, etc -- in which case his political views have quite a bearing on the validity or usefulness of what they write.
Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits? Unless he's saying "trust me, I won't expose my reasoning but it's solid", or unless you are outsourcing your thinking, such things would seem to be irrelevant.
>Can't you evaluate his claims on their own merits?
As with most things, it takes too much time to do that in detail for every argument one hears.
Thankfully with the magic of brain's pattern matching and previous experience to BS arguments we don't have to.
We can eliminate tons of opinions from the list of "potentially interesting to investigate" by their mere showing of certain characteristics we already know lead to bogus thinking. ("Hey man, I made a perpetual motion machine. Wait, where are you going? Don't you wanna hear how I made it? You're so close minded" -- or "I don't believe in climate change, it's all bogus. Here's what I think about educational reform...").
Sure, we might get a few false negatives (some good suggestions lost because their originator is a bigot etc), but the system overall works wonders for reducing the signal to noise ratio.
>You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem.
I don't see why you think I haven't considered that.
My whole argument is based on the idea that ad-hominens are pefectly fine in some cases.
When? For people with a bogus claims record.
How? Under the observation that a person making some bogus claims is also likely to make more bogus claims -- and thus the person can be dismissed as a general bogus-claims-maker.
Why might lose some good arguments he might make here and there, but life's too short, and dismissing the person completely gives us time to listen to people with a better "claims" track record.
In essense, the very basic of filtering, that everybody does (more or less well), and you undoubtly do as well.
>I call your "climate change, it's all bogus" claim a straw man, and indicative more of your thinking than of reality, because that's not even a claim that skeptics make.
Actually lots of "spectics" make it. Some make a lesser claim, that's its not human-caused, but others also claim it's not happening altogether. There's even a term for that:
I'm going to dismiss everything you have to say because it doesn't look like you know how to properly respond to threads when there's a comment cooldown timer.
You are conflating a property of the claim itself (violating the laws of physics) with a straw-man property of the person making the claim. They aren't the same thing - one enables a simple proof by contradiction, the other is ad-hominem.
Further, your "climate change, it's all bogus" ad hominem isn't even a real claim that skeptics make, and is more more indicative of your thinking than of reality.
I get the impression you are just looking for ways to dismiss arguments which make you emotionally uncomfortable. Consider religion instead, it's a lot more unapologetic about simply declaring who the heretics are.
Unfortunately, the general zeitgeist of the times seems to be that a person's politics are somehow a litmus test for whether or not they should be listened to at all, about anything.
Normally this would just be a quirk, but the fact is that a lot of technical people here on HN and other places would happily throw the baby out with the bath water just because they disagree with somebody's politics.
It's stupid and unprofessional. With so many companies focusing on such technically boring problems, image management is perhaps legitimately more of a business concern than having the best tech available.
So, unfortunately, we have people with dissenting opinions but excellent work slandered or ostracized...even if their opinions are actually worth considering. Then again, that just means that those of us who are more genuinely tolerant will have an edge during hiring. :)
Also, on ESR in particular:
You have to understand that, rightly or wrongly, his worldview is long-term Culture War. Literally anything which prevents The Right People from breeding faster (homosexuality) or defending themselves (attacks on the 2nd amendment) or arguing (kafkatraps) is suspect. Because he's playing for keeps, he'll do whatever it takes (including, perhaps, being less than perfectly equal in presentations on things) to further his agenda. That's just how it is, and it doesn't reflect on his technical contriubtions or aptitude at all.
Hell, the bitch of it is, he's even arguably correct on some of his cultural points, if he himself (much less his detractors) didn't spend so much time sounding so disagreeable and grumpy and wingnutty.
Anyways, it's just a sign of the times, as I said. It seems that most people are unable to handle a mental model which accounts for biased or unreliable narrators while still allowing the work of those narrators to be taken advantage of.
They absolutely do, but I get your point that that's not necessarily so in every single case. ESR's page on the rationalwiki gets it right, though, when they call him a "stopped clock"--right every once in a while (and by coincidence):
If, however, some other tech blogger I liked started writing about "kill the gays," well, I don't need to overlook that just because I like their tech writing.
Like I said elsewhere, none of these folks has a monopoly on good engineering writing/technical thinking.
I can read, and ultimately promote, writers whose writing I wouldn't be ashamed to share with all of my friends.
This must be amazing to have inspired so many people to sign up about the same time this got posted and share their brief opinions on how cool it looks.
It's ok because it's legal. It's legal because we've made laws allowing it. I hope they find time soon to get round to addressing if it's ethical, or if the people want it.
That gets to the root of it all I think. There's no way of telling whether its ethical or if the people want it if no one except the Intelligence and Security Committee knows what is going on.
Given they need warrants* for each interception it's pretty clear they aren't blanket bringing back all UK records, just the ones they ask for based on specific criteria.
So yes, I don't mind that at all. That seems like exactly how the system should work.
* Though intelligence warrants work a little differently in the UK
Given they need warrants for each interception it's pretty clear they aren't blanket bringing back all UK records,
They shouldn't be intercepting data without a warrant. They are intercepting everything and then deciding what they think is important or justified. That's illegal and needs to stop.
Tempora is described as storing absolutely all packets traversing given points for fixed number of days.
This claim "we have individual orders" is just based on the interpretation that "before you start the court procedure against somebody it's not intercepting" so of course under that premise, they have warrants. So they collect everything, store everything and they simply don't name that "intercepting and collecting."
The simple question for them is "is there a Tempora project, is it active and how many individual records are in the databases in that project and how many internet packets are on the storage at once?" -- Just an order of magnitude (the exponent of 10) of the packets is enough. If you have a millions of billions packets stored, it's certainly not from any small number of "targets."
But consider how you tap a cable though: you need to be able to analyse it offline to work out what the hell is going on, sift the data you need a warrant for (UK stuff) and whether a warrant applies.
Even if that could be done in real time it would still be "storing" all the data.
Even Snowden's allegations put the maximum length at 30 days which makes it sound much less like a database of everyone's activity online.
Everybody is spied on, all the data are stored. According to Guardian it's 3 days absolutely everything from everybody is stored and 30 days the metadata from everybody. US, UK and foreigners. Everybody. And it's only the Tempora project. More (perpetually) is stored at least for those with warrants under different project names, but we don't know anything about these projects. The numbers 3 and 30 are just constants that can be changed at any moment as soon as there's more storage capacity. Because "they don't need warrants for that."
That they don't use the collected data against everybody at once is clear. But they certainly spy everybody, everything else is a spin. They just later decide on whom to use the data they already intercepted, collected and processed. That interception, collection and processing they call "nothing" and later usage they call "interception" with a warrant. It's a spin.
We also saw that a single warrant can order "everything." There are no limitations.
A few of us kicked and shouted about this when this was proposed. If you'd like an example of how this is being abused, El Reg has a good article from 2009: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/ripa_jfl/
> He returned to Paddington Green station as appointed on 2 December, and was re-arrested for carrying a pocket knife.
FTR, carrying a pocket knife is perfectly legal in the UK (assuming it was within a certain size).
> Officers bearing sub-machine guns broke down the door of JFL's flat. He rang local police before realising CTC had come for him. [...] JFL maintained his silence throughout the one hour time limit imposed by the notice. He was charged with ten offences under section 53 of RIPA Part III, reflecting the multiple passphrases needed to decrypt his various implementations of PGP Whole Disk Encryption and PGP containers. [...] In his final police interview, CTC officers suggested JFL's refusal to decrypt the files or give them his keys would lead to suspicion he was a terrorist or paedophile.
And my favourite paragraph:
> "There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes," said one detective. "Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?" JFL says he maintained his silence because of "the principle - as simple as that".
He was taken into custody for, among other things: Failing to attend multiple bail hearings; Falsely claiming that a passport that had been legally seized by the police was lost, bearing in mind he'd previous missed bail hearings by traveling abroad; Refusing to comply with lawful requests for access to his computer, etc, etc.
There is no '5th Amendment' in the UK, no right of silence and no Miranda rights. There never have been. We do have our own limitations on the rights of police officers conducting an investigation though. If officers have the proper warrants, I think it's reasonable that they are entitled to access to computer records in much the same way they are entitled to access to any other part of someone's property, business and private records.
He was willfully obstructive and obtuse, and suffered the consequences for it, but no more than that. The sectioning is of course a matter for concern, but it requires proper medical oversight and bearing in mind his previous history of mental illness there's no particular reason to believe it was malicious.
Actually there was a Right to Silence, in common law. It was removed by statue in the extremely controversial 1994 Criminal Justice Act (which many of us demonstrated against).
Ok, the situation is more nuanced than I might have indicated. There is a right to silence in criminal law, and you can remain silent in civil law too. You cannot be prosecuted for remaining silent, or directly legally coerced into giving a statement.
However, specific inferences can be drawn from your silence in some circumstances. For example not mentioning something in you statement to police that you later rely on for your defence in court can be taken into account.
So we don't have an absolute right to remain silent, and doing so under suspicious circumstances can get you in trouble, but you can't be prosecuted just for not making a statement.
That's completely back asswards. They have the right to request and require access, as pecufied in their warrant, and if you refuse or are unable to comply then they have the further right of forced entry. They have no 'burden' to do so other than their general 'burden' to perform their duties.
FTR carrying [some] pocket knifes is legal in England and Wales. It is a criminal offence in Scotland.
The UK consists of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 3 different legal systems (though England and Wales and Northern Ireland are similar).
Scotland is radically different with many things being criminal offences in Scotland but are perfectly legal in the other 3 countries, e.g. certain types of violent pornography are serious jail time in Scotland but legal elsewhere in the UK. Plus the knife thing, obviously. Children of 8 years are criminally responsible [i.e. /are/ prosecuted] in Scotland but it is older elsewhere in the UK.
> It is illegal to [...] carry a knife in public without good reason - unless it’s a knife with a folding blade 3 inches long (7.62 cm) or less, eg a Swiss Army knife.
The case is absolutely awful, but he was jailed for refusing to hand over the key, which is (according to the article) exactly what he did. The article is very kind to the suspect here, and nowhere does it even suggest that he had lost the key or otherwise wasn't able to decrypt the files.
Since when is refusing to incriminate oneself punishable with jail time? Last time I checked it wasn't.
Refusing to provide encryption keys is the same thing. There might be illegal data, there might not be. It's the duty of the police to prove it, not the accused.
This is the UK not the US. They don't have a 5th amendment.
In the US courts are split on the issue. Some say giving an encryption key is testifying, an act of the mind, and you can't force someone to testify against themselves under the 5th. Others say its like handing over a regular key, which you can be forced to do, because the 5th covers testimony, not everything incriminating. It was intended to prevent forced confessions.
Once you're in front of a court you don't get to keep secrets, with the exception of some narrow protections. This has always been the case in the Anglo-American system.
The debate is partly this: forcing you to produce an encryption key /also/ testifies that the drive belongs to you (or you had access to it).
You are not necessarily obligated to testify to that fact for the police, and unless they can demonstrate that the drive belonged to you (or you had access) through some other means, the production of an encryption key is tantamount to forcing that confession.
It's much like if there were a lock on a gun they found on the street: if they can't link the gun to you already, they can't demand you turn over the combination for the lock, because knowing such a combination would be a tacit admission to knowing about the gun.
I'd think it's also an issue of the 4th. Consider sharing a machine with different user accounts. Asking me to decrypt a drive just might be an unreasonable search, because outside of logical partitioning, there's no concept of "a user's files" when the police just use a disk copy tool to pull all files off the disk.
We don't have anti-incrimination laws. If you go in front of a judge, the judge has the right to all relevant information with which to make a decision. What happened here is that the judge asked for the keys and was refused them. Plain and simple. If you don't trust your judicial system to (eventually) get to the right answer, you've got bigger problems.
"there can be no doubt that the right to remain silent under police questioning and the privilege against self-incrimination are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure"
The case concerns a claim that it was injust to make inferences as to the guilt of the appellant based on their choice to remain silent before the police and court. This appeal under Art.6 ECHR failed (though a claim of preventing access to an attorney succeeded). The court finding that there was no undue inference made, that any inferences as to guilt that had arisen out of the defendants failure to break silence were allowable.
I'm not sure this really helps so much as it seems as it appears to allow the [partial] curtailment of presumption of innocence.
It's interesting that the article conflates right to silence and self-incrimination, I thought they were kept separate. It mentions the exception for encryption but doesn't mention any exception for safe codes which is what my line of thinking was based on. That being said, I can't find a reference to that either...
nope, it's one of those laws that the police can use on anyone they don't like, anytime. There was a good article of how this "criminalise everyone, and then only prosecute the ones you don't like" attitude was essentially how the US operates by default nowadays - It was on HN a few months ago but I can't find it now.
apologies if I wasn't clear; there are plenty of laws "still on the statute book" which everyone breaks but which would never be prosecuted. e.g. copying music from CD to iPod before about 2010, or compulsory archery practise with the parish vicar on the village green on Sundays.
I was drawing the distinction between that type, which are simply archaic, and this type, which have been designed to incriminate everyone.
there was a chap who had this law used against him a few years back, I don't remember what happened though but it was a big deal at the time.
It was to do with encrypting random data for physics or a game or something and the government got hold of it but because the data was encrypted one way he couldn't give them a key and he was going to go to prison for two years.
I've heard nothing about it since though with all this PRISM stuff and people encrypting their emails I'm surprised it hasn't resurfaced sooner.
It's staggering that there's no discussion on this. I remember seeing the newspapers on the day Snowden broke the stuff about GCHQ. The Grauniad was indignant; nobody else even touched the story. Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing? Cameron's promising an enquiry over the Lawson investigation but his government is still pushing ever broader collection of digital communications.
0833
Sir Malcom Rifkind, a former foreign secretary and the current chairman of the commons intelligence and security committee, and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, analyse allegations that GCHQ has snooped on web information.
> Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing?
There's no evidence that GCHQ are doing anything illegal, nor anything new. They've been doing this for many years. It's what they say they do. It's what they're set up to do.
GCHQ having a 3 day cache of communication-content data is little different to telecoms companies keeping a similar cache[1] except the laws are clearer about what GCHQ can and can't do with the data.
In terms of privacy violation there are much worse examples than GCHQ slurping everything. Corrupt public officials (eg: police officers) selling off information to newspapers; workers for telecoms companies having unauthorised access; people with access to medical records gossiping.
Note that the broader collection you mention is, at the moment, just "meta data" (routing information), and not content data. I guess while not be acceptable it is less unacceptable than collecting content data. (If that makes sense.)
I don't remember but did the BBC run the story on TV? I don't remember it being discussed but I might not have seen the news that day. My point was that none of the other papers picked this up. There's been a lot of talk online but I don't think that's where the majority of people get their news from.
My parents watch the BBC news religiously, I asked them if they'd heard anything about the NSA story a couple of days after the story broke and they were completely unaware. When I brought their attention to some of the articles online their reaction was outrage. I wonder what the national reaction would have been had the coverage been more thorough. I find it difficult to believe there aren't plenty of journalists out there wishing they could get their teeth into a meaty story like this one, what's holding them back?
They hardly covered it on the news/radio broadcasts I saw, also worth noting that although the BBC Website did have some articles about it they weren't prominent on the main news page at all.
"UK government puts editor in jail for one of employees spying on a few dozen people. What punishment do they get for spying on a billion?"
The Government are working within the law... the press was not. Also all to combined government computing power in the UK couldn't analyse the amount of data the government would have to work through if it "spied" and analysed everything that went across any network. Classic case of "big data" analysis - parse all the data in motion, pull off the things of interest, discard the rest.
This is a little condescending. I live frugally but have spent the money I've saved on a house for my family to live in. I've contracted the last year to be able to afford to travel around the world next month.
"You can enjoy your life right now. You just need to spend less money on shit that you don’t need."
True, I don't need a house or to go travelling but my life would be poorer had I not invested in that shit.
You want condescending? 'cause his blog post wasn't. Look, like if you're fucking happy right now, great! But if you have a reaction to his post that makes you feel attacked, belittled, then there very well might be a good reason for that. And boy, it ain't nothin' on the author.
This is one of the problems with total surveillance, everyone has said or done something stupid at some point. If not during the immediate past, then during their teens.
Same here.
1. If it is really snowden, so what, you can see it as weird and try to make it a schocking story "OMG my hero Snowden used to say this?!"
2. Its logs given to ars by users....
3. Personal attack.
Not to mention the fact that they wait until the twelfth paragraph before disclosing the fact that the entire story is based on unverified transcripts sent to them by individual users, and not their own logs.
The Ars IRC server doesn't log conversations, and there are no official transcripts of any discussions on that server. However, after learning that Snowden appeared to be an Ars user, we received chat logs from multiple longtime users who recalled IRC conversations with the user known as TheTrueHOOHA
You mean other people are watching me besides just the NSA? Holy crap, I didn't realize, I thought I was only using TLS to keep the government from finding out my credit card information!
Mehran Karimi Nasseri's story is often misreported - he was free to leave the airport for a long time but was prevented from doing so by suspected mental illness. His eventual hospitalization finally removed him from the terminal building during which time his makeshift home was dismantled. I don't think those circumstances really apply to Snowden's case.
