The balls on this guy. The sheer cynical audacity of trying to market yourself as a "defender of privacy" when you serve on the board of a company so antithetical to privacy that they're under federal supervision for twenty years [1] is breathtaking. Please tell me no one on Hacker News is dumb enough to fall for this.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
Unless you have something specific to say regarding Peter Thiel's specific contribution to Facebook's current or past stance on privacy, I think you are being far too alarmist with an entirely unsupported position.
For example, it's entirely possible that Peter Thiel is part of a losing faction of the board that values more privacy, and has actually been a force for the better with regard to privacy at Facebook? Is that likely? I have no idea, but it's supported by just as much evidence as you put forth.
Keep in mind, by the logic you've used so far, if we ignore the voting history of congress, then every congressperson must obviously have been in favor of invading Iraq, since that's what the US did.
Note: If you take this as a defense of Peter Thiel you've entirely missed the point. I have no evidence as to how Peter Thiel truly feels about privacy in general, and more importantly that's irrelevant to the point I'm making.
So to clarify for those not in the know, he does not care about people's privacy, and is happy to build companies that want to spy on your social activities, and sell the surveillance capability to the us govt.
Do you mean social media sites? People voluntarily give up that information to the public, so it could reasonably not be considered private.
The sex tape would be considered private.
Presumably he draws his line somewhere between those two extremes.
Has he done anything inconsistent with the position "The paparazzi should not write scandalous articles about famous people"? For example, has he invested in companies similar to Gawker? If not, I don't see any real conflict in his position.
I think most people consider what they post on social media sites to be for their friends, not the public. Of course, under an American moral definition of privacy, if you tell something to one person ever, it's as public as if you bought billboards across the country. And if you're tricked into releasing something to the public, say by a company which fails to properly advise you when you attempt to share things with your friends but actually publish them to the wider Internet, you have no recourse, legal or moral.
Which would have been a wonderful fact to include as supporting evidence, yet it was not. Like I said, I'm not defending Thiel, I'm condemning accusations without good evidence. I wouldn't have had anything to complain about if that was included.
A lot of people like the day job because the pay is good and then find ways to work against it at night. Their 'hypocrisy' is actually an imbalance in their universe they seek to correct.
You're intensely equivocating here. The moral calculus of renouncing your massive profit-making association with a company that you serve on the board of if it chooses to do things that you find morally unacceptable is trivial, and entirely different than when you're a citizen of a country that you serve in the legislature of that decides to do things that you find morally unacceptable.
If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
Yes, but there are varying levels of 'moral acceptability', and online privacy violations are on the low end of that. I find it hard to believe that most people would act differently from Thiel in that situation.
Poisoning the water supply is different because the water supply is managed by the local government, and because it's a crime. These add a personal risk to the decision, which your argument is indirectly relying on when you assume it's obviously a bad thing.
You should choose an example that wouldn't lead the executives being personally attacked by prosecutors:
* An oil spill killing ocean wildlife and damaging the look of a beautiful beach.
* A soda company deciding whether to put 10% more sugar in their sodas to increase sales, even though they know its likely to kill statistical thousands of people.
* A manufacturing company moving to China, pressuring local workers into working long hours in poor working conditions and polluting their country.
I believe none of these is a crime, and I wouldn't argue that someone who voted against these should resign from the board rather than help execute on a decision they oppose.
If the anti-poison faction resigns, they cede any remaining influence over the organization to the pro-poison faction. Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes" (and get paid for doing so).
>Voting "no" is better than giving up your vote in favor of someone who will undoubtedly vote "yes"
Is it? What do you think does more to further the cause and draw awareness, a no vote that doesn't matter and gets no attention or news articles Peter Thiel resigns Facebook board seat over moral objections to FB Privacy Policy?
The problem with the idea that someone can do no good on a board if they are outvoted on issues based on moral objections is that it assumes all the other people have identical views and motivations, and every vote and issue will be ineffectual. I think that's doesn't match with reality. Look at the supreme court, and the different a single judge can make on the myriad cases they see. People are complex, and have nuanced views. An ineffectual vote six days out of the week may still yield a positive result one out of seven. Do we throw that away out of idealism?
There's a place for grand gestures. Giving away real, tangible power, even if unable to be expressed most of the time, in lieu of increasing awareness about an issue that everyone already knows about is not what I consider a smart move. To have any gain, it would at least need to increase awareness of the issue. I'm not sure that's even relevant in this case, given the widespread public acknowledgement and numerous media outlets addressing the issue already.
How so? I think I'm being very clear. If you make assertions, you should support them. I do not take at face value that being on the board of Facebook precludes you from caring about privacy. If there is specific evidence as to his actions apart from that, it should be presented. None was.
> The moral calculus of renouncing your massive profit-making association with a company that you serve on the board of if it chooses to do things that you find morally unacceptable is trivial
It is only trivial in the renouncement is morally unambiguous, it is not trivially acceptable that the opposite is true. I submit that it's entirely possible to remain in a position of some power of an organization that is working counter to what you believe is right. In the simplest case, to change that organization. To reject that would be reject the core tenets of democracy, which requires you to participate in a system you may find has resulted in morally reprehensible actions to bring about change and prevent future occurrences of those actions. A board of directors is fundamentally a very democratic form of governance (in that like the United States, the representatives are often elected so it is democratic in its republicness).
> If you're on the losing faction on a corporate board that decides that the best option is to poison the city water supply, and your mournfully cash the checks, you are just as guilty as the winning faction.
But that's not what's going on here. The equivalent here would be if there was a long standing plan to legally dump poison into the water. Feel free to renounce your board membership. The people that are poisoned in the future will feel so much better that you took an ineffectual moral stand rather than alternate action that might have yielded real change.
There is no difference in this than legislative powers. Money and power are interchangeable, to a degree. Should our legislators resign over voted directions of government they do not agree with? They are, be nature of their positions, benefiting from the increase in power and influence the decision may grant them if it increases the standing of the US (but at the cost of the world as a whole).
So, the be absolutely clear, I believe there exists the possibility to have non-controlling power in an organization that you feel is taking morally reprehensible actions, and believe that the most beneficial action to address this is to continue with your position and work to change the organization. To assert Peter Thiel is exhibiting "sheer cynical audacity" and hope that people aren't "dumb enough to fall for this" purely by his association with the board of Facebook without addressing this is not worthy of taking seriously.
To me, that whole line of argument makes no sense. Facebook is at its core and from the start an anti-privacy entity. It relies on encouraging people to post their whole lives and the lives of others. A privacy-friendly Facebook would not be Facebook at all except in name.
Taking your legislation example, a privacy-minded person investing in Facebook would not just like be a legislator disagreeing with a decision, it'd be like a self-proclaimed anarchist pushing for a more powerful government.
The lives of others it is. The funny thing is when I say to facebook users that I will post their pictures or other info to some other social network that they don't use, suddenly privacy becomes important to them. I really don't get this attitude among friends.
Here's Andreessen on the future of the news business [1]. The part you are specifically pointing out in your comment is thus:
"One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works."
My take on Thiel is that he sees himself trying to help navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side, I think he agrees that too much surveillance and data gathering is a problem. He calls himself a libertarian, after all. He just sees the other side as being just as much of a problem, as in this quote (mostly relating to his involvement in Palantir):
"As a libertarian, I don't think we should have had the response [to 9/11] we did to those buildings blowing up. But all the mass movements, all the consciousness-raising in the world did not stop us from getting the Patriot Act. The ACLU is always good at talking about civil rights, but [despite that] once something happens, protections go out the window right way. I think there's something to be said for trying to figure out some ways to stop another attack which will be used to curtail civil liberties even more. A company like Paypal could not get started in the post-PatriotAct world, because we would be accused of money laundering [based on how we operated] in '98-'99..." (from a discussion with David Graeber hosted by The Baffler, Fall 2014)
I have a hard time taking his libertarianism as anything other than a cynical maneuver to clear the way for corporate autocracy. He writes manifestos arguing against democracy, sits on the board of not one, but two private surveillance firms, and wrote a book about how the best business to be in is monopolies. It's like some negative image of Leninism, where the vanguard party is venture capitalists so the revolution is sabotaged before it begins
And therein lies the heart of the phenomenon. Much evil has been done by good people telling themselves that they can prevent evil by wielding evil's power themselves.
Crime can never be totally prevented. Building a tool that attempts to do so will not stop politicians clamoring for even more totalitarianism when the inevitable does happen.
Even ignoring the differences between the privacy issues of Gawker vs Facebook, the decisions a company makes are influenced by more than just one person, and nothing posted here says anything of Peter Thiel's views on privacy with respect to Facebook.
>the decisions a company makes are influenced by more than just one person, and nothing posted here says anything of Peter Thiel's views on privacy with respect to Facebook.
Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter.
FB's decisions might be influenced by more than just Thiel, but if Thiel feels strongly about privacy (and his views aren't heard on FB) he always has the option of selling his stock and leaving FB...
>Again, assuming FB and Gawker have the same privacy issues, what you point doesn't really matter.
They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service. I know plenty of very social and successful people who don't use Facebook. Maybe you feel that there should still be additional regulations on Facebook; fine, that's a debate for another day. But it's very clearly different than a "journalist" prying into your private life against your will to produce a sensationalist and embarrassing article that does nothing to serve the public interest.
>They're not comparable. You give information willingly to Facebook and accept their terms of service.
Sure -- I agree that they're not comparable (that said, I don't necessarily agree that FB is better than Gawker privacy wise just because it's a different model. In fact I believe the opposite -- and don't particularly care for the "volunteer" part. People volunteer to all kinds of societal harmful stuff).
But my argument above checks to see the validity of the parent's comment after "assuming that they're comparable".
An ad-hominen would be: "what he says is wrong because he is stupid/bribed/corrupt/a hypocrite" etc.
Saying: "What he says is hypocritical" is not an ad-hominem - it's not an argument on the content or the man, but the relation between the two (what he says and what he does).
You're trying to discredit an argument because the person saying it is a hypocrite, which is also an ad-hominem. If the argument is true, then it would also be true even if the person saying it were hypocritical.
>If the argument is true, then it would also be true even if the person saying it were hypocritical.
And nobody said otherwise -- for the core argument.
But in real life we don't usually know whether the thing (let's call it A) itself that an argument tries to prove is true.
We only know that the argument in favor of A is formulated correctly (follows its premises correctly, etc).
Regarding A though, there might be other premises we haven't checked (and weren't mentioned in the argument), other facts that invalidate it, etc.
Thus it is enlightening to know if an argument for A is being made hypocritically, to evaluate the possibility of A being true in a wider context.
E.g. if I say "A is good for everybody, for X,Y,Z reasons" and I do the opposite of A, then the possibility of A really being good for everybody is somewhat lessened by the prior that "the person proposing A does not follow A".
This is because:
a) nothing guarantees that X,Y,Z (the things mentioned in the argument) are enough to prove that A is good for everybody.
b) the fact that someone proposes A but does the opposite, adds credence to the possibility that there are benefits from NOT following A.
Heck, even if the argument is that "A is good for you for X,Y,Z" and it's correct, someone that knows X,Y,Z (since he put forth the argument) but does not follow A, might know something like A+ or B that's even better, and tries to sell me short.
I'm convinced that stcredzero is intentionally misdirecting you into arguing about logical fallacies. Based off of her/his other comments in this thread, it doesn't appear that she or he cares much about them. stcredzero's viewpoint is clear and not focused on policing the thread from logical fallacies.
I would say it's a fallacy to harp on logical fallacies; it's not as if everyone has infinite time to convert all arguments to syllogisms. The common list of logical fallacies entered Western culture from the ancient Greeks but shouldn't be taken with religious fervor.
Thus it is enlightening to know if an argument for A is being made hypocritically, to evaluate the possibility of A being true in a wider context.
That sounds like logic, but it makes much less sense than it sounds. So you're saying it's good to examine the hypocrisy of someone's argument, because of the possibility that there's contradictory facts or implications that the arguer is holding back on us? Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
>So you're saying it's good to examine the hypocrisy of someone's argument, because of the possibility that there's contradictory facts or implications that the arguer is holding back on us?
Yes.
>Not only is that also ad-hominem it's a fuzzy half-logical ad-hominem.
It's also correct, and a pragmatic way to find hidden motives in real life.
You're contradicting yourself right here, in a way that seems to indicate that you don't understand the important difference between these two circumstances.
Something that's pragmatic is merely mostly correct or most of the time correct. One could say the same thing about racial stereotypes in the US -- which is to say that heuristics shouldn't be treated as an argument. It's only at best a starting point. Quitting at that point is the worst kind of mental laziness.
> E.g. if I say "A is good for everybody, for X,Y,Z reasons" and I do the opposite of A, then the possibility of A really being good for everybody is somewhat lessened by the prior that "the person proposing A does not follow A".
"It's good for you to not smoke. Now excuse me while I take my smoke break."
I'm not sure what is the example supposed to prove.
That what I said doesn't always hold?
Of course it doesn't.
That's why I wrote about possibilities, and only said that the prior that the person preaching X doesn't follow X "somewhat lessens" the possibility that X is true.
I never said that someone "preaching X and doing the opposite" proves that X is not true.
If I had said that, your example would be a valid refutation. But I haven't, and it's only attacking a straw man.
Besides, the only reason that your example case seems obviously wrong to you is because you're taking as a given what you are supposed: you already know that smoking is bad.
If you didn't, and someone said to you "smoking is bad for you", while he himself was smoking, you would be justifiably suspicious to consider whether it's not actually bad, and the other person is lying or hiding something from you (e.g. to keep all the cigarettes for himself).
My point is that this thinking is a fallacy precisely because it is orthogonal to the argument being made. It is neither evidence for nor against the argument. You are making some sort of argument for heuristics, but heuristics are called such precisely because they are not solutions.
The correct answer is to independently validate the claims, or evaluate the merits of an argument on their own ground. That's tedious and often not worth the effort, and that's OK. We use heuristics all the time -- you don't ask your friend for his proof, because you use the heuristic of trust instead. But at least acknowledge that it's a heuristic and stop trying to claim it as a solution.
Where evidence is provided which undermines the credibility of the author, this does not qualify as an ad hominem attack. The parent provided relevant background as to why one should doubt the author's objectivity.
Simply playing the "ad hominem" card is not a free pass for the opinions of crackpots to be given equal weight.
I don't see the OP laying out a case for the article's content, I see them mentioning how it's absurd for anyone to take the author of this article seriously on privacy issues.
That's kind of what ad hominem is... Discredit the argument by discrediting the arguer. The thing is, that has zero effect on whether the argument is valid or not. The fact that I state 10 wrong facts about bananas does not mean that the next fact I state is wrong, even though I've far and away proven myself to not be a trusted expert on banana facts.
Strictly, the fallacy involved is tu quoque -- if it is used to rebut the argument which is inconsistent with the persons behavior -- not ad hominem. They are related, but distinct.
Although I suppose if one took the route of:
1. A says X,
2. But A acts in accord with not-X,
3. Therefore, A is a hypocrite.
4. And, because A is a hypocrite, one should disregard A's arguments
You could actually make an ad hominem out of the accusation of hypocrisy.
Sure. tu quoque is just the specific case of ad hominem being used in this instance. ad hominem is any logical argument which attacks the arguer instead of the argument itself.
>That's kind of what ad hominem is... Discredit the argument by discrediting the arguer. The thing is, that has zero effect on whether the argument is valid or not.
In real life the content of an argument isn't the only think that matters. The motives of the arguer are also important --
what they're trying to achieve/sell by using it etc.
That's because people don't only offer their arguments to have other people discuss them and assess their merits, but also to use them to influence people towards other stuff, often unrelated to the argument.
E.g. "listen how right and eloquently I speak in favor of privacy -- and thus forgive my enormous contribution to privacy violations, or the fact that I killed an online outlet out of spite".
>The fact that I state 10 wrong facts about bananas does not mean that the next fact I state is wrong
No, but it means that pragmatic persons with limited time spans should do better than spend time listening you on bananas -- and thus are more right than wrong to dismiss anything else you have to offer beforehand.
Sure, they might commit to a false negative this way, but it's statistically more likely that they wont (and being quick and mostly right to access stuff is more important than being 100% right but slow, again for people with limited life spans).
Besides a hypocrisy charge is not the same as a "he is wrong" charge.
If I'm trying to sell you a high-efficiency AC unit, I will assert that it's a high-efficiency AC unit that will reduce your monthly bills, so you should buy it. You answer back that of course I would say you should buy it, because I'm selling it... Except that has absolutely zero impact on the fact that the AC unit is high-efficiency thereby will save you money.
This is why ad hominem is a fallacy. It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
>If I'm trying to sell you a high-efficiency AC unit, I will assert that it's a high-efficiency AC unit that will reduce your monthly bills, so you should buy it. You answer back that of course I would say you should buy it, because I'm selling it... Except that has absolutely zero impact on the fact that the AC unit is high-efficiency thereby will save you money.
I'm not suggesting you "answer back" anything -- I'm suggesting that you should check if the person praising something has hidden motives.
In fact, I'm saying something even more obvious: if a person praises something, and they don't seem particularly fond of having it or practicing it, then be suspicious.
As for selling something, it is already a great motive to make people lie and present the facts in a distorted way, withhold precious information, etc about a product. It happens EVERY single day in millions of stores, showrooms, ads, etc.
If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
>It provides zero evidence for or against an argument. It's completely orthogonal.
Arguments in real life do not live in some platonic ideal sphere, isolated from everything else.
They intermingle with all kinds of "completely orthogonal" things.
Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
> If you are only trying to evaluate the product based on what the seller tells you, you'll be duped. Even if it's 100% true in itself.
I never advised that, but nice strawman. I advised to evaluate the arguments on their own ground. This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
> Sometimes, judging the person making the argument, and their motives, is even more important (and insightful) than judging the argument.
That's fine... If your goal is to gain insight into a person and their motives. If your goal is to judge their argument, then it's absolute and complete fallacy.
>This AC is efficient and will save you money -- that is something you can independently verify, if it's important to you to do so. And if you're buying an AC and you care about efficiency, that seems like the type of thing you should care to do.
Another AC might be just as efficient. Or maybe I just don't even need an AC and while the numbers are all true, they're overselling the benefits. Merely finding out whether a particular model they're trying to sell me is as efficient as they say doesn't help me evaluate their suggestion in the broader context.
>That doesn't mean that you should automatically distrust a salesman. It also doesn't mean you should trust them, though apparently that's a dichotomy that exists for you. It's a null input -- there's zero actionable information if what you care about is buying an efficient AC.
I'm not sure how we got to the salesmen example.
The example I initially gave was about distrusting people that say "X is good for you", but do not follow X themselves -- and about distrusting X for that.
Whereas distrusting doesn't mean "X is thus bad, period", means "you should better investigate X, something seems fishy".
> True, but that just points to the fact that ad hominem should not be dogmatically a logical fallacy.
No, it doesn't. OTOH, a logical fallacy isn't something that means that the conclusion that flows from it is wrong, or even that the fallacy doesn't provide a useful pragmatic filter given limited resources to devote to fully evaluating arguments.
I see nothing wrong with a man who feels remorse for assisting in the stripping of online privacy owning up to his mistakes.
"As an internet entrepreneur myself, I feel partly responsible for a world in which private information can be instantly broadcast to the whole planet."
This article is as much an apology as it is a call to turn things around fix things
That is literally what it says, however, most here seem to be questioning the subtext and authenticity. I have trouble interpreting this as an apologetic introspective look at the evolution of privacy and more as a self serving rant.
Theils crusade against gawker killed what I think was a shitty trade rag focused on gossip, at a very steep price. Too much in my opinion.
I had trouble taking his speech at the RNC seriously.
I deeply respected him, probably naively, and I still do; just in a much more narrow context. His intellect and knowledge of technology and macrotrends is amazing, however I find his philosophy in contrast with some of his actions
I don't particularly disagree with anything you said but even a privacy intruding clock can be right twice a day. The article is merely a pretty conventional discussion of the public interest vs what the public is interested in and what we should expect from journalism. Everything he says is pretty darn standard stuff which has been written a thousand times before, VC or no VC.
Pah, if facebook is under federal supervision, it's probably ultimately because they weren't friendly enough to government. That Thiel is on its board isn't in itself especially damning of him.
Far worse, then, that he founded surveillance industry contractor Palantir.
Thiel "acknowledges" this, though. That puts in him in the same boat as Soros, who is also good at "acknowledging" the paradoxes of his position even as he instructs governments, in private, exactly which people they should send out to handle a particular situation.
Intercept is billionaire-funded, too - and Greenwald has written at length about "what's wrong with the media" - most of which I agree with, by the way. We won't get away from the billionaires and their meddling. The best we can hope for is that they're stronger when they're right than when they're wrong.
That posting people's private sex tapes is not OK, is one of the ways Thiel is right.
It's bad in many ways he doesn't elucidate. For instance, in a world where your last shreds of privacy can be obliterated by Gawker or Buzzfeed the moment you catch public attention, there will be some winners, and some losers.
Women, on the whole, will lose, because it seems fewer women are willing to sacrifice privacy for power. Gays will lose slightly, because they have more to lose from catching public attention (not so true in the US anymore, fortunately, but still very true in many countries).
Who are the winners?
First, those who can pay an army of publicity experts, and have had it for years to keep an iron grip on their public perception, so that all embarrassments and scandals (real and manufactured) can be managed most efficiently. And, who have very few ambitions or opinions not conductive to seeking power. In short career politicians.
The second type is people who just have no sense of shame, whose egos are so big they can just shrug it all off. Reality TV stars, or something.
The firewall is a relic of a lucrative business model that imploded. What news desks can and cannot do anymore is a matter of exigency, not the politics of aspiring plutocrats.
My Google-fu is failing me on the exact link (can someone help?), but Marc Andreessen once penned some breathless, excited editorial about "the future of media", and at one point he talked about the editorial/advertising firewall as a relic that needed to be abandoned. It was so slickly inserted that you could almost forget what he was really saying: that news desks need to be prevented from reporting things that companies rather they didn't.
Every time a VC tries to tell me "what's wrong with the media", I reach for my gun. Everyone: they're not your friends. They're not trying to help you. Their overriding concern is nurturing the value of their investments, and that sometimes means silencing people who report inconvenient truths.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees...
(reposted from other submission)