UK government has tried to ban encryption time and time again. This is what happens when you have old/incompetent career politicians in power instead of deep thinkers like scientists and engineers.
The U.K. has a system where experts in various fields like medicine and engineering are put in the lawmaking process, in addition to experts in becoming elected (ie raising money and selling non tangible ideas to people)
It’s not perfect of course, but in my opinion it’s better than a fully democratic system.
Do those unelected experts advise on new legislation, even write it (why not? We don't expect elected politicians to be experts in much more than ordinary people) or do they also vote to approve or reject those laws like elected politicians do?
Theoretically they do both. I think the system that the above commenter is alluding to is the House of Lords, where a bunch of unelected "lords" can vote on legislation. The idea is for the lords to be people with particular expertise who we want to be voting on stuff. For example if you have some very highly thought of scientist or engineer you reward them with a peerage and they can sit in the house of lords and vote on stuff. Of course the reality is not so great.
That's a stereotype and probably not true. Many deep thinkers are humanists.
It's probably more likely around the hyper rational types, but my boss is the most empathetic engineer I've ever worked for. This is anecdotal but your comment seems fairly clearly overbroad
I've seen the stereotype confirmed on HN several times already. Whenever I, a blind pedestrian, voice my concerns about driverless car technology, I am being downvoted and outright critizised. The undertone is "How can this single person try to block an emerging technology". That pretty much confirms the statement that tech people sometimes have a hard time with human concerns.
I am empathetic to your concerns but I may or may not agree with your proposed solutions. I do think it's always important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing, or always aligned. Compassion is more utilitarian. Driverless cars will save a lot of lives when the technology is good enough, and the compassionate thing is implementing the technology when it saves more lives than it endangers. If that's the non-empathy you are getting from the HN community then the community is right, but again, I genuinely empathize even so.
It's worse than you think. Read the Criminal Justice Act (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988 (S.I 1988/2019) and marvel at some of the nonsense some politician thought it important to ban.
My personal favourite is "Death Stars", since it creates the mental image of some constable trying to confiscate a superlaser-equipped battlestation.
> the weapon sometimes known as a “shuriken”, “shaken” or “death star”, being a hard non-flexible plate having three or more sharp radiating points and designed to be thrown;
Its possible for young people to make these mistakes. My wife is not an old man and her default position is not to defend e2e encryption. So all it takes is a spurious argument against it (think of the children!) and without skin in the game she is happy to go along.
The argument is about proportional gain vs proportional loss and she is not aware of the devastating loss of privacy that would come from banning strong safe encryption.
You could prevent this by teaching rational thinking and cognitive biases at the school level, but I assume the reason that hasn’t happened yet because said students would start calling out the hyperbole that politicians and business people often like to employ.
Good unbiased Thinking requires effort. To optimize this there are caching mechanisms at multiple levels, from inside your brain to the societal level to save the energy required to do the thinking. If you deem that cache and all future ones to be invalid(untrustworthy) you'll have to do a lot of thinking from scratch.
If you want to practically brick such agent you'll just need to do a denial of service by bringing a huge deluge of claims that they have to spend more than their lifetime thinking through all of them critically.
I am not going to jump to the bait of defending my own wife as a rational person.
Instead I'll just point out that difference in information is not difference in ability. She just wasn't aware encryption was used basically everywhere, and so could be forgiven for not having at hand the information to refute the assertion that some back doors in one algorithm or system is harmless.
Only an education in these subjects will help, or a widespread awareness campaign by educated folks. Or even a law protecting it as a fundamental right.
Just as I criticize her field all the time, and am quickly embarrassed by my presumption of hyper rational super powers. Or at least I was for years.. I'm getting better.
