2025-12-10 21:14:43
These are a pair of Facebook posts from 2014 which I just want to transfer over to my blog for ease of finding; but if you are particularly interested in questions of utilitarianism and outcomes (having seen multiple references to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in the past few weeks) they might be interesting…
So my friend Glyn has been going around and posing a question something along the lines of:
« You are locked in a room with a man. You have a gun. The man has his finger poised over a button which will unleash nuclear armageddon upon the earth. Do you shoot the man? »
…which is apparently one of those questions being used to explore morality in a crisis; there are various spins on it, like you shoot him and he hits the button anyway, or will you kill one man to save one million people you don’t know, etc. From what I understand this question vexed some denizens of the Privacy International office for several hours.
Then they asked me, down the pub. I thought for a moment and said “shoot the button”, which caused consternation as nobody had suggested that before. The answer was relayed to Glyn via SMS who nitpicked it as above – “you might cause a short and incinerate the world” – so I wrote up my response as follows:
«This question (as posed to me) is actually a metaquestion, one which can be rationally disambiguated by the fact that someone asked it.
If it were up to me then, faced with a guy with his finger over the Armageddon button, I would certainly shoot him, in the head or heart, whichever presented minimal risk of accidental button-pushing on the way down. Quick kill, low risk.
I would do this because my threat model would be protection of the people whom I love, elsewhere, who would die in the conflagration. With this threat model, this is the only rational action other than suicide which would be nihilistic rejection of the choice.
However: if you are in a position to ask the question then you clearly have a different threat model. Specifically, if you are experiencing a moral quandry about killing one person to preserve the lives of millions, then you are already discounting numeric disparity and for some reason see the killing of one person as equally bad as the killing of 200 million.
In *that* threat model (choosing between two equally bad scenarios) then shooting the button, whatever the result, is the rational action. This is because shooting the button moves you from a state of having two bad outcomes (killing one, or seeing 200 million killed) to a situation where there are two bad and one good outcome (the former, plus: break the button and nobody dies).
This is clearly an improvement in your situation and therefore you should take it.
Any nitpicking about “it might be a drill” is compensated by “if so, the base commander may have filled your gun with blanks”, so can be safely ignored.
Welcome to thinking like a defender [ed: … as opposed to a pentester]»
From what I remember of growing up, when jocks are defeated by geeks who are either/both better equipped than, or can outthink their opponents, three complaints – three unmanly whines – are to be heard from the defeated:
- it’s cheating (because he didn’t attack me head-on)
- it’s not fair (because I didn’t expect what happened)
- he’s a coward for not fighting fair or honourably
The latter is particularly odd because part of the whole point of out-thinking your opponents is so that you don’t have to go up against their strongest suit. Throwing yourself into a meatgrinder may be “brave” or “daring” but sometimes it’s plain stupid, especially if going around the side is smarter.
In other news, John Kerry: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/kerry-snowden-coward-traitor-n116366
If you’re still into Trolley Problems, my solution is: grab the lever and try to cause a derailment; but apparently that’s cheating.
2025-12-09 20:36:40
Because of course what the world really needs is balkanized discourse policed by local law enforcement:
“The term digital sovereignty means that an institution has autonomy and control over the critical digital infrastructure, data, and services that make up their online presence. Up until this point, social media has not been a part of this conversation. We think it is time to change that.”
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/12/the-world-needs-social-sovereignty/
Previously:
2025-12-09 06:35:09
Interesting if true speculation in Australia; the anti-corporatist populist pols will do their nut:
Reddit is expected to launch a High Court challenge against Australia’s under-16s social media ban, the Australian Financial Review has reported. The masthead reports [that it] has enlisted barrister Perry Herzfeld, SC, backed by law firm Thomson Geer to run its case, according to anonymous sources with knowledge of the challenge.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-news-live-wells-under-fire-for-fresh-travel-expense-revelation-reddit-expected-to-challenge-government-s-social-media-ban-in-court-20251209-p5nm0c.html archived at https://archive.ph/PMljn
2025-12-09 04:57:13
[Someone] referred to GRANITE as a “legal atomic bomb.” I think that description is apt, and suggestive of what will emerge after such a law’s enactment – a state of affairs I would describe as an “Online Censorship Cold War.” The larger the EU makes their penalties, or the bigger and more strategically important a U.S. target they pursue … the greater are the statutory civil damages recoverable in American courts.
https://prestonbyrne.com/2025/12/07/what-the-world-might-look-like-if-we-get-a-federal-granite-act/
2025-12-08 17:38:35
In emails obtained by Crikey under freedom of information, the South Australian government wasn’t as keen to hear from [Francis] Haugen since she had described a ban as a “bumper sticker solution”.
2025-12-08 03:20:09
According to sources of Reuters, India has thought about a telecom industry proposal to require smartphone producers to enable satellite location tracking. It is to be kept active, so as to better improve surveillance efforts. Multiple sources and documents have emerged, showing that Apple, Google, and Samsung all opposed the order, over concerns for user privacy.