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Right, when preferences are in conflict do you protect the person who cares or the person who doesn't? Also privacy is like a thermodynamic arrow. You can't un

by msg 13y ago

Right, when preferences are in conflict do you protect the person who cares or the person who doesn't? Also privacy is like a thermodynamic arrow. You can't unspread a secret or make public information private. So you shouldn't treat the decision to go public lightly.

philh 13y ago
> Right, when preferences are in conflict do you protect the person who cares or the person who doesn't? There is a cost to always protecting the person who cares, which is that people may self-modify to care more, making cooperation harder. (Or just pretend to care more than they actually do.) It's not necessarily a worry in this particular case, but it's worth considering in the general case.
saraid216 13y ago
> Also privacy is like a thermodynamic arrow. Running off on a tangent, that's a really interesting analogy. I wonder how much could be done with the notion that privacy is the opposite of entropy: that is, privacy is about minimizing the arrangements of how your information is formed, and there's a universal, inevitable trend towards maximizing those arrangements. Differently, privacy as the predictability of how a piece of information moves: as entropy, or publicity, increases the predictability of the information becomes less as its possibility space increases.
- msg 13y ago
  This notion makes sense to me. The more public or quotidian your thoughts and behavior, the greater chance that people will be able to nail you down. And there are interesting feedback loops when you go public, then people expect you to continue to be public in similar situations. There is an interesting tension between the benefits of collaboration and the benefits of individuality. John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing off each other, or Andrew Wiles working alone in obscurity. Surprise and disruption are closely linked to privacy in my mind. Not necessarily by launch time. But the groundwork for originality to me is laid in the soil of a rich inner life.

by msg 13y ago

philh 13y ago

> Right, when preferences are in conflict do you protect the person who cares or the person who doesn't? There is a cost to always protecting the person who cares, which is that people may self-modify to care more, making cooperation harder. (Or just pretend to care more than they actually do.) It's not necessarily a worry in this particular case, but it's worth considering in the general case.

saraid216 13y ago

> Also privacy is like a thermodynamic arrow. Running off on a tangent, that's a really interesting analogy. I wonder how much could be done with the notion that privacy is the opposite of entropy: that is, privacy is about minimizing the arrangements of how your information is formed, and there's a universal, inevitable trend towards maximizing those arrangements. Differently, privacy as the predictability of how a piece of information moves: as entropy, or publicity, increases the predictability of the information becomes less as its possibility space increases.

msg 13y ago
This notion makes sense to me. The more public or quotidian your thoughts and behavior, the greater chance that people will be able to nail you down. And there are interesting feedback loops when you go public, then people expect you to continue to be public in similar situations. There is an interesting tension between the benefits of collaboration and the benefits of individuality. John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing off each other, or Andrew Wiles working alone in obscurity. Surprise and disruption are closely linked to privacy in my mind. Not necessarily by launch time. But the groundwork for originality to me is laid in the soil of a rich inner life.