Thread by @gravislizard

is there an extant political / social science name for the problem that, while people are individually capable of understanding very complex things, it becomes harder to maintain a populace capable of self-government as society becomes dependant on more highly complex things

just saw some posts about, idk, something going on with machine learning in govt. a tremendous number of people are never going to understand ML and will never be able to understand any policy issues regarding it. ever. it's too weird and complicated and niche!

just as - and I will defend this to my death - SSL is too complicated for most people. most people will never understand why you shouldn't click "Visit this site anyway" on a cert error - you can explain THAT THEY SHOULDN'T, but explaining WHY and what the implications are - nah

and while I support the use of HTTPS *conceptually*, there is a serious problem in that it's not just "some people" or "a lot of people" but SPECIFIC GROUPS that need to understand it are are extremely unlikely to

i would wager that the vast majority of "managers", taken as a group, yes, across all disciplines, everywhere, in all businesses, do not understand the significance of "there's a certificate error on our customer payment portal"

a friend had this happen today at an *extremely* high profile site that I won't name. Suffice to say, he's going to *find* someone who can fix it, but the fact remains that the people he *did* talk to had no idea what he was even talking about.

and here's what i'm driving at: It's not going to change. in ten years, no more people are likely to understand asymmetric key cryptography because it's just INCREDIBLY hard to understand. *I* don't understand it, I've known about it for 10 years.

I've read about it dozens of times. I can understand it for maybe a day and then I lose it. It's just BAFFLING to my brain - other brains just Get It, very easily. Brains aren't going to fundamentally change.

i happen to have a much better grasp on why ML is intrinsically inappropriate for most critical applications, and why the bizarre marketing push to portray it as some I Robot Shit is so harmful, but I completely get why many people don't.

And you could sit down, with each one of them, *individually*, and explain it. And they would get it. But who has time? And on what subjects? And how many people are willing to ask, and how long does that take per person?

Right now, how many people working in the US government understand ML or SSL? Can they vote in good faith on laws about those things? How many judges, lawyers, juries can sit in good faith on a criminal case involving these things?

This worries me, a lot, because I feel like human life is more complicated than it ever was prior to the 20th century, and is accelerating at an absurd clip, and the complexity of society is increasing *geometrically*

It's not just that e.g. SSL and ML are extremely recent technologies, it's that they are YET MORE recent technologies. I feel like a year ago I was like "fuck what are we going to DO about b i t c oi n" and now I'm like "fuck what are we going to DO about ML" but BOTH MATTER

Neither are any easier to understand than they were last year, and they *never will be.* If crypt o c o in is still around in 15 years just as few politicians will be the least bit prepared to discuss it, there'll just be even MORE crises

And more and more and more and more. Computer cars nobody understands, ballooning IoT issues, the reemergence of net neutrality yet again as fiber gets deployed and everyone has gigabit and the backhauls are completely fucked and it's unfixable without regulation

I've been saying this for literally years, a time in which I've gone from 15mbit to 30mbit to 85mbit to, yes, gigabit fiber straight to my home: nobody fucking understands that the internet isn't big enough to tolerate everyone having gigabit fiber to the home

the FCC is going to need to do something about that but fuck, do you understand that I have NEVER worked with an IT "engineer" who even minimally understood QoS? how could anyone at the FCC hope to discuss this issue?

And how could they possibly waste time worrying about that when the IoT shit is literally going to kill people? We are going to hit total bandwidth exhaustion on our human resources to figure out how to solve problems, meanwhile the public can't participate in *any of it*

John Q. Newyork doesn't understand marginal taxes. we can't even teach him THAT. how are we going to teach him how to feel about laws about SSL or self driving cars? ever? in any reality?

now, as far as that part goes: John Q. Newyork also doesn't understand how securities fraud works (fuck that stuff is complicated) but we've had the SEC doing stuff about that for decades, so Maybe It's Not So Bad, Except

What the SEC does basically only affects A) Showbiz-From-Achewood scumbags B) billionaires, so John Newyork doesn't give a shit. What the FCC does largely regulates manufacturers and is very far from John Newyork's immediate life.

If we outlaw self-driving cars - which we absolutely, positively should - Elon Musk is going to go door to door telling John Newyorks that the US government hates him personally, and he's going to win.

I'm rambling at this point but god damnit I don't see how we can fix this. Google is a fucking public service at this point and *nothing* is being done about their rampantly shady bullshit. Chrome should be taken away from them.

We don't even have the mechanisms to institute something like "web browser development should be controlled by a public institution" but I absolutely believe any other take is totally absurd. I also think webapps should be outlawed. I mean.

I see no way to fix ANY of this. We've been down the wrong road for 20 years at this point, it's ALL bad, it's ALL broken, there's no fixing it, and a bubble is going to burst and hurt a lot of people and it'll be too late to reverse

God we just FUCKED UP with computers. Letting ANYTHING important depend on them was a mistake because the public will never fucking understand WHY it was a mistake. They all think computers work! They don't fucking work!

today I watched a german guy at a security conference read the PIN off someone's cry pto wa llet from two feet away through a fucking tempest attack by decoding the signals sent to the screen with a fucking ML program and almost nobody per capita knows what to do about that