cs_h195.html

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<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>August 27, 2012</h2>
<p>Good afternoon. Probably people will be trickling in because they will have
gone to the old room. We'll start anyway.</p>
<p>Um, okay! Welcome to Social Implications of Computers. I apologize in
advance for being disorganized an unenergetic -- just got off an airplane,
so forgive me.</p>
<p>So let's start with the news. Cell phone exposure limits should be
reassessed. (This is a bit old, but still news.) This business about cell
phone radiation has been controversial, and there's never been any really
clear hundred percent convincing evidence that cell phone radiation hurts
you, but there have been some suggested studies. The government
accountability office suggests that it should be studied yet again.</p>
<p>One thing is, by the way, the situation keeps changing as the technology
changes.</p>
<p>The nice thing about GSM is that with the old techs, if your cell phone
cannot find a signal, it keeps broadcasting harder and harder until it
fries your brain! No, until it runs out of battery. So if you're in the
wilderness, you'll run out of battery. I believe that's not the issue with
GSM, but I'm not an electrical engineer.</p>
<p>You're supposed to use Bluetooth, which is also a radio, but it is shorter
range.</p>
<p>FCC fines Verizon for blocking tethering. The issue is one of monopolistic
practices. Telephone service, there aren't many cell phone carriers, as it
should be: you don't want everyone to build redundant cell phone tower
networks. The issue is if you take a natural monopoly (cell phone service)
and turn it into something else (software). This is what got Microsoft in
trouble before (OS -&gt; web browsers). Never understood why that was an
issue, since web browsers are free, and this web browser was never any good
in the first place.</p>
<p>Cell phone providers compete based on the price of their basic plans. And
then you end up paying quite a bit more for addons. One of the addons
Verizon solved was permission to use your smartphone to provide internet
service to your laptop. And they charge \$20 a month (or something like
that) to do that. Apparently they promised that they were not going to
prevent any software to be used on their network, and third parties were
making tethering apps.</p>
<p>FTC proposes tougher kids' privacy rules. Kids' privacy, you understand the
issue: when you put your drunken orgy pictures on facebook, you're supposed
to be adults and get in trouble for it. But when you're a kid, you're not
supposed to know better. So kids need to be protected, and there's various
legislation protecting kids. Sites are supposed to ask for a parent's
permission when asking for personal information. But now third parties can
avoid this parental consent deal (e.g. facebook, twitter).</p>
<p>Pentagon proposes more robust role for its cyber specialists. Namely they
want ability to take action outside of their networks to defend critical
computer systems. Obviously DoD has computer systems and computer
specialists to secure their networks. Obviously a good idea so that people
don't have missiles. Also a number of systems that don't have to do with
defense that are pretty important, like power. So they want the ability to
intervene in the event of cyber-attack for systems they don't own. This is
because they believe their security experts are better than other people's
security experts. This is a problem because it opens the door to the
government mucking around with other people's computers.</p>
<p>Newly discovered malware linked to Stuxnet. Stuxnet was this virus invented
by a combined effort of the military of the US and Israel to destroy the
Iranian nuclear production capabilities. And what the story is about is a
new version thought to be also military, and this one is not trying to melt
things down; it's trying to steal inforamtion, including customer data from
banks. And why is this? They're worried about money-laundering by
terrorists. Their virus programs can't determine ahead of time who's a
terrorist and who isn't. And this is one of the reasons why people are a
little nervous about allowing any expansion of military authorization to
access other people's computers.</p>
<p>Google changes its search formula to allow privacy. I'm sorry, not privacy,
piracy. Google is tweaking its formula to penalize sites suspected of
hosting pirated music, video, games, etc. Google's policy has been that
combating piracy is not their job; their job is to help people find
stuff. Now they're changing their policy. What they're now doing is
tracking takedown notices. The reason why there's this process is because
this stuff is often not put on by the owner, but is user-submitted
content. This is all very interesting because one of the biggest
accumulators of takedown notices is Youtube, and we have yet to see whether
Google is going to stop pointing to Youtube.</p>
<p>Researchers write book using DNA. Pretty recent. Basically, constructed DNA
where sequence encodes the book. This is a denser information-packing
technique. So far, it's really really expensive, so it's not going to show
up in RadioShack just yet, but it's an interesting technology.</p>
<p>Apple patents violated by Samsung. Um, okay. I admit, so am I (re: being on
Samsung's side). Apple has patents not on technology, but on designs. One
of the sillier Apple patents is "rounded corners". There are some other
ones that are a little more serious, like "pinch in to zoom, and pinch out
to zoom the other way". The important thing is not that they're patenting
multitouch screens. That would be a real technological patent. What they're
patenting is a particular use of multitouch screens, where certain gestures
mean certain things. That's called a design patent, and that's more
controversial compared to real technological patents. Apple is trying to
get court to lock the sales of Samsung technology. So if you have a patent,
you can use it to collect royalties from people or prevent other people
from entering the market altogether, and the latter is what Apple seems to
be doing. Really, what they seem to be doing is get rid of Android, one of
their competitors.</p>
<p>This is an example of what we'll be talking about, collected over the last
few weeks. My plan is for everyone to bring in stuff. You are invited, if
you come across a story you think we should know about, to send it in.</p>
<p>I'm going to stop for a moment about administration. Namely, there are two
versions of this course: 195 and H195. We have too many people in both of
them, but especially too many people that want to take H195, and I want to
talk some of you out of it. Usually, if it's too full, I'll just try to get
a larger room. The point of H195 is to get a discussion, and that doesn't
work if we have 50 people in a room. This is the biggest room we could get,
second time around. So here's the deal: H195 is meant for people who have a
real deep interest in the topic and want to be part of discussions and
learn a lot. Unfortunately, it seems that H195 satisfies some breadth
requirement, a provision which I'm going to try to get rid of, but I
haven't gotten rid of it yet. My guess is that some of the people who chose
H195 did so for that reason. So it's more work. And, in fairness to the
people who want to be in it because they want to be in it, I'm going to be
very strict about doing the work. I hope I don't have to resort to things
like quizzes on the reading (because I will if I have to). If you are in
H195, you will have to do twice as much reading, you will have to write one
long term paper, and you will have to actually talk in place. Be at class,
first of all, having done the reading, and participate in discussion.</p>
<p>I'll talk about this on Wednesday for the people who are in H or want to be
in H. If you want to be in H, come on Wednesday and we'll have swordfights
or something.</p>
<p>Reader is at Copy Central. Sadly the Copy Central on Hearst closed, so
you'll have to go to Shattuck Square. Different readers for H and regular 195.</p>
<p>This is a P/NP course. There are good things and bad things from the
student's perspective. The best thing from my perspective (well, from yours
too, I guess) is that you don't feel that you have to agree with me on
things. You'll pass if you do the work. The disadvantage is that not
passing you is a pretty blunt weapon. You'll have to come to class, I will
take attendance (not this time); I hate doing that; it makes me feel like a
third-grade teacher or something. And I've learned that students who are
taking five classes (one of which is P/NP) tend to get caught up in their
162 lab or something.</p>
<p>You're all going to write three papers; if you're in 195, it'll be three
one-page papers on assigned topics. If you're in H, it'll be two of those
and a term paper. The term paper, you'll start by writing a one-page
proposal. Rare that I say "no"; usually I say it's too broad and give some
options.</p>
<p>Will need a bibliography: from the Greek "book", not to be confused with
website. Problem with websites? Anyone can put anything on the web; it
stays there forever even if it's proven wrong. Doesn't get any editing or
criticism prior to publication; tends to be breaking news rather than
later, common analysis. Although websites can be good sources about news
(when it's relevant), it's good when you have some retrospective ideas in
your work as well. Due end of October, and maybe a quarter of them I will
say are fine; the other three quarters you will have to rewrite. So the
term paper's a big deal. Oh yeah, there's a section here called Academic
Integrity. Your part, don't plagiarize; that's easy. My part is, um, trying
to be fair about the ideas I present to you. I don't believe there's any
such thing as neutrality. When people on the TV pretend they're being
neutral, they're lying to you. They have a point of view.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, if everyone seems to be agreeing with me, I'll try to present
the other sides.</p>
<p>The next two pages are events. There's a calendar including assignments and
readings. Things in the reader are supposed to be chronological, but
they're not. The things out of order are marked with an asterisk. The next
thing is an article called the Ethical Context of Computing. It's basically
an overview, and if you look it over, it'll give you an idea of what this
course is about. This isn't an ethics course. An ethics course is "don't
pirate movies" and "don't lie to your boss" and things like that. This is a
course about making you aware about the non-obvious ways that computers
affect our lives.</p>
<p>Most of the time in this class, we're going to be talking about bad
consequences of computing. Going to say at the offset that's not because I
think that computers are all bad; I love what I do. But the good
consequences tend to take care of themselves; the bad ones are more
difficult. Computers in medicine. Wonderful, wonderful things
happen. Looking for ones that are clearly all on one side.</p>
<p>Side comment: you know if you turn a cell phone off, it's not really off?
If you want to keep the government from listening to you, you have to take
the battery out. (Matt: and even then it's got a few seconds of
capacitance).</p>
<p>EFF. What you have here is an issue of their newsletter, which you can get
by mail if you want, or it's on their newsletter. And then you have this
thing in ASCII, not web-looking, and it's called EPIC Alert, from the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC is a much more narrowly focused
group [than EFF]. Spend their time lobbying on behalf of privacy. It's a
small group; that is to say, it is a large group in the sense that you can
be a member of it and send them money, but it's a small staff, very
focused. They publish this newsletter about specifically privacy issues.</p>
<p>Then there's some stuff from CITRIS, which is a campus group. The Center
for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. List of
some projects they work on.</p>
<p>That's the handout, that's the administrative stuff, let me pause for
questions.</p>
<p>Q: Honors reader: same as last semester?
A: Believe so.</p>
<p>Q: Possible to take regular, then come back later to take H?
A: They won't let you, but come talk to me.</p>
<p>Class is bigger than room size. They let you get a little bigger than room
size. Won't be able to get all of you off the waiting list right away. On
Wednesday, I'm going to try to get a better sense of how many are really
going to take H. If you are on the waiting list for H, and you can't get
into H195, you can still probably get into 195.</p>
<p>Wanted to talk about unintended consequences and computers in general, just
for a little bit. It's very very rare that computers raise issues that were
never issues before. What happens is things that were issues all along
become much more important or more pressing or more something. So let me
just take an example. Social security numbers. Your social security number
is a pretty important thing not to get out in the world because of identity
theft. That was always true. But identity theft used to be harder to do,
and the number of cases was much smaller before computers.</p>
<p>But here's another side effect (less obvious). When you buy yourself a
house, that transaction is on the public record. In many (most?) counties,
that record includes your social security number. That didn't matter when
in order to look it up, you had to transport yourself to the county clerk's
office, but these days, they do all that stuff online. So if you're a home
owner, there's a good chance that your social security number is online in
a publicly accessible record. This is one of those disasters waiting to
happen. This is a way computers exacerbate a problem that was around all
along and have unexpected consequences. The public records of deeds is in
many ways a good thing, and was intended to resolve disputes about property
between neighbors. Nobody thought about privacy implications, and when they
put these into computers, nobody thought about the implications, again.</p>
<p>Had they thought about it, when they scanned old numbers, they would have
redacted social security numbers. So that's just a very small narrow
example of the way in which computers amplify issues. It's the same with
almost everything we're going to talk about this semester. I mentioned
earlier the risk of cyber-attacks on power stations. Something you may not
know or care about (but will know anyway) is until quite recently (10-20
years ago), every power distribution facility in the US had the same
lock. Why? Because every once in a while, there's a big power failure, and
it's traditional that the electrical power company areas from neighboring
areas will come into the affected area to help out. They wanted to make it
so someone from the Nevada power company could rush over and get right to
work in a California power substation. They don't do that anywhere because
they started to get security-conscious.</p>
<p>There was never much danger of the Russian army marching in and attacking
our power plants. But there is a danger of some one crazy guy attacking
power plants. So people started thinking about security. What computers do
is make it possible for the crazy guy to not be physically present, and
that's a problem. All semester long, we're going to be looking at
unexpected consequences. In a way, my goal in this class is that when you
go out in the world and build stuff, there won't be as many unintended
consequences because you think about stuff. So that's the goal. It's not to
make you better people; you either are or aren't, and there's not much I
can do about it. But you could be careless in certain ways. I'm sensitizing
you. So that's the purpose of the course.</p>
<p><a name='2'></a></p>
<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>September 10, 2012</h2>
<p>Article from the Washington Post about the process by which the iPhone was
invented, based on internal memos and emails that came out in the Apple
v. Samsung lawsuit. Interesting: author is of view that Apple deserved to
win. What is interesting is the kinds of false starts they made, things
they had to redo, clever ideas. Interesting read.</p>
<p>Civilian "hacktivists" fight terrorists online. About random people who
attempt to infiltrate terrorist organizations online. If I were a
terrorist, I wouldn't be on the web. These guys make up fake identities for
themselves and acquire information they then pass on to the
government. Relevant to today's topic. Constraints on US Gov't that do not
apply to private parties. Police orgs can buy information that they would
not be able to collect themselves. This is not them buying: people
volunteering, but same issue.</p>
<p>What else is new? Bittorrent downloads monitored by copyright
enforcement. They only monitor popular stuff, so if you have obscure
tastes, then you're probably fine.</p>
<p>From Angry Birds to multiplayer video games, NASA ramps up investment in
education technology. They're working on a ten-million massively
multiplayer video game simulating life on Mars. They've already done some
other things in this game area. NASA's interested in education, and the way
to do education effectively seems to be to make games people want to play
(for the game) that are educational. Been done before; mostly bad. You're
playing some adventure game, slashing at monsters, and all of a sudden it
says "what is four times seven?" Interested both in recruiting next
generation of scientists and getting people interested in space to the
point the gov't will spend some money on it.</p>
<p>Internet addiction is real, German Researchers say. Found genetic variation
that might cause it. This is pretty iffy, in my opinion. What might be true
is that there are things in your genetic background that make you more or
less prone to obsessions of whatever kind; that could be true. You can look
it up, but I don't think that the study justified the idea that there's a
special one for internet addiction, but there you have it.</p>
<p>Anti-sec says Apple machine IDs leaked from some company.</p>
<p>That's the news. The topic that we're talking about this week is privacy. I
have to tell you that when I first heard about the topic of privacy on
computers, my reaction was "I don't have anything to hide; why do I care?"
Very valid reaction, some of you are probably thinking that too. So why
should we care about privacy? I want to put aside reasons relating to fear
of identity theft.</p>
<p>One of the things I hope you read this week was the article by James
Rachels. Nobody has nothing to hide -- not even you. You might not be doing
anything to get in trouble, but you may have quirks that you practice in
private (with selected friends).</p>
<p>As we speak, I'm having a little conflict with an administrator (having to
do with 61AS), and the way I talk about it with my colleagues is different
than the way I talk about it to this administrator's boss. It's different
tones: it's not different facts or opinions; it's different tones.</p>
<p>Identity theft: all I'm going to say about that right now: unless you've
looked into it, it's way easier than you think. Researcher at MIT found
that birth date and zip code is all they need to find your medical
records. Can look at anonymized public health data and find you in it.</p>
<p>So. Speaking of medical records, by law, employers are not supposed to use
medical information about you in hiring decisions. There are two reasons
they might want to. One of them is prejudice (so the canonical example is
"you have AIDS", and they think that means you've been behaving sinfully,
and they don't want to hire you, but another is that you might have some
disability that would require special accommodation from your employer that
they might not want to bother with).</p>
<p>Repurposing of information: e.g. Google reading your email to sell you to
advertisers (choosing which ads to display to you). The textbook example of
repurposing that people talk about is around election time, Republicans
make a big issue about welfare fraud. Exists in small amounts. Makes for
good headlines, and so they have these big campaigns to try to catch
welfare cheaters. Back in the 1970s, the state of Massachusetts had the
clever idea of taking their computerized list of welfare recipients and
their computerized list of state employees and doing a merge (checking
which people were on both lists). Found a bunch, but a lot turned out to
not be double-dippers (not working and collecting unemployment), but rather
mistaken matches. Would think that this would not happen, but in fact there
were many people with the same name, or they found some people who used to
work for the state (or used to be on welfare), and just plain wrong
information. Eventually that all got cleared up, but not until after the
state police showed up knocking on people's doors and asking for
information. That's a technical example of what can go wrong with
repurposing information.</p>
<p>Those are the arguments about privacy (why privacy matters) even if you
don't have any secrets. You can get into accidental trouble, can be
discriminated against (for various reasons), and you can be embarrassed for
something turning up in a different context. Happens to people of Harvey's
age who in their youths participated in Usenet. And I know it never
occurred to me in a million years that someone was archiving this stuff,
because something I said forty years ago (online) is still around. Would
have phrased things more carefully if I realized that I was making a
permanent record.</p>
<p>So I want to talk for a minute about the law and privacy. So I should start
by saying I'm not a lawyer, not giving legal advice, etc.</p>
<p>No absolute right to privacy. Cases where various people have legal
authority to look at data you thought was private. Maybe the most obvious
one is if you're suspected of a crime, the police can get a search warrant
to break into your house and look at your stuff, let alone your
computer. But maybe a less obvious case is the one about credit
report. Every time you make a financial transaction, it gets reported to
the credit bureau. Not gov't; it's a private company. I think most people
would say that's a legitimate business purpose.</p>
<p>So. Lots of people can have access to your information for lots of
perfectly good reasons. But in the case of the gov't, there's a long
history of limitations because of the right to privacy in the fourth
amendment. There are some funny exceptions to those limitations. For
instance: you can't be stopped and searched without probable cause, except
that on New Year's Eve, the highway patrol is allowed to stop every tenth
car and breath that student. Result of CA supreme court decision. Can see
purpose of it, but it's a random stop and search.</p>
<p>One that's so common that people don't even think about it any more is the
inspection of your luggage at the airport. The legitimate purpose of that
is people blowing up the airplane, but if they happen to find drugs in your
luggage, the fact that that has nothing to do with terrorism, they can
still arrest you.</p>
<p>The situation is tricky: you can't just say nobody should ever have access
to information about me period. There are many legitimate reasons; that's
why the issue of repurposing is so important. Thought experiment: problem
of terrorists blowing up airports, special team of finding these
terrorists. All they're doing is searching for weapons; they can't do
anything about anything else they find. That would be a way to prevent
repurposing.</p>
<p>When the police have unrestricted power, bad things tend to happen. Privacy
isn't mentioned in the Constitution. It's a judicial construct.</p>
<p>9/11? Massive change to your right to privacy, and not one for the better,
I would argue. Largely to the passing of laws that are not constitutional,
in part due to things that are extra-legal.</p>
<p>Legal to eavesdrop on international calls. Not yet legal to monitor
domestic calls. Law now requires ISPs to make it easy to wiretap a person's
communication.</p>
<p>Some things about the needs that conflict with privacy. Textbook of CS10
(Blown to Bits) starts with a story of a woman who drove her car off the
road, hanging on a cliff (unconscious) for a period of five days because
that's how long it took for the police to get legal access to her cell
phone carrier's information to which cell tower her phone was last in. By
law, if you're an adult, you have to be gone three days before they declare
you a missing person (since maybe you went missing on purpose).</p>
<p>Not a story that happens every day. She lived, by the way. Extreme case in
which privacy conflicts with other needs.</p>
<p>More common thing that conflicts with privacy: most common is just
convenience.</p>
<p>Third parties holding onto your information. Different companies have
different policies. Mostly pretty bad. Google actually is relatively good,
in the following sense: they have fought even subpoenas that they
considered to be overbroad.</p>
<p>During the last big epidemic scare, Google published a map regarding where
there was a big number of search queries of a particular flu. Was very
accurate (week ahead of public health) and was in fact life-saving. Good
use of information where there wasn't any "who made the queries" but rather
just how many.</p>
<p>Two threats to privacy: governments and businesses. Third (recent) one:
individual people with cameras on cell phones.</p>
<p><a name='3'></a></p>
<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>September 17, 2012</h2>
<p>Lawsuit to get records about NSA's surveillance information.</p>
<p>Video games affecting people, evidently.</p>
<p>Government subpoenaed Twitter to give people tweets.</p>
<p>Records can be subpoenaed in a court case, etc. We'll see how this plays
out. Today, in today's Daily Cal, UCB suing big companies. Universities do
research, etc. Back in the day, core memory meant people paid money to IBM
and MIT. Berkeley holds a bunch of patents. Non-software seems reasonable.</p>
<p>Important point: the burst of genius is very rarely true. Enabling
technologies have reached the point of making things feasible. Usual story
about inventions. Flash bulb in a camera, single-use: before sustainable
light bulb. Steam engine. Some inventions aren't like that. Some really do
just come to somebody (velcro, xerography). Nobody else was working on
that. More often, everyone is thinking about this stuff.</p>
<p>IP. A patent is the right to develop an invention, to produce things
dependent on an invention. Copyright is not about invention, it's about
creative and artistic works. And there, if you have an idea and write about
it, other people are allowed to use your ideas, not your words. Trademark,
you know what it is; you can register one; people are not allowed to use it
in ways that might confuse people. You can in principle make a vacuum
cleaner called "time". How close do things have to be to raise a lawsuit?
Lawsuit about Apple Computers vs Apple Records. Later did, which caused a
later round of battling.</p>
<p>Personal likeness, I can't take a picture of you and publish it with
certain exceptions. Most important for famous people. Funny rules:
newsworthy, and news photographers are allowed to take pictures of
newsworthy people.</p>
<p>Trade secrets: if a company has secrets, and you are a competing company,
you may not send a spy to extract these secrets.</p>
<p>House ownership. There are houses where people have had houses for
millennia. Patents and copyrights are not like that: not a right. Those
things are bargains between creators and society. Purpose to society is
that these eventually belong to the public. One of the readings talks about
a different history of patents quoting Italian legal scholars, and if
correct, patents were supposed to be permanent ownership. Why might it be
good to society? Used to be people who made new inventions. Guilds. Hard to
join, and you would be a slave for a while. Master would teach apprentice
the trade, and advantage was that it reduced competition. Trouble was that
there is a long history of things people used to be able to do that we
can't anymore. Textbook example: Stradivarius violins.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, nobody knows how Stradivarius made violins. Stories about how
to make paints of particular colors. What the patent system is trying to
avoid. Describe how invention works so someone in the field can create
it. By making this disclosure, you are given a limited-term exclusive right
to make these.</p>
<p>The thing is, sooner or later, your technology is going to be obsolete. To
your advantage to have a clear legal statement.</p>
<p>Patent treaties. Used to be that if you invented something important, you'd
hire a bunch of lawyers.</p>
<p>Until recently, software was not patentable. ATT wanted to patent the
SETUID bit. In those days, you could not patent any math or software or
algorithm.</p>
<p>Patents stifling innovation in the field. When you file a patent
application. Let's say you deny the patent. You would like to fall back on
trade secrecy. Patent applications are secret until approved. Startups
doomed. Wouldn't matter if term were short compared to innovation cycle of
the industry.</p>
<p>Another thing in the Constitution is that treaties take precedence over
domestic laws.</p>
<p>So let's talk about copyrights! So. Nobody says let's do away with
copyright altogether. Copyright (at its worst) is less socially harmful
than patents because it's so specific. Again, copyrights are a
bargain. Started in Britain between the King and printers. Printers wanted
exclusive right to things they printed. King wanted printers to be
censors. Originally not authors who had copyright, but the publisher. Often
creators of rights will sell the rights to publishers.</p>
<p>This is where computers come in. How to sell to world? Used to need big
company with facilities to create copies and widely
distribute. Self-publish: work available to everyone. Important: rarely
author who complains about copyrights. Usually publishers.</p>
<p>There's always been piracy, but limited historically by analog media losing
information when copying.</p>
<p>Term of copyright has gotten longer and longer. Lawsuit about this about
the most recent extension. In effect, making permanent copyright, against
constitution. Ironic because copyright law now would have made much of
what made Disney rich would have been copyrighted. Lot of exceptions to
copyright law. Fair use. e.g. cannot write a Harry Potter novel, but can
write a Harry Potter parody. Famous case: Gone with the Wind. About how
wonderful life was for the owners of slaves. Someone wrote a book
(retelling from slave's point of view); ruled as fair use (political
commentary, protected by free speech).</p>
<p>Stallman actually invented a system that has 5 different categories of
work. Even Stallman doesn't say to ditch copyright. Hardly any musicians
make any money selling music because their contracts say that they make a
certain percentage of net proceeds. The way musicians survive is concerts,
and ironically, selling concert CDs. Stallman says to make music players
have a money button and send money directly to the musician.</p>
<p><a name='4'></a></p>
<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>September 24, 2012</h2>
<p>Vastly oversimplified picture of moral philosophy. Leaves out a lot.</p>
<p>So Socrates says famously "to know the good is to desire the good", by
which he means that if you really understand what's in your own interest,
it's going to turn out to be the right thing. Counter-intuitive, since
we've probably encountered situations in which we think what's good for us
isn't good for the rest of the community.</p>
<p>Ended up convicting Socrates, and he was offered the choice between exile
from Athens and death -- chose death because he felt that he could not
exist outside of his own community. His most famous student was Plato, who
started an Academy (Socrates just wandered around from hand to mouth), took
in students (one of whom was Aristotle). If you're scientists or engineers,
you've been taught to make fun of Aristotle, since he said that heavier
objects fall faster than light objects, and famously, Galileo took two
objects, dropped them, and they hit the ground at the same time.</p>
<p>It's true that some of the things Aristotle said about the physical world
have turned out not to be right. But it's important to understand it in
terms of the physical world, he did not have the modern idea of trying to
make a universal theory that explained everything.</p>
<p>Objects falling in atmosphere with friction different from behavior of
planets orbiting sun? Perfectly fine with Aristotle.</p>
<p>One of the things Aristotle knew? When you see a plate of donuts, you know
perfectly well that it's just carbs and fat and you shouldn't eat them, but
you do anyway. Socrates explains that as "you don't really know through and
through that it is bad for you", and Aristotle doesn't like that
explanation. Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different
things. Took that in two directions: action syllogism (transitivity),
extended so that conclusion of the syllogism can be an action. Not
important to us: important to us is that he introduces the idea of
virtues. A virtue is not an understanding of what's right, but a habit --
like a good habit you get into.</p>
<p>Aristotle lists a bunch of virtues, and in all cases he describes it as a
midpoint between two extremes (e.g. courage between cowardice and
foolhardiness, or honesty as a middle ground between dishonesty and saying
too much).</p>
<p>Better have good habits, since you don't have time in real crises to
think. So Aristotle's big on habits. And he says that you learn the virtues
through being a member of a community and through the role you play in that
community, Lived in a time that people inherited roles a lot. The argument
goes a little like this. What does it mean to be a good person? Hard
question. What does it mean to be a good carpenter? Much easier. A good
carpenter builds stuff that holds together and looks nice, etc. What are
the virtues that lead to being a good carpenter? Also easy: patience, care,
measurement, honesty, etc. Much easier than what's a good
person.</p>
<p>Aristotle's going to say that the virtues of being a good person are
precisely the virtues you learn in social practices from people older than
you who are masters of the practice. One remnant of that in modern society
is martial arts instruction. When you go to a martial arts school and say
you want to learn, one of the first things you learn is respect for your
instructor, and you're supposed to live your life in a disciplined way, and
you're not learning skills so much as habits. Like what Aristotle'd say
about any practice. Not so much of that today: when you're learning to be a
computer scientist, there isn't a lot of instruction in "here are the
habits that make you a (morally) good computer scientist".</p>
<p>Kant was not a communitarian: was more of "we can figure out the right
answer to ethical dilemmas." He has an axiom system, just like in
mathematics: with small numbers of axioms, you can prove things. Claims
just one axiom, which he describes in multiple ways.</p>
<p>Categorical imperative number one: treat people as ends, not means. This is
the grown-up version of the golden rule. Contracts are all right as long as
both parties have their needs met and exchange is not too unequal.</p>
<p>Second version: universalizability. An action is good if it is
universalizable. That means, if everybody did it, would it work? Textbook
example is "you shouldn't tell lies". The only reason telling lies works is
because people usually tell the truth, and so people are predisposed to
thinking that it's usually true. If everyone told lies, then we'd be
predisposed to disbelieve statements. Lying would no longer be effective.</p>
<p>There's a third one which BH can never remember which is much less
important. Kant goes on to prove theorems to resolve moral dilemmas.</p>
<p>Problem from Kant: A runs past you into the house. B comes up with a gun
and asks you where A is. Kant suggests something along the lines of
misleading B.</p>
<p>Axiomatic, resolve ethical problems through logic and proving what you want
to do. Very popular among engineers, mainly for the work of Rawls, who
talks about the veil of ignorance. You have to imagine yourself, looking at
life on Earth, and not knowing in what social role you're going to be
born. Rawls thinks that from this perspective, you have to root for the
underdog when situations come up, because in any particular thing that
comes up, harm to the rich person is going to be less than the gains of the
poor person (in terms of total wealth, total needs). Going to worry about
being on side of underdog, etc. More to Rawls: taking into account how
things affect all different constituencies.</p>
<p>Another descendant of Plato are utilitarians. One of the reasons it's
important for you to understand this chart: when you don't think about it
too hard, you use utilitarian principles, which is sometimes
bad. Utilitarians talk about the greatest good for the greatest number.</p>
<p>Back to something from this class: what if I illegally download some movie?
Is that okay? How much do I benefit, and how much is the movie-maker
harmed? Not from principled arguments, which is what Kant wants you to do,
but from nuts and bolts, who benefits how much, each way.</p>
<p>Putting that in a different fashion, Kantians are interested in what
motivates your action, why you did it. Utilitarians are interested in the
result of your action. One thing that makes utilitarian hard is that you
have to guess as to what probably will happen.</p>
<p>Now I want to talk to you about MacIntyre. Gave you a lot of reading,
probably hardest reading in the course. Talks like a philosopher. Uses
dessert as what you deserve (noun of deserve). Life-changing for BH when he
came across MacIntyre; passing it on to you as a result.</p>
<p>He starts by saying to imagine an aftermath in which science is blamed and
destroyed. A thousand years later, some people digging through the remains
of our culture read about this word science, and it's all about
understanding how the physical world works, and they want to revive this
practice. Dig up books by scientists, read and memorize bits of them,
analyze, have discussions. The people who do this call themselves
scientists because they're studying science.</p>
<p>We from our perspective would say that isn't science at all -- you don't
just engage with books, but rather engage with the physical world through
experiments. Those imagined guys from a millennium from now have lost the
practice. They think they're following a practice, but they have no idea
what it's like. MacIntyre argues this is us with ethics.</p>
<p>Equivalent to WW3 according to MacIntyre is Kant. Kant really, more than
anyone else, brought into being the modern era. Why? Because in the times
prior to Kant, a lot of arguments not only about ethics but also by the
physical world were resolved by religious authority. Decisions made based
on someone's interpretation of the bible, e.g.</p>
<p>Kant claims to be a Christian, but he thinks the way we understand God's
will is by applying the categorical imperative. Instead of asking a priest
what to do, we reason it out. We don't ask authorities, we work it out.
Also, he starts this business of ethical dilemmas. Everybody in the top
half of the world talks in terms of the good life. Even Socrates, who
thinks you can know what to do, talks about the good life, too. So ethics
is not about "what do I do in this situation right now", but rather the
entirety of one's life and what it means to live a good life.</p>
<p>Kant and Mill: no sense of life as a flow; rather, moments of
decisions. What MacIntyre calls the ethical equivalent of WW3: at that
point, we lost the thread, since we stopped talking about the good
life. Now, it wasn't an unmitigated disaster, since it gives us -- the
modern liberal society, not in the American sense of voting for democrats,
but in the sense that your life goals are up to you as an individual, and
the role of society is to build infrastructure and getting in people's way,
so stopping people from doing things. I can, say, have some sexual practice
different from yours. So that was a long time coming. Now, in our
particular culture, the only thing that's bad is having sex with children,
as far as I can tell -- as long as it doesn't involve you messing up
someone else's life, e.g. rape. As long as it involves two (or more?)
consenting adults, that's okay.</p>
<p>MacIntyre says that there are things that came up with Kant that we can't
just turn back to being Aristotlean. The people who lived the good life
were male Athenian citizens. They had wives who weren't eligible, and they
had slaves who did most of the grunt work. And so male Athenian citizens
could spend their time walking around chatting with Socrates because they
were supported by slavery. And nobody wants to go back to that. No real way
to go back to being Aristotlean without giving up modern civil rights.</p>
<p>So. One of the things I really like about MacIntyre is the example of
wanting to teach a child how to play chess, but he's not particularly
interested. He is, however, interested in candy. You say, every time you
play with me, I'll give you a piece of candy. If you win, two pieces. Will
play in a way that's difficult but possible to beat me. So, MacIntyre says
this child is now motivated to play and to play well. But he's also
motivated to cheat, if he can get away with it. So let's say this
arrangement goes on for some time, and the kid gets better at it. What you
hope is that the child reaches a point where the game is valuable to
itself: he or she sees playing chess as rewarding (as an intellectual
challenge). When that happens, cheating becomes self-defeating.</p>
<p>While the child is motivated by external goods (rewards, money, fame,
whatever), then the child is not part of the community of practice. But
once the game becomes important (the internal benefits motivate him), then
he does feel like part of the community. Huge chess community with
complicated infrastructure with rating, etc. And that's a community with
practice, and it has virtues (some of which are unique to chess, but maybe
not -- e.g. planning ahead). Honesty, of course; patience; personal
improvement.</p>
<p>And the same is true with most things that human beings do. Not
everything. MacIntyre raises the example of advertising. What are the
virtues of this practice? Well, appealing to people in ways that they don't
really see; suggesting things that aren't quite true without saying
them. He lists several virtues that advertising people have, and these
virtues don't generalize. Not part of being a good person; not even
compatible with being a good person. So different from virtues of normal
practices.</p>
<p>Having advertising writers is one of the ways in which MacIntyre thinks
we've just lost the thread. The reason we have them is that we hold up in
our society the value of furthering your own ambition and getting rich, and
not getting rich by doing something that's good anyway, but just getting
rich. That's an external motivation rather than an internal one.</p>
<p>We talk about individuals pursuing their own ends. We glorify -- take as an
integral part of our society -- as individuals pursuing their own ends. In
a modern understanding of ethics, you approach each new situation as if
you've never done anything. You don't learn from experience; you learn from
rules. The result may be the same for each intermediate situation, but it
leads to you thinking differently. You don't think about building good
habits in this context.</p>
<p>A lot of you probably exercise (unlike me). Maybe you do it because it's
fun, but maybe you also do it because it only gets harder as you get older,
and you should get in the habit to keep it up. In that area, you get into
habits. But writing computer programs, we tell you about rules (don't have
concurrency violations), and I guess implicitly, we say that taking 61B is
good for you because you learn to write bigger programs. Still true --
still a practice with virtues.</p>
<p>Two things: that sort of professional standard of work is a pretty narrow
ethical issue. They don't teach you to worry about the privacy implications
of third parties. Also, when people say they have an ethical dilemma, they
think about it as a decision. A communitarian would reject all that ethical
dilemma stuff. Dilemmas will have bad outcomes regardless. Consider Greek
tragedies. When Oedipus finds himself married to his mother, it's like game
over. Whole series of bad things that happen to him. Not much he can do
about it on an incident by incident basis. Problem is a fatal flaw in his
character early on (as well as some ignorance), and no system of ethics is
going to lead Oedipus out of this trap. What you have to is try not to get
into traps, and you do that through prudence and honesty and whatnot.</p>
<p>Classic dilemma: Heins is a guy whose wife has a fatal disease that can be
cured by an expensive drug, but Heins is poor. So he goes to the druggist
and says that he can't afford to pay for this drug, but his wife is going
to die, so the druggist says no. So Heins is considering breaking into the
drugstore at night and stealing the drug so his wife can live. What should
he do and why? According to the literature, there's no right answer. What
matters is your reason.</p>
<p>I'm going to get this wrong, but it's something like this. Stage one: your
immediate needs are what matter. Yes, he should steal it, because it's his
wife, or no, he shouldn't steal it, because he should go to prison. Stage
two: something like worrying about consequences to individuals. Might hurt
druggist or might hurt his wife. Stage three: something like "well, I have
a closer relationship to my wife than the druggist; I care more about my
wife, so I should steal it". Stage four: it's against the law, and I
shouldn't break the law. Stage five: like stage three, generalized to
larger community: how much will it hurt my wife not to get the drug? A
lot. How much will it hurt the druggist if I steal it? Some money. Stage
six, based not on laws of community, but rather on the standards of the
community. Odd-numbered stages are about specific people. Even-numbered
stages are about society and rules (punishment if I do it to it's the law
to it's what people expect of me).</p>
<p>Right now I'm talking about the literature of moral psychology: people go
through these stages (different ways of thinking). Question posed is not
"how do people behave", but rather "how should people behave".</p>
<p>This is modern ethical reasoning. Take some situation that has no right
answer, and split hairs about finding a right answer somehow.</p>
<p>Talk about flying: checklist for novices. Instructors don't use this list:
eventually, you get to where you're looking at the entire dashboard at
once, and things that aren't right jump out at you.</p>
<p>Another example: take a bunch of chess pieces, put them on the board, get
someone to look at it for a minute, and take the pieces away, and ask the
person to reconstruct the board position. Non-chess players are terrible
(unsurprisingly); chess grandmasters can do it if it came out of a real
game; if you put it randomly, they're just as bad as the rest of
us. They're not looking at individual pieces; they're looking at the board
holistically (clusters of pieces that interact with each other).</p>
<p>Relevance to this about ethics: we don't always know why we do things. Very
rare that we have the luxury to figure out either what categorical
imperative tells us or utilitarian approach. Usually we just do something.</p>
<p>BH with weaknesses. Would be stronger if his education was less about
thinking things through and more about doing the right thing.</p>
<p>Our moral training is full of "Shalt Not"s. Lot more in the Bible about
what not to do than what to do or how to live the good life (that part of
the Bible -- gets better). We also have these laws. Hardly ever say you
have to do something (aside from paying taxes). Mostly say what you can't
do. Never say how to live the good life. BH thinks that serves us ill. Have
to make decisions. Often, what you do is different from what you say you
should do.</p>
<p><a name='5'></a></p>
<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>October 1, 2012</h2>
<p>Star Wars: Idea that was developed and led by Edward Teller (one of the
inventors of the H-bomb, leading scientist at Lawrence Livermore
Labs). Really liked building weapons systems. His idea was to build a
network of satellites in space whose purpose would be to shoot down
missiles aimed at the United States.</p>
<p>Lot of reasons to be interested in lasers; one of them was weapons. Reagan
really loved this idea.</p>
<p>Talk about how things changed after 9/11?</p>
<p>There has not been a day since 9/11 where the United States has been at
peace, but I'm pretty sure this is true, none of those wars have ever been
declared.</p>
<p>Prior to 9/11, last attack on US territory was Pearl Harbor (before that
was 1812). The United States is pretty safe against foreign attackers
except for the small group of infiltrated commandos who used to not be much
to worry about, but now they can carry nuclear weapons in their suitcase,
so that's a worry. Hasn't happened yet, but it could.</p>
<p>Three thousand Americans died in 9/11? The US kills more civilians than
that every day. It's not hard to argue that the US response to 9/11 has
been disproportionate.</p>
<p>Even beyond the egregiously bad military technologies (like these drone
attacks), I would be happy if the United States did not have any military
capability at all. And Americans are so accustomed to thinking that we're
the good guys.</p>
<p>Official definition of terrorism: military action taken by a non-government
body. Therefore terrorism is by definition the response of the
disenfranchised people to their situation. Suppose you are in a population
that has no government of its own, has no military, is being oppressed all
the time, and wants to fight back. How do you do it? You can't really
attack anybody's army; there aren't enough of you. So unless you're Gandhi
-- other response: pacifism, and that worked for Gandhi because despite
everything, the British empire had this image of themselves as
paternalistic. So Gandhi was able to shame the British into behaving better
to Indians. The US has no shame, so if you want to fight back, being Gandhi
is a pretty hard sell. The reason the name is terrorist is that you want to
make your enemy afraid.</p>
<p>So what's happened in the United States since 9/11? We've become
afraid. And for political reasons of its own, our government has encouraged
us to feel afraid. When you do that, the terrorists have won. The
large-scale way to fight back against terrorism is to decide not to be
afraid and not to flail around attacking every country you've never heard
of because you're afraid. So yeah, I would be happy if we stopped having a
military, period, since I don't trust the US to have a military. Not honest
enough or decent enough or law-abiding enough to have a military. Maybe we
can sign a treaty with Canada to protect us when people come in and invade.</p>
<p>I had to say all of that, but I don't want the takeaway message to be "you
should be a pacifist or anti-US". The message is that just as computers are
vitally important to our lives, they are vitally important in war, so some
of you are going to have jobs in which you will be building weapons of
war. If you're in that situation, you need to think extra hard about
whether you're doing the right thing or not.</p>
<p><a name='6'></a></p>
<h1>CS H195: Ethics with Harvey</h1>
<h2>October 15, 2012</h2>
<p>(note: left laptop at home on Oct. 8)</p>
<p>Fusion center: place where different law enforcement agencies come together
to share information. So this is partly a kludgy workaround because there
are legal limitations on data collection by the federal government. Data
collection by the states is much less regulated. Loophole is that states
can get together and have centers that amount to nationwide data collection
facilities without actually being run by the government.</p>
<p>Run by LA times. Saying that compared to pre-9/11 law enforcement, these
haven't done a lot but do pose a civil liberties threat. If interested in
privacy and government, you can look this up.</p>
<p>COPPA!</p>
<p>From the New York Times, big campaign going on by internet advertisers to
try to stop the "do not track" movement. One thing that started this:
latest IE do-not-track defaults on. For once, good for Microsoft. You don't
hear me say that very often. And the advertising people say that it's bad
enough if people choose do-not-track, but it should be opt-in, not
opt-out.</p>
<p>Microsoft points out that when you set up the browser, you answer a series
of questions, and it defaults on in that the checkbox is checked by default
if you don't read it carefully.</p>
<p>Supposedly could pose a threat to barter system. Attacking authority of
W3C.</p>
<p>Today's Daily Cal. Breaking into others' brains. Article about this toy
that is a mind-control device. Have you seen this? You put on a little
helmet and mentally give commands to a ball, which you can move by brain
waves. A postdoc at the security research lab at Berkeley wondered whether
this could be used to find out things about you that you weren't aware
about. The issue is whether someone could write malware for these devices
that would find out your social security number or something. They actually
found that if you put up a question on the screen while someone's using
this thing, they can detect brain activity related to some answer to the
question. The reliability was not very good, and the method wasn't exactly
subliminal. This is first-generation, and presumably the hardware will get
better. So one of the things you have to worry about is "brain-hacking".</p>
<p>I just sent out a bspace email with paper topic #2, about the thing we're
talking about this week, computers in community. "Identify from the readings
three ways the internet might be a democratizing force, and three in which
it might be an anti-democratizing force."</p>
<p>Speaking of papers, I have your first papers. Just before class, I xeroxed
them.</p>
<p>For next time, when you submit a paper, please do it single-sided and not
stapled. So if it's multi-page, put your name on every page.</p>
<p>Okay. So that's the story on papers for now. We're going to talk about
computers and community. Because you're engineers, I made a graph
here. Democratizingness on a scale from 0 to 1 plotted against time. Vastly
simplified picture, but there's some truth to it.</p>
<p>Before there was the web, there was the internet, and there was email and
newsgroups. In the beginning, anyone could post to any newsgroup, and then
they invented moderated newsgroups, but the technology was not very strong,
but at least in principle, moderated.</p>
<p>Example: rec.humor; got to be very high in traffic of dubious taste, so
someone started a moderated newsgroup, rec.humor.funny. Messages were in
ASCII, which had good and bad parts. The good part was that there was no
premium for graphic design expertise. The bad part was that it was
accessible primarily in western European languages, which leaves out a lot
of the population of the world, but that wasn't as big of a problem, since
physical location also left out a lot of the world.</p>
<p>ICANN. So pre-web, everybody was equal to everybody else in posting ideas,
so for the people who had internet access, it was pretty democratic, but
that left out a lot of people, many of whom had never heard of the
internet, let alone be connected to it.</p>
<p>And then came along the world wide web, which to the surprise of everybody,
totally changed the nature of the net. Tim Berners-Lee invented it, wanted
to make it easier to find stuff, but it really concentrated the ability to
disseminate ideas in the hands of big companies because in the early days,
it cost a lot to have a web server, and you had to be a professional to
design a web page, and there were a few places that everyone knew about
where they got their information.</p>
<p>It really made the internet a one-way medium: broadcasting, instead of
exchanging. Saved, somewhat, by the invention of the blog. I guess I have
to say facebook, even though I hate it, was a democratizing force; people
were able to use the internet for their own uses rather than the uses of
someone else.</p>
<p>The reason I drew the second dot higher than the first is not because of
Web 2.0 so much as vastly greater connectivity. I'm making an assumption in
all this that democratizion is a good idea. I don't know that anyone would
argue that it's a bad idea, per se, but a lot of people will say that
what's important about the internet is that I can get on and buy stuff, or
I can read the news, or I can search for stuff that other people have put
on the net. And those aspects are not exactly anti-democratizing (except
for web search, which I'll say more about in a moment), but it turns out to
be quite a shame if the main point of the internet is to let you buy
stuff. Statistically speaking, the main use is to let you buy pornography,
which has driven the technology to some extent. However you feel about
pornography, it's a shame if that's all the internet is good for.</p>
<p>Web search: if you get back a page from Google, it lists how many results,
and it lists 20 or so, and nobody gets past the second page, few people get
past the first page, and most don't get past the first 5. Ordering by
relevance. Google controls that ordering in a very mindful way. For the
most part, what they're trying to do is get you the stuff you'll consider
most useful: they're trying to be a good agent for you in terms of how they
present information for you. Other times, they intervene and aren't
entirely about that.</p>
<p>The original PageRank algorithm was simple and gameable. You could get your
page high up in the rankings with bigger pages that had nothing to do with
utility. Google began detecting attempts to game the situation and
penalized them. Shows amount of control Google has. On other times, they
make decisions on a political basis. So, I believe right now they penalize
sights that get a lot of DMCA takedown notices. So if people are telling
your site you have copyrighted material on it, they count complaints, not
valid complaints.</p>
<p>Occasionally, they're more explicit things, where they just won't list
certain things at all. One example that came up a few years back was people
selling prescription drugs on the internet. Why is that? Because in the
United States, a lot of medicines are a lot more expensive than they are
elsewhere in the world, because of peculiarities in our patent
system. Companies were started in Canada and Mexico to sell drugs to people
in the US for cheaper. Turns out that some are just as good, and sometimes
that was not the case.</p>
<p>Apart from search, there are some obvious ways in which the internet
remains not democratic. If you want to know what's going on, you don't go
to some blog, you go to CNN or Fox or whatever. Compared to other media, it
still does very well. Way better than television or even newspapers as a
way of allowing non-mainstream information and ideas to be expressed. But
it's not the case that everybody has the same access as everybody else.</p>
<p>You probably know (but maybe not) that your broadband service (unless you
spend a lot of money on it) is asymmetrical. Designed on assumption that
you'll be doing a lot more downloading than uploading. You can get
symmetric internet access, but it's really expensive (and they assume only
businesses want this).</p>
<p>That may change because of things like Youtube. Lot more uploading by
people than in the early days. Maybe, down the road, we'll start seeing
more nearly symmetrical broadband access. That would be a good sign.</p>
<p>Then there are the more subtle ways in which the net in a different sense
works against democracy. Democracy requires an informed citizenry, and one
of the things the internet has done is make it possible for you to read
only the opinions you already agree with. Something scholars of the
internet worry about. If you get a traditional newspaper, it isn't neutral
in its point of view, but if it's not Rupert-Murdoch-owned, it will
typically bend over backwards to carry columnists and op-eds that disagree
with its point of view.</p>
<p>I don't think that's possible, by the way, presenting news impartially, but
they try. Whereas on the internet, there are left-wing and right-wing news
sources that publish exclusively. Means less likely to be well-informed
about contentious issues.</p>
<p>One of the articles is about the issue of the digital divide. When people
first coined the term, it meant something simple: rich were connected, poor
were not. Now it's more subtle, so rich people's connectivity may be better
in certain ways, rich people's skill at using the internet may be better in
certain ways, but raw connectivity, if you look in the United States, at
least, everybody can get on the internet, because if nothing else, you can
go to the public library and log into the internet there. The rest of the
world is not there yet; improving. There still is a digital divide, but
motivated by the lack of women in Computer Science (positive feedback). If
women aren't in computer science, they're less likely to be skilled in
computers, which means they're less likely to see the benefit of computers,
so they're less likely to get interested in computer science.</p>
<p>Online surveys, submissions, propositions. Good questions much more
important than the answers.</p>
<p>Virtual rape (one of the readings). The woman in the case felt raped. Now,
there wasn't any physical contact involved, so technically she wasn't
raped. The question is just how serious is this? Article is about not just
that it happened, but because this was a user community without much in the
way of rules. The user community had to grope toward rules.</p>
<p>You should read the article; it's pretty interesting. You should read all
the articles. The point I want to get to about it is the one about making
decisions in an online community and how that happens. Again has to do with
how democratic is the net, and many answers to that. Many online
communities in which some company is in charge. Usually, some company set
up the forum in which the community exists, and that company gets to make
the rules. Sometimes it's more like a newsgroup (there still are
newsgroups; usually hosted by Google or Yahoo these days rather than the
original NNTP, but they exist), and in many cases, it really is up to the
participants what are the rules. Sometimes has to do with legal rules, and
the relevant ones here have to do with copyright and pornography. Copyright
we've talked about a lot; pornography we'll talk about. I guess also
libel. You can libel someone online. But when there was the case when some
girl's mother pretended to be a boy and got into an online relationship
with some other girl her daughter didn't like, and harassed the girl until
she killed herself. Everyone wanted to punish the mother, but they had
difficulty finding a law she broke.</p>
<p>Lot of room for decisions to be made beyond what the law says. How people
make those decisions - the fact that it's made by some company doesn't mean
that it's made poorly, which happens sometimes, but sometimes not
(sometimes some blog-hosting site takes seriuosly its responsibility to
promote wide-ranging discussion allowing all points of view to be presented
while not allowing harassment or libel) - I think that democratic
decision-making is a good thing totally separate from how the decisions
turn out (just a matter of opinion). I also think that in general, you get
better decisions the more democratic they are (at least in the long
run). Not always true in the short run. Little digression into the Bill of
Rights of the US constitution: you probably took this class in middle
school, but in case you've forgotten (or were using your computer instead
of paying attention back then), it is not a document to protect democracy,
but rather to limit democracy so the rights of minorities would be
protected.</p>
<p>Right after 9/11, it would be very easy to get through Congress a law
discriminating against Arabs. Didn't happen because the Constitution
doesn't let the government make laws like that. Cannot pass Bills of
Attainder (law saying people with orange t-shirts have to go to prison --
that would be a bill of attainder). You have to actually do something
illegal to be punished by law. That is an effort to prevent ill-considered
rush judgments by a majority from taking effect. Another thing in the
Constitution meant to slow down the government is the fact that we both
have the Senate and House of Representatives. Make it harder to pass
laws. Sometimes that thwarts the will of the majority. There are some good
reasons you want to have limits on democracy. But nonetheless, it's still
better than no democracy at all.</p>
<p>So on the internet, we have seen examples of populist direct action that
are not so good. Kind of mob actions against somebody. Sometimes it is good
when that kind of thing happens. Every so often there's a story from China
about some government official who runs someone over in their car, and
because it's a government official, nothing happens, and people get upset,
which makes things happen to this person. So that's good. Sometimes people
are shamed, maybe out of proportion about what happens. By the way, this
shaming business isn't necessarily something that results from mass
populist actions. There has been a certain vogue among law enforcement and
individuals to post on the internet pictures of people approaching
prostitutes, and that's either the government doing it or just one
person. What do you think about that?</p>
<p>Lots of questions about police collecting evidence. Is it okay for them to
be hiding when collecting evidence? All really complicated because court
decisions have not been crystal clear about the collection of
evidence.</p>
<p>To be effective, a law does not have to be 100% effective. The law against
robbing the 7/11 on the corner does not totally prevent that from
happening, but presumably it would happen more if it weren't a law. So
that's one part of the answer. Another part is you're right, and some
cities in the US (and many more in Europe) have taken the stance of
licensing prostitutes in the same way as barbers. Part of the licensing is
regular blood tests and rules about using condoms, and also, of course,
being of age. So you can have an interesting discussion about what's the
best way to do away with sex slavery by changing laws. This question, by
the way, is on the California ballot! One piece of that law (ballot
proposition) besides the part about sex slavery has to do with internet
regulation. I think it's badly drafted, and they should try again. I think
the underlying purpose is good, but I don't like the proposition. That's
one of the problems with ballot propositions as a form of democracies. You
only get to say yes or no.</p>
<p>Arrow's theorem: impossible for any voting system to be correct. 1) you
voting for a candidate should never hurt the candidate. 2) you'd like it
not to be gameable; the best thing for you to do as a strategy is for you
to vote as you want. Half a dozen or so criteria that are obviously right
criteria, and you can't satisfy all of them. Instant run-off. If in the
first ballot no candidate has a majority, then you cross off the least
popular candidate and that candidate's votes are given to the person's
second choice, and you keep doing that until some candidate has a
majority. It turns out that the run-off violates some of these
properties. There are more complicated versions that do better, but it is
provable that you can't get all of them.</p></div><div class='pos'></div>
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