[zepto]

I still think it’s essentially a false equivalence:

> Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.

Even these are in a totally different class of ‘need’ to Facebook which is trivially substituted by comparison.

[ska]

I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make (i.e. I didn't articulate it well).

Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that so many people demonstrate a preference not to should make you think harder about the problem. It's not just the technology, and many tech people tend to get this wrong consistently.

Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial as you seem to think, it probably would have happened already.

[zepto]

That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody is actually making.

What is the ‘it’ which you imagine people think is trivial?

Who is saying anything is trivial?

Where is anyone saying it’s just technology?

Who said people don’t have a preference to use Facebook?

How do you know how hard people have thought about this?

I don’t think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that isn’t because people are dependent on it in a way that is comparable to the other examples you mentioned.

Unlike the examples you listed, people can easily do without Facebook. There just isn’t much incentive for most people to do so, since they don’t perceive the downsides adequately.

[ska]

I think we're down in the weeds here - so I'll leave it at this. I shouldn't have focused it on tech so much, other people make the same category of mistake.

The assumptions that I am talking about are basically this. (1) "people can easily do without Facebook", or the variant that "Facebook isn't very important to them" (2) There are viable replacements available to the people who do value this, at least in their own estimation.

Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

Hence this falls in to the category I was drawing, mainly that if you say "People don't really need X" and lots of people are at the same time saying "I really need X" and "I don't see a good replacement for X" then you are far more likely to be wrong than they are.

You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.

[zepto]

Ignoring most of this, because you really are just talking about your own assumptions about what other people are thinking, which are nothing to do with me.

However your example:

> You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.

Is interesting for two reasons.

On the one hand, it’s just as bad as your prior ones, because the impact of doing without a car at all will be for many people quite significant in a way that I maintain is simply not the case with Facebook.

I know all kinds of people who have stopped using Facebook and it just hasn’t been a big deal, unlike all the examples you bring up.

On the other hand, I would imagine most people would simply accept that electric cars are a viable alternative to gasoline cars today, and that they will eventually switch to one in the future at some point, even if the economics don’t make sense now, which again makes this analogy just inapplicable to talking about Facebook.

What I take from this is that you are arguing against an amalgam of views you have seen elsewhere and trying to dispel a kind of misunderstanding that is somehow implicit to what you have seen.

I don’t really have anything to do with all that.

What I’m suggesting is that you dispense with these analogies, and simply consider the possibility that people don’t actually need Facebook, and that quitting Facebook wouldn’t actually have much impact for most people. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s not the point.

Being willing to consider this possibility sheds light on Facebook’s own behavior as well as the current situation with regard to what would make things better.

Why would you think it ‘laughable’ that people don’t know their own best interests? That seems to just trivialize a complex issue.

Many of us hold that it is important for society to treat people as though they do, but for the most part that is an ethical assumption that restrains abusive institutions. It’s equally true that most people know that they don’t know their own best interests in many ways, and we all obviously hold many false beliefs about both ourselves and the world. It’s pretty easy to think something is more (or less) important to you than it actually is.

[ska]

Ok, you haven’t said anything remotely convincing to me as to why these are a actually different category, rather than a scale. And you seem to be misunderstanding what I’m truly if to say prettty consistently. Regardless of whose “fault” that is , this really isn’t a good forum for getting into properly, so I guess I’m out.

[zepto]

I’m not trying to convince you that these are a different category rather than a scale. They are neither.

Placing things on a scale is a choice you are making in your analysis. You are free to place things on a scale as much as you like.

I’m pointing out that when you place these particular things on a scale, you produce false equivalences.

[bordercases]

> Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do.

This argument is symmetric: telling me that I need FB because someone else does is equally fallacious. You want to break the symmetry by appealing to "the vast majority of people", which leads me to...

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people.

This is contingent, or at least more contingent than your confidence reveals. This is the point was making in my previous post, when I was giving examples of how things can change, rather than assuming what many people want now will be the same as what they want later.

Appeals to the crowd, like appeals to expertise, are useful as a first-pass heuristic of what's valuable and true. However, without other evidence, the hidden assumption is that there is exists an equilibria justified with a claim along the lines "if you're so good why aren't you rich" or "since people are rational things would have changed already if they could". This is an assumption which you've stated earlier.

The way that you strengthen this type of argument is by giving reasons why it's impossible to go back or move forward from the equilibria. Here, your standard of evidence has been weakening from the categorical "it's never compelling", to the economic "it's otherwise intractable", to the pragmatic "your view isn't useful". This isn't wrong, but it's consistent with underrating that Facebook's ubiquity is conditional, not set in stone. You've backed yourself into a corner by first staking a categorical claim while using a heuristic.

In my view, this issue is about (a) whether there really is path dependence that produces an unshiftable equilibria, and (b) whether privacy violations are necessarily coupled with social network use, such that people wouldn't switch at the opportunity to safeguard their privacy if the social networks are otherwise equivalent for their friend group.

For |A|: The path-dependence claim is trivial to refute: people have switched social networks before, and use some social networks more than others. Facebook is the biggest social network in existence, but a part of this comes down to acquihiring other social networks to prevent them from being competition. Instagram and WhatsApp are two examples. TikTok is an example of a competitor to Instagram and WhatsApp that has seen massive growth. From the business side, businesses usually aggregate across many social networks at once rather than using social networks directly. They care about Facebook because that's where users are, but they don't need their users to be on Facebook. So as long as Facebook doesn't keep acquiring their competition it will be possible that their userbase can switch.

For |B|: Suppose that people were maximizers, yet with bounded agency. If most people can acknowledge that violations of their privacy are bad, but social networking is good, yet they aren't smart enough or wealthy enough to roll their own and get everyone they interact with to switch, we should still expect ceteris paribus that they would want to switch to the privacy respecting option given the right opportunity. Since you've assumed that people must be maximisers, you must think that people generally don't value their privacy if given an option between more or less privacy, if you also think it's impossible for Facebook to be less valuable in the future, and thus no one will ever find a good reason to switch, thus changing the equilibria.

To be honest, I will be disappointed if I'm wrong when it comes to how the crowd values their privacy - that's also an empirical assumption. But this leads into the next point.

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

I'll pull a Fermat and say that I countered this argument in writing, but it was too long to put in the margin.

The long and the short of it is that people knowing and adhering to their best interests completely, is also empirically incorrect. Instead people's preferences are weighed differently based on situational factors, and the self-control that people have to enact their desires against temptation, also varies situationally. People don't exercise when they claim they want to etc etc.

As for the second claim, it isn't actually weak, again for reasons which are empirically true. People aren't maximisers, and if they were, they'd still be bounded in agency. So even if people are fully rational about their desires, they don't always know or understand the influence that these companies can or do have over their lives until it gets past some threshold of salience to take action.

In terms of what's different now, we're in a difficult climate, not just in the USA but globally, across the political spectrum and between cultures. Even though we've "known" about the influence of social media to control the flow of information for awhile, censorship on social media has become much more common, intensifying for larger numbers of people and for more high-profile events. This change in scale has been enough to trigger e.g. an exodus from WhatsApp into Signal, or will likely cool the usage of social-media in general if privacy isn't an option.

If both trends continue to hold, the case against our initial assumptions, as they were empirical, will dissolve.