[JumpCrisscross]

> how the advancements in western society since (say) WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy?

Alan Turing. Hell, Tim Cook, a gay man who grew up in Alabama. Neither would have survived childhood with their personalities intact had their governments had the access No. 10 Downing demands.

Privacy preserves society’s margins. The margins, by definition, are where change—growth—is nurtured.

[defrost]

To be clear, I'm in favour of privacy.

However your examples don't demonstrate how the many advances in western society depend upon privacy nor do they prove that it would not have advanced without privacy.

Alan Turing, for example, was open about his sexuality (an issue that bit him when a robbery took place long after his work at Bletchley).

Even had he been somehow taken out of the picture pre WWII it remains true that Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski would still have cracked the Enigma cipher, built the prototype Bombe's and passed that knowledge to the likes of Tommy Flowers and William Thomas Tutte.

Turing proved a result applicable to the third part of Hilbert's second problem, the Entscheidungsproblem.

He was very nearly beaten to that as a first by Kurt Gödel who provided an answer to the first two parts of Hilbert's second while indicating an approach to the third part.

Turing was beaten to the goal by Alonzo Church who demonstrated the halting problem for lambda calculus is not effectively calculable.

Later, in 1939 J. Barkley Rosser highlighted the essential equivalence of "effective method" defined by Gödel, Church, and Turing.

So, uhh, yes - it would be nice to see some notion of proof come to in to play here.

[JumpCrisscross]

No discovery depends solely on one person. The example illustrates the mechanics in the last line.

Fringe elements are analogous to a society's surface. They, by definition, interact with novel elements and ideas at a higher rate than population.

Internal interactions exchange information. That distributes information (physical and intellectual). It also increases entropy and thus homogeneity. Conductivity (the term of art is legibility [1]) and complexity are at odds with one another.

Ceteris paribus, internal homogeneity shouldn't change the surface. But humans have agency. Homogeneity precedes conformity which drives more homogeneity. Furthermore, less diversity means fewer novel opportunities/interactions between the fringe and the unknown.

Privacy preserves a diversity of fringes which drives social complexity. A society without privacy is simpler, and thus less capable of innovation, than one with it. (There is obviously an upper bound to this phenomenon. A perfectly opaque system is static. But humans, as social creatures, resist isolation more naturally than conformity.)

[1] https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/27204/1/Linked_da...

[smoldesu]

1. You cannot compare Cook to Turing with a straight face, even in terms of their sexuality situation.

2. Privacy is about as personal of a fight to Cook as shareholder obligations are, and only one of them gets him removed if he neglects it.

3. It's pretty fucking stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to Turing today if they had the data. You may recall that there are now laws in both the UK and, yes, Alabama since 2009, that render this a hate crime and deter it properly. It's the lamest possible excuse to support corporate power.

Ultimately Tim Cook will say whatever gets investors horny. If you're dumb enough to factor his sexuality in to your trust quotient, you deserve to be XKeyscored.

[JumpCrisscross]

> cannot compare Cook to Turing with a straight face

A series of examples isn't necessarily a comparison and is certainly not an equation.

> stupid to suggest the UK would do the same thing to Turing today

Re-read the comment. Nobody suggested as much.

[f6v]

This is what’s called “anecdotal evidence”.