Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by happytoexplain 14 hours ago
This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).

Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".

1 comments

This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?

Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.