All the research I am aware of - including what I referenced in the previous comment, is that people are honest by default, except for a few people who lie a lot. Boris Johnson is a serial liar and clearly falls into that camp.

I believe that you believe that, but a couple of surveys are not a sufficient argument to prove the fundamental good of all humanity.

If honesty were not the default, why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?

I think this is just a lack of imagination.

i will go through your scenarios and provide an answer but i don’t think it’s going to achieve anything, we just fundamentally disagree on this.

why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often?

You shouldn’t.

edit : You use experience with this person or in general, to make a judgement call about whether or not you want to listen to what they have to say until more data is available. You continue to refine based on accumulated experience.

Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught?

A lot of assumptions and leaps here.

Firstly crime implies actual law, which is different in different places, so let’s assume for now we are talking about the current laws in the uk.

Criminals implies someone who has been caught and prosecuted for breaking a law, I’m going with that assumption because “everyone who has ever broken a law” is a ridiculous interpretation.

So to encompass the assumptions:

Why are such a small proportion of people who have been caught and prosecuted for breaking the law in the uk, when someone smart and caution has a very low chance of being caught?

I hope you can see how nonsensical that question is.

The evolutionary argument goes like this: social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.

That’s a nicely worded very bias interpretation.

social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours.

This is fine.

This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together.

That’s a jump, working well together might not be the desirable trait in this instance.

But let’s assume it is for now.

A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group.

Reductive and assumptive, you’re also conflating selfishness with betrayal, you can have on without the other, depending on perceived definitions of course.

But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest.

Additional reduction and a further unsupported jump, individuals are more than just a single trait, selfishness might be desirable in certain scenarios or it might be a part of an individual who’s other traits make up for it in a tribal context.

The process of seeking and the focused attention might be a preferential selection trait that benefits the group.

Powerful grifters try to protect themselves yes, but who got punished for pointing out that Boris is a serial liar?

Everyone who has been negatively impacted by the policies enacted and consequences of everything that was achieved on the back of those lies.

Because being ignored is still a punishment if there are negative consequences.

But let’s pick a more active punishment, protesting.

Protest in a way we don’t like or about a subject we don’t approve of, it’s now illegal to protest unless we give permission.

That’s reductive, but indicative of what happened in broad strokes.

Have you read what the current government has said about the previous one? :P

I’d imagine something along the lines of what the previous government said about the one before ?

As a society we generally hate that kind of behaviour. Society as a whole does not protect wealth and power; wealth and power forms its own group which tries to protect itself.

Depends on how you define society as a whole.

By population, i agree.

By actual power to enact change(without extreme measures), less so

Convenient that you don’t include the wealth and power as part of society, like its some other separate thing.

You should care because it entirely colours how you interact with political life. “Shady behaviour” is about intent as well as outcome, and we are talking in this thread about shady behaviour, and hence about intent.

See [POINT A]

PART 2/2

It’s about confidence. People in this thread expressed with no hint of doubt that the politicians who wrote the legislation did it for kickbacks from big tech. This is in spite of the fact that they have no direct evidence of this and it’s implausible on account of big tech being unhappy with this law. This isn’t simply healthy skepticism, it’s the same old useless cynicism.

I have stated multiple times i do not hold this view.

I have also stated that the sheer difference between what this bill says and the stated intent leans toward either technical incompetence and/or some other reason.

Big tech doesn’t like the encryption stuff, fine, but that doesn’t mean the other stuff won’t benefit them.

If i had to guess at a reason other than idiocy I’d guess it’s a governmental overreach thing.

This will vastly increase the powers and control available to the government in this space (at least the ones publicly utilised) , that isn’t conjecture.

The context was that you can’t just air your personal fan-fiction about politicians’ motivations and personal beliefs as if they were something more than that,

See [POINT A]

so an excuse that “it’s just an opinion” doesn’t wash when the video linked by OP is putting this idea (that the law was written at the behest of big tech) forward seriously.

The OP links to an EFF page , i’m not seeing a video , but that might just be my browser.

The text however makes no reference to big tech pandering afaict.

By all means have your justified beliefs about politicians. But so far the only politician you’ve actually mentioned convincingly as being corrupt is Boris Johnson. You haven’t, for example, leveled any attacks at Oliver Dowden who was the Minister for DCMS at the time of passing the Act. His register of interests does not mention any gifts or meetings with big tech firms.

I have been arguing from a perspective on politicians (and people) in general, Alexander was the easiest example because he’s such a prominent example of a lack of consequences breeding shitbaggery.

And again, i’ve also not been arguing the big tech direct intervention angle.

I shall point you to [POINT A] in general because it applies here but i’ll also add something brief about this guy specifically.

From a quick peruse I’m seeing his Wikipedia and he seems like a standard conservative stereotype, if somewhat laid back in his upset at “wokeness”.

Not my kind of person but not moustache twistingly evil or anything afaict.

This is a long form “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”.

It isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is putting great deal of emphasis on the perceived problems and basically no thought into how to do it.

Contextual incompetence rather than maliciousness.

If this singular person was responsible for the writing, presentation and ability of the bill to get this far through the system, i’d be open to it just being technical idiocy.

Unfortunately it will have to have gone through the entire British political system to get there, which makes it subject to the will of many.

See [POINT A]

PART 1/2

What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious.

Is there a similar poll for political decisions and outcomes ?

Genuine question, that’s be super interesting, if so.

To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.

So my background assumption is that people are honest.

I think that’s where our difference in interpretation stems from , i think humans have the instinct for survival and reproduction, that agreement, cooperation and social interaction provided a better environment for survival is incidental.

Honesty is possible in a situation where survival isn’t on the line, in a life or death situation i think the person who would tell the truth knowing it will get them ( or more importantly, their family ) killed, is the outlier.

Outside of hyperbolous scenarios i think honesty is not the default in a situation where it doesn’t have a social/survival impact.

Such as a politician lying for fiscal/politician gain, knowing that there isn’t really any punishment for that.

because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalence.

I also disagree with this, it’s a nice ideal and we should absolutely strive for this, but it’s just not how it works in practice, from my experience.

I think we disagree on what the rules are, it seems like you think calling out perceived injustices in fairness and corruption being met with punishment for the corrupt is what should happen.

In practice i think that only happens in the lower stakes, once you start pointing at people with wealth and power that rule quickly changes from “call it out and we’ll punish the offender” to “call it out and we’ll punish you for pointing it out and as a deterrent to others who might do the same”.

That’s not a society that honesty and inherent (relative) goodness as foundational concepts would produce.

Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.

That comparatively is carrying a lot of weight there and again i think we just disagree about this point in general.

You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.

And again you are missing my point, that they believe or not it isn’t the issue.

I can say with full confidence i absolutely do not care if they believe it, or if they don’t, makes zero difference to me.

If a politician(or politicians) wants to run some shenanigans on PPE contracts, netting their friends x millions of pounds, it care not a whit if they believe in the general correctness of conservatism.

I will state it plainly, mark this as [POINT A] and point back to this, because it seems you are skipping this part entirely.

[POINT A]

If there is consistent historic precedent of a mismatch between stated intent and actual outcome by both the individual/institution and other related contexts then i will assume that behaviour will continue until proven otherwise.

It’s not “i don’t understand, so they must be corrupt” it’s “they have a history of being shady and incompetent, so I’m going to assume they will continue to be shady and incompetent”

Their belief is irrelevant, their later explanations of their intent is perhaps cause for minor adjustment.

Feel free to rephrase the same assumption again, i will point back to this explanation.

That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.

Yes, as I’ve previously pointed out, there are examples of this happening.

Can i prove it’s a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I’m not going to, but I’ll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.

No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.

I’m not sure why you asked about how i do predictive analysis and ask questions that ignore the answer.

I’m not saying this specific action can be proven to be a bad idea before it happens, i have, many times said that i judge these things based on what has come before and the outcomes of those things.

Read the rest of my replies for examples of how this works.

Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City.

Again ignoring the idea of power as a motivation, but sure sunak probably had/has other avenues to money (and power).

I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>

If you are judging the potential benefits of being an MP/PM solely by the salary they pull in you have already failed to consider all of the relevant information.

You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.

I genuinely don’t understand how you think arguing this point and ignoring a large chunk of the salient information would work.

It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.

You have to be trolling at this point, so I’ll say it once more and then I’m just going to point at this line again in the future.

The things that they say and the outcomes that resulted from that don’t match a lot of the time, after-the-fact explanations add flavour sure, but given how often this makes little difference i will continue to base my predictions on what they stated they were going to do vs what happened.

Reading alexanders biography isn’t going to change the outcomes or the stated intents of the time.

Assuming he’s not lying or spinning, which is a big if given his track record, then i might get some insight as to his stated intention, which i will still judge against the outcome.

This is the same method i would use for all political biographies.

If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it…

If i say something is absolutely true, then i should back it up with absolute proof, this applies to everyone.

If i state something is my opinion (or it’s clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.

This is how debate style conversations generally work.

Politics is not the realm of headcanon

I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.

I mean, go up a few lines in your response for this banger :

Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers.

You can’t have it both ways.

Without objectiveness you are left with subjectiveness, also known as personal opinion and perception (headcanon)

But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)

I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.

I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying.

So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.

That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success.

Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.

it is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success.

Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily an indicator of a good idea.

Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact

Agreed

not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else.

Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.

Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.

There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.

So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.

If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.

That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.

The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.

It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”

There is an example of action not based in incompetence.

Citation needed.

Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.

I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.

In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.

People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.

That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )

Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.

Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)

That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.

Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.

I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.

as i said earlier(NOTE: this was actually in a different reply, but the point stands)

it’s not:

“it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.”

so much as it is

“Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.

They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.

That’s fair, there is still an onus on proof of incompetence being the driver of the outcome rather than some other reason.

People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.

That’s a bold and incorrect assumption, i do disagree with the act because it’s stupid and doesn’t do anything the might be even remotely constructive but i don’t hold them to an imaginary belief system that adheres directly with my own, as stated in the first response, my predictive analysis of what i expect to happen is based on their prior history and the outcomes of their previous decisions.

It’s not “I believe this thing so it must be true”

its

“Their recent (and somewhat mid-term) track record points to them making decisions based on deception and self gain, so i would guess that trend will continue”.

If you think past behaviour as a partial basis for predicting future behaviour is poor reasoning, I’m not sure we’re going to agree on much of anything here.

I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome

** gestures vaguely at recent historical decisions in general and multiple attempts at this type of control specifically **

and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, “actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification”.

I’ve specifically said i don’t think big tech is the emphasis here, so I’m not going to provide proof of a position I’m not taking.

All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:

age verification is bad

politicians must know it’s bad OR politicians are corrupt

therefore politicians supported this for corrupt reasons.

I’ve done no such thing, I’ve specifically been talking about the prediction that politicians are generally untrustworthy (and also incompetent at it) based on past behaviour.

Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?

If you want to spend time arguing a point i wasn’t actually contesting, feel free.

I’m legitimately up for discussing this point instead, but I’m not sure it’ll be worth anyone’s time if we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes poor reasoning.

By that rationale you world also need to prove that they are misunderstood upstanding citizens.

Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome, why would yours not also need journalistic rigour?

Just because yours is a slightly positive spin doesn’t mean its not conjecture against the provided facts.

Politicians are people too, sure.

Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.

That’s some ‘boys will be boys’ nonsense.

Take brexit and Alexander as example, his intent was to do something shitty for self gain, he’s not an idiot no matter how it seems.

There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.

He did it anyway, that’s intent.

Regardless of the outcome, he did something he knew was shitty, for whatever reason he had.

These people might be idiots, but their intent is usually to do something shady, that they are incompetent and do a shitty job of it isn’t the point.

Wrt to the America thing, I agree, I’m not saying the government is working with tech companies, im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’, at that point we absolutely should be hunting for the reasons, because if it isn’t the reason they have stated, what are they hiding?

Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

A combination of the effects, the prior actions, reactions and consequences of the subject and others in similar categories/contexts (to the extent i actually know/pay attention).

I don’t know of another way of performing predictive analysis.

Also that didn’t answer the question.

I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

I’m genuinely not sure what you are saying here, but i’ll go line by line, tell me if I’m reading it incorrectly.

I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better.

I don’t know what this means, there are voters who genuinely believe this, yes, i think i follow that bit.

I’m not sure what you think is crazy here (i’m not disagreeing, i just don’t understand) , do you mean to say the politicians do or don’t know better ?

It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

This i agree with, i can also anecdotally add first hand experience of the consequences of such lack of understanding.

Not sure how it ties in to the other sentence though.

and before you bring out the “but everyone i know all says the same”, that’s still anecdotal, it’s what anecdotal means.

“We have a <community group> and everyone I’ve spoken to that tried the <healing crystals> reports <feeling better>”

Again, i’m not doubting your understanding the experience of you or your acquaintances, i’m saying its anecdotal, a vanishingly small sample size and not necessarily indicative of a general position.

It being a real and powerful motivational force means it’s one of the more useful covers.

Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn’t mean it’s the genuine reason behind a decision.

I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

Can you?

Uh, idk how they got that number. It goes against the observations of literally everyone in the industry,

Scientific study vs anecdotal data, that’s what studies are supposed to be, the formalisation and distillation of data into conclusions based on said data.

so maybe it’s not the industry that is biased, but the benchmark they did is incorrect?

Possibly, do you know how that’s normally tested ?

Like just several sprints before I’ve saved my team by generating proto contracts taking backend repo as a context, as backend was busy with other higher important things to unblock us. No AI here means we would be blocked full stop for the entire sprint. And when backend did generate the contract, it was almost identical, and the diff in contracts allowed to identify the issue in the entities they send.

Anecdote, from a single person.

I don’t doubt that that is your experience, but it’s just that, your experience.

and before you bring out the “but everyone i know all says the same”, that’s still anecdotal, it’s what anecdotal means.

My brother in Christ, in big enterprise project chances that you have some familiarity with the code, well, they are non-zero, but also not that high.

I mean, sure ? i’m not sure how that is relevant though.

As i said, the one study i’ve seen is somewhat flimsy…

Do you have literally any other study to backup any claims to the contrary?

My original comment was in response to :

It’s stupid to resist agentic AIs when they boost productivity by a lot.

That might be true, but for it to be applicable the productivity boost needs to be real, and for public claims to be taken seriously, provably real.

That you, personally, think you are seeing this is great, works for you.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/

Citation that isn’t anecdotes please, only actual study I’ve seen into this was a ~19% drop and even that was flimsy.

“Look, a little part of what I said actually happened so the other, less provable, parts of what I said must also be true”

Unassailable logic.

https://xkcd.com/378/

A shallow take but not entirely incorrect.

I disagree somewhat, though not entirely.

TL;DR;

It’s advertising and or brand/cause awareness.

This is effective in drawing attention, good or bad attention is subjective i suppose.

It’s one of those brand awareness things, but instead of a brand it’s a cause.

You aren’t supposed to see this type of demonstration and think to yourself “they have made an excellent point, I’m going to immediately do all i can to support this cause”.

It’s a background awareness thing that builds trust and/or familiarity and works in concert with other things to try and ensure that if/when you are “ready” for action in the same vein, this is the name/cause you have in the forefront of your mind.

Because it’s people, there are probably many different goals and approaches.

There are definitely people doing this just for the attention, others who are working with a ted from scrubs mindset and I’m sure many others that are less than kind.

It absolutely has downsides as well, you’ll piss off a lot of people by disrupting their daily life, a lot of those people have their own immediate survival shit to deal with and lofty causes aren’t a thing they are going to get to any time soon.

Point is, just like any advertising, just because it doesn’t feel like it’s working doesn’t mean it isn’t.

It might put you off entirely but it’s a numbers game.

Fair enough.

You realise that the fact you’re even talking about it means it’s doing more than just making cars idle.

Now, whether it’s actually helping anything in a tangible way, that’s a different conversation entirely.

Possibly , but that’s not what you said.

The implication was that making cars idle was the point of blocking in the road, which is wasn’t/isn’t.

How does <this thing that i know was not the point> <fulfil the goal i know is unrelated to the thing i just mentioned> ?

A failure of sentence structure or purposeful trolling.