Born in Buenos Aires in 1968, studied biology in the UBA, dedicated father and husband, works in research and design of complex socio-technological systems.

Question:

I've been thinking of starting a website in which people could vote on who they would like to see drop dead next. The list of candidates would be curated to only have certified totalitarian world leaders to start -- e.g. Putin and Khamenei would be in, but Trump and Netanyahu wouldn't for now (they are elected and haven't repressed and proscribed the opposition... yet).

Should I do this?

This could be called "death vote". And my guess is that people won't like the idea :) But I really don't like war mongering totalitarians so I see little downside to it.

Question:

I've been thinking of starting a website in which people could vote on who they would like to see drop dead next. The list of candidates would be curated to only have certified totalitarian world leaders to start -- e.g. Putin and Khamenei would be in, but Trump and Netanyahu wouldn't for now (they are elected and haven't repressed and proscribed the opposition... yet).

Should I do this?

Question:

I've been thinking of starting a website in which people could vote on who they would like to see drop dead next. The list of candidates would be curated to only have certified totalitarian world leaders to start -- e.g. Putin and Khamenei would be in, but Trump and Netanyahu wouldn't for now (they are elected and haven't repressed and proscribed the opposition... yet).

Should I do this?

Question:

I've been thinking of starting a website in which people could vote on who they would like to see drop dead next. The list of candidates would be curated to only have certified totalitarian world leaders to start -- e.g. Putin and Khamenei would be in, but Trump and Netanyahu wouldn't for now (they are elected and haven't repressed and proscribed the opposition... yet).

Should I do this?

I love [[Peter Singer]] for many reasons; one of them is that he's completely fine ruffling some feathers on the way of making a logical point.

For example he got pressured by some groups for saying it seems fine to eat oysters and it might even be better than eating just vegetables (as harvesting those can harm small animals) and he basically told them to go fuck themselves (paraphrasing) and stuck to his guns. I don't eat any seafood currently, but go Peter I say.

By the way I've met two people so far who told me they hated (actually hated, not disliked) Peter Singer but on questioning them they didn't have good arguments for why that was the case. He seems to trigger strong emotions (as far as philosophers go).

I love [[Peter Singer]] for many reasons; one of them is that he's completely fine ruffling some feathers on the way of making a logical point.

For example he got pressured by some groups for saying it seems fine to eat oysters and it might even be better than eating just vegetables (as harvesting those can harm small animals) and he basically told them to go fuck themselves (paraphrasing) and stuck to his guns. I don't eat any seafood currently, but go Peter I say.

Apparently this is now an option provided by Eugens mastodon software: enabling http_referrer on outlinks.

Just as an FYI, this setting will only enable the data surveillance corporates to build yet more granular detail on who you are and what your preferences and beliefs are.

If you're an admin on a server that hosts other people, I think it behoves you to make inquiry of those users before enabling such a privacy violating option.

#dataprivacy #privacy

Idea 4: private. Sadly I think in the current age, the only way to build safe communities is to make them private. Since we’re operating on the internet here, in practice this means: everything locked behind a login. No scraping, no sharing. Of course content can always leak, this is inevitable.

@zef this just sounds sad to me; a bit like giving up on the internet altogether. Why do we believe such extreme measures of isolation are needed? There is a cost to extreme security at the expense of everything else, as we know e.g. from software. Maybe some groups need this (unfortunately), but it sounds like a suboptimal default.

Idea 4: private. Sadly I think in the current age, the only way to build safe communities is to make them private. Since we’re operating on the internet here, in practice this means: everything locked behind a login. No scraping, no sharing. Of course content can always leak, this is inevitable.

Idea 5: incentives. I think social networks are making the world worse by reinforcing the importance of external validation. How many upvotes did I get, how many likes? How many points do I have? Things like engagement farming, link baiting should be an absolute no no in such communities. Of course, reputation has always been a thing for humanity, but I think it emerges naturally and doesn’t benefit from too much “support” from the system. At some point you naturally identify the leaders based on their contributions rather than points, titles etc. So perhaps either there should be no such mechanisms, or only minor ones. I think there is value in “low effort“ appreciation like a star of acknowledgement can be nice. Perhaps only visible to the poster to avoid turning it into a competition.

Idea 3: identity. I’m not sure if there should be incentive to “prove your identity” or not. Perhaps this would be up to the community purpose. In some there may be value in explicitly remaining anonymous, in others not. How much effort should be putting in each of these sides of the spectrum, I’m not sure. Perhaps behavior around how much you share (you can imagine an elaborate profile page, with more or less field marked required or somehow verified depending on the case).

Either way since identity should not be shared between communities (no: login with Facebook here), I think this would diversified approaches depending on the community purpose in question.

Idea 4: private. Sadly I think in the current age, the only way to build safe communities is to make them private. Since we’re operating on the internet here, in practice this means: everything locked behind a login. No scraping, no sharing. Of course content can always leak, this is inevitable.

Idea 2: the goal is to enable communities of trust. This is also why community size will effectively need to be bounded somehow. Not sure if this needs to be enforced or somehow emerges. The most sensible idea I have for building a trust system is to make communities invite only, and to have clear traceability about who invited whom. This could create some sort of natural accountability system in case people start to misbehave (“who invited this person?”).

Idea 3: identity. I’m not sure if there should be incentive to “prove your identity” or not. Perhaps this would be up to the community purpose. In some there may be value in explicitly remaining anonymous, in others not. How much effort should be putting in each of these sides of the spectrum, I’m not sure. Perhaps behavior around how much you share (you can imagine an elaborate profile page, with more or less field marked required or somehow verified depending on the case).

Either way since identity should not be shared between communities (no: login with Facebook here), I think this would diversified approaches depending on the community purpose in question.

Idea 1: I’ve come to believe that groups of people cannot scale to large sizes nicely. Communities, organizations beyond some size (probably 100-200) inevitably falter. Trust breaks down, social connections cannot be maintained to large scales. Rather than trying to fix this (which I don’t think we can), let’s accept it and double down on this fact by creating many more small communities. Likely interest based, or local. You can be part of many such communities and have an “identity” for each separately. We’d keep these communities private and isolated though. So no federation, and that sort of thing.

Idea 2: the goal is to enable communities of trust. This is also why community size will effectively need to be bounded somehow. Not sure if this needs to be enforced or somehow emerges. The most sensible idea I have for building a trust system is to make communities invite only, and to have clear traceability about who invited whom. This could create some sort of natural accountability system in case people start to misbehave (“who invited this person?”).