Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online
FishFace@lemmy.world 18 hours agoYou’ve probably heard “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” This is an example of that.
Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome
They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.
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.
Not only is this poor reasoning, it’s really quite arrogant. When it comes to predicting outcomes, there is often genuine disagreement. I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome 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”. 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.
Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?
Senal@programming.dev 17 hours ago
That’s fair, there is still an onus on proof of incompetence being the driver of the outcome rather than some other reason.
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.
** gestures vaguely at recent historical decisions in general and multiple attempts at this type of control specifically **
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.
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.
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.