[JonFish85]

>"Luckily humans have developed a great coordination mechanism called 'democracy' and we can use it when coordination in the market place has failed."

I find that sort of thinking pretty scary. I'm incredibly hesitant to expand the purview of the government into whether products should succeed or fail. It sounds like what you're saying is that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, so we should enact government regulations to think for them. This is something markets are very good at, as others have stated. Expanding the government's role in things should be an absolute last resort, to me.

If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook? It's the same thing there: people trade their personal information for perceived value in other places (Facebook: keeping in touch with people, Google as access to information). Should the government be the ones to decide who should be allowed to make decisions about their information?

It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool. To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

[mikeash]

Government has been doing this for a long time already. To see it in action, just try to buy some thalidomide, or book a flight with an airline that only requires 20 hours of training for their pilots, or buy a new car with no air bags. The question of whether the government should decide what people should be allowed to use or what products should succeed was answered a long time ago with “yes, it should.” The only question here is what side of the line this particular product falls on.

[rhizome]

If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

Third question: should you be allowed to trade my personal information for cheap cool gadgets?

[hutzlibu]

Yes. Legally allowed, but lacking morals.

In other words, don't give your number, to people you don't trust.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>It sounds like what you're saying is that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves

In the prisoner's dilemma are the prisoners stupid? No, they're actually defined as rational. What makes them come to their collectively poor outcome is that they have no way to act collectively, they require coordination. Those prisoners could be smarter than you and me, they're still trapped by the rules of the system they exist in.

>If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

Our own government has some problems with this but since we're being a bit high-minded here, let's ask ourselves what a democratic government ideally is. It's just a way for individuals to coordinate with each other.

Prisoner's Dilemma again. By market mechanisms, we're going to jail for two years. We may meet some strange definition of freedom but if we're both rational then we know we will never realize the option of serving lesser sentences. To me though that isn't real freedom so we can see then that a coordination mechanism isn't here to curtail freedom, it's here to grant it (it lets us both choose to remain silent.)

I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.

>I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook?

If the people collectively decide that then yes.

>It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.

Well here let me rework this:

It's scary because once the people get to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.

You're right that is powerful, we should have that power.

>To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

Let me rework this also:

To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

[JonFish85]

I'm not sure how the Prisoner's Dilemma applies here? I agree that consumers should be educated and have the ability to make informed decisions; in many ways, this is what makes a market more "fair": make sure that consumers have access to information, and let them make the best decisions they can.

> I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.

This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all. I also disagree that the better outcome is to grow the government's role in something like this. To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.

> If the people collectively decide that then yes.

I think we have to be very careful about how this is used; people collectively decide silly things all the time ("Pink Slime" comes to mind, for some reason), and we have to be very careful about how we encode things into law. Once the government is responsible for something, it's hard to walk back on that. Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.

> To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

This may be true to some degree, but it aligns pretty well with people's changing opinions and wants/needs. If we're careful about some things (e.g. monopolies, access to information, etc -- things that allow markets to work efficiently), we can avoid having to bring out the sledgehammer when it's not needed. Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia); that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement. This is a case where I believe this to be especially true.