Total transparancy benefits the top of the pyramid and may not actually work as intended (there are costs)

Freedom requires BOTH radical transparency and radical privacy

This post is in response to Dan's post asking in my opinion the falsely positioned question with "or", when it really is about "and". Dan asks: "Does Freedom Require Radical Transparency or Radical Privacy?". His post has some baked in assumptions which I don't actually think are universal. For example the assumption being that I want to know every detail about my neighbor? I actually don't think I need to know every detail about my neighbor and why?

The reason why is that I recognize my own bias. If I know too much about a particular person then because I too am a person, I may become biased in my dealings with this person. This bias could result in discrimination on an irrational basis (humans are not rational). In other cases this bias could result in persecution.

What does a world look like when everyone can rate everyone else and anyone can search via Google the life history of anyone else?

Consider a world where nothing is forgotten, where every good or bad thing you ever did in your entire life is logged to be searched for under Google. Imagine even the definitions for good and bad behaviors are always changing and behaviors which were considered good or neutral when you did them could later on be re-classified as bad? Every decision you ever make, must be weighed against how current and future attitudes might judge that decision.

By everything I literally mean everything, from the food you eat, to how many times a week you exercise, to who you associate with as friends, to who you marry, to how you have sex, nothing is off limits or sacred from being judged by the masses. In other words, your entire life up for peer review, continuously, and by a standard which you cannot know in advance. How can you know how your grand kids will think of your decisions today?

Total transparency is beautiful to the wealthiest in society

The idea of total transparency sounds most beautiful to the most wealthy in society. When I use the word "wealth" I'm not speaking about the narrow sense where the richer you are, the more on top you are, the wealthier you are. By wealth I'm talking not just net worth but your traits. This is everything, from being born into the right family, as the right gender, race, being born straight, being born with a predisposition to high IQ, etc. When the genetic lottery favored you, then you have the least to lose in a totally transparent world because your demographic isn't the most hated or disadvantaged. Those who have the least to lose and most to gain from a transparency society includes whomever is rich and famous in the current society, and a lot of what determines this is mere luck.

Would the gay jew like to live in a transparent society? I mean just because society is transparent it doesn't mean people don't discriminate or aren't biased. What about transsexuals? Does transparency protect them or help them to get hired? Transparency will favor those who fit in the most, who are the most normal, who have the currently most beautiful traits and or behaviors according to the current beauty standard(s). Total transparency in essence makes life a beauty pageant where some people are just born to look good while others have to look bad, with little to nothing that can be done about it.

This opens a pandora's box of problems but at the same time there are some bright sides

On the bright side, people probably would adopt much more radically conservative behavior. People who have a lot to lose already take less risks. So if a person has for example a reputation to lose, a lot of money to lose, a family to lose, and so on, they cannot afford to take as many risks. At the same time there are people born with none of this, and so they have little to nothing to lose, so they take more or most of the risks, and yet rarely get the rewards. In a sense, it's a sort of lottery, and more transparency doesn't change the fact that luck is the ultimate determiner, but actually has a dramatic effect of making it so luck is possibly the only determining factor which can allow someone to be socially mobile.

Today a person can take big risks, get big rewards, and we call it "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". These private actors do things which perhaps their parents would be ashamed of, or which is considered sinful by their church, but they manage to escape their life of poverty and over time become dignified members of their communities. In a world of total transparency how would anyone ever escape these circumstances again? If every decision from birth is judged by the most conservative members of the community then hard work and risk taking may actually be discouraged in favor of conformity.

My preliminary conclusion

• I don't actually want to know everything about my neighbor's life or all the details of every action. I want the algorithms or AI to know, but for them to maintain their privacy (human access should be restricted). This way my own bias will not get in the way of making the best possible decisions from the information that exists.
• I want the scores or results from these algorithms to be released in such a way that these scores can be used in my own algorithms to support my decisions, but I do not want to know the details of every behavior which make up a particular score. Do I need to know everything about a person to determine if they are trustworthy in certain situations? No I don't, because algorithms already can take scores and produce a level of trust without any human studying a person. Humans do not have a good track record for being in these positions of judging the lives of others.
• I want maximum privacy and transparency at the same time, as only having both is the path to true freedom. It's not a question of should we let everyone see everything we do, read our minds 24/7, etc, in order to free ourselves, vs let everyone mask everything they do, and have no clue what anyone is thinking 24/7 in order to free ourselves. Freedom requires we have the best possible information from which to make a decision but it does not require a human being to access that or a human judge.

The problem with Dan's world is it relies on the human element too much. The faith in the human element is the same faith behind democracy. There is nothing in Dan's radical transparency to prevent mob rule, and mob rule never has justice. Why does mob rule never have justice? Because humans cannot truly be moral, as humans are biased, flawed, and irrational. These flaws might not make as much of a difference when all aspects of your life aren't being judged, but when they are? Then you will have these flaws magnified.

The solution in my opinion comes from putting the AI or machines in the position to access our life history and not putting people in these positions. It is in my opinion damaging to the human psyche to either be in a position of constant judgment by other people, or to be put in the position to constantly judge other people. Neither of these in my opinion are something humans are accustomed to on this scale. Artificial intelligence can know everything about everyone without the risk of bias, discrimination, persecution, provided that we can debias the AI and also restrict access to the data via for instance homomorphic encryption.

So my conclusion is we should aim for maximum privacy and maximum transparency. A transparent world where the all seeing eye is AI, and not our neighbors. The less I know about you the better it is for me and you, as long as the machines know us both.