What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?
It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess.
The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.
Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.
Each human's window into the larger world is increasingly through a lens controlled by automated software we don't understand.
That Facebook is a social networking platform that some people incidentally use to try to relay news of general public concern, not an online public affairs platform with an incidental social networking function?
There was the WWW itself, at least for a time, though there are elements which tend toward centralisation, largely discovery, discussion, authentication, and directory.
Tim Berners-Lee and others have recently announce Solid.
I think it means absolutely nothing. I use Facebook so I can see how my friends are doing, not to find news articles to read (unless it's an article my friend just shared, and even then only maybe). I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.
And yet enough people do that it's a real and recognized problem to the point that HN discusses it every couple of weeks. HN in itself being a similar echo chamber.
People get news from what they look at. There's no such thing as "news". It's all eyeball based. The source with the most eyeballs is considered The News.
Actually, nearly 50% of American adults use facebook as a news source [0]. Not that this means they don't have other sources, but it seems very likely that increased consumption of news via facebook is cutting into consumption from other sources. Anecdotally I've noticed that trend in my own news consumption, to my chagrin.
[0] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...
I believe you have to be a special kind of crazy not to acknowledge that as a problem. Or, considering their big user base, a very general kind of crazy.
Anecdotally I'd agree with you, but apparently statistically most facebook users are trending that way, so it's a genuine concern.
I get all my news from Twitter.
Couldn't a newspaper that uses algorithmic metrics (or any kind of metrics or surveying) end up making a similar editorial decision for similar reasons? Journalists have worried about independence of editorial and advertising for somewhat analogous kinds of reason for a long time, and also about whether their news outlets were doing the most important journalism vs. journalism with the greatest mass appeal.
When there were two reasonably good newspapers in virtually any city (or 3, or 9, or in some cases 30 or 40), there was a readily available local alternative to the editorial decisions of any one paper, though other factors (political machine, major advertiser, mob) might have similarly restricted what was covered.
But those days are gone -- many cities in the US have only one major daily, and it's often stopped trying. Local radio and television, as well as national broadcasts, are abysmal.
What I'm noticing today, at least in print media, is a staggeringly widespread mediocrity and lack of relevance. Actually, that goes beyond print to broadcast (radio and television), and many mainstream online sources.
The saving grace, at least for now, are competing, largely non-mainstream sources, which carry information that is less likely to be carried. Yes, some sites cater to eyeball-attracting, outrage-inducing bogosities, but others actually contain solid content.
My local paper has had little if any coverage of international trade pacts which treaten to rewrite major elements of laws across multiple countries, but I can find detailed information at, of all places, Buzzfeed. Or The Intercept. Or The Guardian. Or Pro Publica. Or your EFF article -- one of the best explainers I've found, and some colourful infographics to boot (they've been in heavy play, and largely my only content, at Google+, as Google are among the sadly far-too-many tech companies promoting the TPP, TTIP, BITS, and TiSA).
Something is badly wrong with media, though, and globally. It's not a whole lot that's not been warned about for a long, long time -- Eric Blair (George Orwell), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Neal Postman, Jerry Mander, I.F. Stone, and others cautioned about it. Oh, and Walter Lippman and Noam Chomsky. But is it ever getting flagrant.
I'd even be modestly satisfied with algorithmic placements, so long as they were different algorithms, possibly rotated, and with some sortition blended in for random perterbations.
Facebook's a problem, and a large problem, but not the only problem.
The point here is that this is all being funneled through one filter. And many media / news companies may disappear over time so the issue could become worse.
Number and variety of sources of information is the distinction.
I think your analogy would apply if there were many "Facebooks". But there is only one.
I don't quite get how that is any different from a TV news station or a newspaper coming to the same conclusion?
The moment is squires extra optimizing targets, that's a problem. What is more troubling is that we can't even know when that changes (if it didn't already).
You'll be a hell of a lot healthier since the war photo is pointless(Exactly what's the point of reseeing the photo... to remind you war is bad?) but your friends count.
This specific people may escape that fate, as it's important enough to be in history books - I believe I first saw it in primary school - but handing Facebook the power to hide important parts of history from a huge proportion of people is dangerous.
Those war photos are supposed to be reminders for future decisions.
Based on continuous USA policy to export war to foster weapon economy, not much has changed though.
“Kim is saddened by those who would focus on the nudity in the historic picture rather than the powerful message it conveys”, writes spokesperson Anne Bayin to Dagsavisen.
Kim Phuc says that it has been painful to see the picture, but that it represents an important moment in history.
“She fully supports the documentary image taken by Nick Ut as a moment of truth that captures the horror of war and its effects on innocent victims”, writes the Kim Phuc Foundation in a statement.
Wrong. Facebook is for making money. If providing users with pleasure or benefits makes them money, then that's lucky for the users.
> "Facebook has become a world-leading platform for spreading information, for debate and for social contact between persons. You have gained this position because you deserve it."
Also wrong. The second sentence, I mean.
I agree with the intent here. I agree with the outrage at Facebook. The author of this piece, too, seems to understand the futility of this open letter, and I do think it's a good thing that he's making the statement regardless. I just think that maybe he's being too generous to Mark and Facebook.
It's relevant to free-speech, art, censorship, the means of production, etc., and the fact that Facebook plays a role underscores their power, and why this matters.
It a slippery slope when policy fails to achieve an appropriate, nuanced perspective.
Given the wide variety of news sites and media companies, I don't think Facebook will give blanket exemptions. But Facebook has been willing to make small changes to the guidelines ( e.g., breastfeeding), so perhaps we can look at this as an opening offer in a negotiation.
That means your post is one of hundreds this person sees that day and their guidance is likely "no genitalia, no nipples, and definitely never any naked children". So they act accordingly.
So what's the ideal path from here? Do you educate them about art? What's the line after that? Is this photo ok? What about the famous album cover? What about private party pictures? Etc. Can we even describe a reasonable line? Do we expect them to reverse image search every single photo for context? (Not many people could recognise that photo on its own) How many more people would be needed for clarification? What's the incentive to get them?
I know that there are companies in Europe that only do the verification of the reported content, and the employees cannot say that they work for facebook, but in a way they do.
I don't think internet search engines should try to be helpful. Guessing what the recipient would like to see removes chance for serendipity and creates and information bubble with a radius given by the algorithms parameters... and then, for what is brought out, they remove the too-saucy bits. This is worse than censorship.
- A man having sex with a chicken sandwich
- A fake story about Fox News firing Ann Coulter
- A fake article about the iphone 8, claiming tim cook said Siri is going to do your chores for you.
So yeah maybe the people were kinda needed?
I agree but the results need to be helpful in so much as they need to be context relevant. Google serves up any old cr*p, hardly ever related to what I'm looking for.
Of course, the flip side of that is for the result to be context relevant the search engine needs to know you which could be privacy infringing etc.
Let me guess... you live in a non-swing state, yet registering your preference for Coke vs. Pepsi is vitally important.
For those who don't understand why this is relevant: the important point is that Facebook was never, is not, and will never be meant for dispersing information and fostering meaningful discourse. Its only raison d'être is entertainment and generating revenue for its shareholders, so it's rather pointless to try to fight their arbitrary rules.
If you are trying to bring up meaningful discourse on Facebook, you're not getting the right audience, because Facebook is all about reinforcement of the user's existing believes and world views.
I have friends and ex-colleagues who hold different political views than me. I virtually never see their posts on Facebook, because algorithm and machine learning. And I'm aware of that fact when I use Facebook.
Afterposten is in the media business, they understand the unwritten rules. Call me a cynic, but I feel that the only point of their open letter is to sound righteous and generate publicity.
How does it do that without users? I was taught, anyone with any interest in the operation is a stakeholder. If easy dispersion of information is their offer to users, they should be liable for that. If they aren't, the user should either seek support from the government to hold the debtor (facebook) accountable in an anti-trust issue, or consequently reevaluate the offer, if the original intent can not be expected anymore.
Since FB uses advertisement, which is controversial, this is not a clear cut case to me. Because of multiple share holders, facebook has to arbitrate the interests in their own interest. This is also controversial in the question of delivering the best experience regardless of the advertisement. The advertisement just makes it so much more complicated, because it often times borders on deception, if not fraud.
How important is it to be on Facebook? On Twitter? On Reddit? On HN? Indexed by Google? Have connections to the Huffington Post?
If you have something interesting to say, can those forces stop you? Or will it spread because it is interesting?
If you make great art, will it become popular just because it is great? Or does it depend on your marketing skills?
Could we have technology that makes interesting, helpful content spread no matter what?
Do we have to invent some kind of "internet voting" system to accomplish this? Can blockchain technology help with this?
Popularity depends a lot on your marketing skills too. If you can 'figure out' the secret to success on social media sites, or how to get your site's SEO to be good, that helps a lot more than the quality of the work at the moment. Unfortunately.
Not sure if you can make interesting, helpful content spread no matter what. Seems like it could be a challenge to have any system to find interesting content that isn't dependant on any third party services or search engines. And even more of a challenge to get people to use it.
Also, I think the actual problem isn't these corporations, it's ultimately the governments of the world.
Even if the major social networks allow something highly controversial to remain, sooner or later they may be required by the government to take it down. Even someone as big as Apple will have trouble standing their ground, as was shown recently.
The government and the law is what's supposed to protect people's right to information and free speech, yet they are also the ultimate source of censorship.
Wait, what? Facebook is more like tobacco: addictive, very bad for you, and very profitable.
For instance Facebook allows me to communicate with friends and family I wouldn't otherwise be able to communicate with (at least not as efficiently). I can't see that being bad. As a matter of fact it's something I derive a great sense of satisfaction and wellbeing from.
> Furthermore, Facebook should distinguish between editors and other Facebook-users
Sigh ... so he's asking to be marked as one of the "elite" by FB while us plebs should be treated lessor?
Digital serfs.
You are in Marks living room. He has asked you not to bring certain kinds of photos to his place. You did anyway so he took the photo from you. You brought another copy the next time. Now he is getting angry with you.
Maybe you should meet at your place in the future? Or maybe you shouldn't be friends with Mark at all.
You're absolutely right that if this happened in someone's living room, their rules should apply.
However, there are 1.3 billion people in "Mark's living room". Is it still his?
In a way, some physical metaphor like this one drives the point home well. Though Mark might not say bluntly that "You are in my living room, just adhere to what I order you", he is actually saying something like "I'm not permitting this in my living room because it is an inconvenience to other people".
The ugly truth is 1.3 billion people are guests and no matter how big they are they have to agree with the host.
I'm not saying Facebook isn't Mark's to do with as he pleases, but... something isn't right here.
If our governing authorities took measures to pull such photos from the web, then we'd have a problem worth protesting. If Facebook.com pulls the photo and points to its policies as the reason... then simply publish the photo elsewhere.
I wish that were true, but Facebook is actually for selling the world's eyeballs to advertisers.
If we want to treat Mark as the editor to Facebook, then he wants to tailor its content to the type of audience he wants to attract and business he is in.
Would Teen People or Vogue print a picture of napalmed children on its cover?
You can be naked for the following reasons: Breastfeeding, Satire, Comedy, Artistic (but only photos of art), educational, and surgery (but only reconstructive)
but being naked because you didn't exactly have time to grab clothes while fleeing from being burnt up, is too far on the nudity scale?
:)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn3-Q1lY7fU [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDwdBc0-uq8
I fully agree with people taking note and becoming aware that Facebook is simply a business providing them a service and not a benevolent social network uniting the world.
But until people are willing to get upset enough about issues like this to leave Facebook, they really have no incentive to change. It's a reflection on society more than on one company. Like it or not, we use Facebook because we like it, it provides a service we're happy to consume. If we're happy and the advertisers are happy why would they care about these sorts of things?
a) the network effects that make people join the network even if they wouldn't want to on their own
b) Facebook's own agressive strategies of bringing users into their network without conscious choice - e.g. the acquisition of whatsapp or the internet.org initiative.
At this point it's more like some property shark who'd buy up half the city's apartment blocks, then proceed to cut services and raise the rents - and when people complain, respond "well, for some reason all those people chose to rent my apartments, so they must approve of what I do"...
> But until people are willing to get upset enough about issues like this to leave Facebook, they really have no incentive to change.
They will have an incentive to change if e.g. advertisers start worrying about their image if they advertise on Facebook too. Causing outrage and creating a debate around whether Facebook is damaging our society is a way of making Facebook a less attractive advertising channel as well.
Removing that picture for being pornographic should be much more controversial than the controversial pornographic aspect. The latter is really an US-centric notion.
You're right - it's often extremely damaging. But we've ingrained it into capitalist society in the same sort of ways as casual racism and everyday sexism. Pretty much completely socially acceptable, and often easy to participate in unintentionally even when you're trying not to...
I know you're not wrong here, but at what point does social responsibility trump profit? Should it?
Of course social responsibility trumps profit.
See what happens when you woodenly interpret the words someone is saying?
(I moved a lot as a child)
I get your point that it's not the only solution to this problem. But it is currently the best choice, even if only because of the network effect.
>I wish people would stop kidding themselves that Facebook is the same as the Internet as a whole.
I never said that. That's ridiculous. I said it's complex enough that summing it up in a single dismissive sentence is probably disingenuous.
>Please don't pretend that cutting it off would mean you couldnt communicate with your friends anymore.
Never said that either.
I can guess some differences. FB conversations are semi-public, phone conversation are generally not. Except AFAIK except for ads you have to opt into most info in FB. To get news from this source you have to have joined/liked their group. So you opted in. Maybe some friend shares the post but you opted into friending them.
I'm not saying FB should or should not limit what you can post. Only that it's interesting to consider other examples. Why should the phone company not be allowed to ban certain topics but FB should?
well, its literally a discussion on facebook's morality. Its a bit hard to talk about that without questioning it.
> To question someone's morality solely due to it being different than yours is, bluntly, a waste of time.
I'm not trying to change facebook here, I don't care /that/ much. I saw a discussion ("its facebook's morality") that I wanted to contribute to ("But its a weird sense of morality innit?"). Isn't that what discussions are for?
On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?
There's quite a bit of difference between corporations and people which means that granting corporations "personhood" is quite... crazy, IMO. In particular, almost all corporations are (almost by definition) asocial, don't care about what their peers think of them, etc. etc. They're basically sociopaths. Besides that they are (when big enough) effectively invulnerable to judicial sanctions, etc. etc.
It should be obvious why this is a bad idea.
That's true, but the Catholic church only imposes it's will on Catholics. It may certainly try to influence non-Catholic people towards its views, but... let's just say that it's been met with "limited success".
The problem with (large) corporations is that they have the power to impose their wills almost without regard.
And how much does that computer cost? An Arm SoC is not much...
Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.
I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.
There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
It takes integrity to defend a principle in lieu of doing the expedient thing of instilling a "zero tolerance" policy. One that you can define so broadly that you never have to suffer the PR backlash that will eventually result when someone takes advantage of these freedoms and does something abhorrent.
>Not all content is appropriate for all sites.
But I thought that all content is appropriate for all sites. Don't all people fit into size 36 jeans, like cheesecake, ride unicycles, and love to go hiking? I quite like your negate the absolutes game.
>Beyond that, while this is a famous picture, what most people think they know about it is wrong, so it's not really adding much to the public discourse.
That is a rather banal statement. It is obvious that the argument isn't about one particular picture, but about defending freedom of expression.
Nobody complains, nothing is likely to change, things stay the same. I'm on the side of complaining. You?
If you start from the position that kind of content belongs on FB, then sure. But not of you don't. And I don't.
>But I thought that all content is appropriate for all sites. Don't all people fit into size 36 jeans, like cheesecake, ride unicycles, and love to go hiking? I quite like your negate the absolutes game.
And I quite like your pointless reductio ad absurdum. The point is Facebook is a site with a purpose, these kinds of articles are at best tangential to the site's purpose, and it's perfectly reasonable for Facebook to say "This content will make some people uncomfortable, and they're not coming to our site to be made uncomfortable." I would have thought my point was obvious.
>That is a rather banal statement. It is obvious that the argument isn't about one particular picture, but about defending freedom of expression.
Nobody is saying this guy doesn't have the right to express himself. The argument he's trying to make is he has some sort of moral right to put content he likes on a site created, owned, and operated by someone else for a purpose other than disseminating news. He doesn't.
This is why news organizations have their own web sites.
>Nobody complains, nothing is likely to change, things stay the same. I'm on the side of complaining. You?
Not me. I think Facebook made a perfectly reasonable decision here, and I'm not interested in change for its own sake.
This is so different, if you don't like Facebook use a competitors service. If a good one doesn't exist that lines up with your moral aspirations create one. But under Saddam and Gaddafi, you don't like them, keep quiet or you might disappear, if the wrong person over hears you.
I've decided that since I don't actually enjoy being punched in the face, I'm going to avoid face-punching services altogether.
Is anyone working on this?
On a serious note, there were platforms that used to dominate discourse on the internet before Facebook. Usenet, ICQ, AOL, Myspace.
Now there are alternatives. Medium for blogging; Reddit and 4chan for discussion; Twitter for sharing breaking news, trolling celebrities, and complaining about customer service; LinkedIn for connections and keeping in touch; Pinterest for sharing photos and links; Snapchat for sharing photos and videos; et cetera. I have a few friends, particularly in the 25-and-below generation, who don't have a Facebook but are very active on Snapchat or when it was trendy, Vine.
Don't forget countries where Facebook is a minority player. Weibo, Renren, WeChat, VKontakte are examples of thriving social networks that could possibly grow beyond their borders.
Because they lose revenue. In Facebook's case because advertisers have demonstrated time and again they won't spend money when their products are associated with controversial content. It doesn't matter how nuanced or obtuse the reason for the controversy.
I guess it's weird to me that some people can't just "filter" and move on.
Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!
If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!
It's irrelevant if the most fantastic analysis of news and current affairs is readily available around the corner if people stop going there.
Look, if people aren't going to choose news-focused sites over social-networking-focused sites, then existing social-networking-focused sites that bait-and-switch their users into a news-focused experience are just going to lose to actual social networking sites, starting the problem back at zero.
It’s hard to answer your counterfactual definitively, but probably, yes.
Why can a drug maker jack their prices up 100x? Because it's profitable.
Why do gas companies raise their prices when there's an impending disaster (hurricane, blizzards, etc.)? Because they can.
Capitalism is great in a different aspect: it provides a form of unaccountable eugenics. Your parents were poor, and went to a public school that wasn't funded well. That travels along with life, leading to a harder life for you. Less money for the essentials, and perhaps health insurance.
There's nobody out there with a knife going to kill you; it's more of ling-chi or death by a thousand cuts. And the culmination amounts to moralizations like "You should have went to better school", or "Its your fault not getting a better job", or insults of "Lazy".
But your lifespan is shortened; there's less everything for you. And society has no one to blame except you. Well, other than every other actor who causes tiny bits of pain and suffering... but not enough to quantify. Not like they could sue, anyways.
We already have a taste of it with the internet, where it's 'Create once, share everywhere'. The idea of scarcity is forced via legal tools, where scarcity means little.
And now, with cheap solar, leads to cheap/free energy. And robots are creating more and more goods. And we're on the cusp of a level 4 vehicle automation systems. As this trend continues, many things will approach 'infinity' the same way they do already online.
What does that mean? It means that people could have the requirements of life provided as a citizenship right: food, water, shelter, electricity, internet, plus a bit more. Unlike the older socialism and communism systems, that required people be slaves to the state and work in prescribed manners, robots and computers could be the provider of these essential resources.
And that starts looking at post-capitalism systems. Would there be money? Of course. Some resources would still be rare. But this idea of "go to work so you can eat and survive" would no longer be hanging over people's heads like a guillotine.
On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.
While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head.
The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true.
That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
Is this a generational point of view? I don't think that the word "privilege" is "inseperable from personal attack. To me, this very much fits into the definition of a privilege as "a benefit enjoyed by a person, beyond the advantages of most". Access to and time to read a broad variety of news sources is very much a benefit enjoyed by some people, beyond the advantages of most. I don't see how there's any personal attack implicit in that...
This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth.
Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints.
I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
And to give a little more background, Facebook was trying to get free "internet" access away in India, but it wasn't really internet access it was actually just a Facebook walled garden. The local population organized and ultimately the government rightly told them to piss off.
Because being able to access a diverse set of viewpoints on the Internet is not, actually, a "privilege" but rather the central point of the whole affair.
I speak to communicate with people - that's communicate with, not talk to, and if you're unclear on the distinction, any dictionary with etymological information will serve you.
Talking about other people's opinions, behaviors, and beliefs in terms of privilege makes communicating with them harder instead of easier. So it's not worth my while to do.
Now, your self-description is quite colorful, but seems to only support my claims. It almost sounds like you're saying that a diverse group of people do actually have the means to discuss complex topics and critically analyze diverse viewpoints beyond whatever Facebook's algorithm might choose for them.
And thank you bobcostas55 for bringing data to the conversation upthread.
But if this is what you call "communicating with people not just talking to them" I'll just step out now.
Sorry to say, yours is the first direct reply in years of HN I've regretted not being able to downvote.
Before I could get more than a few words into all of that, though, I got an email from my father, who told me that my distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up is in fact permanently paralyzed in the lower half of his body, and between that and other injuries will almost certainly require lifelong care.
I may be a sarcastic asshole of a redneck, but I am also an amazingly fortunate redneck. I have made a successful career in software engineering, which enables me to earn more in a year than both my parents combined. A lot of that I send back home. I cannot send enough. I do not make enough. In that light the perspective you express strikes me as thoughtlessly facile. I did a poor job of expressing that in my last comment, which was written in the heat of the moment. Perhaps this one, with the benefit of reflection, will make it more clear.
It's a shame you are unable to downvote that comment, if you feel it is warranted. Perhaps someone else will step up and do so.