The Viking I lander situation seems somewhat different in that the problem with the patching system wasn't something that arose mid-mission. It must have been either a bug in the software written back on earth prior to the flight or an operator error, again on earth. In either case it could have been prevented by greater effort or diligence pre-launch. Physical/mechanical problems occurring mid-mission are not amenable to such prevention. A problem that shouldn't even require one shot to discover seems qualitatively different from one that requires that one shot to even reveal.
One could argue that if the primary purpose of a government is to protect the lives and wellbeing of its people then the French course of action in WWII was far superior to that in WWI, given that, as a percentage of the pre-war population, French casualties in WWII were roughly a third of the WWI figures. There were certainly terrible consequences of French capitulation, but there's no reason to believe similar or worse outcomes wouldn't have resulted from putting up greater resistance.
You (implicitly?) raise an interesting point: is character, as we usually think of it, sometimes defined as much by what someone doesn't know as what they do know? If so, someone who knows everything isn't going to be like any character we've encountered in the human world. I suppose I should clarify that it's not ignorance, per se, that shapes character so much as the pairings of knowledge and ignorance. To a significant extent a person's knowledge (if interpreted more broadly than encyclopedic knowledge that can be gained without actual experience) is a ...
ChatGPT offers multiple "personality" choices these days. You don't say which one you're using, so I assume it is the default. Have you tried any of the others? If so, was your impression any different?
You're only communicating if people are listening to you. If you talk in a way that causes fewer people to listen to you you're being anything but more efficient. The goal isn't to issue forth your great truths into the empty void -- it is to be heard and understood by the greatest number of people. Tact is the avoidance of needless offense to other people. It is a cop-out to say that the only way something brutal or ugly can be communicated is to offend people in the process. What that statement actually means is that you can't be bothered to find a tactful way to communicate.
I think if you actually dig into the facts here you'll see that while there may be a gradual increase in restrictive laws over long periods of time the majority of restrictive measures introduced -- just like the majority of nearly all measures introduced -- fail. This is particularly true at the Federal level, while at the state and local level there's a lot of variation from place to place.
Deflecting demands for proof, particularly as that term is understood in the "hard" sciences, is not unreasonable. Deflecting demands for stronger arguments is just intellectual laziness.
Are you equating access to information and morality?
"A fast government is more able to process new information, identify new threats and respond appropriately..." -- I was with you right up to that last part. In what way is a fast government more able to respond appropriately?
If we accept your premise that slow governments immediately lead to human extinction that in no way implies that fast governments are any better. Yes, if a fast government made the right decisions it could, in theory, implement those decisions more quickly, but I see no logical reason to believe that a fast government is any more likely than a slow government to make correct decisions and quite possibly the opposite. I'm afraid I don't find the contents of cyberpunk literature, classic or otherwise, to be a basis for large-scale political decisions or structures.
Just FYI, virtually no one who genuinely lacks tact believes that they lack tact. That's the nature of the problem: there are societal norms which, if you're aware of them, implicitly guide your behavior and, if you're not, you will violate without even knowing it (pretty much by definition).
Just curious: do you limit all of your choices and activities to those you are certain are 100% safe?
Since we established right up front that power should be thought of a multi-dimensional (and I agree with that structure), it isn't really meaningful to ask whether one kind (or linear combination of kinds) of power is more or less important than another.
"In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn't succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular." -- I find it misleading to compare "most oppressed" with "hold a lot of power". At the very least we need to modify the latter to "hold...
It sounds like you're arguing that every restrictive law that's ever attempted is eventually enacted. Is that really your claim?
Isn't what information shouldn't (and should) influence people constantly changing?
Where (outside of widely-recognized-as-totalitarian societies) are VPNs illegal?
For context, I'm 65. "Back in the day" for most people, most of the time, phone calls were rare enough that no one worried about being interrupted by them coming in randomly. I suspect the frequency with which people send text messages, combined with the effectively zero cost of phone calls (hint: they weren't always that way!), raised the frequency (or potential frequency) of phone calls to the level where people started worrying about the interruptions. Just a theory.
"If it's a social taboo to harm you, then that's a type of power." -- that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you're treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn't have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn't mean that other groups don't have far more power over them through any number of other means.
We had basically the same game (until it was banned) many years (I presume) before your experience. I'm not even sure the game made sense in your day, with the sort of information you describe, let alone in the modern day. We have made a profound transition from a world where you didn't know most (theoretically knowable) things to one where at near zero cost you can know anything.
"start behaving as if you're being watched" -- I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the chillingness of these words isn't overwhelmingly self-evident. It is much easier for a totalitarian government to pick off a few isolated dissenters than a group that was able to gather and organize "in secret" at least up until they reached a viable size.
I think what you're taking to be an attempt to excuse a problem is instead an explanation of why your apparent surprise is unwarranted. Nothing in the examples you give suggests denial of the problem, but the way you frame the complaints not only states the problem but attributes fault and presumes some "obvious" way things should have happened that would have avoided it. The pushback seems to mainly be on these latter elements.