From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:34:25 MDT
weidai@weidai.com (Wei Dai) writes:
>Or think about it this way. There has to be certain private vaults within
>your brain that are not open to inspection. They would contain things like
>your ATM password, or the fact that you think company X might be a really
>great investment opportunity. How could the inspector know that you have
>not hidden your real beliefs in these vaults?
It's not obvious to me that we will continue to need such vaults.
Passwords may become obsolete because pervasive surveillance makes it
too hard to use without eavesdroppers seeing them.
Beliefs about investments can remain valuable enough for people to
put effort into creating them if they are inspected infrequently enough
that it is normally possible to act upon them before they are inspected.
Inspection would presumably reduce the returns on such knowledge, but
that's probably a good result because it implies markets are being made
more efficient.
If we need such vaults, it's probably for things like making bad laws
hard to enforce. That need is hard to predict over the time periods
we're talking about.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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