I love stuff like this:
The telling word here is "right" used to qualify "decisions". The notion was that Wikileaks would just dump massive amounts of government information and that members of the public would analyze this information and reach the "right" conclusions.
But what are the "right" conclusions? You can't really know what they are without having done the analysis and Daniel Domscheit-Berg hadn't done the analysis because he was waiting for the public to do it. But he thought he already knew what the right conclusions were. In fact, he was certain of it.
Because he never seriously doubted that all this information—which he had never seen or analyzed—would do anything but justify the things he already believed.
It didn't work out that way.
What you see here is the central fallacy of the enlightenment at work.
The whole idea of "Enlightenment" rests on the assumption that if everyone has access to the facts and they all reason logically, they will all arrive at the same "truth". It never seems to occur to Enlightenment rationalists that a group of people could look at the same data set and all analyze it rationally and arrive at different conclusions.
And you can see in that why the Enlightenment promptly produced totalitarian nightmares.
If you provide people sufficient background information, they are capable of behaving correctly and making the right decisions.That's from Daniel Domscheit-Berg writing in his book Inside Wikileaks.
The telling word here is "right" used to qualify "decisions". The notion was that Wikileaks would just dump massive amounts of government information and that members of the public would analyze this information and reach the "right" conclusions.
But what are the "right" conclusions? You can't really know what they are without having done the analysis and Daniel Domscheit-Berg hadn't done the analysis because he was waiting for the public to do it. But he thought he already knew what the right conclusions were. In fact, he was certain of it.
Because he never seriously doubted that all this information—which he had never seen or analyzed—would do anything but justify the things he already believed.
It didn't work out that way.
What you see here is the central fallacy of the enlightenment at work.
The whole idea of "Enlightenment" rests on the assumption that if everyone has access to the facts and they all reason logically, they will all arrive at the same "truth". It never seems to occur to Enlightenment rationalists that a group of people could look at the same data set and all analyze it rationally and arrive at different conclusions.
And you can see in that why the Enlightenment promptly produced totalitarian nightmares.
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