I use ProtonMail, and I was thinking, “Damn, it’s spectacular not being tracked… but hold on a minute. Perhaps less than gmail, but still at all. And what about browser fingerprinting, and cookies, and even fonts!” I ended up in that feedback loop we all end up in. Perhaps ignorance is bliss? What is something you (might) wish you were ignorant of?
I’ve been searching for knowledge my entire life, and I love sharing what I have learned. Helping others with whatever struggles they may have gives me more pleasure than doing the same thing for myself. I don’t care if it is helping fix computers, doing math, physics or chemistry homework, helping replace a chip on a broken electronics component, or basically whatever you may think of. I’ve been around the block once or twice - I spent basically all my free time over the past 25 years nerding over anything and everything.
I would hate to be ignorant and lose the capability of helping others or myself.
Google has too much power and control. Even if I don’t have power and control of all my data, someone else having that power instead of Google is still preferable to leaving it all in their hands.
Break it up into many small pieces that do not like eachother.
Hang on I have a meme for this.
Always cut the cards and smile when you lose.
Or
Forewarned is forearmed.
Ignorance is bliss until it isn’t. At which point you’ll be completely unprepared to deal with the problems you’ve been pretending don’t exist.
There’s no perfect privacy. Just understanding your threat level. Minimizing the surface area of data collected on you is always a good thing. Just gotta discover what points matter the most to you.
I don’t have to wish, my friend.
I don’t know
Life is hard whether you’re ignorant or not, whether you’re kind or not. There’s no way to make life simple or always comfortable. So I think you’re better off choosing to be not ignorant, and to be kind.
I like your take, I think most of the “advantages” of beign ignorant come from the increased damage we’d cause to others, directly or indirectly, without mental ripercussion; so ultimately we’d all just suffer way more.
I get that POV, but ultimately, water finds its own level. There is always going to be so much out of your control. It’s like “play the hand you’re dealt”. In a poker game, you don’t get to decide your hand. You can only play it as well as you can.
Bad things don’t disappear if you can’t percieve them, so no.
If you can’t perceive bad things, they won’t affect your mental health. Sounds a lot easier than perceiving bad things all the time and not being able to do anything about them.
I often think about how much happier I might be if I never read the news. No more worrying about where the world is going, just blissful ignorance. I just can’t bring myself to do it, I feel like I have to watch the slow motion car crash.
Understanding the world is the first step to fixing it.
That’s true, but as an individual, I can’t fix anything. I can be a tiny part of a greater movement, but whether such a movement will form is completely beyond my control. So is whether or not that movement would succeed. Of course, some people become more than mere passengers to global events, but that seems far beyond me at this point. The best I can hope to do is make a tiny difference within my community.
Sure, but you can also join an org, and make a difference that way at a larger scale.
Fair, there is actually one local to me I’ve been looking into. I’m not sure what use I can be but I should at least try.
Go for it!
1st-century BCE Syrian-Latin writer Publilius Syrus reads:
In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est (“Life is most delightful when one knows nothing.”)
Not an answer to your question, but…
are you saying I need to be worried about fonts spying on me now? Like typeface?
What others said. Additionally Google offers free fonts to embed in websites that allow Google to know when you visit any site that uses one.
They used to use your list of installed fonts as one of the data types to figure out who you are.
I’m not sure if that’s still a thing, how many people download new fonts now, but it was an important part of fingerprinting at one point.
One of the ways of fingerprinting that they use is to determine what fonts you have loaded onto your browser and it’s surprisingly effective. I think before I changed mine to all default my fonts were unique to like 1:10000 people which once you factor in other fingerprinting techniques can make you pretty obvious
are you saying I need to be worried
you’re probably fine
Sometimes. Being dumb is really good for confidence.
You gotta be just the right amount of ignorant though.
Not at all.
The idea of “ignorance is bliss” is kinda like relying on herd immunity. You have to hope that everyone else creates a society that is good and just. Otherwise, material conditions will constantly worsen, you’ll just be left unequipped with the tools to know why.
Such an existence sounds maddening to me, and considering how often ignorant people are turning to hate in the face of drastically declining material conditions, I feel confident thinking that it is maddening for them as well. If you at least know why everything is turning to shit, you can try to stop it.
Many things at many times, but never about my personal life and thoughts, and that of my immediate circle. It’s things like why Kissinger was infamous or what Belgium was doing in Congo some years ago, and how it seems at times that I “swim in the sea of the unconscious” (from Persona 4’s OP, wonderful game!) and I can’t seem to find any solution to it besides waking people up one by one and the destiny of the world lies on people who know what Labubu is but don’t know why they do the things they do because they’re consumerist, hedonistic, unthinking automatons (to certain degrees, of course, but the Western ideological vacuum leaves people to default into it. And God has been dead there since at least Nietzsche’s days)…
But then I take a deep breath and remember I too will die in due time and whatever responsibility I feel for this world will die with me. And also, I’m just one man. 🤷
