I, for one, imagine that I could easily walk into the Banned Shop, given the right circumstances. All it takes is one slip up—fatigue, drunkness, or woozy medication would be sufficient—to lead to permanent death.
With that in mind, I don’t think we should be planting more minefields than this reality currently has, on purpose. I like the idea of making things idiot-proof, not because I think idiots are the best thing ever, but because we’re all idiots at least some of the time.
Certain types of content labeling might work a lot like Hanson’s Banned Shop, minus the trivial inconvenience of going to a different shop: the more obvious and dire the label, the closer the approximation. Cigarettes are probably the most advanced example I can think of.
Now, cigarettes have also been extensively regulated in other ways, so we can’t infer from this too well, but I think we can tentatively describe the results as mixed: it’s widely understood that cigarettes stand a good chance of killing you, and smoking rates have indeed gone down since labeling laws went into effect, but it’s still common. Whether or not we count this as a win probably depends on whether, and how much, we believe smokers’ reasons for smoking—or dismiss them as the dribble of a hijacked habit-formation system.
I, for one, imagine that I could easily walk into the Banned Shop, given the right circumstances. All it takes is one slip up—fatigue, drunkness, or woozy medication would be sufficient—to lead to permanent death.
With that in mind, I don’t think we should be planting more minefields than this reality currently has, on purpose. I like the idea of making things idiot-proof, not because I think idiots are the best thing ever, but because we’re all idiots at least some of the time.
Certain types of content labeling might work a lot like Hanson’s Banned Shop, minus the trivial inconvenience of going to a different shop: the more obvious and dire the label, the closer the approximation. Cigarettes are probably the most advanced example I can think of.
Now, cigarettes have also been extensively regulated in other ways, so we can’t infer from this too well, but I think we can tentatively describe the results as mixed: it’s widely understood that cigarettes stand a good chance of killing you, and smoking rates have indeed gone down since labeling laws went into effect, but it’s still common. Whether or not we count this as a win probably depends on whether, and how much, we believe smokers’ reasons for smoking—or dismiss them as the dribble of a hijacked habit-formation system.