When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
Yup, the distinction you’re describing sounds pretty inconsistent and arbitrary to me as well.