Comment by quotemstr
20 days ago
It's amazing how often we hamper the majority of society by protecting the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes.
20 days ago
It's amazing how often we hamper the majority of society by protecting the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes.
That's not what it's ever actually about. You're buying a disingenuous framing that pins blame on the bottom when all these harmful trends come from the top. This isn't to protect grandma, it's to protect Google. This is always what happens when you allow pockets of power with interests misaligned from those of most people. The pockets of power get their way, and people are worse off.
The thing is, even if Google has a hidden motive in this case, the prevailing public morality doesn't allow you to argue against a measure designed to protect the weakest and poorest among us. Once a vulnerable group has been invoked, the public stops caring about their rights, the cost-benefit balance and most other rational concerns.
I think the phenomenon is most visible in the United Kingdom. Not just with respect to the recent age verification measures, but also with respect to the government's recent financial misadventures.
That's not entirely wrong but I dislike the framing.
It appears to transfer the guilt of a successful deception that manufactures consent to public morality and the vulnerable. The real issue is it couldn't succeed without mendacious officials that suffer no consequences and uncritical/supportive media pushing the ball across the line.
It's also a much broader phenomenon than "protect the vulnerable". There are many other overused buttons they press to seek consent e.g. fear being the most common. Fear of terrorism, fear of job losses or tax rises, prejudice of others etc.
> You're buying a disingenuous framing
Of course it's a disingenuous framing. A certain kind of person is both attracted to power and deathly afraid of people voicing unapproved opinions "outside their kitchens".
Things can have multiple justifications, some public, some not: some conscious, some not. Central control and a feeling that a parental figure is in control of the tribe primes, at a primal level, a certain kind of person to like an idea. The specific post-hoc justification is almost incidental.
That said, such things need a semblance of legitimacy to work. It'd be much harder to crack down on general purpose computing under the guise of safety if we had cultural antibodies agains safetyism in general.
I have a friend from college who once clicked on a link to download more RAM for his PC. He has a PhD now and deserves it - the PhD just isn’t in anything tech-adjacent. Bottom quintile is a floating signifier.
Everyone makes mistakes
Protecting the bottom quintile from consequences of thier mistakes also protects everyone else if they ever make those mistakes in a momentary lapse
Maybe society shouldn't be structured in such a way that people have to be constantly hyper vigilant to avoid mistakes with high consequences
It's just not possible to prevent mistakes while letting people color outside the lines. Most brilliant ideas look like stupidity at first. I want to live in a world that biases towards discovery over safety.
There is a line, at least a blurry one, though.
There is not much to discover from e.g. not using seatbelts. There is absolutely a need to protect a population from itself which should cover certain stuff, while not others.
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You don't necessarily need to prevent all the mistakes, you can often just make them less costly.
s/the bottom quintile from the consequences of their own mistakes/the top centile from antitrust law/g
The "bottom quintile"? By what metric?