Comment by bluefirebrand
21 days ago
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.
> There is absolutely a need to protect a population from itself which should cover certain stuff
No, there isn't. I'd much rather live in a world where we were able to make our own decisions about personal safety, regardless of how poor those decisions are.
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There's a direct line from mandating seatbelts to mandating developer certificates. If you accept in one domain that it's legitimate for power to reduce freedom to protect people from themselves, you'll accept it in every domain.
Look: in order for a mandate to be justifiable, it needs to at least provide superlinear benefit to linear adoption. That is, it has to solve a coordination problem.
Do seat belts solve any coordination problem? Do they benefit anyone but those wearing them? No. Therefore, the state has no business mandating them no matter the harm prevented.
A certain kind of person thinks differently though. He sees "harm" and relishes the prospect of "protecting" people from that "harm". They don't recognize the legitimacy of individual bad decisions. The self is just another person trying to hurt you. This kind of person would turn the whole world into a rubberized playground if he could.
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You don't necessarily need to prevent all the mistakes, you can often just make them less costly.