Comment by scott_w
20 days ago
> You just have to inform user of the risks
Warnings aren't always enough, sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves.
It's not always people being stupid. I recall reading an article by someone who got scammed who seemed generally quite knowledgeable about the type of scam he fell for. As he put it, he was tired, distracted, and caught at the right time.
Outside of that, a lot of the general public have a base assumption of "if the device lets me do it, it's not wrong," and just ignore the warnings. We get so many stupid pop-ups, seemingly silly warning signs (peanuts "may contain nuts") that it's easy to dismiss this as just one example of the nanny state gone mad.
Please read again the sentence you just typed.
> We have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves.
You can apply this argument to literally anything, and taken to its logical conclusion, this is exactly what will happen.
> sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves
I highlighted the word you missed, deliberately in my opinion, as it completely changes the meaning to exclude your frankly idiotic assertion.
The idiotic statement is yours. If the "sometimes" is important to you, you can have it - you're not the first person on the internet to play word games.
But unless you can come up with a very detailed list of when it's acceptable "to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves" and when it's not acceptable (it never is, it's a crazy statement), and I don't think you have such a list, your "sometimes" just means "whenever I, as the person writing the software judge", rendering it completely meaningless.
> sometimes we have to lock people down and physically prevent them from harming themselves
Seriously ill people as an exceptional last resort though, right? Or just everyone?
I’ll take a real world example where I watched someone start to climb over the side of a bridge. Luckily my words stopped him but I did consider whether I should pull him back and pin him to the ground for his own good.
Is your position that it would be better for his freedom for me to let him jump if I couldn’t dissuade him?
I would consider that an exceptional case for a person who is very unwell.
That said, I think suicide is a complicated case because some people want to be stopped, and some people will just try again the next night.
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