Comment by ceteia

  >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]

I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly."

Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.

> If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards

This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.

> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives

Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.

Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.

Clearly education doesn't work, so Europe must ban any speech concerning fattening foods, drinking alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling, upsetting news and video games.

If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!

Oh my, that is a depressing view on the human condition.

But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility?

> From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...

Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.

There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.

People need to decide on their own, so I am against censorship.

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Then you failed at education if a prompt can undo decades of education.

And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.

It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.

What if it's easier to call opposing viewpoints "lies" than it is to defend yours.