Comment by munificent
14 hours ago
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I know my opinion is not popular, but I do not agree that it is the states responsibility to pick up the slack for bad parenting.
To be clear, I made no mention of the state or responsibility.
All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.
There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.
Such as?
Define bad parenting?
Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Should they go hungry when not fed?
Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
The libertarian "eh whatever" means of government has a lot of negative side effects too.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Of course the government should do something. They should punish the neglectful parent, and take away the child if needed.
What I'm missing is the logical leap to "everyone must give their sensitive personal information to an overseas corporation".
Also these kids will grow up to do harm to the communities in that state, which will spend more money at the end cleaning up those mistakes.
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I don't think it's an either or situation. We are on the precipice of a paradigm that's barely comprehensible to the average populace. There needs to be a conversation first before anything is decided. Everyone is too quick on the trigger.
What do any of these have to do with you handing over you ID to some random web service?
Whatever it is it should at least try to be data driven. And have a strong connection with harms and dysfunction. None of this 2% non-reproducible study BS.
More than 50% of boys admit to intentionally viewing poor, and most of them weekly.
Many think this is a slam dunk for a nanny state to step in. But surely we would have hard causal data on the need for it if that was the case? And I’m pretty sure we don’t.
Now let’s apply this simple bar to Claude, etc.
Who decides what is bad parenting? You tread on dangerous grounds.
> Define bad parenting?
Parents that do things that are bad for their kids wellbeing.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Yes it should do nothing
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
Yes they should
> Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
These days modern jails are rehabilitation centres so its a moot point, but yes we should.
I know this is not popular, you can choose to downvote me if you like. But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it. IMO perfect is the enemy of good here.
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> children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
I had an abusive caregiver as a child and I can confidently say that age-gating websites wouldn't have done shit to help me.
The way to protect these children is through the family court and foster care systems, which are both seriously under-resourced and overwhelmed.
There's different kinds of shitty and they didn't mean that kind.
Then don't use the shitty to justify what to do with the not really shitty. It's a logical fallacy.
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Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
This is a very cogent observation that I'm afraid is going to go over many heads. Children and parents are intrinsically suited to each other by genetics, shared environment, and other empirical factors. Societal and legal reasoning that asserts a child as a Platonic form cannot in fact benefit the singular development of that child.
i.e., luck
If luck = something you didn’t choose or had no control over, sure.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
And 2 is lucky it is the sum of 1+1.
I want to live in a free society that has some level of justice.