Comment by JabavuAdams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JabavuAdams | Hacker News Reader

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> Why exactly shouldn't it be beneficial if we let the market (the viewer) without any regulation decide which information should spread and which shouldn't?

1) It doesn't work. It leads to the lowest common-denominator winning.

2) Humans aren't rational.

3) The world is complicated enough that the median person simply doesn't know much about anything outside of their silo.

4) There are powerful forces conspiring to profit off of people's ignorance, rather than to turn them into less ignorant, more rational, more empathetic people, more curious people.

5) There are many people who simply aren't that curious. Left to their own devices, they will be overly susceptible to trickery and populism.

This might be a nice idea in a socially homogeneous group of a small number of like-minded farmers. It fails surely and predictably in a large group trying to make good decisions in a complex and technical world.

Read: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics

It doesn't matter if I am rational or not, it is my freedom to consume information from whichever source I prefer just as it doesn't matter if it's justified to spend double the money on an Apple product over something from a competitor.

It's also irrelevant how you would like people to be (more rational, empathetic and so on), actually no one on this planet even cares about your opinion on that matter enough to actually change themselves. (and no one ever will, trust me)

What matters is that people are free to choose to be whatever kind of person they want to be.

Some of them choose to be persons that you don't like, well then don't be around them, issue solved.

You seem to believe that we exist to follow some great plan devised by other people who believe they are smarter and know what we should actually be instead of what we choose to be. This is not the case.

We've all seen the results of ideology that seeks to reach utopia by changing man into something elevated. (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Rouge Khmer, Venezuela) It always failed in a catastrophic manner and caused often unimaginable suffering because of the authoritarianism inherent in this ideology.

We've learned enough neuroscience to know that humans make predictable systemic errors in judgement. This is when pursuing their own preferences, not someone else's preferences.

This has real effects that harm other people. Do what you want to yourself. The problem is when you harm others due to your own ignorance or avoidable biases.

None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.

> This has real effects that harm other people.

That's why we have courts where you can claim damages.

> None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.

Oh really? The Soviet man, the Übermensch as understood by the Nazis and all similar Socialist concepts are then completely new to you? Some of these concepts are pretty close to what you described a person should be like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man

So it seems to me that you basically share many of the views of a Hitler or a Stalin on questions like these.

You seem to be pattern matching on certain features and neglecting that details matter.

How can conscientious teachers or coaches exist in your worldview?

Surely educators are all evil because they dare to seek to improve people. Education has been used as a pretext to imprison people in oppressive regimes therefore education is evil. Absurd!

I have no issue with education and teaching without coercion, what you are proposing though is use of force to prevent spread of information you do not like or that might cause people to reject your ideology.

This is the real issue here. You are arguing in favour of using force (the basis of Socialism) while I'm arguing for freedom. (the basis of Capitalism)

And please don't tell me that censorship or regulating media isn't really using force. You go break censorship laws in countries that have them and lets see what they will do to you.

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