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Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

> at what point does personal responsibility take over?

Maybe a good approach can be:

- When there are millions of people with otherwise functional lives falling for unhealthy behaviour then you blame the carriers.

- When there is a very small percentage of the population engaging in that behaviour, then is personal responsibility.

For example, personal responsibility cannot be asked for when people lack education.

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It's incredible how condescending people here are. Since you see no value in Facebook, those who use it a lot must be uneducated barbarians who are not willing to spend their time on [thing you enjoy]

Economists talk about “revealed preference,” that is, people enjoy the things that they do. But I don’t think that’s actually true. FB, like drugs, short-circuits your brain and just because your reward system is hacked and you spend all day doing it doesn’t mean you actually are getting real value from it.

Like people retired people who will spend all day and most of their disposable income sitting in front of a slot machine pushing a button. I imagine that is not what most of them wish they were doing with their lives.

This is such an unbelievably condescending opinion. Filipinos are not so uneducated that they lack the ability to assess the quality of their own lives. Facebook didn’t invent self-destructive behaviour (to use a hyperbole), it will always be available for people to indulge in. Personal responsibility will always be the only answer to it, and to imply that Filipinos lack the education to implement it is remarkably offensive.

The reference to education was an example. I don't think parent implied lack of education in Philippinos

[Edit: spelling]

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