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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

> I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked."

Thanks for your vulnerability admitting someone very close to you has behaved out of spite and contrary to their own interest and the interests of their community.

How is your mother’s behavior in delaying^ not “too stupid to make their own decisions” though? Behaving out of spite is stupid (and totally human! Not judging her character, but yes her behavior was wrong on several levels).

Is it that Yes people are too stupid to make their own decisions, but a government mandate isn’t the right tactic to influence their behavior? What’s the right tactic to influence stupid people?

(Genuinely curious since you appear to see both sides)

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Personal attacks are not cool here no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points without stooping to this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28694731.

Her belief was that she'd be feeding into a system that encouraged things to happen that were against her principles. I wouldn't call that self harm out of spite. Spite would be "they were right, but I'll be damned if I let them know that!" She never changed her mind on the censorship.

    Is it that Yes people are too stupid to make their own decisions, but a government mandate isn’t the right tactic to influence their behavior?

That's pretty much what I see. People make sub-optimal decisions all the time for a variety of reasons and these decisions often affect others. Government mandates on bodily autonomy get tricky and have massive externalities. It's all good fun until you're the one the government says is making a bad decision.

    What’s the right tactic to influence stupid people?

I don't think making a sub-optimal decision makes you stupid. In this particular case I think a better question would be "how do we influence people who are making bad decisions based on emotions and politics?" It's pretty tough to craft a government solution to that last part since the government is always political. Polite discourse is the best way IMO. It won't turn everyone, but when people get interested they won't be thrown back into their in-group by seeing nothing but coercion and vitriol.

Thanks! This polite discourse is helpful to my understanding others’ perspectives.

Not wanting to enable and reward nefarious tactics is not “acting out of spite.”

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