Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaydad12 | Hacker News Reader

This is perhaps scientifically interesting, but doing this to someone without their knowledge and consent is wildly unethical.

View on HN

The media/bad actors online/scam artists aren't concerned about being ethical with their megaphone on full blast instilling fear and panic amongst Americans.

The fact is if I have the choice between being unethical and saving my parents from a life filled with panic and fear, I know what I'm choosing.

Even if true, your first part is irrelevant to the question.

As for the second part, there's a reason why we don't take on these responsibilities ourselves, for competent adults. If you _truly_ believe your parents are mentally incompetent, the right thing to do is to present this before a court, with your parents present and allowed to respond. That's how civil society works.

That's too binary for the real world. Somewhere between padded rooms and someone being left to engage in destructive behavior by themselvesbis "intervention", which is a common-enough concept exclusively applied to competent adults.

In this case, we're talking about secret sabotage of someone else's Internet access. This falls outside of the common concept of intervention. In general, if you have to act secretly, you're almost certainly in the wrong.

Those media entities were calling people out in the West as wanting to kill their grandmothers when some of those people in the West weren't following very, very strict Covid restrictions, while nowadays the same media calls people in China as heroes and freedom fighters when those people in China are doing the same thing that the anti-Covid restrictions people in the West were doing about two years ago. No-one in here cheers for blocking the likes of the BBC and the NYTimes.

First, I think it's a little bit different to compare these two. One is 3 years after COVID, with vaccines, some level of herd immunity, and better treatment options. The other was immediate when little was understood. China's position is extreme, the west never reached that level of lockdown.

But in any case, I agree. A news diet is important. My parents watch CNN, and I can tell it has negative effects. I tell them to not watch the local news every night and don't put on CNN. This isn't a political thing.

But it must be said - there are much stronger calls to violence on one side, than the other, at this point in time.

I doubt there's consensus on which "side" has stronger calls for violence. But it's not needed. We can just agree that calls to violence are virtually always wrong and deal with them uniformly without respect to ideology.

Doing something to someone "for their own good" rightly has a terrible reputation. It happens most often in traditional parent / child relationships where the parent makes a change that is in the child's best interest in a way they cannot yet see. It can also happen in other situations.

I think that there are rare situations where people will be better off if their preferences are ignored. Those situations are tricky to identify and destructive to personal relationships to act on. The best-case scenario is that someone eventually recognizes that you did something good for them - but you should make peace with a long interregnum where they consider you a villain. You would also need to be prepared to carry the weight of being wrong. Acting against the desires of someone you love because you think you know better than them is only ok if they eventually share your view of what is right. It's a situation where you are choosing for your foresight to be judged in hindsight.

My response to a similar reply on the linked comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33723987#33725758

Thanks for the link. I think you should seriously contemplate this. If my kids did this to me, I'd ban them from my house, at a minimum.

More abstractly, suppose your thinking is correct, and now they're "de-programmed". If you were right, you could now tell your parents what you did, and they'd thank you. Does that sound like how it would play out?

a couple of years ago, my best friend had a major pyschotic episode. among many other unfortunate incidents, she drove her car into the yard of a stranger in the middle of the night, and knocked on that person's front door.

in response, i took her car away from her. drove it to a spot she didn't know about. she was, of course, furious with me. and my actions were no doubt illegal.

despite that, it was the right thing to do. if a similar situation were to arise, i would do it again in a fraction of a second. and now that my friend is in her right mind again, she agrees that i did the right thing.

would i have reprogrammed a router, if that had been a factor in distracting her? absolutely i would, without a second thought.

That's more-or-less the plot of the movie "The Brainwashing of My Dad". The Dad in question is interviewed in the film. He is generally aware of what happened and happy about the situation.

Is that a guaranteed result? No. But it's more likely than you might expect.

The problem in these scenarios turns out to be that people aren't "brainwashed" or delusional or psychotic; but that they spend enough of their attention on bullshit that the bullshit feels like their identity.

My mom had a psychotic break a few years back. My whole family let it go on for weeks, with the attitude “she’s an adult” etc.

As you reference in your threat about your kids, I knew the consequences of going against her will.

However, when I was finally able to visit home I realized she has lost weight and was a danger to herself, even trying to “take a walk” at 2am on a cold winter night.

I lied to her, convinced her to get in the car and drove her to a mental facility where she received treatment and has recovered mostly.

To this day she resents me and doesn’t fully trust me.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems in my family I’m the only person willing to trash our relationship to keep her safe.

This could have been avoided if she was self reflective and open to feedback, but her ego cannot take it, she’s simply too fragile.

These are hard cases, and you have my sympathy. (Same for sibling post.) Quite possibly I'd have done the same.

This sounds very different than the case under discussion, which seems to be that an adult child decided that he didn't like the information that his competent parents were listening to, and that it was making them unhappy, so he secretly sabotaged the parents' router.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com