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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Meh. There's a long history (especially here on HN) of hyperfocusing on unfortunate edge cases of technology and ignoring the vast good they do. Someone posts some BS on twitterface and it leads to a lynching - yes, bad, but this is the exception not the rule. The rule is that billions of people can now communicate directly with each other in nearly real time, which is incredible.

So call me skeptical. Maybe the tech isn't perfect, but it will never be perfect. Does it do more harm than good? I don't know enough about this product, but I am not going to draw a conclusion from one lawsuit.

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There's a long history of taking the dulled down, de-risked, mitigated, and ultimately successful technologies that we've allowed to proliferate our society and say "see, no need to do dulling down, de-risking, mitigation!"

Bioweapons haven't proliferated through dedicated effort to prevent it.

Nuclear weapons aren't used through dedicated effort to prevent it.

Gangs don't rule our civilization through dedicated effort to prevent it.

Chattel slavery doesn't exist in the western world through dedicated effort to eliminate and prevent it.

Bad outcomes aren't impossible by default, and they're probably not even less likely than good outcomes. Bad outcomes are avoided through effort to avoid them!

Yet we also had 'comic books are making kids amoral and violent', 'TV is making kids amoral and violent', 'video games are making kids amoral and violent', 'dungeons and dragons is making kids amoral and violent'...

The existence of those movements doesnt say much except that we need to carefully consider things to avoid overreach. Unless you think we should rethink our approaches to Chattel Slavery and proliferation of biological weapons because we want to avoid people complaining about and trying unsuccessfully to ban violent video games.

> The existence of those movements doesnt say much except that we need to carefully consider things to avoid overreach.

It says that people react to new media technologies that target children the same way pretty consistently.

No, it says that you can decide what reaction you're looking for across a global population of billions of people and succeed in finding it.

True of any reaction to any object or idea.

I'm sure you could, but the things I mentioned are culturally American, as is the lawsuit.

What makes this more culturally American than the people who kick and holler over even the mention of regulatory scrutiny?

Confirmation bias amigo

Someone adding a critique to your argument is not an attack nor is it evidence of some belief system on the their part.

Huh? If your point with comic books etc. is that "sometimes some people take issue with things that end up inert", then sure. No argument there.

I suspect that your point was more broadly that the presence of those people somehow suggests that we should discount risks about the particular subject we're discussing today, then it makes no sense. The comic book examples only matter if you can demonstrate a systematic tendency to overrate risk.

You'd struggle to demonstrate such a tendency due to selection bias, so I maintain my position that each technology should be assessed on its own merits and not by associating it with other positive or negative reactions to other types of technologies.

Sure! Some technologies are fine. Some of them are not.

The existence of one set does not negate the existence of the other.

I mean... TV and video games are heavily controlled to prevent children from being exposed to some content without their parents permission. Additionally Playboy is no longer a pornographic magazine but when I was a child I couldn't buy it.

And I bet comic stores and game stores have their own rules about obscene material ontop of the existing US rules. Hey kid put down the Stripperella.

You just compared twitter to slavery and nuclear weapons. Clearly Godwin's law is overdue for an update.

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