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Comment by mr_custard | Hacker News Reader

Woah there! disingenuous?

Using the example of life-saving CPR as a "similar" example seems to be extremely disingenuous of you, and I suspect you know why.

* CPR - almost universally considered a good & essential thing for all humans by any measure (sure, a small number of religious groups might beg to differ).

* Targeted ads - well... not so much. wow.

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What? It was just an example about how defaults affect behavior, not a sneaky attempt to blur the idea of right vs wrong.

Although I am guessing you would suddenly start arguing for right vs wrong if I took your own idea about defaults and suggest that all governments which want to restrict Facebook's power (which is probably all of them by now) should just default to blocking access to Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp unless people go to some government building and sign a release form saying that they are aware of all the consequences of using social networks and that they should not come to the government for help if, say, said social network swindles their kids of real money.

I would say that, regardless of whether the outcome is right or wrong, we know that the default is incredibly powerful, so it's disingenuous to suggest that changing it makes no difference. Which was the original point as I understood it.

I took it as a thinly veiled attempt to paint advertising as axiomatically good.

If the poster didn't intend the post to come across that way, he may be experiencing an inherent bias in his opinion, in that he believes advertising is self-evidently good and simply didn't consider that other people might not agree.

I'm not sure that's any better.

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