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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?

Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.

We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias.

Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.

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> Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.

Um, sorry, what?

If you choose to do a thing, whatever it is, that thing very much is your responsibility, and (if it ends badly) your fault[1].

I've done some bloody stupid things over the years that haven't ended well and, guess what? That's all my fault.

Taking things from the prosaic to the hyperbolic, here are some notable examples of the kinds of people who typically have poor impulse control but who very definitely should be held to account for their actions:

- Paedophiles

- Rapists

- Shoplifters

- Serial murderers

[1] I will grant you this doesn't apply to children, which is why we have concepts such as the age of legal majority, but it certainly applies to adults of sound mind (i.e., the overwhelming majority of adults).

To be clear, I'm not saying people should be excused of crimes, just that we can't always assume everyone has the same level of capability and self sufficiency. Now with that out of the way:

Addiction is a disease, not a crime. It's therefore a great example of something which fails your test.

I won't address the strawmen you laid out because information addiction is the challenge we're facing in this thread, and addiction of any sort is recognized as a disease and disorder.

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> Um, sorry, what?

Please null the tone. I'd like to engage you on level and respectful terms.

> Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.

If someone with bad impulse control kills another person, is it not their fault?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that this is the moral principle being debated here.

I certainly don't know the answer, but we should think about this one a little bit before saying that no one is ever at "fault" for anything.

Impulse control is just another facet of human personality, just like being aggressive, or being a bigot.

This boils down to [the incoherence of] free will. Same consequences too (mostly none) -- you still want to control antisocial behavior, regardless if you think people are wet robots running their unique blend of experience and wetware or if they are sock puppets possessed by magical souls unencumbered by earthly effects. Or anything in between and to the side.

You still want to throw malfunctioning unit into a cell, or repair it some way. (Some soul-having scenarios are downright dystopian -- can't fix a defective soul unaffected by natural events, might have to dump it into a volcano).

> Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.

Impulse control is a skill, not everyone is the same or has equal level of abilities in anything, but we are ultimately choosing our reaction to an input and we have power to extend our influence on ourselves and world around us.

It's also a heritable trait, at least based on the slew of research I found when googling impulse control genes.

That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it does mean we should be respectful of people who may have a much harder time with it. Not everyone can meet a societal baseline that's challenging enough for people deemed to be normative; a person with one arm is plenty likely to be good at basketball, but imposing qualification rules based on their capability to do free throws might be a bit out of bounds... so to speak.

That's what algorithm (self-)regulations (and gripes along what Mozilla published here) would aim to address.

I may have generalized without meaning to. I agree that there are segments of the population my point wouldn't apply to (children being one).

However, I personally find it scary when an organization with as much cachet as Mozilla encourages people to absolve themselves of responsibility.

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