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Comment by SkyBelow | Hacker News Reader

It is far smaller a stage than an open internet has given people, some of whom use it for far worse things than either Amateur How-To's or Conspiracy Theories. The solution should be to education society, not lock down information flow to protect society. For kids it is a bit different, but that's on the parents to protect their child and no amount of technology is going to fully counteract neglectful parenting.

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> The solution should be to education society, not lock down information flow to protect society.

I'm not convinced the experiment we've performed over the past ~15 years is bearing this out.

It's hard to say. I think it's more that society has changed and become less tolerant.

The sorts of G-philes we used to distribute without a care over BBSes in the 80's get people arrested today.

There was an article in the local newspaper a couple of months ago about a guy being arrested for sending someone bomb-making instructions over the internet. We did that all the time. Even plans for how to make a floppy disk explode inside someone's drive.

The Anarchist's Cookbook didn't cause mass terror in the 20th century. I wonder if it's even available in libraries anymore.

> I wonder if it's even available in libraries anymore.

I just checked my local library, and they currently have a copy on the shelves that I could check out. It doesn't even seem to be "adults only".

I've never actually seen a physical copy before (only photocopies of some pages that my friend asked me to "hold onto for him" and PDFs). Now you've inspired me to check it out next time I'm at the library.

I know for sure that the PDF of the 2000 version by the Jolly Roger is still available online though.

This a small perspective. We have experimented with free information vs locked down information over many hundreds of years. We consistently see that bad people take control over the information lock and use it to create tyranny and death.

I'm not convinced that we've done much at all to educate society about the technology that permeates our 2020 existence. The elementary, middle, high school offerings for computer science / engineering related classes are dismal. The current trend is to dumb everything down ("make convenient / easy") until it's accessible by everyone so that then everyone is ultimately left dependent on some company.

The biggest part of the experiment that has failed is our government run school system, so maybe we fix that rather than give the government more control.

Part of the conspiracy theorists’ standard self-defense toolkit is training their followers to believe that all mainstream sources of news, science and education are hopelessly compromised and should thus be studiously ignored.

How do you propose to educate someone who believes that?

A focus at the grade school level of using evidence to reach a conclusion instead of having a conclusion and backing it with evidence. For adults who already have their beliefs set, having someone close to them slowly analyze their beliefs helps.

Also, realizing that sometimes the conspiracy theorist are right. How to draw a distinction between secret CIA projects or NSA spying verses faking moon landings and contrails. Getting conspiracy theorist to focus on true conspiracies might be far easier than getting them to drop conspiracy theories in general.

This is one of the reasons I'm not in favor of much of the deplatforming that has been going on. It's not just that the mainstream sources are supposed to be compromised, but they are actively trying to silence the speaker. When YouTube, Facebook, etc. _actually do_ silence people (at least on their respective platforms), they now have proof of at least that claim.

> For kids it is a bit different, but that's on the parents to protect their child and no amount of technology is going to fully counteract neglectful parenting.

This is a bit harsh and naive. Given how easily it is to access the wide open internet these days, the amount of vigilance on the part of parents to avoid being "neglectful" like that is greatly increased. And that has a lot of negative side effects.

Yes, as a parent of multiple kids, it's been extremely difficult to keep tabs and set boundaries on this sort of thing that both keeps my kids from awful content and doesn't make them feel we're suffocating them. I was thrilled when I was able to take away my child's unfettered YouTube access, which I had to constantly monitor and curate, in favor of YouTube kids which has 99.99% of the time presented appropriate content. Though now my oldest is aging out of that walled garden, and we're back to stricter monitoring. It's hard. I want my son to be able to watch folks playing games he likes, get tips & strategies etc., but some of the language used... it's not great. He's old enough now that we can let him be exposed to it and use it as an opportunity to teach.

Other things are much more subtle & subversive than mere foul or sexually suggestive language though. Something like "f--- those carebear wuss players that help all the triggered snowflakes that want everything handed to them" I mean, even if you agreed with some of socio-political themes this suggests, the particular language used is one of social division, derision, and disdain. Not "virtues" I'd like to instill in my kids.

>This is a bit harsh and naive.

I would call it more fatalistic than naive. Even if we completely ignore cases related to technology we will find an overwhelming number of instances of children being harmed by neglectful parenting. Even if we ignored neglect and focused on active forms of child abuse, the numbers are horrendous.

This is not a problem caused by technology nor one that can be fixed by limits placed on technology. I fear too strong a focus on specific issues like kids having access to an unfiltered google when the harms of neglectful parents are far greater, and when we have decided that parental freedoms are worth the trade off.

>The solution should be to education society, not lock down information flow to protect society.

An extremely 90s tech utopian world view that time has proven to be misguided. And if you're not adjusting your thinking after the multi decade experiment where we tried it this way, then it's just an ideology and you're not really the educated and rational ubermensch you believe to be.

I'm hesitant to adjust my thinking because the alternatives are far from acceptable. I have an inherent distrust of authority to give them the power to regulate, and I would hope that those paying attention to the unequal application of law would have similar views. Do you really want the same government that gave Epstein his weekends only jail sentence for his convicted (convicted, not alleged like in many cases) crimes to also be in control of what information is allowed? I'd settle for conspiracy theorist any day of the week.

How can you trust that same government to educate the citizenry, especially considering private schools are increasingly out of reach for most?

For concerned parents, be involved in your child's education and not depend upon the school to do the job. Overall schools focus too much on standardize testing, so if you fully leave the job to the schools you end up with good test takers who aren't going to do particularly well in many colleges.

When it comes to matters of ethics and morals, you definitely should not leave that to the school and I even suggest some subversion of the often authoritarian message I find schools teaching (personal experience with a pretty below average school district, others may have vastly different experiences).

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