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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

You're getting downvoted, but you have two points.

Almost everybody believes a sizable part of the population to be brainwashed, they disagree on what part it is however.

And I do very much believe that it is a discussion worth having for society at large. Do we believe that we are generally aware of the dangers of things we do? Is outlawing oversized sodas the right thing to do? Would it be okay to allow them only if you can use a code word that signals that you do, in fact, understand the risk? Do we not like that approach at all, or do we just not want to deal with deciding who understands the risk and is able to walk down the stairs and who isn't?

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Let those who don't understand the risk learn the hard way. Free will is not only about doing right, it's also about making mistakes. Now it's obvious that the trend is biasing towards enforcement of the right-doing regardless of consequences and impact on individual freedoms. Almost all writing of Stanislav Lem, for example, is dedicated to this one theme. And extrapolations he made are only becoming more and more relevant as the time goes.

Having said that, the freedom to fail should only apply to individuals. Corporate or government entities should never be treated as humans and be allowed to fail the hard way. First, because the magnitude of consequences are incomparable, and second, because the strings of corporate responsibilities are entangled in such a way so as to lead nowhere. They can always lose a head and grow another one.

As to crossing of one's individual freedom into another's, that's what the service men are for. But it was alright while they operated under presumption of innocence. Now they are clearly trying to render people guilty until proven otherwise. That was one of the points in my first reply.

One large issue is that you'll often not have a chance to learn from your mistakes and do better in the future. If you jump off of a building, you die. If you drink the big gulp for 40 years, you get diabetes. Sure, you may have learned from it, but you can't start over.

I'm still in the camp of "let them", but it's a mixture of "it's hard to figure out who really knows the risks", "I don't want to live in a world that's optimized for perfect safety and takes away all freedom to achieve it" and "we want people to take risks, even giant risks, even when they clearly have no idea how large the risk is, because we'll advance much quicker because of it, we just don't want all people to take those risks at the same time".

If we let them crash and burn.

Shouldn't welfare and free will go directly against it each other?

If someone crashes and burns, society has to pay for it through taxes where all members of the society suffer because one of them has crashed and burned.

Meanwhile, if you remove this person's agency to crash and burn, you've saved society from scarifice but you removed that person's free will.

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