I think the analogy is tenuous but nevertheless valid. i saw where the article was going from the start. and of course, it's not about forcibly doing the wrong thing but the point at which u realise and what you then do. hopefully this is only done once.

when some friends, relatively new to unix, asked me various questions, I asked them what would happen if they did:

cd /; rm -fr /

I then suggested that, just to make sure they understood the consequences, they do this on basic Linux virtual machine so they could break the machine as much as they needed. illustrative, useful and they never felt they needed to do it again. bruises and cuts have their place :)