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Comment by tdfx | Hacker News Reader

This is one aspect of American culture that absolutely mystifies me. The need to "idiotproof" every potential angle of harm in society leads to a predictable outcome: a bunch of idiots that have never learned anything the hard way. It creates a feedback loop that creates a need for more stringent nannying by the government until personal agency is completely eroded.

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Yeah, all those kids that haven't poisoned themselves are a real drain on our society.

I just don't buy that warning labels somehow create a dumber populace. Are we saying that self-electrocution is a required ingredient for critical thinking?

Warning labels, perhaps not. But in Australia I cannot run Cat6 for "safety". I might electrocute someone with the 12V and must get a licensed professional to do the work for me.

A label warning that high voltage is inside is fine, a required label is quite ok, a fine because you didn't put the label on (even though it wasn't explicitly required) is a little bit of a stretch, banning modification is clearly an overreach (in my book).

There is a line somewhere, and drawing it too close to either end is harmful. So now we're arguing degrees, and not absolutes.

The way this usually works in the USA is a “homeowner’s exemption” - you can run cat6 in your house all you want but you can’t charge others to do it for them without certification/licensing.

Which can lead to all sorts of fun homeowner specials when you buy an older property.

You can also have fun times if they used "professionals". Electricians, and especially plumbers, are like termites. In the course of following their own imperatives, they often do serious damage to the building structure. Sometimes they also screw up their own trades, but more often they screw up something else.

Yeah, even if you're having a custom home built, you either need a really diligent prime contractor, or you need to visit it every day, because nobody cares about anyone else on the job site, and very few companies have all the trades in-house.

Definitely have an independent home inspector do an inspection before the sheetrock goes up. Issues are cheap or free to fix before that step.

A genuine question, from someone who doesn't have the option: would you prefer to have it banned?

No. It’s very nice, but for things like actual electrical and gas work, a permit is required.

Many people don’t pull permits however - it’s something to be aware of when buying older homes. The advent of arc breakers and GFCI have reduced the chance of serious harm in these areas.

And I’ve also seen (and done) work that was significantly above the base line contractor level (that nobody would pay for usually) just because it was the homeowner bothering to do things very right.

In your own house you can not run Cat6? Or is it just can't install as a professional? If the first one, then that is loicense culture gone too far.

I cannot run it "permanently". Basically, I can run it along the floor but not hidden at all as that counts as installing.

https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/diy_cabling_-_read_this_before...

Are you talking about running it in your own house?

Because if you're talking about a commercial building you are talking about a non zero chance of setting up a situation that can harm others. It's not about the 12v. It's about you getting it hooked in with 110/220 and killing someone else. People that do it professionally tend to have liability insurance you pay your survivors something.

I do wonder if too many warning labels leads to warning fatigue. I remember the first time I saw a Proposition 65 warning it gave me serious pause wondering if the product (a set of Christmas lights) was even safe to handle with bare hands. The 10,000th time I didn't notice at all. "Yeah everything causes cancer nowadays whatever who cares". Meaning there is now a chance I will end up ignoring the warning on something that is actually really carcinogenic because everything I buy says it can cause cancer and reproductive harm.

I don't think it's any one thing making society dumber, but there is a clearly a combination of things at work making society dumber. I'd be interested to know which of those things show the highest correlation, but something is inf act making people dumber.

Idiocracy is only 15 years old, how did we get to where we are this fast?

I think warning labels produce a number populace and produce nothing of value. And that's by design. If you put lengthy labels on everything the effect is the same as no labels at all. Nobody reads them and you just use the item as best as you can figure out. In CA they put cancer warning stickers on almost everything. Either you stop buying anything or you ignore them.

I agree about the warning labels being too… eager… but I was shopping in the past and was about to buy a bottle of olive oil, except that there was a big cancer warning on the shelf for that specific bottle. So I bought a different bottle of olive oil that didn’t have the cancer warning. So in that case it was quite effective

So it's not really idiot-proofing, it stems from this:

You have two innocent people. One harms the other, unintentionally. Who pays for the damage?

ex. I throw a rock, it hits your windshield. Total accident. Should I pay?

ex. I manufacture an atv - it's really fun to ride, but it tends to flip over, killing the rider. I obviously don't intend for this to happen, but it does, several times. Should I pay for this? Should the government regulate it?

My personal pet theory for this has always been that the United States was founded by lawyers. Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton were all attorneys.

Of course this doesn’t speak to the rise of lawsuits as an industry in the 70’s and 80’s. I’m not sure of the reasons for that, but as the author notes it had a huge upswing at that time.

The rise of lawsuits is because that's how the system "works". For better or worse. The US doesn't have the same sort of oversight watchdog groups with actual power like in the EU, so lawsuits with threat of monetary damages is how coffee is no longer flesh-burning scaldingly hot.

No, the famous hot-coffee lawsuit did not result in lower service temperatures. Coffee is still widely served at the same flesh-burning scaldingly hot temperatures:

> "Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[37] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[37][38] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[38] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

That's a shame. And also on appeal, the judgement was tamped down. What is the system working here is that the woman got her medical bills paid for, and in a country where medical bankruptcy is a routine thing, that's really important.

There are good reasons for the industry standard high holding and service temperatures. I can tell when coffee has been sitting at temperatures that are too low.

I'm glad Stella got her bills paid, but no, that's not how the system is working. Successful hot coffee lawsuits are extremely rare. I'm aware of only a couple successful payouts in case alleging only excessive temperature. The only two "hot-coffee" lawsuits I know of in the past couple of years both involve defective lids and insufficient warnings.

I personally theorize that many of these considerations are practical, as education quality and quantity have both dropped considerably in the USA over the last generation or so, and precipitously so over two or three generations.

The median person has a lot less knowledge, education, and experience today than in the past, and I hope and believe that the current circumstance is a general response to that as opposed to simply a legal system run amok with assignment of liability.

I can't speak to the quality but quantity has definitively not dropped[0]. More people are more educated now than ever before, and that's only increasing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

I'm talking about the number of things learned, not the number of hours spent under the broad category heading of "education".

Showing that more people graduate high school or university without compensating for the reduced level of education those milestones represent is a somewhat meaningless graph, which predictably goes up and to the right.

The Flynn Effect is about how general intelligence is generally trending upward. In the good old days, people were significantly dumber than they are now.

This holds up in all quantiles. The smartest kids today are much smarter than the smartest kids a few decades ago, and this is apparent in the difficulty level of academic competitions.

Looks like Flynn Effect is in reverse for the last 20 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Not in the USA.

"Some research suggests that there may be an ongoing reversed Flynn effect (i.e., a decline in IQ scores) in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and German-speaking countries,[4] a development which appears to have started in the 1990s.[5][6][7][8] In certain cases, this apparent reversal may be due to cultural changes which render parts of intelligence tests obsolete.[9] Meta-analyses indicate that, overall, the Flynn effect continues, either at the same rate[10] or at a slower rate in developed countries.[11][12]"

I'd contest that idea. Although they may have more knowledge or be intellectual I'd argue people two or three generations back were far more capable than our current population.

They'd be able to fix their own cars, frame their own houses,etc. Most people these days struggle to change their own oil.

These people are also unable to program a VCR. When cars were unreliable, it was beneficial to understand how they worked. When computing devices were unreliable, it was beneficial to understand how they worked. The field-specific skills are different, but the basic reasoning skills were poorer among those older generations.

Have you instead tried thinking that instead of people getting dumber that life is getting more complicated and that we have little tolerance for injury?

Jump back 50 years and the number of people with crippling injuries really skyrockets. Many more people had missing fingers, legs, or arms back then.

>a bunch of idiots that have never learned anything the hard way

Why do people need to learn the hard way? Now that we have YouTube there's less of a need for so many people to repeat the same thing to learn something as opposed to watching a video on it.

When you are watching a video everything seems easy. When you try to repeat what was shown in the video yourself everything becomes impossibly hard. The learning experience is really not comparable.

> Now that we have YouTube there's less of a need for so many people to repeat the same thing to learn something

maybe you can watch a video about: having a girlfriend/boyfriend, going to the beach and surfing, having friends and going on adventure trips with them... all these things were done before, so why do you need to do them when you can just check YT out...? I hope you sense the absurdity of what you're suggesting.

>so why do you need to do them when you can just check YT out...?

That's kind of different as I'm talking about their not being much of a difference watching a chemical in a video and watching it in real life in terms of gaining knowledge.

I don't see anything wrong with watching videos about people exploring or going to the beach. You might even have more fun than doing those things yourself and you don't even need to leave the comfort of your house.

What's even worse is that any time you idiotproof something, better idiots form spontaneously.

Good ol us of a. Continuously building a better idiot.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Please someone think of the lawyers!

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