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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure a philosophy PhD would probably identify this being a regurgitation/reinvention of previous work, but it's still a nicely put argument .

I know there is an allergy to considerations of safety in parts of the tech community (because it's boring and buts up against a libertarian view of the world), but safety is good! People not wrapping their cars and themselves around electricity poles is good! People not having their life savings stolen by hackers is good! Kids not getting groomed by paedophiles is good!

Yeah, we should be cognizant of tradeoffs and safety is by no means the only thing we should value, but it is something we should value and work towards.

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Safety is a trash concept and I don't even need to be Wittgenstein to prove it.

What is absolute safety? You must answer with a synthetic concept. That's pure fail. It becomes a judgment, not a definition. But you want to play a cute game and invoke pedophiles even though your argument is just another judgment and therefore does not define absolutely.

See, you can work with code and be completely illogical.

Truth hurts, huh? Downvote without rebuttal means you admit I'm right & it makes you angry. Thanks.

You had me until the "groomer" version of "think of the children."

Concern over safety (especially of the children) is a political weapon. A ridiculously overused one. I think that's part of why people react the way they do.

I am not a libertarian, but in recent decades safety has been the excuse for the erosion of our civil liberties in the US, so I can understand why their feathers would be ruffled by this.

I am not so sure safety is a thing we should value or work towards in general. I'd claim something like "well-being" on an individual and a group level would be more important. But safety and well-being are both still vague abstract generalities, so not terribly useful yet. We need stronger definitions or frameworks for those concepts and we need to talk about them as applied in specific instances.

Safety has become the battle cry of the fascist, the totalitarian, and it is the murderer of liberty.

'Safe' is as vulnerable to scrutiny as 'Game' or 'Good.'

I agree that “think of the children” has been misused by power-hungry cops.

I’m emphatically not saying that safety should be the only consideration when thinking about technology. But what I am saying is that preventing clear harms to people is important and undervalued by the (predominantly) relatively young men who start tech companies.

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