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Comment by confoundcofound | Hacker News Reader

Something tells me you are wholly unaware of the damage that addiction and obesity can inflict not just on the person afflicted, but on their family, community, and society as a whole. The benefits/costs equation is so massively lopsided here that you'd be cruel to advocate that people endure years of avoidable torment to satisfy your faulty notion of free will / agency. I can't think of anything more agency-promoting than ridding someone of their addictions.

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What line would you draw between the technology existing and being useful to society and people's fundamental and inalienable right to refuse ever having it used on them?

Following their original thread, how would you feel if the government decided that this could be used for criminal correction, or if a company made going through a quick brain cleanse a part of the hiring process, or a college part of it's onboarding, or the military a part of boot camp?

Do we clean every spot to flawless similarity or just clean the bad thoughts?

If the latter, who gets to decide what the bad thoughts are?

Your argument is akin to being against needles because the government might use them to perform lethal injections.

I don't know if you've ever known any addicts, but they aren't exactly happy about being addicted. Give them a treatment that works and is affordable and most of them will be just happy to get some targeted head buzzing to treat their symptoms.

There is a similarity but I don't think it's quite 1:1. Both of your reference points are an order of magnitude weaker or stronger than mine.

As I've said in other responses, my viewpoint is coming from the viewpoint of a generally healthy mind and not wanting that to be taken from me.

If I become someone with an unhealthy mind my viewpoint could change.

Hysterical scaremongering which masquerades as lucid, rational thought doesn't go very far here.

Once again, an order of magnitude more than the reality. My response was not by any but the thinnest stretched imagination "hysterical scaremongering"

Your real problem is with the state, not with technology.

Wrong again. It's trusting my brain to other people.

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