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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

Of course not, we sue the shit out of the richest guy we can find in the chain of events, give most of it to our lawyer, then go on to ignore the weakening of the family unit and all the other deep-seated challenges kids face growing up and instead focus superficially on chatbots which at best are the spec on the tip of the iceberg.

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"The weakening of the family unit" sounds like a dog whistle but if you have concrete examples of what you think we could otherwise be doing then I'm genuinely keen to hear about it.

We saw big jumps in deaths of kids by firearm[0] (+~50% in 2 years) and poisoning[1] around mid 2020 to 2021.

The biggest thing I know of that happened around the time that a lot of these deaths started jumping up, is we started isolating kids. From family, from grandma, from friends, from school, and from nature. Even when many of these isolating policies or attitudes were reversed, we forgot that kids and teenagers started to learn that as their only reality. For this kid, trusting a suicidal ideation positive feedback loop brought into fruition by Valley tech-bros was seen as his selected option in front of him in term of options of how to navigate his teenage challenges. I hope we can reverse that.

Edit: Concrete facts regarding this particular case

- Kicked off basketball team

- Went through isolation period of pandemic as he experienced puberty

- Switched to remote school

- Does remote school at night when presumably family members would likely be sleeping

- Does not get normal "wake up" routine kids going to school get, during which they normally see a parent and possibly eat breakfast together before they both go off to school/work

- Closer with ChatGPT in terms of options to share suicidal ideation with, than any of the alternatives.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023...

[1] https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/mtfwcaption-...

You've misunderstood. I'm asking how you suggest we go about strengthening the family unit or what other steps you believe we could take that would place the responsibility for societal improvement on the right shoulders.

In this particular case, as crazy as it sounds, I think early attempts by both the parent and school to make reasonable accommodation for in-person students with IBS to take a lot of extra bathroom breaks would have at least tilted the scales a little bit. It looks like the kid was shifted to remote school after he got IBS and some people at school weren't understanding of his situation. This put him on the path where he was staying up all night "doing remote school" but also had a nearly full-worknight amount of unfettered time with suicide-AI for months on end with no daytime obligations, sleeping in and not seeing his parents in the morning, and losing contact with peers.

Of course this is a hindsight analysis, but there's not much evidence that more contact with family and peers would make the situation worse.

I think from my prior comment it's obvious I'd like to prevent a lot of isolating policies on low-risk groups from happening again during another pandemic, so I don't think I need to go over that again.

For broader society, I suppose the concrete action item is if you see a young family or friend, we should aspire to reach out to them and see how to integrate them in something we might like to do with them.

Do you propose that the family should not sue?

I don't blame a grieving family for suing, they probably have 1000 lawyers whispering in their ear about how putting their kid in a media campaign with an agenda and dragging them through a lawsuit where they have to re-live the suicide over and over will make their lives better.

Sue everybody. Maybe sue the heavy metal bands that he was listening to too.

It's probably healthier for them if they can afford it. Otherwise they would blame themselves for so badly losing track about where their son was mentally.

In reality suicidality is most likely a disease of the brain and probability of saving him was very low regardless of circumstances. The damage was most likely accumulating for many years.

I remember how relieved the Sandy Hook families were after the Alex Jones judgement. Alex Jones said some vile things, but the biggest thing bothering those families was the death of their kids.

But the families couldn't go after the murderer (who killed himself), or even the murderer's upbringing by the mother (Lanza shot her). They desperately needed someone to clamp down on, but everything directly proximal was out of grasp. They couldn't get the gun laws changed either. It drove them insane.

The families started blaming Alex Jones, the closest vile person around with big pockets (who did say some pretty insane lies about their kids), for everything wrong with their lives and eventually won a settlement large enough you would think he killed the kids themselves. And from what I can tell, it was a weight off their shoulders when they did. Whatever in their brains that needed to hold someone accountable, they did it, and it was soothing to them.

Alex Jones made his money by convincing people that the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary were actors in a conspiracy, which resulted in them bein harassed endlessly. He even continued to attack them during the defamation trials. I think it's unfair to say he was merely "the closest vile person around with big pockets," he really was the cause of a lot of pain.

I don't know how anyone can look at the $1B judgement and not decide it was about $10M of "lied about the kids" and $990M of "we can't get the murderer so here's some money from the nearest evil rich guy we could pin something on."

As far as I know they didn't assign those kind of liabilities to the individuals that actually contacted the families to harass them, it's pretty clear the $1B wasn't just about harassment by people (who weren't Jones) that did it informed by his lies.

> I don't know how anyone can look at the $1B judgement and not decide

There's more to the case than that number.

> $10M of "lied about the kids"

Ridiculous. I'm not going to waste any more of my time replying to you.

Sure, and if you ignore the number, which is quite convenient for you after you oh so lamentedly "wasted" a few sentences of your guarded time, you can rightly surmise that Jones lied and was made to pay injuries for it. Once you look and see the number is the size of the GDP of Granada at the time, then you realize it was about more than telling lies that some entirely different people used for purposes of harassments.

The fact that Jones did do something wrong after all are what opened him to being the nearest proximal vile guy with deep pockets to go after and take the brunt of what was dished out. The interesting piece here isn't that the victims got a check from Jones, it's that they got a blank check.

I’m not sure why you have such an axe to grind with the parents of innocent kids who were murdered while at school, then terrorized by mobs of idiots incited on purpose to sell overpriced supplements by yet another idiot.

It’s not the parents who set the award. If you don’t think as a parent who has gone through hell not just once when your kid was gunned down in cold blood but then proceeded to have total strangers harass them on a daily basis would push for the most punishing award possible, you are pretty out of touch.

If you feel that award was not proportional to the damage, why don’t you pick a bone with the judge or jury? They are the ones who ultimately decided the verdict after all.

You have to look at the but for cause. Would there have been throngs of people harassing these people if not for Alex Jones goading them on, over and over and over?

Do you understand what punitive damages are?

you're kidding right? Alex Jones would not stop telling everybody that the families made everything up to the point the families were getting death threats and phone calls non-stop, years after their children were murdered.

What's you theory as to why Jones got a $1B judgement against him for vicious lies, while the people making death threats (none of which were Alex Jones) did not?

What sounds more like reality, awarding the entire GDP of the nation of Granada to compensate for dead kids, or because lies were told that other idiots used to propagate mean threats?

Why shouldn't they get judgements too? Some people's voices are more outspoken than others. They deserve to be punished more when they break the law and cause harm.

> They desperately needed someone to clamp down on … It drove them insane.

> Whatever in their brains that needed to hold someone accountable, they did it, and it was soothing to them.

Now do Peter Thiel & Gawker.

Classic. Blame the family. Diffuse responsibility. Same exact shit with social media: it's not our fault we made this thing to be as addictive as possible. It's your fault for using it. It's your moral failing, not ours.

It's not addictive, it's useful. By letting the government decide what we can do with it, you're neutering it and giving big business a huge advantage as they can run their own AI and don't require censoring it.

And if we didn't have these pesky regulations, we could have our burning rivers back! Those bastards took away our perfect asbestos too. The children yearn for the coal mines.

Businesses can, will, and have hurt people and trampled people's rights in the pursuit of money.

The government won't be regulating business usage though that my entire point.

These things are addictive though. They're often literally engineered to maximise engagement, and the money that goes into that completely dwarfs the power of schools and parents.

Isn't one of the common complaints about GPT5 that it is less sycophantic and people feel less connection to it? That is a design choice and it isn't hard to see it as similar to the choices maximizing engagement for social media. You can call it maximizing engagement, but that is addicting. And it works.

I recently started using a site after years of being mostly on a small number of forums, and I can feel the draw of it. Like I've lost the antibodies for my attention. Or they've made it better, either way I'm working on either coming up with a strategy which minimizes my feeling of needing to check in, mostly by adding friction, or just deleting my account.

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