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I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.

• sjwright 8y ago
  That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently. The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.
  • dymk 8y ago
    You're literally comparing the decision making skills of lesser financial means to those of child - which strikes me as extremely problematic. To claim that the "us" commenters of HN have some specialized skillset, tuned to consume better media than the rest of the world, absolutely baffles me. Can we agree that mentally stable adult humans, generally, should have some agency and responsibility to choose how they consume media?
    • sjwright 8y ago
      You're putting words in my mouth. My point has nothing to do with someone's relative affluence or poverty. All I'm saying is that in almost all domains, everyone in modern society relies upon the expertise of others. That's equally true for Bill Gates as it is for the homeless person waiting in line at the soup kitchen. I'm not even going to respond to your second paragraph because it's almost insulting that you thought it necessary to ask.