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by colechristensen 1339 days ago
Honestly though there should be limits to the amount that a disclaimer should be able to protect you when your product advises people to do dangerous things you know (or have every responsibility to know) could be lethal.

There’s a lot of room between a one in a billion mistake that hurts somebody and a fifty fifty chance a mushroom is poisonous. There are plenty of edible vs deadly mushrooms that only have incredibly subtle differences that you should trust nobody but a human expert to identify.

Effectively what I’m saying is a disclaimer shouldn’t be able to get you out of murder charges for a game of Russian roulette.

2 comments

It identifies plants and animals. The main use is not for finding food. "advises people to do dangerous things" is a ridiculous way to describe it.
>Effectively what I’m saying is a disclaimer shouldn’t be able to get you out of murder charges for a game of Russian roulette.

By your logic knife makers will all be praying that their knives arent used for killing or harming people or they'd be charged for murder.

This isn’t at all the case.

These identification apps are selling incomplete information where the need for full information about toxins is obvious.

Nobody was ever surprised that a knife hurt somebody or had cause to accuse a knife maker that their product could cut things in a way a consumer wouldn’t know about.

The issue isn’t that a tool can be harmful but that a danger to the producer of a product would be obligated to know and share isn’t obvious to the consumer without previous knowledge. If you’re selling information you must know your audience.

Any human teaching you to identify mushrooms will teach you about the risks of poison right away. “I didn’t tell you what you needed to know but you should have known better” only works when it’s reasonable for you to know better. General audience mushroom identifiers shouldn’t be expected to know how easily a misidentification could kill them, plus it’s just not difficult to do.

This doesn’t match the situation with knives unless you can find me someone who really does need to be warned about knives and isn’t, say, 4 years old.