[whateverman23]

People often confuse society as a whole with individual choices.

An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard.

But when talking about society as a whole, that breaks down. Society is going to have a percentage of people who don't brush and floss. Who aren't managing their diet and weight. Who are taking risks beyond what you find acceptable.

When talking about society as a whole, it's a dead end to just say, "well people should just be better". It doesn't work that way, and it certainly doesn't fix anything. Society will always have people who have a lot of sex. Making it safer is better. Society will always have people who have teeth issues. Not having them die or be in massive pain is better. Society will always have people who can't maintain a healthy weight. Making it easier is better.

[monological]

Of course, what you're saying is obvious. I'm just asking questions to get people to think about the ramifications of technology. Society is the sum of all the individual choices people make, which are influenced and amplified by technology, either for good or bad.

[r00fus]

Are these questions really about the technology or philosophy about what constitutes a society?

Tool use is fundamental to any meaningful society and that's technology.

[TeMPOraL]

> An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard.

Maybe I'm one of that percentage, but I wouldn't describe these things as not hard.

But the problem GP highlights is that of a ratchet - those changes start as choices, but then become requirements. Key example:

>> A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be

>> able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.

> Why did this person choose to move physically away from their tribe? To slave away at a job they don't care about? Would they have chosen to move away if the tech to communicate long distance didn't exist?

That's the ratchet in action. Progress in transportation at first enabled people to pursue new opportunities, new living arrangements. But as more and more people did that, everyone started relying on others being able to travel long distances fast. It became a social expectation, and a professional expectation, and that's how in a few decades, we went from cars being generally-available, to car culture, urban sprawl, hour+-long commutes, and constant gridlock. Problems we can't extricate ourselves from now.

The same mechanism is at play with every new invention. Even the humble clock is something you need to have, because you need to sync with people in time to minute precision, because everyone else has a clock and expects this too. Same with phones and bank accounts. Smartphones, Internet, credit/debit cards are just finishing this process too - arguably this is held back by the governments, who need to service everyone, including the elderly, but wait a few more decades for those elderly to die, and we'll see governments closing physical offices and removing in-person processes to cut costs, at which point smartphones (or their future equivalents) and Internet will become necessities.

Another, more controversial example: all the efforts to make women equally able to pursue careers and have equal pay - they started as clearly beneficial, offering choice to people who did not have it before. But couple decades down the line, the market adjusted to the workforce effectively doubling, and now single-income households are increasingly impossible. And so, at first, women could choose to work, but today, they have to. There is no choice anymore. This becomes a huge problem when children are in the mix, as in an average family, neither parent can become a stay-at-home one. Instead, children get sent to daycares and kindergartens, which of course cost money, further locking both parents into their jobs, and because child care facilities are group spaces, kids constantly get sick, creating huge logistics hassle for parents...

This is not to criticize women's right movements here - only to point out that the choice won was temporary, and the society/economy forcing a two-income model creates a whole set of other problems we're still figuring out how to deal with. Hopefully one of these days we'll figure out how to have equality while supporting either of the partners to be the stay-at-home one.

[musicale]

I wonder how family income has tracked increases in the cost of housing, health care, and/or higher education?

[TeMPOraL]

That's a big part of where the market ate the sudden surplus when two-income household became a widespread thing. That's what markets do: if people, on average, have X$ more disposable income, the prices of everything will adjust until X = 0.

The "on average" in the sentence above is key - those whose surplus of money was less than X end up worse off.

[chii]

> Making it easier/safer is better.

But who bears the cost of this betterment? I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice, esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".

That's why all individual choices should have individual consequences, and only under some circumstances where there's a prisoner's dilemma should there be a method/regulation to enforce cooperation.

[whateverman23]

> But who bears the cost of this betterment?

We all do, of course.

> I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice

Then, in some cases, you'd prefer them dead/permanently disabled/permanently in pain/etc. Which, I guess is a position to have, but not one I'd like to take. It sounds like I'm exaggerating here but I'm not.

Remember, the theory in the posts above is that technology makes people more likely to take more risky behaviors. And I'm arguing that there will always be a significant percentage of the population that engages in risky behaviors (for whatever your definition of risky is), and we should have technology to help.

> esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".

Not everything is black and white. We are allowed to pick and choose here and limit this from happening. Most examples we've been talking about involve an individual having to use some communal system, like a healthcare system. That isn't an "advantage" or "profit" that the individual is abusing.

[deterministic]

Did you pay for the roads you drive on or your freedom others died for? Do you pay for insurance? It’s kinda hard not to indirectly pay for others bad choices.