I don't think this is obvious at all. I think its a reasonable function of the state to pursue policies that improve the mental and physical health of its citizens, partly because the negative effects of an unhealthy population are not limited to the individuals who are unhealthy. Liberty is great. I wouldn't want to live anywhere where it wasn't one of the primary goals of a society, but there is no stone tablet from God saying its needs to be the only goal a society can set.

When you say "a society" sets a goal, it always implies a ruling group of people imposing their view of the common good unto everyone.

How do you make sure that whoever makes that choice makes it in a way you yourself will agree with?

Do you seriously believe that is not happening now? Or that even a libertarian utopia could manage to achieve agreement?

If you're going to get philosophical, go all the way. Why have society at all because it's just people imposing their will on others? Or do you at least agree that there exists a line?

Even though there clearly must be a line on some topics, many people think those lines should be placed to minimize the number of times people are forced to do something (or prevented from doing something) against their will.

It’s not at all obvious that “adults can’t have TikTok” is anywhere near the correct side of that line.

I think a mature person accepts some compromise with society at large. How do you make sure your wife always wants to do what you want? You don't. You live with other people, depend on them, pay for them when they are sick or poor (one way or another). You can't escape society. All that the libertarian view appears to do is make everyone miserable with externalities that a properly functioning state would regulate out of existence.

People's lives are ruined by gambling all the time, for instance. It is dumb to pretend like the pleasure a few people get out of it is worth someone betting away his family's welfare. It is ok to just decide "this needs to be regulated." Not everything is some intractible philosophical mystery that no consensus will ever coalesce around. Not every single thing every single person wants needs to be taken seriously.

This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.

Everything we don't understand we conceptualize using the most similar tools which we do have command over.

I'd much rather live in europe, having experienced both cultures. I don't have any problem with people earning wealth from selling goods and services, but I could do without people who want to be billionaires simply to be a billionaire.

You can claw my HP48 out of my cold, dead, hands.

Perhaps that is all that is required, but I don't want the minimum. I want a simple life with enough to live. I don't want to optimize everything and I don't want to live in a world which is trying to optimize every interaction I participate in.

I have written a very large codebase in Scheme (gambit) and in the end I really, really, wanted a type system to catch bugs.

Jank looks promising if you want a typed Lisp. It’s essentially native Clojure without the JVM: https://jank-lang.org/

In case you're into machine learning, I'm also building something similar - a tensor-first, native Clojure-like ML framework.

There's also Crunch Scheme(from creator of Chicken): https://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/6/crunch

That's why I switched to Common Lisp, its type system isn't perfect but it works well enough for my needs (especially with the occasional (describe 'sycamore:tree-insert) in the REPL).

Can you say more about the system? A lifetime ago I was really excited about gambit (and bigloo) but I never had the chance to work with them beyond messing around here and there after work.

https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp might be of interest. It's a statically typed lisp.

I get where you're coming from but I talked to a few folks working in large Haskell codebases and I'm not sure I would make that trade.

Yeah, its genuinely a case of "software hard."

Kawa is a Scheme which runs on the JVM and is pretty great.

https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/index.html

I am one of these people who cannot countenance a Lisp that doesn't have `syntax-case`.

kawa is unfortunately a somewhat shoddy project. Alot of halfbaked features / abstraction ideas (eg trying to support CL for whatever reason), dubious tooling for a java project (autotools), unclean and inconsistent code formatting. It's missing some features that are expected in a real scheme like multishot continuations; someone wrote research about it as a MSc thesis, but due to mentioned shoddiness its integration to upstream stalled and hadn't been merged.

At some point I thought of forking it to then cut out and polish the core, but then my attention got caught by graal's truffle framework as a plausibly better path for implementing scheme in java

Its funny, I can definitely sympathize with wanting multishot continuations, but I can't think of many times where I have wanted them to solve a problem.

Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.

Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?

This is only a few countries. There’s many more considering it.

Freon bans?

That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.

These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.

People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.

Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.

Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.

Nah, this doesn't pass the sniff test. Anyone saying otherwise wasn't paying attention.

It passes the sniff test, it’s just that you weren’t informed or were aware of the build up of issues over the past decade.

There’s known issues with bullying, grooming, to mental hygiene issues like screen addiction and poor focus.

Hell, these are the first generations which have lower educational attainment than its predecessors.

It’s been reported on over and over again. It’s a cost center so no one cares about it.

Maybe I'm just spoiled with a large working memory, but I don't want an AI agent thinking or remembering of synthesizing for me. Seems like a great way to never have a new idea.