gaaaaaaaaaaah

“If $THING were actually bad for people, they wouldn’t do it!” is a really terrible argument. 

Our psychology was not engineered to optimize our well-being.  (That’s not how evolution works, and even if it were, we evolved for a very different environment than the one in which we live.)  We are drawn to diets that kill us.  We are drawn to gambles that are negative-expected-value.  And, yes, we are drawn to lifestyles and social structures that make us miserable, because human brains systematically overweight certain kinds of inputs and underweight others.  This is predictable.  This happens literally all the time, everywhere, with everyone.

…look.  Paternalism-versus-libertarianism is a complicated meta-debate.  Honestly, I come down on the libertarian side the vast majority of the time, for most concrete social-policy purposes; because there’s so much variation between people, I’d rather let them pursue their own idiosyncratic forms of welfare than force them to accept a best-for-the-average-bear solution.  When I do support paternalistic solutions, I tend to be adamant about giving them escape hatches. 

But if someone is saying “People doing X to themselves is a problem that we are actually seeing in the world,” and you’re saying “How could that ever be a problem?  Why would anyone ever do such a thing?” – you are probably the one making a mistake.