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CronoDAS comments on Ureshiku Naritai - Less Wrong
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That particular theory, no. I don't think I've mentioned it online before.
I grant that my theory would be rather hard to prove or disprove. If you want to argue that something is absolutely safe, you'd probably be giving a bunch of caveats about proper use and suitable people to use it. If you want to argue that something isn't absolutely safe, you'll be bringing up sloppy use and side effects.
Meditation is very commonly recommended as good for people. Alicorn is the first person I've heard of who reacted that badly to it.
The practical application of my theory is to take some care in how you make general recommendations of what seems like it should be good for everyone, and pay attention if something which is supposed to be good for everyone seems to be going wrong on you.
I think that is related to the theory of why idiot-proofing is misguided. If you want to make something completely idiot-proof, you have to make it impossible to make a bad decision, which, in practice, means taking away the ability to make any decisions at all - meaning that anything idiot-proof is also pretty much guaranteed to be completely useless. If something is powerful enough to do good, it has to be powerful enough to change something, and, as in the case of idiot-proofing, it's really, really hard to prevent every possible bad change without preventing all change whatsoever.
Good theory, but I also quite like the more traditional theory:
Do you like it, or believe it?
Mostly like it for comedy value, but I think there is an element of truth.
I would agree, on reflection.
Edit: I am curious if we see the same element, however. It seems to me that that element is aptly summarized as "writing a program that cannot fail spectacularly when used by someone who doesn't understand it is a tremendous challenge - one which is necessary to face, but one which has stood against the combined best efforts of at least a generation of programmers."