A truly elegant argument in favour of getting hit with a baseball bat every week.

It seems to be an argument against restrictive paternalism, enforced dependence and misguided risk aversion.

The implied game analysis is something along the lines of the following:

• Running into a pole is a drag (negative -100 utilons).
• Living a life dependent on caretakers and restricted from most of human experience gives 50 utilons per day and results in 1 pole hit per 100 days.
• Living a completely independent life open to most possible lifestyles and experiences is worth 1,000 utilons per day and, if you are blind, may result in running into a pole once every two days.

Within that framework he would consider anyone who limits themselves unnecessarily to be crazy (irrationally risk averse or suffering from learned helplessness) and anyone who restricts the options available to blind people under their control to be perpetrating a serious harm (through misguided but possibly well meaning paternalism).

Consider the following similar declaration:

Falling off a bike is a drag. When learning to ride children will inevitably fall off their bikes. A child never being allowing to ride is far worse than falling off a bike sometimes. Pain is part of the price of freedom.

Most people can acknowledge the deleterious effects of too much coddling of that kind and Kish emphasises that it applies in exactly the same way to blind people as well. And not just because they are deprived of the experience of mountain biking by echolocation but more importantly because it trains the coddlee to rely on caretakers rather than themselves, stifling initiative and capability in a way similar to that which Eliezer recently discussed.

I saw it more as opposing restrictions on one's ability to hit oneself in the head with a baseball bat every week. I'm not saying anyone should do it, but if they really want to I don't feel I have the right to stop them.

There is an important distinction between 'not being allowed to run into a pole' and just 'not running into poles because you look where you're going'.