Nornagest comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 March 2007 06:53PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 17 March 2013 01:19:55AM *  1 point [-]

Certain types of content labeling might work a lot like Hanson's Banned Shop, minus the trivial inconvenience of going to a different shop: the more obvious and dire the label, the closer the approximation. Cigarettes are probably the most advanced example I can think of.

Now, cigarettes have also been extensively regulated in other ways, so we can't infer from this too well, but I think we can tentatively describe the results as mixed: it's widely understood that cigarettes stand a good chance of killing you, and smoking rates have indeed gone down since labeling laws went into effect, but it's still common. Whether or not we count this as a win probably depends on whether, and how much, we believe smokers' reasons for smoking -- or dismiss them as the dribble of a hijacked habit-formation system.