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fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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This seems like a dictionary dispute.
In one sense, a con-man who sells you a fake medicine to treat a serious affliction is "giving you what you want". After all, you willingly paid for the medicine, and — not knowing that it is fake, and expecting it is a real cure — you believe that you are better off than before the exchange. You feel better having bought it; in the moment, you are glad to have bought it.
But in another sense, he is not "giving you what you want", because your goal in buying the medicine was to get a cure for the affliction, and fake medicine won't do that. Once you find out that you have been defrauded, you are not glad any more, but probably angry or indignant at being deceived. Not very many people would react to discovering that they have been cheated, by fondly recalling how nice it felt to believe that they would be cured.
No, I don't think this is a meaningful sense of "what you want". In the same way giving your wallet to an armed robber is "what you want", too.
I agree; I wouldn't use the word that way — but that notion of "want" would explain the way miekw is using it above.