It’s surprising how much society apparently thinks merely being above 85 IQ is sufficient to gate all kinds of things behind. Like, bomb-making. As though there isn’t ample information available that anyone with 4 brain cells can find. Yet we see utility apparently in worrying about whether the most smooth-brained would-be bomber gets a useful answer from a chatbot.

The counter-argument here is Popcorn Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time) which brings together search and bittorrent with a nice UI and makes piracy a bit too easy.

Or Firesheep (https://codebutler.com/2010/10/24/firesheep/) which made impersonating someone’s facebook account a breeze by sniffing their credentials which were sent in clear text (eg. on cafe wifi) and showing them in a UI and made stealing credentials a bit too easy, leading to wide calls for broad adoption of https everywhere.

Or Dropbox, which the nerds derided as pointless “because I can build my own”.

It’s fuzzy and individual, but there’s a qualitative difference - a tipping point - where making things too easy can be irresponsible. Your tipping point just happens to be higher than the average.

Most people are fine with catastrophic failure cases as long as Mr. Fart doesn't get to say his favorite color: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

> It’s surprising how much society apparently thinks merely being above 85 IQ is sufficient to gate all kinds of things behind.

Doing the thing just needs to be at least as hard as automatically recognizing (ie without deliberately spending effort on it) that it's a bad idea to do the thing.