[glwiththat]

If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or…

Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives

[schiffern]

  >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]

I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly."

Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.

[pwndByDeath]

Cause and correlation, education gives you options, it always comes to a choice, I know the donuts lead somewhere but I choose to eat two anyway.

Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.

[shevy-java]

> If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards

This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.

> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives

Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.

Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.

[GoblinSlayer]

Many people believe their mind is a passive reflection of reality, thus any change that happens to mind is infallible by definition. I wonder how can they possibly resist addiction with such mindset.

[mikkupikku]

Clearly education doesn't work, so Europe must ban any speech concerning fattening foods, drinking alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling, upsetting news and video games.

If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!

[MASNeo]

Oh my, that is a depressing view on the human condition.

[ceteia]

But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility?