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0 pointsajuc5y ago0 comments

> Half of adults play video games and about half of those play violent video games

The outrage was mostly about children and permanent damage to their brains caused by games. Almost all children play games, and certainly more than half of all games (weighted by popularity) are violent.

> very high, say 1 out of 1,000

That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.

If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem TBH.

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troupe5y ago

I get what you are saying. Keep in mind I'm just saying this would be how we look for causation, not whether it makes sense to actually do something about it.

> That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.

I guess I'm thinking of how we'd view a side effect in medicine. If 1 out of 1,000 people who had the problem the medicine was supposed to cure were likely to die or cause a death when taking the medicine, it would seem like a high number of deaths. You'll routinely see side effects of things that happened 1 in 50,000 cases being listed as possible side effects of medicine.

> If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem

Whether this matters probably depends on what violent thing they do. If it is an additional Columbine type event for every 100k people, that would be much less acceptable than one additional instance of verbal abuse by someone in a disagreement at a bar.

ajucOP5y ago

In medicine they give the probability out of all people using the drug, you gave the conditional probability with many assumptions.

This would be like saying "this drug might kill 1 out of 1000 people who also have this rare gene which only 1% of population has".

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