Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn? Rolling coal and other egregious pollution? Online gambling? Abortion? Fentanyl?
Evidence. If you think something is harmful to society, you have a hypothesis. The next step is to test it. Not assume it's true and ban everything.
I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful. If I had to hazard a guess, and this is again just a hypothesis, I'd actually suspect that a teenager exposed to porn games is less likely to suffer mental-health issues than one on algorithmic social media or forming intimate connections with chatbots.
For them, n=1 is enough evidence. For their moral compass or larger scale goals, n=1 is one too many.
There will always be some people - teenagers or otherwise - that develop mental health issues from e.g. porn games. But there's people developing mental health issues from Farmville or ChatGPT supposedly turning sentient and sharing the infinite Truth of the universe too. Somehow those aren't an issue.
It's not about preventing mental health issues. It's not about protecting women.
If cigarette was banned from the beginning, we would still see people getting mad without much evidence.
The truth is the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer.
Precautionary principle should always prevail.
That's why we just don't go full GMO, and you would still not wait for any proof that "it's harmless".
You also don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless.
Additionally, without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette).
TL;DR: You actually need a proof, but it's a proof that it's harmless and not the other way around.
Of course, these things don't live in a vacuum; the manufacturers of e.g. pesticides have a vested financial interest in selling their product, because money. They pay for scientific studies in favor of their product, they schmooze (= bribe) with decision makers and politicians, they overwhelm the system, they take their product global and sell it to whoever is buying, etc.
Same with cigarettes or asbestos or lead paint; it's part "we didn't know" because it's long-term effects or the science wasn't there yet, but part "shut up and buy my product" too.
Anyway, proof that it's harmless is not easy to get in certain cases, not when the effects only show up long-term or when the science doesn't yet know how to test. Was science at a point where they could test for the presence and endocrine effects of microplastics in the human body?
This makes sense. If anybody at any point thinks that something might be bad, it should immediately and permanently be prohibited for everyone. We don’t need a mechanism to check this because people are never mistaken or misled, and there is no such thing as a bad actor.
Since the principle should always prevail, it applies to people as well. If anybody thinks that another person could do harm in the future, they should be allowed to kill them in order to protect society from harm.
A system where the only rule is “every person gets to make the rules for everyone else” isn’t the stupidest imaginable thing because
Yes. Then the evidence was suppressed for decades more. We have no analogy here.
> Precautionary principle should always prevail
Why? Why assume the status quo is perfect? Also, what part of pornography isn't embedded into the human status quo?
> don't use a random pesticide, unless you have a full proof that's it's harmless
There is no such thing as "full proof."
> without cigarette, without GMO and without pesticide humanity would still be fine, and maybe better without (if we stick with the cigarette)
Now do vaccines, antibiotics, filtered water, the agricultural revolution and every other life-saving invention.
This is sort of like Jordan Peterson's claim that something is true if it improves evolutionary fit - a claim that seems reasonable on the surface but is rotten nonsense inside.
That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.
>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?
My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.
simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)
Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.
But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.
Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.
Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.
The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.
There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.
This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.
In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.
How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?
Nobody has any right to dictate other people's lives. For his view to be even considered, he should be required to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that whatever he is against is actually harmful. And after that, only after that, should the voting whether this finding should influence public policy begin.
People should be allowed to harm themselves when they are informed about the consequences. Similarly, society should be allowed to harm itself because not everything has to be a race to the bottom of productivity and strength.
Do abortions lower the birth rate and are more populous societies stronger? Even _if_ the answers are yes to both, I don't see why any society should optimize this metric to the extreme. And theological arguments quickly fall apart in the first step of proving harm.
The pragmatics of activism prove contrary to this ideal. The reality is that this is a failed argument and it will continue to fail regardless of how often it's repeated. I hate to say it, but the only way to counter is to win at the activism game rather than complain about the rules.
Are you, personally, harmed by someone watching porn?
Maybe it makes society as a whole weaker compared to other societies but that doesn't mean your society actually loses anything. Countries have nuclear weapons and multi-national defense pacts now. Just because China has several times the population of the US and could win a conventional war, doesn't mean it's gonna invade.
We don't live in tribes of a few hundred people who are constantly on the brink of starvation and/or genocide anymore. But many people are still governed by instincts from that environment.
Side stepping local country government, and applying pressure to payment processors to enforce your own rules globally should not be able to happen. Even a government should not be able to dictate what other countries do.
And in the case of addiction like drugs or gambling, instead of stigmatizing the victims, they should be there to support them.
Let people make their own decisions, not the government.
