> when you see something that you think is harmful to society, what determines whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition

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.

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Cthulhu_ 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thing is, with things like these, they only need one or a handful of cases. With everything, there is always a handful of cases - porn addicts, gambling addicts, revenge porn victims, trans women in women's spaces and sports, etc. The fundamentalists and right-wing media will hyperfocus and signal boost these statistically insignificant cases to push their own agenda.

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.

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kreco 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is not the correct way.

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.

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Cthulhu_ 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

But things like pesticides are being tested and approved first. With the knowledge they were able to get at the time, they were approved. It was only later, when long term and large scale usage of certain pesticides were shown to have a negative impact on the ecosystem that they looked at them again.

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?

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jrflowers 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Precautionary principle should always prevail.

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

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JumpCrisscross 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the evidence is coming half a century after when everyone got cancer

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.

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kreco 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Why? Why assume the status quo is perfect? Also, what part of pornography isn't embedded into the human status quo?

No one said that. But you should fool yourself saying that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Here is your own quote:

> I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> No one said that If the precautionary principle should always prevail, then yes, that's what's being said. In this case, it's difficult to even disentangle what the status quo is. Pornography, this group's bogeyman, is millenia old. Computer games, decades. The combination is a bit novel, but it's also more precedented than these bans. > I have seen zero evidence that any of these games are harmful Yeah. I see evidence they're demanded by the people who we're putatively protecting, however. And I see lots of evidence of other harmful things that aren't banned. Herego, why the fuck are we kneejerking on this?
	▲	rpdillon 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's probably a fundamental political question underlying a lot of these discussions: do you default to letting people do things or not? My long-held belief is that there's a certain hubris to saying that you know best for everyone. So I default to letting people do things, since preventing them is exerting power over them. With that framing, you would need evidence that something is harmful if you're going to exert power over other people to prevent them from doing it.

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7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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tomrod 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I disagree, the precautionary principle (Chesterton's fence) is heavily overused, often as a bludgeon and for power maintenance.

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.