One argument in favor of it is intuition. Looking at pictures of forbidden things might reasonably make it more likely you’d do those things. There is resistance in many quarters to applying this reasoning to the parallel situations of fictional violence in movies and to the degradation of women in pornography, in part because there is no convincing data.
If you care about the issue you are pushing, don’t make assertions like that without linking to relevant meta studies.
I might appear to have a vested interest in the availability of such materials. I don’t, personally, though the number of men who are given years in prison for looking at pictures does distress me deeply.
Motivated reasoning doesn’t score you points on Lesswrong. In a case like that you would profit from keeping your language as academic as possible.
It might be okay to make a joke about suffering that those men who are imprisoned face but making jokes in contexts like this isn’t easy so I wouldn’t recommend you to try.
In any case, one of the rationality principles does say that arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, not the attributes of the person making them.
You yourself say that you are in the emotion of distress that indicates that you aren’t thinking clearly about the issue and it helps people to draw conclusions about your argument.
A reasonable analogy might be sex education. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it will make kids (teens especially) think about sex and become sexually active. The data doesn’t support that, of course, and the explanation is that kids are thinking about sex already. Pedophiles are also thinking about sex; the fact that the people they are attracted to are always inappropriate partners doesn’t change this aspect of the situation.
If that analogy is correct there little we can do with regards to pedophiles besides locking them up. Cyberporn legislation would be a tool to do so.
Besides you fail to provide any reason why this analogy should hold. Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the enviroment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile?
I believe one major objection to all forms, including the virtual, is rarely formulated: people find it gross and disgusting.
The fact that you think it’s rarely formulated says more about you than about the position against which you are arguing. There are plenty of people who do consider all forms of pornography to go against human dignity and to objective the objects that pornography shows.
Even if that doesn’t bother someone, the alternative of virtual child pornography should be tried first.
That leaves the question of how to decide if a given image is virtual or isn’t.
Non-consequentialists don’t want to sacrifice the welfare of a few children to help the many.
That no sentence that you should write in a context like. It raises emotions that you don’t want to get raised.
You also haven’t identified what welfare you care about. Is it about the pleasure of consuming child pornography?
If so, is it basically about providing a way for pedophiles to wirehead themselves? If that isn’t the goal what is?
You also muddle your goal. You start by pretending that you just want a discussion about whether child porn availability increases child sex abuse and end by calling for legal changes.
PS: Lean to format your links correctly. Not knowing how to format links signals your outsider status.
Thanks for the tips on how to make more persuasive arguments. One reason I don’t source many things is because I don’t know what is controversial and what isn’t. I sort of rely on a (politely) adversarial process. If someone questions an assertion I make, I can see if I can find a source.
A reasonable analogy might be sex education. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it will make kids (teens especially) think about sex and become sexually active. The data doesn’t support that, of course, and the explanation is that kids are thinking about sex already. Pedophiles are also thinking about sex; the fact that the people they are attracted to are always inappropriate partners doesn’t change this aspect of the situation...
If that analogy is correct there little we can do with regards to pedophiles besides locking them up. Cyberporn legislation would be a tool to do so.
Few ordinary kids rape other kids or otherwise break the law with regard to their sexual activity. Pedophiles following that pattern would mostly not abuse children.
Besides you fail to provide any reason why this analogy should hold. Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the environment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile?
There is considerable evidence that it is determined early in life, perhaps in utero.
As for abuse, what I’ve heard is that a rough childhood (which includes sexual abuse) is associated with criminal behavior of all sorts in adulthood (including sexual abuse) but the link is not specific. The preferential attraction to children is not caused by abuse. No, I don’t have a source on that I can easily find.
You also haven’t identified what welfare you care about. Is it about the pleasure of consuming child pornography? If so, is it basically about providing a way for pedophiles to wirehead themselves? If that isn’t the goal what is?
The hypothesis for this discussion was a hypothetical finding that child porn possession reduces child sex abuse.
If it merely doesn’t increase such abuse, a couple questions arise. One is the civil liberties goal of leaving people alone when they’re not hurting anyone. “Wirehead” isn’t a term I use, but as I understand it, people should be delighted if pedophiles did that instead of abusing kids.
One reason I don’t source many things is because I don’t know what is controversial and what isn’t.
If you write a post about a controversial topic you benefit from backing up as many of the claims that you make that you can.
Few ordinary kids rape other kids or otherwise break the law with regard to their sexual activity.
That’s not true. Having a strict age of consent at 18 doesn’t stop 15 year olds from having sex with each other.
In addition parents ban children frequently from having sex and they still have sex.
The church in which a child is might forbid them from having sex before marriage but they still have sex.
Laws that regulate the sexual behavior of children have roughly the same effect as laws that regulate drug use.
One is the civil liberties goal of leaving people alone when they’re not hurting anyone.
Civil liberties are usually given to achieve some end. You give people the right for free speech to further political debate. You might convince a free extreme libertarians with that argument but not many people.
“Wirehead” isn’t a term I use, but as I understand it, people should be delighted if pedophiles did that instead of abusing kids.
Nothing in the argument you made provides evidence for child porn reducing the abuse of children by pedophiles.
There is considerable evidence that it is determined early in life, perhaps in utero.
The wikipedia article suggests this.
Here’s a video
The wikipedia articles talks about a link to testosterone. Not mastrubating increases testosterone. Watching porn often comes with masturabtion so the data that the wikipedia article doesn’t suggest that increasing porn availability is a good thing.
Videos are not as good for sources because you can’t simple get the information. The best thing are peer reviewed meta studies.
Few ordinary kids rape other kids or otherwise break the law with regard to their sexual activity.
That’s not true. Having a strict age of consent at 18 doesn’t stop 15 year olds from having sex with each other.
If there are jursidictions where two 15-year-olds having sex with each other is breaking the law, they are rare.
In addition parents ban children frequently from having sex and they still have sex. The church in which a child is might forbid them from having sex before marriage but they still have sex. Laws that regulate the sexual behavior of children have roughly the same effect as laws that regulate drug use.
It is certainly true that children often break parental rules regarding sex—many others choose not to have sex. But having sex with another person against their will is something that most people don’t do—I speculate because they think it isn’t right. There is a danger with pedophile attractions, in that it is comparatively easy for an abuser to convince himself that the child really is inherently interested and enthusiastic. But I think a lot of pedophiles do understand that very well and so they abstain, a lot are deterred by not breaking a serious taboo, and many don’t want to face prison.
Civil liberties are usually given to achieve some end. You give people the right for free speech to further political debate. You might convince a free extreme libertarians with that argument but not many people.
Whoa, do you have a source on that? In the US, I think a lot of people take civil liberties very seriously. We don’t dole out freedoms for a specific purpose, we assume we have freedoms unless there is a compelling reason to take them away.
Nothing in the argument you made provides evidence for child porn reducing the abuse of children by pedophiles.
It is in the Diamond paper that I referenced before: “It is certainly clear from the data reviewed, and the new data and analysis presented, that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan, the United States and elsewhere has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.”
Not all professionals agree with that, so I don’t take it as established fact, but the idea that it does not increase child sex abuse is more firmly established.
If there is a decrease, we don’t know the exact mechanism behind it, but the idea that pedophiles are looking at it is a very plausible hypothesis.
The wikipedia articles talks about a link to testosterone. Not masturbating increases testosterone. Watching porn often comes with masturbation so the data that the wikipedia article doesn’t suggest that increasing porn availability is a good thing.
I was citing the Wikipedia article in answer to your comment “Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the environment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile? ”, and I think the section I linked to does a decent job of showing very early effects.
The way you’ve used testosterone level as a mediating variable seems very weak and questionable. The relevant data there is the societal experiments studied by Diamond: If you make child porn freely available, what happens to society-wide levels of child sex abuse?
Whoa, do you have a source on that? In the US, I think a lot of people take civil liberties very seriously. We don’t dole out freedoms for a specific purpose, we assume we have freedoms unless there is a compelling reason to take them away.
When it comes to doling out freedoms that historically means in the US the rights that God gave men.
I don’t think many Christian would say that God gave men the right to enjoy child pornography but democratic society took that right away from men to reduce the amount of child abuse by pedophiles.
I also don’t think you can reasonable argue that the founding fathers had in mind to protect child pornography when they wrote the first amendment.
To turn to the present, given the current way the US works saying that it’s citizens value civil liberties it sounds like a joke.
A lot of people here count themselves as utilitarian. The idea of civil liberties is nice but for most people it’s an means to an end and not an end in itself.
It is in the Diamond paper that I referenced before: “It is certainly clear from the data reviewed, and the new data and analysis presented, that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan, the United States and elsewhere has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.”
n=4 (countries) is not enough to draw any robust conclusions. That not even enough to run a linear regression. Even conclusions drawn through linear regressions don’t replicate well.
Counting the reported amount of sexual abuse is problematic. It can a sign that people are less likely to report crimes that is in the case of the data for Japan particularly concerning as he suggests: “in these latter years the rapist was less likely to be known to the victim; proving lack of consent became easier.”
The paper doesn’t look like a regular academic paper. It has no abstract. The journal in which is published is named: “Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment”. 101 isn’t a usual name for a journal. The fact that first amendment comes up in a journal name suggest that the journal is politically motivated. If I google the journal name + “imprint factor” I get no results.
Even if you would grant that increased pornography as such doesn’t increase child abuse by pedophiles, it might be still better to have the pedophiles being exposed to adult porn than child porn.
If you’re looking for a regular academic paper, this paper publshed in the Archives of Sexual Behavior appears to make the same point Josh was making. And that journal does appear to be a legitimate peer-reviewed academic journal.
Usually, the more relaxed law on pornography is a result of general sexual liberation of the society and, consequently, there is also higher avaibality of real “non video” adult partners. So, thoretically, the porn could intensify lust, but bigger pool of available real-life adult partners can counter the effect. Some abusers, which are not really pedophiles, but use children as substitute object, are also removed from the game by availability of real-life adult partners.
However, what is the situation with child porn specifically ? Is it a stimulant or inhibitor of the crime ? Are there any countries, which first had availability of adult pornography only, and later lifted the ban on child pornography as well ? What were the statistics of child abuse before and after ?
All I am trying to say is, that the 2 papers from Diamond are not a proof for me, that the availability of child porn leads to lower rates of real-life child abuse. (Intuitively, I guess it is probably so, but it is not proven.)
n=4 (countries) is not enough to draw any robust conclusions.
That’s pretty good for studies where we are counting “nations” to come up with our N.
Counting the reported amount of sexual abuse is problematic. It can a sign that people are less likely to report crimes that is in the case of the data for Japan particularly concerning as he suggests: “in these latter years the rapist was less likely to be known to the victim; proving lack of consent became easier.”
He is certainly aware of the issue. I think the passage you quote strengthens rather than weakens his conclusion in that case.
The paper doesn’t look like a regular academic paper. It has no abstract. The journal in which is published is named: “Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment”. 101 isn’t a usual name for a journal.
Right, it’s a book, not a journal. When access to journal articles requires payment, citing them is problematic.
The fact that first amendment comes up in a journal name suggest that the journal is politically motivated.
There may be some bias in the book. Social science research in general is very politicized, and sex research more than most. Since these findings have potential implications that run counter to received wisdom on child pornography, the most eminent researchers who don’t want to lose their grants might be reluctant to do this sort of work. All sex research has to be examined keeping in mind the political goals of the authors, including all the work on the harm done by pornography.
That’s pretty good for studies where we are counting “nations” to come up with our N.
Putting in effort in no way implies that you end up with the truth. If you want to know the truth you have to look into the underlying statistics. The underlying statistics don’t care that it’s hard to get data about multiple countries.
There no reason to look at countries. Crime statistics are available for US states. You have 50. Maybe you can also find data about pornography sales for each of those states.
There’s Google Trend data that you could use to find out how pornography distribution differs between US states. Google Trend data might even tell you something about the amount of child pornography in relation to other pornography.
You could add some sort of crime like theft to control for difference in the crime rate that aren’t sex related.
You could also control against factors that people frequently use to explain changes in amount of sexual assault. I’m sure the literature on that topic will suggest a few ideas that you should control for.
When access to journal articles requires payment, citing them is problematic.
Usually journals have freely available abstracts of their articles. There are also resources such as http://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar that provide access to articles for everyone.
Reading acadmic papers is a good way to increase one’s understanding of how the world works, even if they aren’t always perfect.
I believe that they did look at crimes like murder and assault as a control for sex crimes in at least some cases.
I did hear of a study once (no, I don’t have a citation) tracking US sex crime rates in relation to when the internet (broadband?) became widely available in different parts of the country, finding some tendency for rape to go down after the internet was available.
In any case, those are all helpful ideas for professional sex researchers but go beyond my competence.
If you care about the issue you are pushing, don’t make assertions like that without linking to relevant meta studies.
Motivated reasoning doesn’t score you points on Lesswrong. In a case like that you would profit from keeping your language as academic as possible.
It might be okay to make a joke about suffering that those men who are imprisoned face but making jokes in contexts like this isn’t easy so I wouldn’t recommend you to try.
You yourself say that you are in the emotion of distress that indicates that you aren’t thinking clearly about the issue and it helps people to draw conclusions about your argument.
If that analogy is correct there little we can do with regards to pedophiles besides locking them up. Cyberporn legislation would be a tool to do so.
Besides you fail to provide any reason why this analogy should hold. Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the enviroment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile?
The fact that you think it’s rarely formulated says more about you than about the position against which you are arguing. There are plenty of people who do consider all forms of pornography to go against human dignity and to objective the objects that pornography shows.
That leaves the question of how to decide if a given image is virtual or isn’t.
That no sentence that you should write in a context like. It raises emotions that you don’t want to get raised.
You also haven’t identified what welfare you care about. Is it about the pleasure of consuming child pornography? If so, is it basically about providing a way for pedophiles to wirehead themselves? If that isn’t the goal what is?
You also muddle your goal. You start by pretending that you just want a discussion about whether child porn availability increases child sex abuse and end by calling for legal changes.
PS: Lean to format your links correctly. Not knowing how to format links signals your outsider status.
Thanks for the tips on how to make more persuasive arguments. One reason I don’t source many things is because I don’t know what is controversial and what isn’t. I sort of rely on a (politely) adversarial process. If someone questions an assertion I make, I can see if I can find a source.
Few ordinary kids rape other kids or otherwise break the law with regard to their sexual activity. Pedophiles following that pattern would mostly not abuse children.
There is considerable evidence that it is determined early in life, perhaps in utero.
The wikipedia article suggests this.
Here’s a video
As for abuse, what I’ve heard is that a rough childhood (which includes sexual abuse) is associated with criminal behavior of all sorts in adulthood (including sexual abuse) but the link is not specific. The preferential attraction to children is not caused by abuse. No, I don’t have a source on that I can easily find.
The hypothesis for this discussion was a hypothetical finding that child porn possession reduces child sex abuse.
If it merely doesn’t increase such abuse, a couple questions arise. One is the civil liberties goal of leaving people alone when they’re not hurting anyone. “Wirehead” isn’t a term I use, but as I understand it, people should be delighted if pedophiles did that instead of abusing kids.
If you write a post about a controversial topic you benefit from backing up as many of the claims that you make that you can.
That’s not true. Having a strict age of consent at 18 doesn’t stop 15 year olds from having sex with each other. In addition parents ban children frequently from having sex and they still have sex. The church in which a child is might forbid them from having sex before marriage but they still have sex.
Laws that regulate the sexual behavior of children have roughly the same effect as laws that regulate drug use.
Civil liberties are usually given to achieve some end. You give people the right for free speech to further political debate. You might convince a free extreme libertarians with that argument but not many people.
Nothing in the argument you made provides evidence for child porn reducing the abuse of children by pedophiles.
The wikipedia articles talks about a link to testosterone. Not mastrubating increases testosterone. Watching porn often comes with masturabtion so the data that the wikipedia article doesn’t suggest that increasing porn availability is a good thing.
Videos are not as good for sources because you can’t simple get the information. The best thing are peer reviewed meta studies.
If there are jursidictions where two 15-year-olds having sex with each other is breaking the law, they are rare.
It is certainly true that children often break parental rules regarding sex—many others choose not to have sex. But having sex with another person against their will is something that most people don’t do—I speculate because they think it isn’t right. There is a danger with pedophile attractions, in that it is comparatively easy for an abuser to convince himself that the child really is inherently interested and enthusiastic. But I think a lot of pedophiles do understand that very well and so they abstain, a lot are deterred by not breaking a serious taboo, and many don’t want to face prison.
Whoa, do you have a source on that? In the US, I think a lot of people take civil liberties very seriously. We don’t dole out freedoms for a specific purpose, we assume we have freedoms unless there is a compelling reason to take them away.
It is in the Diamond paper that I referenced before: “It is certainly clear from the data reviewed, and the new data and analysis presented, that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan, the United States and elsewhere has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.”
Not all professionals agree with that, so I don’t take it as established fact, but the idea that it does not increase child sex abuse is more firmly established.
If there is a decrease, we don’t know the exact mechanism behind it, but the idea that pedophiles are looking at it is a very plausible hypothesis.
I was citing the Wikipedia article in answer to your comment “Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the environment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile? ”, and I think the section I linked to does a decent job of showing very early effects.
The way you’ve used testosterone level as a mediating variable seems very weak and questionable. The relevant data there is the societal experiments studied by Diamond: If you make child porn freely available, what happens to society-wide levels of child sex abuse?
When it comes to doling out freedoms that historically means in the US the rights that God gave men. I don’t think many Christian would say that God gave men the right to enjoy child pornography but democratic society took that right away from men to reduce the amount of child abuse by pedophiles.
I also don’t think you can reasonable argue that the founding fathers had in mind to protect child pornography when they wrote the first amendment.
To turn to the present, given the current way the US works saying that it’s citizens value civil liberties it sounds like a joke.
A lot of people here count themselves as utilitarian. The idea of civil liberties is nice but for most people it’s an means to an end and not an end in itself.
n=4 (countries) is not enough to draw any robust conclusions. That not even enough to run a linear regression. Even conclusions drawn through linear regressions don’t replicate well.
Counting the reported amount of sexual abuse is problematic. It can a sign that people are less likely to report crimes that is in the case of the data for Japan particularly concerning as he suggests: “in these latter years the rapist was less likely to be known to the victim; proving lack of consent became easier.”
The paper doesn’t look like a regular academic paper. It has no abstract. The journal in which is published is named: “Porn 101: Eroticism, Pornography, and the First Amendment”. 101 isn’t a usual name for a journal. The fact that first amendment comes up in a journal name suggest that the journal is politically motivated. If I google the journal name + “imprint factor” I get no results.
Even if you would grant that increased pornography as such doesn’t increase child abuse by pedophiles, it might be still better to have the pedophiles being exposed to adult porn than child porn.
A friendly nitpick: I think you meant “impact factor”. That doesn’t yield results either, of course.
If you’re looking for a regular academic paper, this paper publshed in the Archives of Sexual Behavior appears to make the same point Josh was making. And that journal does appear to be a legitimate peer-reviewed academic journal.
Usually, the more relaxed law on pornography is a result of general sexual liberation of the society and, consequently, there is also higher avaibality of real “non video” adult partners. So, thoretically, the porn could intensify lust, but bigger pool of available real-life adult partners can counter the effect. Some abusers, which are not really pedophiles, but use children as substitute object, are also removed from the game by availability of real-life adult partners.
However, what is the situation with child porn specifically ? Is it a stimulant or inhibitor of the crime ? Are there any countries, which first had availability of adult pornography only, and later lifted the ban on child pornography as well ? What were the statistics of child abuse before and after ?
All I am trying to say is, that the 2 papers from Diamond are not a proof for me, that the availability of child porn leads to lower rates of real-life child abuse. (Intuitively, I guess it is probably so, but it is not proven.)
That’s pretty good for studies where we are counting “nations” to come up with our N.
He is certainly aware of the issue. I think the passage you quote strengthens rather than weakens his conclusion in that case.
Right, it’s a book, not a journal. When access to journal articles requires payment, citing them is problematic.
There may be some bias in the book. Social science research in general is very politicized, and sex research more than most. Since these findings have potential implications that run counter to received wisdom on child pornography, the most eminent researchers who don’t want to lose their grants might be reluctant to do this sort of work. All sex research has to be examined keeping in mind the political goals of the authors, including all the work on the harm done by pornography.
Putting in effort in no way implies that you end up with the truth. If you want to know the truth you have to look into the underlying statistics. The underlying statistics don’t care that it’s hard to get data about multiple countries.
There no reason to look at countries. Crime statistics are available for US states. You have 50. Maybe you can also find data about pornography sales for each of those states. There’s Google Trend data that you could use to find out how pornography distribution differs between US states. Google Trend data might even tell you something about the amount of child pornography in relation to other pornography.
You could add some sort of crime like theft to control for difference in the crime rate that aren’t sex related.
You could also control against factors that people frequently use to explain changes in amount of sexual assault. I’m sure the literature on that topic will suggest a few ideas that you should control for.
Usually journals have freely available abstracts of their articles.
There are also resources such as http://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar that provide access to articles for everyone.
Reading acadmic papers is a good way to increase one’s understanding of how the world works, even if they aren’t always perfect.
I believe that they did look at crimes like murder and assault as a control for sex crimes in at least some cases.
I did hear of a study once (no, I don’t have a citation) tracking US sex crime rates in relation to when the internet (broadband?) became widely available in different parts of the country, finding some tendency for rape to go down after the internet was available.
In any case, those are all helpful ideas for professional sex researchers but go beyond my competence.