this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
445 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
70267 readers
3581 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Am I the only one that thinks there’s something positive to stricter control of pornography?
Even if you love porn and grew up exposed to it as a kid, you gotta admit that there are psychological effects on avid adult viewers and more on minors.
Think about what was available as a kid, too. Wait 10 min for a 3 minute to load or just search pics. Now it’s a completely different overstimulating world that transforming how people relate to sex and themselves.
No you don't. That is right wing propaganda completely unfounded by science. That porn addiction nonsense so many Americans babble about is a product of that propaganda, and doesn't actually exist.
Wow. You don’t think porn addiction exists? Said like a true porn addict.
If every person who disagrees with you counts as further evidence that you're right, then you're thinking in an unfalsifiable manner, which is the basis for many a flawed conclusion. It doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but you should really make sure to find justifications for your beliefs that are based on falsifiable reasoning instead. That's the best way to know if what you're believing is right or wrong, because you can try to falsify your beliefs in the way that you know them to be falsifiable, and if they still couldn't be falsified, then you can say "Well, I tried to disprove this, and it still passed that test!"
So, let me ask you this, what would, hypothetically, suffice to prove or at least suggest evidence that porn addiction does not exist? If your answer is "nothing", then you're in unfalsifiable territory.
It goes both ways. People are gonna find whatever study supports whatever they want to believe and just cling to that. Denying porn and, even sex addiction for that matter, doesn’t exist is denying the basis of addiction and the human brain. Dopamine.
So then can anything that produces dopamine be addictive? Can I get addicted to hugging my girlfriend, or addicted to reading books, or jogging? Or is there some threshold? Does the intensity per time matter, or just the intensity, or just the time? What about the frequency of exposure? Does any amount of dopamine release make me slightly more addicted to whatever it is, or is there some threshold that needs to be exceeded? Do dopamine-based addictions produce physical withdrawal symptoms, always, never, sometimes? Depending on what? And are physical withdrawal symptoms necessary to constitute addiction or are there different tiers of addiction?
You see what I'm getting at. There's sooo many questions that need to be answered before just saying "this produces lots of dopamine therefore it's addictive and bad and should be limited". While I appreciate and empathize with your sentiment about people cherry-picking the studies they like (sounding like an LLM here lol), it's not as if science doesn't know how to deal with that problem, and it certainly isn't a reason to stop caring about or citing studies at all, or say "well you've got your studies and I've got mine". Just because both sides have studies that give evidence in their favor doesn't mean both sides are equally valid or that it's impossible to reach an informed conclusion one way or the other.
My next biggest question (and what I'm trying to drive at with the semi-rhetorical slew of questions I opened with) would be what makes something an addiction or not? Am I addicted to staying alive, because I'll do anything to stay alive as long as possible? That seems silly to call an addiction, since it doesn't do any harm. And how do we delineate between, say, someone who is addicted to playing with Rubik's Cubes vs. someone who just really likes Rubik's Cubes and has poor self-control? Or what about someone with some other mental quirk, like someone who plays with Rubik's Cubes a lot due to OCD, or maybe an autistic person who plays a lot with Rubik's Cubes out of a special interest? Does the existence of such people mean that "Rubik's Cube Addiction" is a real concern that can happen to anyone who plays with Rubik's Cubes too much? Or perhaps Rubik's cubes are not addictive at all, and it is separate traits driving people to engage with them in a way that appears addictive to others.
I know I've written a long post and asked lots of questions. It's not my intention to "gish gallop" you, just to convey my variety of questions. The Rubik's example is the one thing I'm most curious to hear your thoughts on. (There I go sounding like an LLM again)