Honestly, dude, you seem to be sort of engaging in black-and-white thinking that I wouldn’t expect from a LW reader.
Ironically, I imagined myself as making fun of other people’s black-and-white thinking. (Masturbation completely healthy and harmless: in the skeptics discussion I linked. Porn: superstimulus ruining one’s mind and life.) I tried to find out how exactly the world would look like for people who believe both of these things; mostly because nobody here tried to contradict either of them. What would be the logical consequences of these beliefs—because people are often not aware of logical consequences of the beliefs they already have.
To me, both these beliefs feel like exaggerations, and they also feel contradictory, although technically they are not speaking about exactly the same thing. One kind of superstimulus is perfectly safe, other kind of superstimulus is addictive—is this an inconsistent approach to superstimuli, or a claim that these superstimuli are of a different nature?
I am thankful for two contributors willing to bite the bullet and describe what could the world look like if both beliefs were true. TheOtherDave said that actions controlled by one’s own mind (masturbation) could have smaller effect than actions not controlled by one’s own mind (watching a porn movie), just like it is difficult to tickle oneself. Qiaochu_Yuan said that some actions have natural limit where a human must stop (masturbation), while other actions have no such limit and can be prolonged indefinitely (watching porn), just like you can’t eat the whole day, but you can play a computer game the whole day. -- Both of these answers make sense and I did not realize that.
And that’s essentially all I wanted from this topic. (Unless someone would give me a pointer to a scientific study concerned with differences between masturbation without porn and masturbation with porn, in terms of addiction and behavioral change.)
Ironically, I imagined myself as making fun of other people’s black-and-white thinking. (Masturbation completely healthy and harmless: in the skeptics discussion I linked. Porn: superstimulus ruining one’s mind and life.) I tried to find out how exactly the world would look like for people who believe both of these things; mostly because nobody here tried to contradict either of them. What would be the logical consequences of these beliefs—because people are often not aware of logical consequences of the beliefs they already have.
To me, both these beliefs feel like exaggerations, and they also feel contradictory, although technically they are not speaking about exactly the same thing. One kind of superstimulus is perfectly safe, other kind of superstimulus is addictive—is this an inconsistent approach to superstimuli, or a claim that these superstimuli are of a different nature?
I am thankful for two contributors willing to bite the bullet and describe what could the world look like if both beliefs were true. TheOtherDave said that actions controlled by one’s own mind (masturbation) could have smaller effect than actions not controlled by one’s own mind (watching a porn movie), just like it is difficult to tickle oneself. Qiaochu_Yuan said that some actions have natural limit where a human must stop (masturbation), while other actions have no such limit and can be prolonged indefinitely (watching porn), just like you can’t eat the whole day, but you can play a computer game the whole day. -- Both of these answers make sense and I did not realize that.
And that’s essentially all I wanted from this topic. (Unless someone would give me a pointer to a scientific study concerned with differences between masturbation without porn and masturbation with porn, in terms of addiction and behavioral change.)