mattnewport comments on Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (194)
In the short term, demand for violence is effectively fixed, so decreases in the supply of simulated violence lead to increases in actual violence as a substitution effect.
In the long term, exposure to violence leads to desensitization, so demand for simulated violence expands to meet the supply.
Given two otherwise-identical societies, in which one strictly limits the supply of violent imagery and the other does not, I predict that the latter will (eventually, due to desensitization) have a higher demand for violence, leading to more actual, physical violence during blackouts.
I've heard it argued that the one time when large-scale censorship would be morally justified is if a "Langford basilisk," that is, an image which kills the viewer, were found to exist. What if there were such an image, but it only killed a tiny percentage of the people who saw it, or required a long cumulative exposure to be effective? What if, rather than killing directly, it compelled the viewer to hurt others, or made those already considering such a course of action more likely to follow through on it?
This isn't a fully-general argument for censorship of any given subject that provokes disgust; it's quite specific to violent pornography.
If the supply of virtual violence is increasing faster than demand so that real violence is going down would you still support banning virtual violence for fear of this potential uptick? Presumably you would want to try and determine the expected value of virtual violence given the relative effects and probabilities?
If it helps your estimates, evidence suggests that increasing exposure to virtual violence and pornography correlates with reduced rates of real world violence and sexual violence.
In this case, my goal is to minimize the expected future amount of real violence, so yes I'd like to see the math. Including the long-term black-swan risks, that interruptions to non-critical infrastructure could create an unanticipated surge of sadism.
Other evidence, not of an increase in violence, but of hard-to-measure slow-developing side effects..
This just sounds like one more potential reason near the bottom of an already long list of reasons to mitigate against such interruptions. This argument looks analogous to the claim that making bullets out of lead is bad because someone who is shot multiple times will end up with an unhealthy dose of lead in their bloodstream.
Very interesting link-- I'm not sure that avoiding superstimuli is part of rationality, but it might be part of the art of living well.