It's only personal because you've made this topic part of your identity. That's why other posters were recommending you read through the sequences on identity, and why it may be worth reconsidering what you base your identity on.

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.

Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn't experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn't want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years. If she knew there could be a way of handling the situation privately in accord with her needs and wishes, she may be more likely to report it and get it to stop.

This scenario sounds a bit fantastical; the rape survivor who doesn't go to the cops isn't doing it because they "[didn't] experience it as terrible" and want to protect their rapist, it's because doing so puts them on the firing line and brings back all the trauma with the added benefit of a negligible chance of actually seeing justice. I would know here; one of my childhood friends was raped by some freak when she was a little girl, and even though she managed to grow up healthy despite it that single attack still left a lot of deep psychological scars. And that is a best-case scenario; a girl like you describe is trapped with their rapist and is unlikely to even be willing to tell their parents what happened, which means they will be raped over and over while being forced to pretend nothing is wrong.

It's not the stigma against pedophiles which hurts these children... it's the pedophiles who rape them.

I realize you claim not to have hurt a child, and if it's true I'm certainly glad about that, but there really is no comparison between the inconvenience of sexual frustration / possible police investigation and being raped. "Coming out" and making sure that society can protect itself is the only moral thing to do if you really are sincere here; the cost of raping children or providing demand for pornography in which children are raped is so much higher than any price a person can pay socially or legally that you would absolutely come out ahead no matter what happened. The highest ideal of a civilized person is to do the right thing even if it's painful, and that means having the courage to accept the consequences of your actions.

Suppose a girl is being abused by her uncle. She doesn't experience it as terrible but she wants it to stop. But she doesn't want to face a formal investigation, which involves endless interrogations for her, embarrassing publicity, family strife, and perhaps sending her uncle to prison for 10 years.

Most young children wouldn't understand the implications of a formal investigation. Children are not mature enough to decide what the correct way to handle the situation is.

ETA: I'd like to understand the thought process behind the downvotes.

all of your examples are tradeoffs, which was my entire point. Each punishes pedophiles in order to (presumably) protect children. Making each of your changes would obviously be better for you and other pedophiles, and you haven't actually made these arguments you say you have so I don't see any reason to think they would protect children rather than put them in more danger.

Second: 1-5 percent of men is 0.5-2.5 percent of humans and there are a lot more PSAs about rationality that I think would help a lot more than that many people. What percentage of people are children? If there are a lot more children than pedophiles doesn't the math say it's fine to ruin some pedophiles lives?

Third: Multiply all these relatively unconvincing arguments by their likelihood of ever being implemented based on them being discussed here. If we spent a long time talking about this and campaigning for it we MIGHT get a legal change that would help a small percentage of the population but we definitely completely ruin our reputation, not to mention it would distract from anything else we want to talk about.

Did you intend to talk exclusively about virtual child porn? If so, you might want to change the wording of your initial assertion, since "virtual child porn" is not what people think when they read "child porn".

If not, I don't think you've adequately supported your assertion. It may be the case that viewing child porn does not increase the probability of committing child abuse once you've conditionalized on relevant common causes. But it is the case that producing child porn (actual, not virtual) requires child sex abuse. Since increased availability would presumably be causally linked to increased production, ceteris paribus increased availability should be causally linked with increased abuse. Now it may be the case that there is some countervailing causal mechanism leading from increased availability to decreased abuse, but you haven't really provided adequate evidence for the existence of this mechanism, or that it fully compensates for the increased abuse associated with production even if it does exist.

Also, when you say that child porn with real children should be illegal, do you mean that just production should be illegal or that possession should be illegal as well?

And this:

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.

This is not right. The attributes of the person making an argument are often valuable evidence regarding the validity of the argument, especially in an area where one is not an expert. For instance, I don't know much about the research about the relationship between child porn and child abuse. You haven't presented a comprehensive meta-analysis of this research, merely a selection. If I'm trying to evaluate whether your framing is representative of the actual state of the research or whether it is cherry-picked to favor a particular position, my beliefs about your personal attributes are very relevant.

As an aside: I'm really not comfortable with a single-issue poster whose single issue is pedophile rights, especially if this slides from advocacy for celibate pedophiles (which I don't consider objectionable) to advocacy for consumers of child porn (which I do consider objectionable). Consider participating in other discussions on this site as well, so that people don't get the impression that you're on here just to push this, shall we say "provocative" agenda. I feel somewhat bad about saying this because I dislike the idea of piling on to posters who voluntarily identify themselves as low status, and also I do think your commitment to celibacy and the avoidance of child porn in the face of your unfortunate desires is commendable (although I don't like your attachment to pedophilia as an identity). Still, I haven't downvoted you yet, but if every top-level comment or post you make ends up being about pedophilia, I might start doing so.

Josh,

1. My intuition is, that viewing pictures is more a tension relief and prevents the real offence, rather than stimulating the crime. I would prefer to have hard scientific data. However, without those data, I would bet money on my stated hypothesis, rather than the opposite.

2. You should cite more sources, preferred are the research paper, and among them, metaanalyses, as ChristianKI correctly says.

3. I am not from USA, but worked there for 2 years in the past. I remember hearing about people facing prison for the possession of children pornography, and was genuinely surprised and sorry for the offenders (although I am a standard heterosexual woman). We had a long discussion with my that day US boyfriend, why is the possession punished so severely. I was surprised by the unproven, but unquestioned assumption, that having pictures stimulates the owner to commit the actual crime. Of course, pictures of children molested or having sexual intercourse should not be taken, because children should not have sexual intercourse or be molested. However, some people define children pornography very broadly, even children taking a bath, running around naked in the garden etc. Some 35 years ago, my parents photographed me naked on the beaches of Yugoslavia and it was pretty normal at those times. I would not be happy, if they were selling those pictures to strangers for pornography. However, I believe, selling their own old pictures when the child becomes adult could become legal once - if it is proven that the pictures do not increase the crime.

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.

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.

Still at it. Well.

I have ruled out that case by calling the topic "celibate pedophilia"

You have done nothing of the sort. You have merely drawn a line around the class (a class of unknown size) of those who have such urges but have never acted on them. But is this concept a natural kind? Does it carve reality at a joint? Does this line on the map correspond to any line in the territory? Is it an empirical cluster in thingspace?

I believe the answer is no. The reality appears to be that there are people who, alas, have urges of this sort, some of whom act on them and are caught, some who act on them and have not been caught, and an unknown number who have not acted. Is there anything to distinguish the latter class from the first two that is predictive of whether or not they will offend in future?

Would you hire as a shop assistant a professed non-practicing kleptomaniac? As an accountant, a professed non-practicing fraudster? For childcare, a professed "celibate pedophile"?

The rest is blatant concern trolling. "Ooh, is this a forbidden topic? Help, help, I'm being discriminated against! Shouldn't we have a rational discussion about this? Are we only thinking about status? Think of the civil liberties. Poor little me, all those downvotes, how could I possibly tell what they mean? Does anyone want to clarify this?"

Alicorn gives you far too much credit for "remaining thoughtful and civil". Yes, you are being polite and well-spoken, I'm sure your discourse goes down very well over after-dinner coffee and cigars with like-minded friends, but it's an empty shell. As C.S. Lewis might have said, it is hard work to make a reasoned argument, but effortless to act as though one has just been made.