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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

> those words really don’t damage children much

Wait, who is this? Can they verify this claim? What does "much" mean anyway? Why damage children at all by choice?

Did you click on the linked source? It says it was written by Kurt Vonnegut, who is arguing that the value of accurately depicting reality to students is more important than protecting them from whatever imagined risk of reading harsh language there is.

The rest of the questions seem valid though.

They are, but they're equally valid the other way. Why start with the assumption that Puritan sensibilities are OK and require everything else to prove itself?

Because Vonnegut made an affirmative claim that this doesn't hurt children, and the comment was challenging that claim. I didn't notice anyone making a claim that it definitely does hurt children.

Evidence is hard to untangle from other social factors. It is relatively safe to say that people have in the past not been sheltered from rough language and did just fine in most every culture. Sheltering children started about Victorian times I suppose, later than children got removed from dreary factory work in the generalized Western culture. (And incidentally later all kinds of work.)

So no, the onus of evidence is on people claiming that rough language hurts children in some way. (Note we're not talking about abusive language here.)

It's ok to say "it doesn't appear to" but the onus of evidence is always on someone making a positive claim. It's safe to say that children have historically not been sheltered from many things that are today definitively known to cause harm, so the appeal to the past is not a strong one here.

The positive claim being that coarse language hurts children, yes. This is the positive asserion that needs proof.

Nobody has made that claim in this thread. The positive claim we are discussing is still Vonneguts quote.

Well, the thread started with :

> but, I don't think this is really what people want their kids reading […]

This is actually the initial claim, and the Vonneguts quote was a response to this claim.

Parents used not to care about what their children hear or read, until society told them it's bad parenting.

The question "Why damage children at all by choice?" rests on the implication that these things damage children, and avoiding them avoids damaging children.

I was quoting Kurt Vonnegut who affirmed it DOES damage children to some degree.

> don't damage children much

OK, but nothing in there implies that avoiding it guarantees no damage, or even less damage.

Are they? I have a deep seated feeling that this is a troll question: does the author himself really believe that coarse language hurts? Does anyone believe that when they stop and think about it?

Not every statement should require extended proofs. It's probably the case that you can't think of any children being hurt by coarse language, nor of having heard of any reporting of this. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

I apologize that Vonnegut wrote his letter at a time before the internet made defensive writers of us all.

https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm...

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