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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

What's the moral argument against?

There's an argument that putting children through traumatizing simulated events has unclear psychological consequences. Western education at young ages goes surprisingly graphic when talking about certain historical atrocities (think seeing Schindler's List in grade schools). While this sort of shock-and-awe storytelling can be impactful, its consequences may not be all positive.

Another issue is that a stronger reliance on "empathetic/emotional" learning experiences can delve too far from education and too much into propaganda. Group A can produce material that hits deep at our psyches and highlights the evils of Group B, and vice versa. Whose side wins the popular debate isn't from the facts on the ground, but from which group has the tech/production skills to make their story grip the heartstrings. In that way it's like any other over-produced documentary, but VR can have the seductive appeal that it's "more real" and thus more objective.

The issue of "experiential VR learning" becomes harder and harder to do right the further back in time you go, because of the mistake we moderns make when trying to "relate" to the past. We often imagine time-traveling and dropping ourselves in a past environment, thinking that's what it would be to be, say, a medieval peasant. We too easily forget that our own mindsets and approaches would be fundamentally different in some ways.

If watching Schindler's List is traumatizing, then what is going to happen to your kid when they actually meet someone trying to take advantage of them in one way or another?

At a point it’s a matter of norm and probability. If the chances that a kid goes through that kind of experience are astronomically low, prepping them for that kind of traumatic event while encuring PTSD risks might not be worth it.

Are you sure it's that unlikely?

I would even dare to say that the moment you allow a majority of your children to grow up this way; you allow a minority of psychopaths to do whatever they want to them (the children). It’s a simple game-theoretic question.

I'm thinking a lot about your OP.

I'm still developing these thoughts, but I think the critical difference lays in the difference between "VR experience of Hiroshima bombing" and "watching Schindler's List."

A movie is a narrative. Otherwise it wouldn't be entertaining and nobody would watch it. Even documentaries have narratives. Narratives require good guys, bad guys, etc.

A VR "experience" is just that - one little slice of experience. I really don't think that can be biased (maybe, depending on the experience). It's just "putting yourself in someone's shoes." I don't see how anybody could be biased about how terrible a city being nuked was. It was terrible. Someone might argue that "it was for the greater good," but it was still terrible. Maybe it'll make it harder for a future (now child) president to make the decision to drop the bomb, good! Is that a biased viewpoint, to not want suffering of anybody? I guess maybe it is.

A counter argument: if we don’t teach kids about the atrocities of war, fascism, and communism, they will grow up ignorant of those things and discover them all over again for themselves, but worse, because we can now slaughter and surveil people much more efficiently than ever before. I’d be in favor of showing “Come and See” by Elem Klimov to school age kids, with peasants burning alive in barns and everything else, because that did actually happen and it absolutely can happen again. In fact I made my son watch it when he was 12.

Counter counter argument: do we make them watch equally graphic recreations of what happened in Nanking? Based on the American morals I'm use to seeing in others (granted these may not apply to people not in the US), any notion of letting a child see the horrors of war is immediately destroyed once you introduce certain forms of violence.

There's a very simple overhead-view VR recreation of the Hiroshima bombing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It, along with the rest of the content, is emotionally stirring while at the same time not placing blame or pointing fingers (something I found incredible).

Some of the stories told at the museum are from school kids who were walking around the city during the blast. They walked through streets in intense pain, skin hanging in sheets off their bodies, trying to find their friends so they could pick them up and help them. Some of them were on fire. Some returned to their homes to find their families dead. Those same children grew up and lived full lives, and can be heard in recounted interviews at the museum.

Children are a lot stronger than many adults think.

> putting children through traumatizing simulated events has unclear psychological consequences.

I visited Yad Vashem when I was 16. I have been traumatized for the rest of my life. The Children's Memorial is not for children.

I think those are all valid concerns in the long run. My thought about 9/11 is that most of the country 'experienced' 9/11 but in a much different way than being on or near the site of the attacks. As a kid, the weeks/months long aftermath was far more impactful on my psyche than the immediate moment of learning of the attack. It would be tough to recreate that experience in VR.

If it's not handled appropriately, you're potentially making a really poor-taste virtual roller coaster. It could easily be seen as making a spectacle of a national tragedy.

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