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Comment by CodeSgt | Hacker News Reader

They said:

> but then in the next breath make the assumptions that difficulty forming relationships today is significantly greater than in the past

The implication being that I made the claim that it was broadly more difficult for most people today. I didn't realize that me adding "everyone" would so drastically change the meaning of their sentence. Please give me your interpretation of that if it isn't basically what I said.

Am I crazy? I say that people with chronic porn addictions have a hard time forming relationships and all of a sudden I'm accused of making blanket statements about how difficult it is for people to form relationships today compared to the past.

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> I say that people with chronic porn addictions have a hard time forming relationships

Well originally you used wording that would imply a significant subset of the population. But even ignoring that it remains a completely baseless claim. How are you eliminating all of the other potential explanations that exist? And how are you arriving at the conclusion that the porn addiction is the cause of the problem as opposed to one of the effects?

What do you mean originally? I never edited the og comment. I'm arriving at it because the reason I know people with chronic porn addictions at all is they've confessed how big of a problem it is for them and the issues it's caused them. If you think you know their lives better than they themselves do then go tell them that.

> but then in the next breath make the assumptions that difficulty forming relationships today is significantly greater than in the past

A pedant would say that a extreme impact on a subset of a group means there is also a significant impact on the average of the entire group. But that's not the point.

This statement calls back to your claim that (excessive) porn use severely impacts their ability form relationships. It's not a blanket statement you now make it out to be. Someone doesn't need to repeat back to you word for word the entire context of the conversation.

The explicitly said that my viewpoint was a common conservative one. This implies that it isn't a call back to my claim about chronic porn users having a hard time forming relationships. The common conservative viewpoint they were referencing is that "people today generally have a harder time forming relationships". Not "The people I know with chronic porn addiction have a hard time forming relationships".

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