Comment by Gormo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gormo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.

Well:

(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;

(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;

(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to

(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.

Something like 82% of parents and 70% of people want social media to be banned for under-16s. How much more agreement do you want?

See point (2) above.

In your view should it be legal to distribute child porn if you didn't make it?

Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.

In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.

This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.

In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.

So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. Why not also in the social media case?

> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm.

No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.

For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.

In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.

> Why not also in the social media case?

The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com