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this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy. Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not ou
by scottious 8mo ago
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
- _3u10 8mo agoOddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes. Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos. What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
- not_a_bot_4sho 8mo ago> Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes Go on
- refulgentis 8mo ago> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Where do you live that this is not possible? (I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mulmen 8mo agoIt’s illegal to drink in public in Washington state [1]. I believe this is the case in most places in the United States. Las Vegas is a notable exception. [1]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=66.44.100 https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=66.44.100
- refulgentis 8mo agoCan't tell if you're being earnest or pedantic (if earnest, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood than HN so maybe I'm just more familiar with the solution. The Wire has a scene that'll explain it better than I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mulmen 8mo agoI don’t see how either of those are relevant. The question is where you can legally drink in public. The answer is very few places in the United States. People break laws all the time.
- jazzyjackson 8mo agoIllinois sells liquor in grocery stores but not after 2am. Or maybe it was a local ordinance. The town next to me was 1am then you couldn’t buy liquor at the 24 hour grocer. So not just bars.
- techblueberry 8mo agoThe person who said smoking and hard drugs, and you said a beer outside after 2am. Those aren't the same thing!
- Gormo 8mo ago> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy. The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy. A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out. > Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out. It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out. Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is. And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
- scottious 8mo agookay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted").. > apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.