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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

They might if sugar was able to be consumed for free with virtually unlimited access. I'm not sure it's a very good analogy.

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It is free. It LITERALLY is in unlimited access. It's in everything you eat...unless you live in a cave and only eat squirrels and rabbits. Especially in the US where High Fructose Corn Syrup is in nearly every product that's consumed. Pornography is no where near as dangerous as the obesity epidemic in the United States, which costs the citizens and corporations billions and billions of dollars a year on healthcare alone. But sure, let's focus on porn.

We can tackle multiple issues at once. My country taxes sugar already.

Nobody is claiming obesity isn’t a risk. But it’s an error to equate sugar to the obesity for one. It is also not "literally" unlimited access unless the cost of sugar is zero and that's easily falsifiable. I'm assuming your point is that people can have as much sugar as they want. Two, food is necessary to life but porn is not. That makes controlling food much, much harder. It would be like someone addicted to sex having to walk through a brothel every day to get to work. Sugar is inexpensive (but still not free) and we’re experiencing the bad effects so I’m not sure what you’re pointing out other than as vices get more free and more accessible, the scale shifts towards worse outcomes. Your whole point boils down to whataboutism rather than debating the actual points.

Lastly, I’m not sure you made any case that pornography is relatively safe.

It more or less is? It's extremely inexpensive.

Extremely inexpensive is infinitely expensive when you're a 13 year old with 2 dollars to your name.

It does not need to be literally the same thing to be a useful point of comparison, which is the nitpick argument bumby was making.

Not nitpicking, I’m just saying a weak analogy doesn’t strengthen your case. Equating sugar to porn misses some of the important aspects of what makes porn potentially dangerous.

I was replying to your own position of it being extremely inexpensive. I understand that comparisons and metaphors are never 1 to 1. If you have another point to make then I'll gladly hear it out.

Lottery tickets are extremely inexpensive. But what do you think would happen to consumption of lotto tickets if they went from $3 to free, especially in a frictionless environment where you can just download them?

Lottery tickets are substantially more expensive than sugar. And if lotto tickets were free, (1) there would be no harm in consuming them and (2) you would also win $0, and no one would buy them.

That’s kinda the point. Sugar is also "substantially" more expensive than "free" pornography. With your analogy of sugar, there isn’t the same asymmetry of risk/reward as there is with “free” pornography.

The reward of lotto tickets is a function of cost with the current approach, but that’s the wrong point to get wrapped around the axle. Consider instead that if the lotto reward is funded by taxes. The point is the risk/reward profile gets skewed.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure you can find evidence that excessive gambling is a net negative.

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