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I think the most concrete example of what you're describing is the "pattern" we saw with tobacco. Science suggested for a long time that cigarette smoking might be bad for you. As the evidence grew stronger, tobacco companies ran ads with Joe DiMaggio about how healthy their brand was[1].

Eventually the evidence was so irrefutable, and there were enough "casualties," that most reasonable people were forced to accept it.

This seems like a pattern that repeats itself. It begins with anecdotal evidence, followed by a long period of scientific research, then propaganda campaigns and eventual acceptance.

We're currently seeing it, about halfway through the curve, in the food industry with sugar. It's also happened previously with lead, seatbelts, asbestos, gambling, mercury, alcohol & driving, cholesterol, tanning booths, etc.

And now, perhaps, it's starting on the effect of information consumption. I use the term "information consumption" because it seems to be about much more than just teenagers and their phones.

[1] http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6149/6012309554_2c177196a8_z.j...

> tobacco companies ran ads with Joe DiMaggio about how healthy their brand was[1].

Tobacco companies actively engaged in a campaign of misinformation. They deliberately spread confusion about science.

Do we need real data to know that too much porn is a bad thing?

> The problem is that these are the same sorts of arguments > that have been deployed in the face of every technological > advance

I agree and at the risk of sounding like my parents, I think the internet is different. Never before has their been a technology so all encompassing and so powerful (and dangerous).

If I wanted to look at pictures of girls when I was a horny teen, I had the bra section of the JC Penny catalog. The jump from that to the type of online porn that exists today is pretty big. Add to the fact that online porn is so much more accessible than visiting a porno shop, it's no wonder kids can fall into it more easily.

But lets turn back the clock a few thousand years, where pre-teen boys were practically expected to engage not only in sexual acts/experiences, but often with those FAR older than themselves. At the risk of more unsubstantiated statements (qualifier, I spent 7 years studying latin+latin history), I feel like the amount of sexual content exposed to children in that era was FAR greater than now, even with the internet+porn, just in different media, and handled in very different cultural and social light, with much less stigma.

There seems to be a lot of paranoia around this issue, but observe that there have been HUGE ranges of how humanity has handled sexual content over the last few thousand years around the globe, and generally "we've turned out ok." This is a question that answering empirically will be VERY difficult, due to the sheer complexity of the human development process and the number of confounding variables, and I think a degree of faith needs to be had in the resiliency of our species and social structure to adapt.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. That exposure to hardcore porn online is okay because it's better than being raped as a child? Or it's okay because we can adapt to its negative influence and come out alright?

What if I want something better than "ok" for my kids?

Firstly, to say that the older/younger relationships from that era would be generally considered rape even by todays standards would be quite a stretch.

Secondly, I must apologize in advance, I'm having a lot of trouble stating my point, probably because I'm sitting in a cluster computing conference, and will try to give this a better shot when I can devote more focus to it, but in short: I think we have some very skewed ways of looking at sex and sexual act. A stigmatization of the topic as a whole even makes it very hard to talk about. There are examples of rape and "improper" behavior in sexually liberal, and sexually conservative societies. There need to be new and less black and white ways of looking at and judging both sexual maturity, "appropriate" behaviors, and conduct. It is not productive to point the finger at a prevelence or lack of sexual material and then yell "THINK OF THE CHILDREN", this is going to be answered I think by a better understanding of human behavior and cognitive function, and right now we're grasping in the dark for useful metrics and basing decisions on questionable logic.

Anyway, I feel like I may be going away from the answer you wanted/rambling a bit, so I'll cut this short and perhaps reread/reedit my response. I also want to brainstorm a bit with my female, who as a psychologist/cognitive scientist, works with the most extreme cases of sexual deviance/criminals, and in positions of sexual assault support, and I'm sure has some relevant thoughts on the issue.

I think Internet makes an interesting system, as hardcore porn is easily available (really easily), while talking about sex (specially with teenagers/kids) is a huge taboo, and no one knows how to deal properly with sex education (understood as a broad subject)

I think most of the people understands that Rambo is not a good example of a real life soldier, or High School is not similar to Howarts. Equally, I think most of the people understands that porn is not a good representation of real life (nor romantic comedies a good representation of real life relationships, which is also another interesting example of arts influencing life, but I digress). Of course, if we don't discuss those issues with a more realistic approach, I guess there are some people that can miss the point and get bad assumptions and expectations.

>Do we need real data to know that too much porn is a bad thing?

Yes, we do. We also need a definition of "too much". For too many people, "too much" means "more than I prefer."

>If I wanted to look at pictures of girls when I was a horny teen, I had the bra section of the JC Penny catalog.

Those pictures fulfill the same purpose as looking at a girl with no clothes. The motivation was the same.

>The jump from that to the type of online porn that exists today is pretty big

You know what's an even bigger jump? Going from looking at pictures to actually seeing a real naked female, or actually having sex. That's as "hardcore" as it gets for a person, no? Yet everyone manages, forever throughout human history, often with no intermediate steps of seeing pictures of women. Crazy, I know.

> it's not surprising that a lot of comments are resorting to anecdotal reasoning of the form: "Well, I use the internet and I'm ok..."

But this isn't an invalid argument in discussions like this.

We're not looking at questions that pertain to intervene into the population aggregations here; we're talking about how we should approach the use of law to into the particulars of specific individuals' lives. "Data" may not be the plural of "anecdote", but the context in which we're attempting to make judgments here is the context that anecdotes, rather than data, most directly describe.

The fact that people can say "I did X and I'm okay" proves that there isn't a purely deterministic relationship between X, whatever it is, and bad results, and this is a valid argument against top-down, universalized restrictions on X.

> I have vague misgivings and a handful of anecdotes and not a lot of sound science.

Science addresses "is" questions. There are valid "is" questions involved in this discussion, and it's entirely appropriate to rely on science to answer them.

But the fundamental topic at hand here discussion is an "ought" question, not an "is" one, and "ought" questions are outside the scope of science.

> Nonetheless, I think it's worth entertaining the hypothesis that in many ways the internet is like candy for your brain, and constant exposure might have subtle -- perhaps not yet fully recognized or appreciated -- effects on our cognition.

It does, actually. Read Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' [0], it's a pretty decent book about the subject. It also starts off with comparing our usage of the internet with the rise of reading - you know, books and the like. History lesson; humans needed to adapt their brains to be able to read attentively for longer periods of time. The book contrasts that with the ADD nature of the internet, and yet, indicates how it's actually going back to where we were before. Or just a change similar to when books became publicly accessible.

tl;dr, yes there is a change, but I don't think it's necessarily good or bad; just different. And shocking / to be resisted by the older generation, just as how their parents were shocked and resisting the Beatles and similar long-haired freaks. :p

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...