If every person who disagrees with you counts as further evidence that you’re right, then you’re thinking in an unfalsifiable manner, which is the basis for many a flawed conclusion. It doesn’t necessarily make you wrong, but you should really make sure to find justifications for your beliefs that are based on falsifiable reasoning instead. That’s the best way to know if what you’re believing is right or wrong, because you can try to falsify your beliefs in the way that you them to be falsifiable, and if they still couldn’t be falsified, then you can say “Well, I tried to disprove this, and it still passed that test!”
So, let me ask you this, what would, hypothetically, suffice to prove or at least suggest evidence that porn addiction does not exist? If your answer is “nothing”, then you’re in unfalsifiable territory.
venusaur@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Disproving all evidence that sex and porn addiction does exist.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
So then can anything that produces dopamine be addictive? Can I get addicted to hugging my girlfriend, or addicted to reading books, or jogging? Or is there some threshold? Does the intensity per time matter, or just the intensity, or just the time? What about the frequency of exposure? Does any amount of dopamine release make me slightly more addicted to whatever it is, or is there some threshold that needs to be exceeded? Do dopamine-based addictions produce physical withdrawal symptoms, always, never, sometimes? Depending on what? And are physical withdrawal symptoms necessary to constitute addiction or are there different tiers of addiction?
You see what I’m getting at. There’s sooo many questions that need to be answered before just saying “this produces lots of dopamine therefore it’s addictive and bad and should be limited”. While I appreciate and empathize with your sentiment about people cherry-picking the studies they like (sounding like an LLM here lol), it’s not as if science doesn’t know how to deal with that problem, and it certainly isn’t a reason to stop caring about or citing studies at all, or say “well you’ve got your studies and I’ve got mine”. Just because both sides have studies that give evidence in their favor doesn’t mean both sides are equally valid or that it’s impossible to reach an informed conclusion one way or the other.
My next biggest question (and what I’m trying to drive at with the semi-rhetorical slew of questions I opened with) would be what makes something an addiction or not? Am I addicted to staying alive, because I’ll do anything to stay alive as long as possible? That seems silly to call an addiction, since it doesn’t do any harm. And how do we delineate between, say, someone who is addicted to playing with Rubik’s Cubes vs. someone who just really likes Rubik’s Cubes and has poor self-control? Or what about someone with some other mental quirk, like someone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes a lot due to OCD, or maybe an autistic person who plays a lot with Rubik’s Cubes out of a special interest? Does the existence of such people mean that “Rubik’s Cube Addiction” is a real concern that can happen to anyone who plays with Rubik’s Cubes too much? Or perhaps Rubik’s cubes are not addictive at all, and it is separate traits driving people to engage with them in a way that appears addictive to others.
I know I’ve written a long post and asked lots of questions. It’s not my intention to “gish gallop” you, just to convey my variety of questions. The Rubik’s example is the one thing I’m most curious to hear your thoughts on. (There I go sounding like an LLM again)
venusaur@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Come on man. You can look up what addiction means. This is proving why there need to be stronger restrictions. If you can’t look up a definition parents can’t work parental controls.
Here’s part of what makes something addiction:
Continued involvement despite physical, psychological, social, or legal problems.
Porn could easily fall into this not only rolled into sex addiction but think about somebody who is jerking it all the time and this has an affect on their relationship, or they’re watching violent porn and this affects how they treat women, or they see the infantilization or submission of women in porn and think women should be like children or that they’re entitled to women’s bodies.
I get it. Yall love porn, but we also need to be responsible and not be in denial.
KelvarIW@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
“My Strange Addiction” is a “reality” TV show and absolutely not a source to take any psychology perspective from. I wouldn’t even trust it’s definition of “addiction”. The only episode I remember was one of a woman “addicted” to consuming her cremated partner’s ashes, which sounds like a grief/trauma coping mechanism, and is all around sad.
You list these strawman examples. Fine. Those are made up scenarios. There has been violence, sexism, racism, in the earliest records of civilization, and porn has only existed for the last century… Maybe. You know where I first got exposed to the idea “women should be like children” or “[men]'re entitled to women’s bodies”? The Catholic Church.
You’re describing porn the way the DARE campaign described drugs. At least the DARE campaign was talking about a physical chemical compound.