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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2546 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The norm outlived them, but it's got more grounding than you'd think.

I mean, I wouldn't call this grounding in the same way that the swing towards anti-tobacco has grounding. People thought cigarettes were health-neutral or healthy, then they found out it causes lung damage and cancer. Simple enough. This grounding is a bunch of motivated reasoning (not from you but from the people) that doesn't really make any contact with reality. For example

Both the health risks and the long-term family formation risks were a big matter for Moynihan-and-Reagan-era politicians

There are no causal health risks or family formation risks I can find in the literature that survive close examination. The latter issue sounds like a dog whistle for lower class people being most of the underaged relationships at the time, which makes sense because richer people tend to marry later at the present moment, the former issue is ... I don't know. If you look at the literature closely it seems confounded with class also. Babies from younger mothers tend to be less healthy but then so do young mothers. The causal effect seems approximately 0 after 15. Also the illogic with plentiful tolerance for 30 something birthing and then fretting about health effects of pregancy at 16.

I will say the obnoxious tyranny of the laws do tend to match other laws from the time, like drug laws and computer access laws.

combination of Clayton Cramer bringing up the 1970s introduction and iteration of federal CSAM law really surprising me

Can you link to this? First I've found out about this guy, looks like he exposed some fake scholarship on American gun politics history. I read a bit about that, and I would say most of the academic literature supporting high ages of consent and similar ideas has the same issues he found in gun politics history literature.

Thanks for the detailed discussion. It has strengthened my view that high age of consent laws (meaning ~18) are intellectually and morally standing on a foundation of air. I think when that happens it's usually hiding deeper ugly motivations as Robin Hanson talks about as opposed to a whole society accidentally falling for nonsense while shutting out all of the people who politely try to help them out of it. In this case again I think it's broadly some kind of Hamiltonian spite, that's all I can get out of the gigantic travesty that the Epstein affair has been anyway, as Michael Tracey has documented.

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