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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2647 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

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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Anyone know the story I'm thinking of? It was a world where every wall is dominated by porn, and people know nothing but that. People have fleeting memories of life beforehand (just dreams IIRC) but other than that this is all they've ever known.

Hard to google for obvious reasons.

The idea was that some civilization really liked porn, so they'd send somulated versions of themselves in to experience hundreds of years of it, not aware they were basically creating hell.

On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

I don’t think that’s right. Gambling has been a problem in every culture where it was permitted. If it is available it will trap men, as it did to important men of history like Tesla and Mozart. It’s a superstimuli, So it will be inherently addictive regardless of what is going on in a culture. Video games are a hyper-extension of gambling, involving all the same cognition but with added superstimuli.

Porn, like gambling, is also a superstimuli. No matter how healthy your culture is, superstimuli activity will always be more desirable by definition. It doesn’t matter how hot your wife is if you can see a variety of the world’s most attractive women by clicking a few buttons.

I would say these things are definitively in the category of “causes”, just like the availability of opiates and alcohol are also causes. If every human had the ability to click a button and be administered an opiate, probably half the world would be addicted, because human nature involves occasional lapses in judgment and willpower.

With gambling I think back to when I was a kid, and it was perfectly possible for a middle class American to gamble any time they wanted, you just had to take a trip to Atlantic City, Vegas, or one of the Indian reservations. Because it was in a designated area, and most people need to take an overnight trip to get there, there was a romance and occasion to it.

There's something miserable about video poker machines in gas stations that I just can't get behind. About windowless off track betting parlors. And gambling on your phone removes all the positives you might be paying for at a casino: the atmosphere, the occasion, the trip, the social conviviality and adventure. It replaces it all with the bare fact of pissing money away.

And maybe I'm just glorifying my childhood, addicts still fucked things up, but it seems like we had a good compromise and fucked it up.

100% There's a already lot of good evidence already backing the idea that gambling in a convenience store, or even worse, on a phone, is uniquely addicting in a way destination gambling is not. I actually turned down a job with DraftKings earlier this year because I think their business model is hugely predatory.

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