OT: Child sex robots

You have what? 

No 4-year-olds that I know even know what sex is, so I'm not sure how his criteria could apply to the bulk of 4-year-olds. In any case, I think there are plenty of objections to be made to the consent-based approach without misrepresenting it, which I very much think "advocating for sex with 4-year-olds" is doing. 

Topline: none of the surrounding wankery escapes the advocates criteria + criteria subject 4 year-olds to sexual use by adults.
Nor the community service for rape thing.


Eva Yojimbo said:Well 1, it's irrelevant that it's "implication" from his direct criteria, and 2, as noted he's been bandying the "4 year olds" in his posts since the last board.

Bafflement indeed. Advocates criteria + criteria subject 4 year-olds to sexual use by adults. Ain't no dodging that one.

The suggestion of dishonesty is either dishonest in and of itself or is profoundly misguided. His directly posted criteria open a/the bulk of 4 year olds to use for sex, and no talking around it will make it any less reprehensible of an idea.

Again, irrelevant in order to explain enough to them to meet his directly specified criteria. Using the fact that their guardians have not yet educated them to the point of the very straightforward requirements of his criteria, or that they haven't been groomed yet I can only deem as bizarre.  

The serious posing that they are discounted by way of the very basic instruction needed, again, I don't really know how to characterize.

Sure, I really can't grasp how someone who's had any real time with children or really any idea would seriously pose this as discounting.

A general "consent approach" doesn't take that step because it would require a specific approach or implementation with specific criteria to take that step at all.

Not conceiving any particular implementation of a consent approach doesn't in any way rehabilitate his criteria that sanction adult use and abuse of kids. I've never suggested that there may be one that solves any particular issue; in fact I stated outright several times that I thought consent-based approaches were fatally impractical.   

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Deez: "Feel the same way I do or there is something wrong with you."
Meez: If you think 4 year-olds can be f!ckable, or that anything done to infants could be called "sexual relations", as you do both, then there is something very wrong with you.
Deez: And yet you attempt to deny being an objectivist.

Topline: none of the surrounding wankery escapes the advocates criteria + criteria subject 4 year-olds to sexual use by adults.
Nor the community service for rape thing.


Eva Yojimbo said:Yeah, that emotional puritanical rejection of child use for sex by adults. It's like the 1600s all over again.

Speaking of scienceisgod chat.   Maybe it's a good thing for the kids after all.  It's not like circumcision at least.   We know the vast majority of those cases react so much worse than those diddled as a kids.   So many worse things to worry about for all the misplaced outrage.  But at least we know the "moral outrage" is akin to the misplaced venom once held for homosexuality.

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but from what I remember it was journalofeddi who advocated for sex with children as young as 4 years old

Err, Bryce, there's only been a handful of replies on this multiverse tangent. The vast majority of the discussion has been between rabbit and I over the child sex robots and related pedophilia issues (and a lot of semantic/grammar confusion). 

FIFY

Framing the argument is any attempt made at saying "this is what the argument is about." Someone advocating a consent-only approach is arguing that "anyone who can and does consent should be allowed to have sex;" so trying to frame their argument as "4-year-olds should be abused by predators" is just very dishonest because that's not their argument; it's just one consequence of what could happen with a consent-only approach, and it completely ignores the virtues they see in the freedom/liberty to do what one is capable of and consents to doing. It's very analogous to the attempt at framing pro-choice as "people who advocate killing fetuses" without understanding the choice aspect and the various situations where abortion might be the best thing for everyone involved. 

I don't know if the professional consensus has seen/read it and weighed in on it. Still, there's no denying that the research exists and that its very existence counts as some evidence for the "not harmful" group (we could certainly debate how strong/weak evidence it is; but it wouldn't be honest to pretend as if it's not evidence at all). 

I don't think I accused anyone of dishonesty at the "very start," but it was certainly "framing" to try to discuss a consent-only approach as an "advocates sex with 4-year-olds" approach. The basis for asserting that it's predicated on moral outrage are precisely that some of the arguments, including how it was framed from the start, would only be made by someone who was morally outraged; not someone who was trying to accurately describe what the argument was and counter it. Plus, as I've said, the same/similar tactics were used by those morally outraged at things like homosexuality; eg, the "slippery slope" argument against gay marriage is one predicated on moral outrage, and it's not all that dissimilar to the notion that there would necessarily be rampant child sex-abuse under a consent-only approach to sex. 

The xenophobia is in the desire to protect the vulnerable from the unknown that's perceived as potentially dangerous. We see that at work all the time in over-protective parents who try to protect their kids from anything and everything. As good examples from recent history, parents trying to protect their children from the "evil" influences of rock (or rap) music, or protect them from the influence of violent video games. Parents "feared" these things long before there was any research suggesting they were harmful at all. Even beyond kids you could see it at work in the fear-based propaganda against marijuana long before there was any research to suggest if it was harmful. Like I said earlier, when it comes to sex in general I think you still see a lot of Puritanical/Christian xenophobic attitude towards it, the notion that it's something innately sinful, dirty, harmful, etc. I can see it (in part) in how completely ignorant most adults are when it comes to facts about how sexual children are at all (many are shocked when/if they find out that children, even as young as 2, masturbate); and that ignorance seems to stem from this false notion of "innocent children" where "innocence" is tied in with sexuality (if children are innocent, they can't be sexual). 

The reason why I suspect it's more xenophobic-related than based on the "opinions of the accepted experts" is because I can almost guarantee you that no parent researches the opinions of accepted experts before deciding whether pedophilia is bad. Most people, in general, don't deeply question most social mores and ethical positions, and even fewer do so to the point that they consult research of experts' consensus. Ask yourself why so many people in Germany in WW2 didn't resist the Nazis; the simple answer is that people's instincts about morality is shaped far more by the influences of evolution and social mores than on any scientific or rational investigation of their legitimacy. If you're raised in an environment where Jews are considered inferior, then it's very easy to just blindly accept that without ever questioning it. I mean, did YOU do any research into what the experts thought about pedophilia before arguing in these threads? I know I didn't.

Like I said, it would depend on what experts you mean. Experts can be biased by their own experience as I explained above. It's easy for them to only see effects as opposed to causes. The causal aspect is what research is for. I don't know how much research there is and how it balances on the harmful/not harmful scale, nor if they discern causes. 

Let me give an example: back on IMDb 1, Blade made a thread about how children of homosexual parents are more likely to be fat and depressed. The research he offered was solid enough to where we all more-or-less accepted that the statement was true. However, stating this effect didn't argue for any cause. Most of us (by "us" I mean myself, Cash, DA, et al.) that the "cause" was most likely the stigma these children faced having homosexual parents. That seemed (to us) far more likely than the notion that homosexuals were somehow innately bad at parenting. The analogy with pedophilia and experts would be this: even if some experts see the negative effects, this doesn't really address what the cause is, nor does it mean that the causes they see are universal, or even perhaps in the majority. So it would be very easy for experts to be biased in such a way. Again, research could help remedy this, and I simply don't know what the "consensus" of the research is. 

The key thing to remember about evolution is that it's tuned us for survival and reproduction, not for finding truths, and there are many instances where in tuning us for survival is probably did so in a way that made us wrong the vast majority of the time. To take an example, human's tendency to ascribe agency to effects makes sense from a survival perspective: if you assume that rustle in the bush is a hungry predator, you're more likely to survive if it is as opposed to the guy that doesn't assume that. Now, it might only be a predator 1/100 times. This would mean the "assume it's a predator" guy is wrong 99/100 times, but each time he's wrong he still survives, and the one time he's right he also has a better chance at surviving. So in tuning us to fear the unknown, evolution didn't care that most of the time the unknown wasn't anything genuinely threatening to us. 

Now, just like with the "agency" example, it's obvious that sometimes our fears are warranted, that sometimes what we instinctual consider immoral/wrong we do so because it IS genuinely dangerous to our survival and the well-being of others. But my point in general has been that you need more than the "moral outrage" reaction to prove that, that the reaction by itself is an extremely unreliable gauge for whether something is genuinely wrong and/or harmful. 

I'm not sure why you think prepubescent sex would reduce a child's chances of making it to the point of successfully raising offspring of their own...

None that I know of; but I would again make the distinction between "recommending it" (which would imply there's something good about it), and simply saying "it's OK" (which would only imply there's nothing harmful about it). 

The basis is in the fact that different fields would/could cover the issue from different angles. The sociologists wouldn't study it in the same way that psychologists or philosophers or neuroscientists might. This isn't the case for "climate science" where it was mostly just climatologists studying it. 

The former might be superior if the experts in a given field had diligently studied all the available research. My whole point is that in just saying "expert consensus" you aren't really making the distinction between the experts that have studied all available research and those that haven't. 

The "tentatively" contains a healthy dose of "I could be wrong about this." Further, it contains a dose of "I can understand how/why the 'expert consensus' could be wrong." 

Let me offer another example of the latter. I know we got into about quantum physics once upon a time to and you also appealed to expert consensus. The major thing I tried to explain to you is that within quantum physics there were two very different kinds of experts: experimental physicists, who used the basic formulations for pragmatic purposes (like engineering); and theoretical physicists, who were still trying to "explain" what quantum physics really meant and if there was some more general theory that could explain it better. When it came to the former, the vast majority were not even informed of much theoretical work, and were not even taught ideas like "many-worlds" or "Schrodinger's Cat" because, to paraphrase physicist Matthew Rave, those were philosophical concepts and not relevant to the work of a practicing physicist. So even though you could consider both experimental and theoretical physicists experts on quantum mechanics, they had very different kinds of expertise, and the former were often quite ignorant when it came to the philosophy behind the concept of something like many-worlds. Given that, it wouldn't really be fair to speak of a generalized "expert consensus" on many-worlds, because some quantum physicists would've been entirely ignorant of the relevant information about it. 

To make the analogy with pedophilia, a psychologist might regularly deal with people who've been victims of pedophilia; but the very nature of their job would mean that they've probably ONLY seen those who thought the experience was negative (thus biasing the psychologist's conclusions), and even in coming to the conclusion that it is harmful the psychologist wouldn't have been able to discern a direct cause for the harm. So what you really need, then, are "experts" engaged in the research side of things, in reviewing as many cases as possible, preferably cross-cultural, and noting all those that were harmful VS not-harmful, and trying to find causal connections between the situations concerning each. If there's a consensus just among THOSE experts, I don't know what it is. 

Like I said, it depends on what you mean by "consider;" you almost certainly shouldn't "consider it" to the point of rejecting the expert consensus, but you may consider it to the point of questioning/investigating the expert consensus to better educate yourself on the issue while being more tentative in your own opinions on the matter.