The hostility toward anyone even talking about this caught me off guard too. I would’ve thought Lemmy would be the exact opposite - a place where people opening up about personal struggles get met with compassion. Boy was I wrong.
Here’s the thread where I discovered it yesterday, though I don’t recommend reading through it. It’s quite awful.
A deep learning model can tell biological sex from retina pictures, but not even the best eye doctors can. You feed it a pile of images labeled “these are from men” and “these are from women,” and it figures out the differences and applies that knowledge to pictures it’s never seen before. As far as I know, we still don’t know what exactly it’s picking up on - or if it’s even something a human could distinguish - but for an AI it’s not a problem.
I think the term “AI” has just been a bit stained by all the people conflating it with GenAI. Yes, GenAI is AI, but the term AI covers all kinds of systems, and GenAI is just one subcategory.
A true AGI would be the ultimate labor-saving device, but the two main issues are that we have no clue how far away we are from reaching it - and we also have no guarantees that when we do, it’s going to end well for us.
It also might not be about more compute. The human brain is generally intelligent and it doesn’t need a massive datacenter to run it.
I explicitly stated in my previous response that I’m not part of that community. I’m just an individual dealing with an issue, and I have compassion for all the other individuals facing the same thing - people who are too ashamed or afraid to seek help or even tell anyone about it. Seeing the response it gets here, even from folks who probably pride themselves on being empathetic and compassionate - yeah, I don’t blame those people for staying silent.
This isn’t about supporting a community or pushing some ideology. It’s about raising awareness that real people struggle with this stuff. It’s not sexual shaming or defying God - it’s about taking back control of their own lives. As with anything, the dose makes the poison. Nobody I’ve talked to about this thinks porn or masturbation is inherently bad - they’re just the kind of person who takes it too far, to the point it starts causing real harm in their life. They don’t have an agenda. They need help, and I feel for them.
If even a single person feels seen by my comment - the one that gets downvoted into oblivion by the haters - and gets even the tiniest sliver of help or hope from it, then it was 100% worth it.
And I don’t want to take that away from anyone. I just wish it didn’t affect my own life to the extent that it has for the past 20+ years.
Not everyone struggling with compulsive porn use is part of the NoFap community.
I’m not, and I shouldn’t have to answer for the “crimes” of anyone else just because they’re dealing with a similar issue as I am. They don’t represent me, and I don’t represent them. It makes zero sense to take the views of the loud extremist minority and slap them onto the entire group. Most people who self-diagnose with the “porn addiction” label just want help sorting out their own life - they couldn’t care less what anyone else does with theirs.
lack of any specifics
Bringing up specific examples would be counterproductive - the whole thread would just turn into a debate about those examples instead of staying on the actual point. The discussion isn’t about what the disagreement is over; it’s about what that disagreement looks like.
It has always been a broad term. It simply refers to any system designed to perform a cognitive task that would normally require a human. It’s not synonymous with the term software.
Disagreement is perfectly fine as long as it’s civil and actually about what’s being said. That’s not what’s happening here - you instantly get accused of having malicious secret motives, as is demonstrated below. It’s just a way to shut down discussion instead of actually engaging with it.
Discrediting what someone says by questioning their underlying motives instead of engaging with the actual content is called ad hominem. Along with strawmanning, it’s probably the number-one logical fallacy poisoning online discourse - and likely a major reason this whole discussion even started in the first place.
No, you were just pointing out the flaws in your strawman interpretation of their argument.
Steelmanning doesn’t mean making their argument better for them or “giving them the benefit of the doubt.” It means making sure you’ve actually understood their point correctly before you start explaining why you disagree. If you can’t steelman your opponent’s view, then by definition you can’t argue against it either - because you haven’t grasped what claim you’re even trying to counter in the first place.
No, it’s not - it’s about the seeming inability to disagree politely.
The opposite of strawmanning is steelmanning. It’s when you recite a person’s view back to them in a way that they agree is exactly what they think. Only after that do you move on to actually discussing the disagreement - now that you’re both on the same page instead of talking past each other.
I highly doubt OP would agree with your “steelmanning” of what they said.
You’re not accurately representing their view neither. At no point have they taken issue with criticism.
Exhibit A.
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
Well I fundamentally disagree with that as I’ve explained above.
Also, very few people just hang on their own instance. You’re a sopuli user replying to feddit user in a lemmy.world thread. Anyone can up- and downvote you here. The choise of instance doesn’t make much of a difference.
Speaking up for people wanting to cut back on their personal porn use.
I don’t necessarily have an issue with that - as long as it can truly be done in a way where the only information the platform gets about me is whether I’m of age (they don’t even need to know my exact age). But I don’t have faith that it can actually be done like that, and I see it as a slippery slope toward even more surveillance.
Post scores are visible for individual replies and that’s enough to signal to people what views are okay to share and which ones aren’t.
But who’s moralizing about it here? The mere mention of struggling with compulsive porn use - or even just noting that others do - gets immediately met with vicious hostility and completely baseless accusations. It’s totally unreasonable to dump that massive pile of imagined baggage onto someone and then treat them as if it all applies to them.
You literally cannot get some people to acknowledge that there are tens of millions of (mostly) young men who genuinely struggle with this. It’s not about thinking porn or masturbation is bad. It’s about having taken it to such an extreme that it’s actively harming their life - and many of them seek help online. Unfortunately, these toxic communities are among the very few places available for advice and peer support.