> it's not surprising that a lot of comments are resorting to anecdotal reasoning of the form: "Well, I use the internet and I'm ok..."
But this isn't an invalid argument in discussions like this.
We're not looking at questions that pertain to intervene into the population aggregations here; we're talking about how we should approach the use of law to into the particulars of specific individuals' lives. "Data" may not be the plural of "anecdote", but the context in which we're attempting to make judgments here is the context that anecdotes, rather than data, most directly describe.
The fact that people can say "I did X and I'm okay" proves that there isn't a purely deterministic relationship between X, whatever it is, and bad results, and this is a valid argument against top-down, universalized restrictions on X.
> I have vague misgivings and a handful of anecdotes and not a lot of sound science.
Science addresses "is" questions. There are valid "is" questions involved in this discussion, and it's entirely appropriate to rely on science to answer them.
But the fundamental topic at hand here discussion is an "ought" question, not an "is" one, and "ought" questions are outside the scope of science.
But this isn't an invalid argument in discussions like this.
We're not looking at questions that pertain to intervene into the population aggregations here; we're talking about how we should approach the use of law to into the particulars of specific individuals' lives. "Data" may not be the plural of "anecdote", but the context in which we're attempting to make judgments here is the context that anecdotes, rather than data, most directly describe.
The fact that people can say "I did X and I'm okay" proves that there isn't a purely deterministic relationship between X, whatever it is, and bad results, and this is a valid argument against top-down, universalized restrictions on X.
> I have vague misgivings and a handful of anecdotes and not a lot of sound science.
Science addresses "is" questions. There are valid "is" questions involved in this discussion, and it's entirely appropriate to rely on science to answer them.
But the fundamental topic at hand here discussion is an "ought" question, not an "is" one, and "ought" questions are outside the scope of science.