Comment by ura_yukimitsu
15 days ago
It's good that you warned them in advance, but I don't think "there are much worse things they could be doing" really is a reason to discard those who are hurt by this as "snowflakes" and the content they're exposed to as "silly and non-threatening." From what you're saying, there's also a big difference between what you were dealing with and what this article is talking about: in your case it was only still images, and only "regular" porn (and I assume they probably had to monitor every image posted if it was "a long time ago" so overall they were not exposed only to that content); in this case they're reviewing videos content including not only porn but also violence and sexual abuse, that was pre-flagged by an AI so with way less rule-abiding content mixed in.
People butcher livestock for pay on a daily basis, rendering a live animal dead and cutting it to bits, on a massive scale to provide the food that we eat. Rescue and medical personnel deal with the injured, ill, and dying on a daily basis on a massive scale. Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
> Merely watching videos, even of disturbing material, doesn't even come close to being as bad as those and some other professions.
The research and reporting, which looks at actual people's experiences says otherwise. This issue has been coming up for years.
People live through war, murder, torture, rape, etc. We can always find something worse but that doesn't make the current situation better. Human experience of pain and trauma isn't scaled relative to the worst possible pain and trauma.
I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.
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> Yes, images and videos can be horrific, but that horror absolutely pales in comparison to what the world has to offer.
"Eat your dinner, there's kids starving in Africa."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505
The alternative is…. They don’t have a job?
What else is going to happen?
For many people, the alternatives can literally be death, wading unprotected through human excrement, sold into defacto slavery, etc. etc.
AI can do some of it (now), but largely isn’t going to be more accurate and still needs humans to double check its work.
I really don't think it's fair to minimize someone's struggles just because their situation could be worse. Is only the most miserable person on the planet (by what metric anyway?) allowed to complain about their condition?
I also don't think it's fair to exploit people who are in terrible situations by pushing jobs we don't want onto them, pay them a handful of crumbs, and then say they should be happy with what they get because their neighbor who does another job gets half a handful of crumbs.
The women in this situation aren’t complaining. Very much the opposite.
Why the compulsion to paternalistically ‘protect’ everyone even to the point of making them unemployed? I assume they weighed their options and decided this was the best one. It sounds like you want to stop them from doing that?
Isn’t that the real minimization?
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I actually had a conversation about this with my mom. We were talking about the hotel cleaners in Dubai walking around with toothbrushes to clean the shower which seemed mildly ridiculous to our European eyes.
But we came to the realisation that these folks were probably happy that they could send money back to their villages. And we left a nice tip.
I don't question your good faith. You seem to have fallen into a trap of many of good faith (and those of not-so-good faith):
For ~ the first half of the 20th century, the leading scholarly theory on US slavery was that the slaves were happy living in a civilized land, etc. You'll see the same claim about many things.
I think the trap has two sufficient components: First, it lacks empirical observations - actual fact that tethers us to reality - and therefore is very prone to drift far from the ground truth. Second, it's a much more comfortable worldview for us, and we tend to adopt such worldviews until compelled to do otherwise.
Just because there is an upside for them - sending money home - doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok. As an extreme example, some underage people go into prostitution because they need the food and shelter to survive - the fact that they get those benefits doesn't make them happy or make it good or ok.
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Risk of developing trauma or mental illness is probably much lower for shower cleaners than CSAM / gore filters.
There is plenty of productive work to do in the world that isn’t streaming through the dregs of the internet for hours on end.
This argument is a false dichotomy.
I take it you’ve never lived in India? Visited Pakistan or Bangladesh?
Plenty of people would (literally) kill for those jobs, and have no other useful employment.
In those countries, Women are often widely forbidden from doing most jobs, which makes them particularly vulnerable.
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wow, this is absolute peak privilege of someone sheltered.
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