[trhway]

>all sorts of unhealthy behavior

How we know of that unhealthiness? Because some people have explored those options, and we learned the result. One can say those people did public service for our species.

>People use youth to excuse

You're either doing strawman by substituting excuse for explanation, or you're arguing against evolution and natural selection which placed the peak of exploration/exploitation behaviors ratio at the youth time, be it our species or say wolves or cats, etc. I think there are a lot of good reasons why that peak is at the youth time.

>Some of my friends smoked cigarettes but most of us didn't because why would we harm ourselves on purpose like that?

Well, cigarettes is established harm. Took decades of years and millions of people, and as result we call it an obvious harm today. It looks though to me that there are greater harm out there which can be observed these days - the more and more suppressed exploration instinct which over the generations will result in tremendous negative impact on our civilization, and bringing it back wouldn't be so easy as say quiting smoking (did it myself 22 years ago after a decade of pack-a-day smoking)

[komali2]

> How we know of that unhealthiness? Because some people have explored those options, and we learned the result. One can say those people did public service for our species.

We've known cigarettes are unhealthy for a very long time. We'd know sooner if it weren't for cigarette company lobbying. And we didn't need to wait for people to die of cancer, a look at the label is enough lol.

> or you're arguing against evolution and natural selection which placed the peak of exploration/exploitation behaviors ratio at the youth time

This is at least as fallacious if not more so. I don't have a name for this odd "because of evolution" argument but I hear it a lot when discussing sociology. "Kids smoke cigarettes because cavemen wanted to explore the horizon" isn't a coherent causal explanation at all.

> Well, cigarettes is established harm.

Exactly, and very well established by the time I was a teenager in the 2010s.

> . It looks though to me that there are greater harm out there which can be observed these days - the more and more suppressed exploration instinct which over the generations will result in tremendous negative impact on our civilization

Ok so what I'm getting is that you have a pet theory that kids not smoking these days is a symptom of an overall rejection of some form of naturalism that you believe is overall harming our society somehow. Is that the case?

[trhway]

>I don't have a name for this odd "because of evolution" argument but I hear it a lot when discussing sociology

sociology without evolution/natural selection is like physics without Newton's laws - a religion.

> "Kids smoke cigarettes because cavemen wanted to explore the horizon" isn't a coherent causal explanation at all.

both have the same major component - they are different manifestations of the drive to disobey authority and the established order of things. There are 2 ways of dealing with such things - 1. to convince against and to explain harm, etc vs. 2. to suppress, to force into submission.

>Ok so what I'm getting is that you have a pet theory that kids not smoking these days is a symptom of an overall rejection of some form of naturalism that you believe is overall harming our society somehow.

You picked an easy example (borderline strawman) - smoking (well, it is easy today, after 300+ years it took to establish the harm of tobacco smoking) where the 1. is easy. In many situations the 1. isn't that easy and it requires approach specific to the issue at hands, and the society more and more it seems drives toward applying the 2. as a general solution for all the issues, be it cigarettes or horizon exploration. That general drive of widespread application of the 2. is, i think, very harmful for our civilization.