[sc0rb]

I thought this conversation was great until the downvote happened. So far, the opinions that have been expressed here are pretty good, it got even better when someone that had actually been abused started to share their experiences. Using the combined intelligence of the posters plus the unique perspective and experience of the poster that was abused, I'm sure an intelligent conclusion could have been reached.

The downvote clearly shows that someone here is lacking maturity. Downvoting because you don't like what was said is mindless censorship.

Also, I like your point about emotional investment. I am way too emotionally invested when it comes to drink driving. I lost both parents to a drunk driver and I would happily see hanged any drink driver. This is an emotional response rather than a logical one and this is why people with too much emotional investment shouldn't make the rules. Their input is definitely needed though.

[btilly]

To be clear, I did not downvote and indeed could not because you cannot downvote direct replies.

My guess as to the reason for the downvote is that once he veered into making personal comments on my state of mind, he was engaged in ad hominem. No matter how good or bad his points, that behavior is discouraged.

On whether I am too emotionally invested, if my points had been imbued with excessive emotion, that would have been one thing. But they were not. My big point was, "This potentially addresses a real problem in trying to reach abused children, and we should collect data on whether it actually works." I believe that to be a fairly neutral point.

Once we have data, we can revisit this with information of the form, "We had 5 complaints and 2 children called our hotline because of a sign that was seen fairly regularly by an estimated 1000 children." At that point we can try to find a balance between people who had a mildly unpleasant conversation with their children, and children who no longer have absolutely horrible things happening to them.

But until we have that data, we can't productively have those conversations. Clearly abuse is orders of magnitude worse than being confronted with an unpleasant and possibly confusing sign. Clearly more normal children are going to be confronting that sign than are going to see abuse stopped. How do these opposing interest balance? Nobody can tell because we don't know what portion of people who see the sign are disturbed by it, and we don't know how many abused children will actually respond to it.

So we should run the experiment and collect data.