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Comment by stratomorph | Hacker News Reader

Single page version: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2009/12/16/MakeLove/print.html

So, the author starts with an academic study of the sex lives of modern young people, which drew some conclusions that porn is not the devil: "pretty conventional, almost identical to their parents," and "pornography has been demonized and that its effects are negligible." Then, she spends more than a thousand words trying to refute that entirely by anecdotal evidence, capping it off with "porn is having a profound impact on our culture."

I know asking everyone to act like good scientists is too much. But I would like it if people would at least try to act like bad scientists, and selectively use studies that support their predetermined conclusions. What a world, where you strengthen your point by citing only studies that refute it.

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Couldn't agree more. [Edit: rest is unrelated to the article]

Recently, a facebook group against water fluoration started in my town. A few of my friends being in it, I checked it out, and saw a few things that didn't make sense in their affirmations: bad chemistry, selectively picking facts and misinterpreting them. I made a comment on the group to clarify them and was careful to put myself as neutral and mention some good points.

Well, they promptly deleted my post. I have a hard time understanding why they want to convince people with scare tactics and bad data, when they could do a perfectly credible stand without doing so. My opinion of democracy went significantly down with that. I wish I could refer them to Eliezer and Less Wrong... but I think these people aren't interested in truth.

(The group, if you speak french: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=262927717140&ref=m... )

I think you've misunderstood. Sure, the author agrees that porn is not the devil, i.e. it doesn't lead to violent crime and it's not going to lead to the collapse of civilization, but nonetheless wants us to knows there are serious negative consequences that we should be aware of.

You see, that's my point. How do we know there are serious negative consequences at all? Because of the anecdotes she mentions? She didn't cite any rigorous study that concludes pornography is harmful, but simply appealed to our gut feeling that it's got to be hurting us somehow. While I may agree or disagree, my complaint is that her anecdotal evidence is somehow supposed to sweep away the presumably well-designed study cited at the start. That's the opposite of science.

Edit: My tone here is a little combative. Sorry, it's not intended as an attack on you.

That's OK I wasn't offended.

If it's so hard to study, for example, the climate scientifically, then it must be orders of magnitude harder to study something like the effect of pornography scientifically. I simply don't think it's a scientific question.

That's not to say that the article should be confused for an academic study of any sort, but it's certainly useful insofar as it will encourage some readers to think about a specific aspect of pornography prevalence that they'd never thought of before.

I was thinking reading the article: the guys who mindlessly copy porn moves and replies, how do we know it they would have been any better without porn? A pretty good hypothesis is that they wouldn't, they'd have been either woefully inexperienced or unimaginative. That's why gut feelings are bad and studies are good.

But studies don't come into existence out of thin air. You need to put things into conversation for someone to put the effort in to go out and do a study.

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