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Comment by jkcorrea | Hacker News Reader

Call me crazy but I don’t need every life decision to be backed by peer reviewed studies. I’m perfectly happy using my intuition to tell me that e.g. yes the more I jerk it to a pixels on screen portraying (often unrealistic) sex the more I’m conditioning myself to have issues with the real thing.

I know a number of highly intelligent people in the sciences who make decisions like this (searching/waiting for Science to tell them what’s right) and who laugh at me when I follow intuition/folk knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong, academic research is an amazing thing. I follow many research backed protocols for fitness, diet etc. But I also think when it comes to systems as complex as our bodies, there’s much collective wisdom in our intuition and societal traditions that science hasn’t and may never catch up to.

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Eh, at the same time our society is often very closed off about these things, such that I doubt just how much folk wisdom there might be floating around. For example, something very basic occurred to me not too long ago: if you orgasm to something repeatedly you will condition yourself to seek out more of whatever the situation was when you orgasmed. I wouldn't say it's downright Pavlovian, but it's not far off classical conditioning.

It'd be nice to get some studies etc. to back it up, because it's still just a hypothesis at this point, but now that I reflect upon this, it should have been like, stunningly obvious. It should be the sort of thing parents tell their kids at puberty, basic word of caution. Yet just typing it out triggered all sorts of "oh, that's socially taboo!" warning bells for me. You shouldn't speak about conditioning in humans, you shouldn't speak so openly about pornography, etc.

You may be right with respect to "what works for me" - because you can literally experiment on yourself and tell (if you're keeping honest track of effects using various good practices from science / experiment design).

But you wouldn't be in a good position to argue against anyone saying otherwise.

There are numerous problems with folk beliefs and personal intuitions. Much like we are 100% fooled every time when we look at optical illusions, we can be fooled about other things. I'm glad you've figured out what works for you, but it's not anecdotes but only good science that can tell us what is "on average" going to happen (without investigating the individual particularities).

But that’s what folk beliefs essentially are: “on average this is going to happen”

Isn’t that inherently what happens when you play telephone across time and cultures? You end up with stories stripped down to the essence, the most important advice from those who came before us boiled down.

Are you advocating that when we find what works for us we don’t share that finding with others? I think that’s exactly what’s wrong with the “science is the only right answer” mindset..

I sincerely doubt any folk belief around sexuality - given the history of humanity. I grew up (in Russia) with my mom literally telling my 6-ish y/o self "don't touch your pipi or it will turn black and fall off". Given that people went insane 100 years ago when a skirt was short enough to expose an ankle, I doubt that kind of society would produce good folk beliefs around pornography or sexuality in general.

You're not crazy. The statistical power of most studies is very poor, and aggregating over narratives extracted from stat analysis is just gonzo. I mean, read from Aquinas or from Supreme Court decisions to see the erudition and "scholarmanship" required to even claim you're taking multiple takes into consideration.

Learn to listen to your body, this is inordinately important. I didn't pay attention to these chills I was getting that weren't warranted by the weather nor were accompanied by fever and... let a few days slice and I was admitted to the ICU with sepsis + an immune system shutting down.

Well here's the question for you. Is it the pixels, or the acts you are watching, which you yourself described as unrealistic; or even the single "fast food" chain you wander to sate cravings?

The mainstream stuff seems all the same, "rough and with step-$x". Eating the same meal over and over and over is gonna cause issues.

Intuition suggests other problems to me. Wanking is releasing a bunch of positive reinforcement brain chemicals, but nothing has been done to deserve such a reward. Wanker did nothing to win over an actual mate.

Yeah I think the article is a bit of a strawman: if you take ED to be more broadly “issues around sex” I think you’ll find a lot more people agreeing of the correlation

Just browsing the replies here I see many guys saying effectively “Well I watch tons of porn and my penis still works” which is kind of a level 1 analysis on how porn might be affecting their brain

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