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Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you didn't read my comment...

    >  Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.

Like I said, I'm no expert, so even if I had time to read the report (I don't) it isn't a scientific metastudy. It's a report, by a quite possibly (probably) biased organisation. So unless I had some special knowledge about the area (I don't) or time to review it in detail (nope) I don't know whether to trust it or not vs. a scentific metastudy.

A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)

Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.

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When someone says "why don't you read XXX instead of jumping to conclusions", and it turns out you not only haven't read XXX but refuse to, the claim that their statement is rude becomes a little hollow.

He pointed out that the study did not appear to be a peer reviewed scientific study, and asked if this was really the case. He was told to read it himself, but reading the report yourself doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the review/publishing process for the report. (Of course since it's not in a scientific journal the chance it received peer review is pretty low.) Telling somebody to read something themselves may or may not be rude, but it certainly wasn't an answer to the question.

I know everybody on HN likes to think they are an expert in everything, but reading 'reports' by think tanks or other political institutions, even ones that cite scientific studies, is a good way to confirm your own biases, but not a necessarily a good way to educate yourself about contentious issues. If you are not familiar with the area of research you won't know what has been missed or ignored or proven unrepeatable or flawed. A peer reviewed meta-study would be much more likely to include the full cross section of available research.

You're probably right, but I think your point is orthogonal to mine. Being told to read something is insulting and rude if the presumption should be that you'd already read it before commenting, but that presumption vanishes when you militantly declaim that you shouldn't have to read things.

I'm biased because I sympathize with the "rude" commenter, in that I think discussions would be better on HN if people took more time to read linked sources and spent less time promoting their own preconceptions.

Also, if this community is as smart as it likes to think it is (no comment), it should be able to extract credible content from think-tank reports without succumbing to their intended conclusions.

You assume the rudeness is in being told to read it, rather than the tone of that. Actually it was the way he went about it, like I said, without that preface to his comment it loses no content and gains civility. There was no need, and my point stood as the kind parent suggests without my having read it. So I disagree, your point is not orthogonal.

I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.

I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.

Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?

Yes, I'm sorry to say, you'll generally have to read things in order to discount them entirely.

Clearly here on hacker news criticising the blessed points of a high karma user like yourself is not permitted (it's costing me karma) so I ought to stop.

It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)

I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.

Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.

So any kind of tone is ok if you disagree with somebody? I mean I disagree with you here, so can I get condescending?

I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.

What tone? He said you should read something before arriving at conclusions about it. He didn't add "you moron" to the end of it. And, it turned out, you hadn't read it.

Every criticism stings. They sting me even when I'm confident that I'm right, and even though a Markov 'tptacek could probably get 1000 karma points pretty quickly on HN. Don't confuse the sting of a critical comment with a breach of etiquette.

Say 'Why didn't you just X before jumping to conclusions?' out loud and tell me it's not rude. It also presupposes that my only reasonable response would be to read the whole report and criticise its contents, whereas I suggest you can criticise it from the point of view of who it is written by and the fact it's not a scientific article. I also clearly stated that I just didn't know. Why that justified that kind of response I don't know.

You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?

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