Porn may be messing with your head | Hacker News Reader

Porn may be messing with your head

reuters.com

21 pointsyiedyie10 comments

"It's not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether people born with certain brain types watch more porn"

So, it might not be messing with your head. Link-baity headline.

It looks as if headlines of the form "x may be y" fall under Betteridge's law of headlines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I dunno, seems pretty honest to me. It's what they concluded, isn't it? A correlation that should be further studied.

Yes, the article is honest, and the correlation probably merits further study. But the headline, while technically not incorrect, is a sneaky way of summarizing the findings to try and drive traffic to the article.

Compelling headlines may lead to increased readership! Click here to find out more.

And sample size of 64, too! The interesting thought here is not the result but how such BS is published in the JİAM Journal or reported by the (relatively) serious Reuters. The answer is: people like to see confirmation of their beliefs, true or not. This positive result bias in research has been idetified as a major problem byany researchers.

Might not be messing with both heads, anyway.

"Basically everything that people do very frequently can shape their brain structure and function"

So yeah, nothing to see or really learn here. Just link-bait mostly.

It was just a survey, not an longitudinal or experimental study.

> Because the study can’t prove that porn caused the changes to the brain, Kühn said it’s not possible to say whether watching porn is actually harmful.

> “Basically everything that people do very frequently can shape their brain structure and function,” she said.

No shit, Sherlock. At least they could have a control survey (?) to test if the effect is specific to porn or is it simply a consequence of watching more TV.

Is there a way to filter the up-votes of all the people out (on other submissions) who voted for this? It would be a great feature for HN

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