Cutstuff Forum
General => Anything Goes => Topic started by: Balrog on June 01, 2011, 08:50:42 PM
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http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/19/m ... -internet/ (http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/19/mind-reading-the-researchers-who-analyzed-all-the-porn-on-the-internet/)
So: this is a bunch of whacks in way over their heads, conducting a survey that has been dissed as unethical, poorly designed, and just plain creepy (http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2195588&cid=36281518), all for info that I could get from half an hour of TV Tropes?
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This was a good post.
As a social psychology researcher AND as a philosopher, I had questions about the above article (I failed to realize that you were heavily implying it to be false at first).
1.) They analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn? Even with custom-tailored software, that would take a very long time. More importantly, since two human beings could not possibly inspect all of this (or even a few percentages of it), the data would need to be separated into categories by a computer program as well. I had heard that new technology is under development right now which will aid parental controls by analyzing audio for porn instead of just color in video or images. It supposedly will have a success rate in the upper 80%. Even if they had a final product of this technology or something like it, there would be at least a 10% margin of error that it was porn at all, much less what kind of porn it was.
2.) He states that "guys are turned on by lesbians because it's a doubling of visual cues. And one psychological cue for arousal in men is female sexual pleasure. Seeing lesbians kissing doubles that too". He actually writes as fact that, because the visual cue is doubled, the arousal must be doubled. Obviously, that isn't true. For an inkling as to why, think of this: You see a naked woman in a basketball court. You are aroused. You see fifty women in the same basketball court. Are you 50X more aroused? Is that even possible?
3.) They offer explanations for certain pornographic preferences which have nothing to do with his experiment. Even if they had 'analyzed' the data (whatever that means), they would know the percentages of views on specific pornographic topics. This would tell them nothing as to the motivation behind these searches. To claim to know why due to some sort of a priori knowledge is insane.
4.) To discover whether pornography is addictive, they looked at an AOL data set. This is clearly a confound. Any difference between AOL users and users of any other internet service (of which I believe there may be a few) will not be a factor in this experiment. It's a smaller problem than the above listed, but it's still a big one.
5.) He insults Evolutionary Psychology, calling it narrow. Regardless of one's position on the subject, it is one of the biggest powerhouses in psychological research today, and if his findings contradict this branch, it is most likely because his study is flawed. However, he himself uses an explanation from Evolutionary Psychology to explain his findings that men enjoy porn involving cheating wives: "This is an example of what biologists call a sperm competition cue. Across the animal kingdom, when males see other males mating, it tends to provoke arousal. If he is going to compete with the other male, he has to produce more sperm". This makes him not only arrogant, but a hypocrite as well.
Sorry to write so much, I just can't help but get on a tirade about bad research.
People are already so biased against research involving human subjects that these make us all look bad.
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I counted the word "porn" used on that page at least 33 times.
Edit: above post was tl;dr, yet I read it anyway.