Comment by abustamam
2 days ago
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.
2 days ago
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.
He is trying to cast the illusion that anyone that doesn't believe the YouGov polling on here (e.g. me) is suffering from cognitive bias.
While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov.
> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case, what good are any of them? They're only telling you something about how the issue was put rather than anything about the true preferences of the population.
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It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.
Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.
Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.
Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.
This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.
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He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn.
Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.
(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say that, they should have specified that, rather than saying the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it is read.
There is a couple of threads of people asking for help with porn addiction, you will find that the responses are in a funny way much like potheads, plenty of denialism.
Also, if you post anything critical of porn; you get downvoted with little exceptions. Try it, if the topic ever comes up, say something critical and your comment gets flagged and removed.
HN has a massive demographic overlap with problematic pornography consumers.
Re downvotes: I suspect there are different forces at play. I would downvote such a post, not because supporting porn is one of my agendas, but opposing puritanism is.
It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn demographically?
1) Men.
2) Men age 18-40 in particular.
3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.
It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
Tech people? I have met utter goons obsessed with porn that barely understand how their phone actually works.
A lot of them work in Westminster.
Old news, but I suspect there hasn't been a sudden outbreak of puritanism.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mps-peers-and-staff-...
In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.
Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.
Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
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