Any scientific study is designed to reflect reality/the facts. If it doesn't it is biased in that it doesn't reflect reality -- what is actually going on out there in the real world.

Who was more accurate? The alchemists or the astronomers? The latter because of the scientific method.

OK for your pea brain HL.

You do a study of smokers vs non-smokers and discover that smokers have a higher rate of lung cancer. Makes sense pretty scientific.

Then you do a study of non-smokers from hawaii vs non-smokers from sydney and find that the hawaians have a higher rate of lung cancer than those in sydney. WHY? This is a confounding factor, still a scientific study with an unknown factor.

Then you do a study of smokers vs smokers who also smoke marijuana and find that the marijuana smokers have a much lower rate of lung cancer.

Then you compare the marijuana smokers vs non smokers who work in the hospitality industry and find that the non smokers have a higher rate of lung cancer than marijuana smokers.

All of the above are true,(check the SEER database) all scientific studies, all factually correct.

Just shows that you cannot rely on Epidemiologic studies unless you know ALL of the confounding factors. IE Rape is related to pornography, not proveable by any scientific method.

Get back to your sick society full of bigotry and hate, kids being shot in amish schools in a tradgedy maybe guns had something to do with it.

Another scientific fact, America spends 50% more on cancer treatments than Canada but the cure rate is much higher in Canada. Maybe you should look at this rather than worrying about how people get their rocks off. :)

"A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count...."

HL, perhapas the problem is your single focus on women. Last time
I was in the US, I asked the taxi driver how dangerous his job was.
He told me 6 of his buddies had been shot that year already,
that was in New Orleans. Plenty of men suffer from violence too.

If you want to get serious, look at the many countries where porn
is legal, but which don't have nearly as much violence as the
US has. From that its not hard to deduce that perhaps its not
porn that is the problem, but other violent trends in your
culture, which are accepted as normal in the US.

IIRC, something like 100'000 a year are shot. How many of those
are men?

Have you read T.S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?
What you seem to be talking about are individual theories tested scientifically. The fact that humans can't do more than test one hypothesis at a time only means that scientific knowledge proceeds slowly, and that each hypothesis is necessarily limited in scope, because the human mind is not omniscient.

I had the impression that what the original issue that you were responding to was the issue of bias due to hypotheses skewered by bias at the outset of testing, that presume conclusions before actual testing.


Many of the statements of so-called fact that you make about the world are themselves untested hypotheses, or tested against a limited supply of facts. Or are you omniscient? In any case, I am personally not interested in responding to your comments, which have little to do with any accurate survey of whether or not there are victims of pornography in the real world. Or have you interviewed every individual who might have been a victim?

What of the limits of human knowledge, the limits of existing knowledge on any subject, the limits of funding for scientific studies, for social science studies? It seems to me that you have reached conclusions about some issues without considering all possible facts, while asserting indirectly through name calling that you have considered all possible facts.

You might be interested in googleizing social scientific studies on the subject worldwide, or perhaps not.

And isn't this forum supposed to be about a SEARCH for knowledge, assuming we don't have enough, about issues of importance? If so, I would expect fewer conclusions and more fact-finding.

In my view, your display of rage does little to further scientific study.

I must admit it is 25 years since I read Kuhn's drivel, the man uses 21 different meanings for paridigm is what I do remember.

Kuhn's view of scientific progress would leave us with a mystery: Why does anyone bother? If one scientific theory is only better than another in its ability to solve the problems that happen to be on our minds today, then why not save ourselves a lot of trouble by putting these problems out of our minds?

I do note that his philosophy (not science) is being resurrected to back "creation" and "intelligent design" and I assume this is why you know about it.

OLO is a forum for opinions if you had not realised :)

"I am personally not interested in responding to your comments, which have little to do with any accurate survey of whether or not there are victims of pornography in the real world.

I am personally interested as to why your focus is so narrow,
when it comes to violence. What is your real agenda?

What we can show is that porn exists in many countries of
the world, many who don't have anywhere near the sort of
violence statistics that the US has. If violence is your
real concern, perhaps then you should address the bigger
picture and examine that. Is it that perhaps you have
some kind of religious agenda against porn perhaps?