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.
> 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.
> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.
It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
> what good are any of them?
If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population
They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
It am suspicious of polling because I have a decent understanding of statistics. That is the opposite of statistical illiteracy.
> But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
That isn't the argument being made. Nobody said it is "useless". I said I was "suspicious of polling organisations". Polling can be and has been used to manipulate public sentiment.
Therefore it is prudent to be suspicious of any polling.
> If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
That's fair in the context of, you're a political operative who is trying to enact specific policies as your occupation and you therefore have the time to go through and carefully inspect numerous polls to derive a well-rounded understanding. But that's also quite disconnected from how polls are typically used in the public discourse.
Ordinary people don't have time to do that, so instead political operatives will commission a poll to get the result they want, or find one from a reputable pollster who unintentionally made a phrasing error in their favor, or just cherry pick like this: https://xkcd.com/882/
And then use the result to try to convince people that the public is actually on their side and it would be ineffective or costly to oppose them. Which, unless you have the time to go carefully read a hundred different polls to see whether the result is legitimate, means that the sensible strategy is to give polls no weight.
Or to put it another way, on any politically contentious issue there will always be at least one poll saying X and another saying not-X, which means that in the absence of a more thorough analysis that exceeds the resource availability of most members of the public (and even many legislators), neither has any information content because the probability of a poll existing with that result was already ~100%.
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.
The internet has made it much more difficult to censor. It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target people and thus easier to censor.
I believe that this is the precursor before massive political censorship.
As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you don't buy into that there are obvious problems with handing you ID over to third parties. There is no guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often haven't).
They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?
There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
And yet homomorphic encryption is a thing. It's possible to process the encrypted request and be unable to see it.
Similarly we could easily devise many solutions that can prove the age in the privacy - respecting ways (like inserting the age-confirming token inside the pack of cigarettes which an adult could then purchase with cash, etc)
You're not understanding the dichotomy. It doesn't matter what kind of encryption you use, the system you're asking for can be made much simpler than this: Just use the same token for everyone and only give it to adults. It needs no cryptography at all, it just needs to be a random string that children don't have. You don't need anything to do with cigarettes, just print it on the back of every adult's ID or allow any adult to show their ID at any government office.
But then anyone can post the token on the internet where anyone can get it, the same as they could do with anything cryptographic that you put on the back of cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties, which is precisely the thing that would make it not private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.
If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it won't work. It would never work anyway because there are sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than the thing that fails to work while causing widespread harm, but then people are going to complain about it and try to impose the thing that does cause widespread harm by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should be abandoned instead.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.
