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[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (7 children)

This reminds me of the argument that we should be making more realistic porn. The problem is that people who are consuming large quantities of either news or porn are doing it as a leisurely recreation, and realism makes the content less entertaining. Because the customer is the consumer, lower entertainment value directly translates to lower profit.

Is there a way to reduce the entertainingness of news without reducing the consumption level, or to maintain the entertainingness of news without making it also be misleading?

Edit: the ideas presented in the article are good spitballing, but they're entertaining in a "friend's highly political art student gallery event" kind of way, not a "blow off steam shitposting after work" kind of way. Realistic news would need to be able to compete with the latter

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (6 children)

I really don't understand the 'realism' objection to porn.

Porn is the manifestation of (the mostly male) fantasy. About the kind of sexual experience a person (man) would like to have, under what circumstances, with what kind of partner.

With that in mind, perhaps real life would be better if it were more like porn, rather than expecting porn to be more like real life.

This has no bearing, by the way, on the news. The news is another kettle of fish serving a different purpose.

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (5 children)

What feels good doesn't film well. It's hard to find angles that show what's going on, and a lot of the important action is subtle enough to be hard to see. Porn is a commitment-free spectacle for accompanying masturbation where depth is replaced with novelty, and trying to simulate porn when you have sex means focusing on an outside viewer's perspective of the experience above the sensation and experience itself. Moreover, female porn fantasies are quite different in nature (ahem, harlequin novels anyone?), so your comment that maybe life would be better if it was more like male porn simply ignores female preference.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

A few points.

I have no idea what this really means:

It's hard to find angles that show what's going on, and a lot of the important action is subtle enough to be hard to see.

Likewise:

Porn is a commitment-free spectacle for accompanying masturbation where depth is replaced with novelty,

This tacitly assumes that sex should be accompanied by commitment. Why is that? It need not be.

Sure, many traditional cultures and religious systems placed sex within the confine of commitment, and there's even an evolutionary biology explanation based on the resource intensity of child rearing.

But that's all about sex as procreation, not about sex as enjoyment. Again, porn is fantasy. Consider that commitment-free sex may be a desirable part of fantasy. Maybe it's just about a hot partner who just wants fuck you, in a number of ways and positions, without needing emotional validation and/or financial support. Maybe it's even about intentionally undermining those conditions, and the act of doing so a pleasure in itself.

By the way, I'm not advocating that porn is an equivalent substitute for sex. The argument is that porn is basically the manifestation of what one party wishes real sex were like, but isn't.

Finally, while almost all porn is created for the male POV, I understand and accept porn for the female, trans, or basically any other POV too. I don't deny anyone the right to fantasy, in whatever form it takes (within reason).

BTW, I did not make the argument that life would be better if it was more like 'male porn'. I just said 'porn'.

But at the same time, I hardly see empowering women to be more sexually aggressive, less concerned about emotional attachment, more domineering (or submissive) as desired, more vocal about what they want, don't want, and all without shame, would be a bad thing for women. One of the interesting things that is often overlooked is that porn stars 'objectifying' themselves makes men like them more, not less.

Really what I see a lot of porn boiling down to is men not having to chase women, and control to initiate sex ceded to women. That would seem to be pretty compatible nominally with what feminists would want.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Seems the heart of the matter is you and I wanting different things in our sexual partners, and feeling compelled to make arguments explaining why our preferences would actually be the best thing for everyone. I'm too much of a coward to go into more detail about my experiences and where I'm coming from right now, sorry.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If that's the case (that you and I want different things) that's perfectly fine with me. I think that people can want different things even if those things are contradictory.

My problem really is with people saying that fantasy is intrinsically bad, and demanding that it be altered to fit 'reality' or more specifically the preconceived narrative of what reality should be.

Fantasy is really just the other side where the grass is greener. If we're talking about men, and typical cis porn, then we're talking about a really hot woman who wants to have all kinds of sex with us, will initiate it, is not requiring an emotional bond, and is capable of pleasing and being pleased without a man having to make a special thing of it.

There's nothing at all wrong with that, and of course, also nothing wrong with women who aren't interested in that approach. I simply object to the dismissal of what one party wants on the basis that they should not be allowed to want it.

[–]georgioz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Reminds me o Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers by Scott.

He basically has the same point. In the modern world the anecdotes make for terrible reporting. It's even worse. Even large number of anecdotes make for a terrible reporting. There is no other way to solve this other than a very thorough and meticulous analysis.

[–]OneAndOnlyMrLonely 1 point2 points  (1 child)

'it is entirely possible to legitimately see a p=(1 in 1 billion) or p<0.00000005 just when the null is true (which it never is), and if you consider just the most recent set of papers from the past decade or so, you could see p<0.0000000005. Throw in the low but non-zero base rate of fraud, questionable research practices, incorrect parametric modeling assumptions, endemic publication bias...'

At least in my field (immunology), rare events like you describe are massively eclipsed and drowned out by shoddy science.

'Crime and crime rates are an easy one - falls in the crime rate should get as much space as the total of individual crimes; if a murder gets a headline, then a year with 50 fewer murders should get 50 headlines about that reduction.'

I like this a lot. People are absurdly pessimistic about the world today while massively taking for granted all the advances we've made. I've had so many people tell me they wish they'd been born in the 18-19th century...They think it's just like losing their cell phones and riding around on horses instead of cars, taking for granted sanitation, vaccines, readily available food, etc...

'This could be applied to costs & benefits as well: in a discussion of clinical trial design and bioethics of randomized experiments and whether it can be ethical to run a RCT, one could allow discussion of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (affecting 399 men) but only if one then has proportionately much discussion of the estimates of the number of people hurt by small underpowered incorrect or delayed randomized trials (millions)'

I'm less on board here. The Tuskegee experiments were atrocious in a whole different way, and furthermore, disenfranchised huge segments of the population and (rightfully) led to widespread mistrust of medical professionals.

'A proportional newspaper might allocate space by geographic region populations, so there’s a giant void with a tiny little 2-line wire item for Africa, while the USA section requires a microscope to read everything.'

Is this a typo? The population of Africa is nearly quadruple the USA, no?

I agree with philotrow though - the goal of news corporations is profit, and the aim of news consumers is entertainment. I think people looking for unbiased information are a very small minority.