It's the world's largest *SOMETHING*
May. 5th, 2011 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, the folks over on the Freakonomics blog are soliciting questions to ask the authors of what they (the authors) are calling "the largest experiment ever". Given that I'm familiar with these authors and their methodology, I'm not ready to cede the title of "experiment" to their work but I will at least grant that it's quite large as the subject they're studying basically comes down to porn on the internet.
So, obviously, they have something like an embarrassment of riches when it comes to data and they're trying to spin that into a strong point. I'm not saying it's a weak point, but... well, okay, I just did an experiment to test my hypothesis that "the" is more common than "of". I used a Google search for each word. About 27 billion results for "the", about 22 billion for "of". So on the basis of the fact that my experiment has 49 billion some points of data analyzed by a high-tech state of the art computer program can I say my experiment is bigger than theirs?
Obviously not. Whatever problems their methodology may have, they had to do more work than that to bring this book to market. But that's the only way in which their experiment can be said to be "larger" than one that spans decades, or even one that spans years. They looked at (for a certain value of "looked at") information on the web that involved purported millions of pieces of media.
And I say "certain values of 'looked at'" because I know they didn't spend years on this. As of autumn of 2009, they were working on an entirely different angle for establishing that the internet proves their preconceived neurological models were right.
Because these are the SurveyFail guys (here is a link to my own contemporary post on the subject) and the book they're pushing was conceived of as Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain.
This means that in the course of about a year and a half, they completely revised their methodology and their premises*, came up with a new focus for the book, devised and performed and analzyed the results of "largest experiment ever" and wrote the book about it. Assuming that
(*But not the meta-premise, which is that everything the Western world has traditionally taught about male and female sexuality is still true even though women banded together and created MOUNTAINS of porn for their own enjoyment approximately five minutes after a decentralized, non-commercial channel of intercontinental distribution outside the control of any individual or industry came into existence.)
I keep coming back to their methodology. For those who didn't follow (or don't remember) the initial brouhaha over their original proposition, these guys' idea is that they can prove their models of how the brain works by looking at something (women reading litporn, for instance), declare (not determine) what is happening in the women's brains, and saying, "See? It all fits!" and then call it science.
As one (actual... i.e., non-hypothetical) example of how this works:
It's well-known among anyone who knows how women on the internet actually produce and consume porn that male/male pairings are a pretty popular subject. To the internet generation, this is pretty much a "duh" thing. Women who like guys and sex and sex with guys might like guys having sex with guys. It's kind of like how some men who like women and sex with women like women having sex. This isn't even something new... Spock/Kirk porn was being copied and mailed and faxed (I think; I can't find a citation for that at the momentbut I believe I've read it) long before there was an internet. As soon as their methods of reproduction and dissemination that didn't rely on an entrenched industry catering to male needs, women were writing and sharing male/male porn.
These researchers, though, have a model of the brain that seemed to suggest that there shouldn't be anything that is so straightforward of a parallel between male and female sex drives, and that also suggested that women really shouldn't be liking porn in the first place. So how do they explain (explain away) this discrepancy?
By throwing out the notion that women might like m/m porn for the same reason men like f/f porn and instead latching onto the idea that women like m/m because it fulfills a transgressive/"dirty"/rebellious urge in the same way as, say, men who look at "shemale" [sic] porn do.
Now, they proposed to prove this experimentally by... and this is where it gets technical... establishing that there are women who consume m/m porn, nodding their head, and say, "Hmmm, yes, our models predicted this. If we were to do a brain scan, it would show that the same transgressive urges are being fulfilled as in men who look at 'tranny' [sic] porn."
Of course, if you spend much time in slash fic communities, you might find some people who find the m/m thing "transgressive", but the fact that there are whole mutually supportive communities devoted to it kind of undermines that. There's nothing furtive about it. Male/male sex is not taboo to many of the writers or readers. Crucially, in trying to prove that male and female brains are different, the researchers projected their own "male" viewpoint (GAYS ARE GROSS! BUTTSEX IS GROSS!) onto their female research subjects.
Interestingly the new version of the book seems to have thrown out the premise that slash fic is transgressive entirely. Their next tact seems to be that women like porn not for sexual purposes but for what we might call cuddlier reasons: romance and a sense of togetherness and community. Again, the premise has changed but the meta-premise... that the internet and what happens when porn exists outside the multibillion dollar industry devoted to it needn't make any of us rethink our views of male and female sexuality... remains the same.
Anyway, if you want to get your laugh for the day check out the tags on the book's Amazon page.
It will also be interesting to see what kind of questions make it through the moderation queue on the Freakonomics blog.
So, obviously, they have something like an embarrassment of riches when it comes to data and they're trying to spin that into a strong point. I'm not saying it's a weak point, but... well, okay, I just did an experiment to test my hypothesis that "the" is more common than "of". I used a Google search for each word. About 27 billion results for "the", about 22 billion for "of". So on the basis of the fact that my experiment has 49 billion some points of data analyzed by a high-tech state of the art computer program can I say my experiment is bigger than theirs?
Obviously not. Whatever problems their methodology may have, they had to do more work than that to bring this book to market. But that's the only way in which their experiment can be said to be "larger" than one that spans decades, or even one that spans years. They looked at (for a certain value of "looked at") information on the web that involved purported millions of pieces of media.
And I say "certain values of 'looked at'" because I know they didn't spend years on this. As of autumn of 2009, they were working on an entirely different angle for establishing that the internet proves their preconceived neurological models were right.
Because these are the SurveyFail guys (here is a link to my own contemporary post on the subject) and the book they're pushing was conceived of as Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain.
This means that in the course of about a year and a half, they completely revised their methodology and their premises*, came up with a new focus for the book, devised and performed and analzyed the results of "largest experiment ever" and wrote the book about it. Assuming that
(*But not the meta-premise, which is that everything the Western world has traditionally taught about male and female sexuality is still true even though women banded together and created MOUNTAINS of porn for their own enjoyment approximately five minutes after a decentralized, non-commercial channel of intercontinental distribution outside the control of any individual or industry came into existence.)
I keep coming back to their methodology. For those who didn't follow (or don't remember) the initial brouhaha over their original proposition, these guys' idea is that they can prove their models of how the brain works by looking at something (women reading litporn, for instance), declare (not determine) what is happening in the women's brains, and saying, "See? It all fits!" and then call it science.
As one (actual... i.e., non-hypothetical) example of how this works:
It's well-known among anyone who knows how women on the internet actually produce and consume porn that male/male pairings are a pretty popular subject. To the internet generation, this is pretty much a "duh" thing. Women who like guys and sex and sex with guys might like guys having sex with guys. It's kind of like how some men who like women and sex with women like women having sex. This isn't even something new... Spock/Kirk porn was being copied and mailed and faxed (I think; I can't find a citation for that at the momentbut I believe I've read it) long before there was an internet. As soon as their methods of reproduction and dissemination that didn't rely on an entrenched industry catering to male needs, women were writing and sharing male/male porn.
These researchers, though, have a model of the brain that seemed to suggest that there shouldn't be anything that is so straightforward of a parallel between male and female sex drives, and that also suggested that women really shouldn't be liking porn in the first place. So how do they explain (explain away) this discrepancy?
By throwing out the notion that women might like m/m porn for the same reason men like f/f porn and instead latching onto the idea that women like m/m because it fulfills a transgressive/"dirty"/rebellious urge in the same way as, say, men who look at "shemale" [sic] porn do.
Now, they proposed to prove this experimentally by... and this is where it gets technical... establishing that there are women who consume m/m porn, nodding their head, and say, "Hmmm, yes, our models predicted this. If we were to do a brain scan, it would show that the same transgressive urges are being fulfilled as in men who look at 'tranny' [sic] porn."
Of course, if you spend much time in slash fic communities, you might find some people who find the m/m thing "transgressive", but the fact that there are whole mutually supportive communities devoted to it kind of undermines that. There's nothing furtive about it. Male/male sex is not taboo to many of the writers or readers. Crucially, in trying to prove that male and female brains are different, the researchers projected their own "male" viewpoint (GAYS ARE GROSS! BUTTSEX IS GROSS!) onto their female research subjects.
Interestingly the new version of the book seems to have thrown out the premise that slash fic is transgressive entirely. Their next tact seems to be that women like porn not for sexual purposes but for what we might call cuddlier reasons: romance and a sense of togetherness and community. Again, the premise has changed but the meta-premise... that the internet and what happens when porn exists outside the multibillion dollar industry devoted to it needn't make any of us rethink our views of male and female sexuality... remains the same.
Anyway, if you want to get your laugh for the day check out the tags on the book's Amazon page.
It will also be interesting to see what kind of questions make it through the moderation queue on the Freakonomics blog.