You assume the rudeness is in being told to read it, rather than the tone of that. Actually it was the way he went about it, like I said, without that preface to his comment it loses no content and gains civility. There was no need, and my point stood as the kind parent suggests without my having read it. So I disagree, your point is not orthogonal.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?
Clearly here on hacker news criticising the blessed points of a high karma user like yourself is not permitted (it's costing me karma) so I ought to stop.
It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)
I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.
Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?