[davidgh]

I made a previous comment that I deleted because it was a bit sarcastic which doesn’t help the conversation. More seriously:

If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?

Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.

[vidarh]

I dismiss them because there's literally decades worth of research into the effects of porn which to my knowledge has failed to come up with anything more than very minor effects, and when the best that's coming up now is some poorly constructed survey papers trying to infer things from self-reporting it's a strong indication there's nothing worth paying attention to, given the amount of effort and money that has been poured into it from groups with a strong interest in finding something.

If I trusted self-reported anecdotes I'd also seek to protect my family against ghosts, extra-terrestrial probing sessions and vengeful gods, among a long range of other risks I don't take seriously. If you can't provide evidence that gives a stronger indication of a damaging effect than that, I'll treat it the same way I threat those risks. If anything, if those studies are the best you can find it reassures me that the risks are near non-existent.