I’ll be the first to tell you this: I love Trevor Noah and his team.
That said, I still have 3 problems with the video below, which seemed to suggest that the behavior of the alt-right was related to their unwillingness to consume porn.
Confirmation Bias
There are tons of empirical evidence that pornography coupled with masturbation is not healthy. Nowadays, people in their teens and twenties are suffering from premature ejaculation and other forms of erectile dysfunction. To put that into context, before the proliferation of porn on the internet, these kinds of ailments typically happened to men over 40 years. Confirmation bias sets in when you ignore the myriads of evidence against pornography consumption and look for that one person theorizing about how porn is causing the alt-right to be angry. I had the choice to simply watch the video and move on, but I feel there are thousands of people here who are miseducated on the real harm that porn causes in society.
Anybody Can Do Armchair Theorizing
Dr. David Ley was only providing a theory of how he thought masturbation influenced the behavior of a certain group of people. I do not have any problem with that. I think every good scientist has the right to theorize about anything. That is the way of science. However, science does not start and stop at theorizing. You start with a hypothesis, and you test that hypothesis by experimentation. This does not even have to be a true experiment with real people in a lab. You can go to aggregated data from national surveys such as the BRFSS and many others, and simply compare the reported happiness of people who watch porn and masturbate, versus people who do not. All I am saying is that it is irresponsible to push such a theory without empirical evidence of any form. This is one of the reasons I feel psychology continues to get a bad rep among the hard sciences. You do not see physicists, chemists or biologists theorize and end there. They follow-through by providing empirical evidence that supports or disproves their hypotheses.
Correlation is NOT Causation
One of the first things you learn in grad school is that correlation is not causation. The fact that two events happen concurrently does not mean that one caused the other. You cannot simply say that the alt-right is always angry because they do not watch porn. That’s simply lazy science. As an example, I typically wake up when the sun rises. But I won’t go on to say that sunrise caused me to wakeup. Neither would I say that my waking up caused the sun to rise. There are more factors that directly impact when I get up, such as the time when I slept, or how much I slept the previous night, or how tired I was the previous day. Similarly, there are myriads of factors that directly translate into anger in the alt-right, just in the same way that there are myriads of factors that translate into anger in other people groups.
Conclusion…
Now, I understand this is satire (i.e., Trevor Noah and similar satirists should not be taken very seriously). However, the problem with satire is that you see what you want to see depending on your stand. People on the right would watch this video and laugh at how dumb liberals are to believe that not watching porn can cause anger. People on the left would watch the same video and laugh at how dumb conservatives are to not watch porn. And that’s why I have taken the time to write this long essay, so that irrespective of your leaning, you learn to see through the lenses of objectivity.
