MAP Forum

There is a researcher I follow who isn't that controversial but she has openly talked about the challenges conducting research in this field and the risk of base assumptions when those base assumptions are not allowed to be challenged.

There are base assumptions which no university would allow research to challenge because it would be far too controversial. So all research has to start from those base assumptions and must be within very narrowly defined areas.

Base assumptions are assumptions such as these.
1. That sex with children is abusive and so the aim of any research must be to reduce the incidence of sex with children.
2. That children are not capable of benefitting from sexual activity.
3. That pedophilia is an illness that should be treated.

The next challenge is data sets since there are very few data sets available and they can be misleading. Data tends to be collected from people convicted of sex crimes and so are not representative of pedophiles in general. If you collected data on parents only from parents convicted of crimes against kids then the conclusion would be that no parents should be allowed to have kids.

So we have fixed assumptions and poor data sets, the next problem is that research has to be very careful not to be too controversial. You can pretty much start with a conclusion and then use your limited data to draw a map towards that conclusion. No university would support research that could draw controversial conclusions and any attempt to do that would be career ending.

So she openly admits that it's an odd area since it doesn't really follow the scientific method. Start with assumptions that can't be challenged, take small and flawed datasets and conduct research that must support one of a narrow few sets of conclusions. You could do research on identifying offenders or reducing the liklihood of offending, but you couldn't do research that risked normalising or benefitting pedophiles.

One example is an article on research into brain activity to develop a way to identify the mental condition of pedophilia, try to identify what is failing in the brain and so some day develop a treatment. But the problem is that so far this approach has failed and there's currently no way to differentiate the illness of being minor attracted to sexualities. Rather than conclude therefore that minor attraction is a natural sexuality the same as other sexualities based on the data and evidence, the conclusion is that the tests are not the correct tests and more research is needed.

She is generally mainstream but it's interesting to see that researchers do at least acknowledge that their field is based on a level of bs at least.

If you were a physicist studying gravity and found out in a new piece of research that gravity works slightly different than we had previously anticipated, your research would be met with curiosity; people would be trying to replicate it, old literature would be getting looked over to analyze why this wasn't discovered before; it could shape the scientific community's approach to gravity going forward.

This is the only field where a new discovery, especially one that might prove there is less harm than previously thought, can be disregarded as untrue without analysis. There is no valid reason to be restricting research like this, no justifiable way to defend it, yet the public generally don't care. People "believe the science" when it comes to believing AMSC is bad; you're meant to just ignore that the scientific method isn't actually allowed to be followed, and if your research concludes the wrong thing, it's never published.

Bookshelf wrote: Fri Dec 19, 2025 3:56 pm If you were a physicist studying gravity and found out in a new piece of research that gravity works slightly different than we had previously anticipated, your research would be met with curiosity; people would be trying to replicate it, old literature would be getting looked over to analyze why this wasn't discovered before; it could shape the scientific community's approach to gravity going forward.

This is the only field where a new discovery, especially one that might prove there is less harm than previously thought, can be disregarded as untrue without analysis. There is no valid reason to be restricting research like this, no justifiable way to defend it, yet the public generally don't care. People "believe the science" when it comes to believing AMSC is bad; you're meant to just ignore that the scientific method isn't actually allowed to be followed, and if your research concludes the wrong thing, it's never published.

There is no justified reason for research to run this way. Research only operates this way when there's a belief that the findings of true research would threaten a world view.