Well I would expect that when you are using something often, then it will go stronger like muscles. So more wanking -> more sperm count. But I am just guessing here.
It’s true. Christians are the most likely group to have kids. The most likely Christians are Mormons, then Catholics, and Evangelicals are tied for second.
The group least likely to have kids are agnostics, with atheists being very slightly more likely.
Maybe with longer lifespans, people making conscious choices which partner to have children with, and IVF being an option, there just isn't that much evolutionary pressure on sperm counts. Something that reduces your sperm count by 50% but makes you 10% more attractive could absolutely be an evolutionary advantage in the developed world.
Not that I think this is what's going on, but I think rejecting it outright is too hasty.
IVF and things like caesarians & other prenatal care are surely having an evolutionary effect. Fertility and ability to give healthy live birth used to be the most fundamentally important evolutionary pressures for us (and basically every other species), and now we can opt out of them.
IDK how long we'd expect it to take for most of humanity to become dependent on a high-tech society to reproduce, under those circumstances, but it'd seem really weird to me if that's not the direction we're going. But maybe that takes hundreds or thousands of years to have a pronounced effect, rather than tens.
From TFA: "But the transmission of these exposures doesn’t stop there—the epigenetic effects of these exposures may be transmitted from one generation to the next, not just from the mother but possibly from the father too. It may be due to factors in the father’s sperm that disrupt the reproductive development of male fetuses in the womb, Levine notes."
My bet is on the microplastics that have been found everywhere, from the arctic snow[1] down to the placenta of unborn babies[2]. They are known to be endocrine disruptors, however they only got their media spotlight (as far as I am aware) in the last ~4 years. Thus we're far away from being able to fully understand their effects on the human body.
Fun part is that I have some crazy (non-scietifically backed) theories that they are the cause of behavioral changes in humans which became more prominent in our society in the last 10-20 years. Unfortunately this is unresearched territory, as the only important article I came across were related to animals thus far [3][4]
I wonder how we can even determine what effects microplastics have on the human body when they are so prolific that every human on earth has them. Comparing with humans from the past has many challenges, so I guess the best we can do is comparing people that have more to those with less.
I mean, VR porn is already pretty nuts, I can imagine that a few generations of technology down the line the desire to explore the universe can be fully supplanted
Has masturbation notably increased over the years?
Of course the availability of pornographic material has increased, but previous generations seemed to do fine with sears catalogues so I'm not sure that is a big factor.
Young, productive workers and consumers will exist somewhere globally, it’s a matter of capturing some of that productivity as investment return. If it all goes to hell, sure, the rows in a database are going to mean very little and you’re going to fallback to fuel, food, and firearms until the end (unlikely).
Not all markets are equally accessible by public companies as is the case with the US. Often you have a lot of private companies, companies owned by people close to the government, etc. If you own real estate it might suddenly be disowned and given to someone close to the local elites, etc. Also, in coming decades, declining birth rates will be a global concern, not just one of the developed countries plus russia (and OMG does russia have this problem right now).
Yeah, if the number of people shrinks, so does the size of a market, and so do revenues of companies. If you own stocks, those will be worth less. If the number of people shrinks, so does the demand for living space, and the value of your apartment goes down. Etc.
Outcomes aren't great for old folks who go into homes without having someone on the outside looking out for them. I don't know if you've seen the recent stories but a little cognitive issues and you'll be signing away everything you've earned to the home itself or one of it's employees. It's quite common.
Yeah but that was the whole point. You're telling someone who already doesn't want kids why they should want kids, but you're giving them only one reason. If they do so, it will only be for that reason
Not necessarily. Suppose that person has multiple reasons to want kids and multiple reasons to not want kids. They analyze the pros and cons and figure that the cons slightly outweigh the pros so they choose not to have children.
If later they learn something unpleasant about nursing homes, or pension plans, or something else relevant to their expected quality of life at their old age, then that might tip the scale towards having children, even though it is only one of many reasons.
The last reason that tipped the scales towards a decision is not necessarily the only one or even the most important.
There will be a lot of poor suckers. A lot of pension schemes and even social security in the US rely on having younger workers paying into it. It's a huge part of how people do retirement planning.
If your answer is that you are not planning on counting on it for the future then a lot of people will ask why not stop paying into it and keep the money taxed for yourself? It is a significant tax. You CAN actually stop paying into it and then make yourself ineligible for payments out which includes spousal benefits being cancelled. You CAN conscientiously object, it is a provision of the SSA law.
If a lot of young people saw that, they would withdraw from it and put the trust right now into a deficit which would adversely affect the people withdrawing from it right now.
I think there is a non zero probability of this happening regardless for different, uglier political reasons but it doesn't make a lot of sense for people to be forced to pay into something with no promise of ever getting something back.
Your money will have to be worth something and nursing homes to still exist in a world without children. Imagine everyone stops having children tomorrow and make a point for that case, then accept some will have a few kids - that is an improvement but is that enough?
This is misleading. Birth rates globally are still above replacement level. Even if they weren't, immigration still provides opportunities for people to move from areas of higher relative birth rate to areas of lower relative rate, should they choose to.
it's not really misleading at all. Places like Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, and Malaysia all had birth rates below replacement in 2021.
Sure, you can still find nice big numbers in places like Niger in sub-saharan Africa, but even they are starting a sharp decline. And they are starting with a low base. Their entire national population is only the size of the greater NYC area.
What you're describing is tragedy of the commons. No negative consequences to not having children, but big negative disproportional cost to the parents raising them. With disproportionately privatized losses and socialized gains.
People often say you shouldn't have kids for your own retirement. In the ultimately hypocrisy, they often mean kids will be for everybody's retirement (when they're forced to pay social security taxes as adults).
The economic incentive is to let others have kids and shoulder disproportionately the costs, while you can free ride and "not have negative consequences." Immigration doesn't solve this problem at the system level as removing children from foreign tax pool into our domestic pool shifts benefits from one elderly person to another.
> Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.
The question is then who will care for these people when they get old? Other people's children? So other people should have children, put the effort to raise and educate them for your benefit? This is a very egotistic view.
I would argue that expecting your children to care for you is actually far more egotistic than merely expecting a social safety net for all people to exist.
I did not say that in any means, shape or form. I said that all people need someone to help them when they are old, so all people have some responsibility these "someone". The "someone" are children of people, so society needs people to have children that will become adults and be part of society; all people, if possible (medical conditions are usually the accepted exception).
I'll rather hang myself then going to a nursery home now and even more so in the future. I'm living a happy life and looking forward to tomorrow - and yet I am dead serious about that. I've seen enough people in those places. Did you notice that one thing you learned while growing up and maturing was that you started to notice when the party is over and it's time to leave instead of hanging on until the very dire end - it's the same thing with life.
Also neither is yourself getting children or other people getting some a guarantee for a dignified existence in a future nursery home nor is such utilitarian thinking a good basis for deciding on whether or not to bring someone into the world.
Humans will eventually go the way of the Dodo - and that's okay. Because we are not special. Not at all.
Not to belabor this point, nor reply to myself. But my mom is 85 and totally capable of shopping and helping herself and her brother just died at 91. He was also capable of doing basically anything you would need to survive daily.
I remember visiting for the first time my great grandmother when I was 6 years old. She was 99. When she saw her great grandson topless with shorts (hey it was the tropics) she reached forward and gave me a massive purple nurple and laughed. She was still shopping daily and moving around.
So I'm not really sure what scare mongering tactics in favour of parenting you are trying to propagate here.
Don't have kids just because you are expecting them to take care of you in old age. That's just cruel.
The situation is a bit more complex than that, but in any case, that's a rather weak rationale for not committing suicide.
Here is a better reason: You'll be dead quite soon in any case, so unless you're in agony, you may as well enjoy your final days here. Think of some of your favorite activities and pick one. Rinse and repeat.
Sound shallow? Maybe, but I've spent an awful lot of time contemplating the question.
Sorry if I did a poor job of conveying, but my comment was never intended to rationalize committing suicide or not committing suicide. It was to illustrate society generally doesn't respect these wishes, that these wishes often fail, and that ending up in an institution staffed by our juniors may be less of our own choice than we may think.
Assisted suicide (death in friendlier terms) like we have in Canada is only going to become more permissive and other pleases will continue to adopt such laws.
In the future when people have real options this is less likely to be an issue.
I’m hoping this was said in jest but this is definitely not great news for you, and will only make the demographic cliff even steeper.
Assuming you at some point want to be alive when no longer young this is something to be alarmed by, as there simply aren’t going to be enough work-capable people around to keep the machinery of society functioning while still supporting those who have aged-out of the working aged population, unless your plan is to Logan’s Run anyone that shows signs of senescence (which probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time).
The machinery of many societies, including the most powerful ones, is one where an owning class keeps most things for themselves, yet expects the non-owning class to want to contribute children to it and pay for it themselves. No thanks. If the owning class cares so much it can start doing things like making having a family much less economically stressful.
The machinery of society will presumably evolve to match the number of work-capable people. Automation will likely increase, efficiencies will be found, some services will be cut.
From my perspective (I'm in my 50s) things have been spiraling out of control for a while now. Do we really need a couple of dozen flavors of Mountain Dew? Must I be inundated with advertisements for crap I'll never buy even when going to extraordinary lengths to minimize them? Do we all need a three bedroom house with a three car garage? Do I really need a 200 game backlog on steam?
To be fair, and I’ve said this elsewhere, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see consistent declines in real estate prices over the next five decades anyway - solely because of the steady tide of newly-vacant houses coming to market due to the collapsing replacement rate - so I doubt the constant construction of new and bigger houses can continue anyway.
I live in a semi-rural area. Three car garages were always seen as the over-the-top status symbol when building a new house, at least back in the day. This is probably a local thing.
You mean, reality itself? Does the next moment in time consent to the current one? I don't think we should annihilate ourselves because you can't reconcile it with your clinging to the idea of consent
I referred to the pyramid scheme that we have designed, where people have children and said children work to fund the retirement and pension of old people.
Old people could just accept their death, and pass away peacefully instead of burdening the society with their existence while actively causing harm to younger generations with votes on matters whose consequences they will not experience.
Personally I am very fond of voluntary human extinction.
If we give up on withering away, and instead learn to accept death with some dignity instead of becoming a parasite to our offspring, euthanasia is a good way to go.
The fact that the older, non productive population will be more than the productive population in the not so distant future suggests that we need to rethink the way we go about doing things.
If life expectancy moves past 100, and people retire at 60-65, society will need to feed and take care of people for 35 or so years, that is far far more than the time and money it invests on its children, for a much larger segment of the population, which suggests that the old exploit the young.
As a young adult, I am asked to reconcile paying and working for old people, most of whom despise my very existence because I am not cis-het, people who repeatedly called for my death, people who go on twitter tirades about how LGBT people shouldn't exist and in the process making a their base of borderline functioning adults more rabid, my taxes and work pay so that said rabid animals have healthcare while they vote to deny mine.
I have to fund the pension of people who tried to indoctrinate me into their religion by instilling fear into a younger me, telling me that I will go to hell every single day for being a non believer, or for being different.
With all due respect, humanity is a steaming pile of garbage.
>I have to fund the pension of people who tried to indoctrinate me into their religion by instilling fear into a younger me, telling me that I will go to hell every single day for being a non believer, or for being different.
I had a test recently and I have 0% "normal" sperms, when 4%-14% is the normal range. Pretty radical. The doctor said to take vitamins, to get testosterone to normal level, and to excercise. In other words not much to do
Your sperm does reset ever 75 days. Depending on the problem, it may be fixable. Exercise and raising testosterone will have a meaningful effect. Also check the various products you are using for endocrine disruptors and also you can go organic in terms of food (avoids pesticides, which are suspected of playing a role.)
I am not a man, but this reminds me of a time years ago when I started to have allergic reactions to things several times a day. My allergist put me on a strict elimination diet of triggers. I could only use unscented products for bathing and laundry, organic food only, and I even had to get rid of my teflon pans and use only stainless steel or cast iron. It sucked but it did seem to help, maybe you could try something like that too.
I really didn't consider brand. I thought it would be easy enough to determine a copper pan versus a teflon or iron pan that branding wouldn't offer any advantages.
I had some relatively severe allergic reactions to (apparently) enzymes in laundry detergent, once we stopped that it went away, and doesn't seem to come back even with minor enzyme encounters.
Well if you spend too much time sitting and don't reduce your calorie intake to match, you get fat. Being fat generally does bad things to your health, and one known example of that is that being fat reduces your fertility.
Being fat correlates with reduced fertility. It may ultimately be caused by whatever thing that results in reduced fertility, but there is no evidence of being fat causing reduced fertility.
Lose weight, eat less sugar, be more physically active/work out, and avoid endocrine disruptors like xenoestrogens. The last one is probably the hardest to do since a lot of plastics etc. contain them.
You’ll be surprised. Some vegan friendly foods which are delicious are packed with more than 1x your daily value in a single serving. So if you eat two a day for instance the levels of estrogen you’re pumping in are quite significant and very very easy to do.
Lifting heavy objects seems to be the best way. Start where you are at, or below. Lift every other day. Increasing should be relatively easy in the beginning.
There's several ways. Get enough sleep, eat healthy fats, quit alcohol, lift weights, reduce body fat to a healthy level (but not too much) increase vitamin/mineral intake if you are deficient.
Or go on TRT.
HCG might have some risks as far as prions and Clomid makes most people that need testosterone feel like crap. It’s a shame we don’t have better options.
It's a risk/reward situation. I hope we find better options, but it seems like a really delicate situation. The studies in this area always seem really small, but the problem seems much bigger. I think people attribute failure to the other partner to such a great extent that people try for long enough that some healthy enough sperm do their job. It takes people a long time to seek help when it's really easy to check the sperm.
Oh no, at least as of a few years ago the recombinant HCG was super expensive. My insurance paid for $3000 of it and then stopped, which I believe was about 3 months for me.
My doctor says lifting weights doesn't increase testosterone. It would be nice if it were true but it seems to largely be a myth. (I believe testosterone goes up slightly immediately after lifting weights but it has no real impact as it shortly goes back down.)
The study almost certainly was either poorly designed, a statistical abnormality, doesn't show what you think it does, and/or failed to replicate.
If it was valid for showing what you think it shows I would think my doctor, a urologist who attends medical conferences, would know about it.
What my urologist said is also backed up by a book for laypeople I read on men's health written by a urologist named Aaron Spitz called "The Penis Book". I just double checked and it says "Contrary to popular belief, lifting weights does not boost your testosterone in a meaningful way."
While I am not a doctor it's my understanding people who do this for a living know individual studies are unreliable. Scott Alexander wrote on his blog "I think a useful epistemic habit is to be very skeptical of individual studies, and skeptical but not too skeptical of large randomized trials, good meta-analyses, and general medical consensus when supported by an evidence base."
I didn't read the study because I only saw an abstract at that link.
But frankly, I doubt it's worth my time to read the study. Either you posted the study without having reviewed the literature, in which case you don't appear to be genuinely curious about this topic, or you linked to the study after reviewing the literature, in which case you should already be familiar with the conflicting evidence and shouldn't be asking me to present it.
Healthy lifestyle and excercise... but I also got an injection prescribed by the doctor as mine was very low (below healthy range both regular and free test). She said that I may have more will for physical excercise after that, so it may help me to get to a point when I can maintain proper levels myself.
Testosterone (17β-Hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one) is the main sex hormone in males. Maintaining and enhancing testosterone level in men is an incessant target for many researchers. Examples of such research approaches is to utilize specific types of food or dietary supplements as a safe and easily reached means. Here, specifically, since 1967 until now, many research studies have revealed the effect of onion on testosterone; however, this link has yet to be collectively reviewed or summarized. To accomplish this contribution, we searched the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases for full articles or abstracts (published in English language) from April 1967 through December 2018 using the keywords “onion” versus “testosterone”. In addition, a number of related published articles from the same databases were included to improve the integrity of the discussion, and hence the edge of the future directions. In summary, there is an evidence that onions enhance testosterone level in males. The mechanisms by which this occurs is mainly by increasing the production of luteinizing hormone, enhancing the antioxidant defense mechanism in the tests, neutralizing the damaging effects of the generated free radicals, ameliorating insulin resistance, promoting nitric oxide production, and altering the activity of adenosine 5′-monophosphate -activated protein kinase. However, this effect requires further approval in humans, mainly by conducting clinical trials.
Keywords: onion, testosterone, luteinizing hormone, oxidative stress, antioxidants
Get tested and find a course of action that aligns to your goals. An endocrinologist, or urologist with specialization in male infertility are critical in the context of the original post (male-factor infertility.) Many TRT regimens are not helpful for achieving healthy sperm and can impose significant recovery times.
People have mentioned other things and I believe Joe Rogan mentioned this and got flack for it, but treating you testicles to light therapy can actually do quite a bit.
Sunlight or LLLT both work, and the latter has several studies showing it helps with sperm directly from what I remember. I did it when we were trying to conceive.
That's what I gathered. The report had a set of different potential abnormalities , by intersecting them all the number gets kind of low. Here's a photo of the report if you're curious https://imgur.com/a/LtG2KVb
Well, there's not much to do in a sense of a one weird trick. No easy way out here. Mine was 290/190 at the age of 33. Not zero, but a lot of people are alarmed way before reaching that low
I'm not sure that's what they were recommended. If you fix your diet, get to a healthy weight, and start weight lifting, all of the research I've seen suggests that will positively affect your free testosterone. That's what I thought the doc meant given the surrounding advice, but I could read their comment either way now that you've mentioned TRT.
Do you believe you were already as healthy as can be? Those seem like reasonable suggestions. If you were already very fit, the doctor's suggestion might have been discouraging. If you weren't, sounds like there's a lot that can be done.
A sedentary lifestyle with poor nutrition can have a big impact on your health.
EDIT: unfit = zero resistance training, zero cardio, and more "food products" than "real" food.
Do you mean morphology? Supposedly, it can be improved using the following:
> Research has not shown a clear relationship between abnormal sperm shape and tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine use, though some studies suggest that smoking can impair fertility.
> “By proposing an alternative approach to sperm count data, we aim to contribute to the burgeoning discussion among reproductive health scientists and other researchers and clinicians about men’s health,” said Boulicault, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT
A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!
I thought you were being hyperbolic but the linked article and study does seem to miss the forest for the trees.
Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?
> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions because it categorized data as “Western” sperm counts or “Other” sperm counts.
> Further, the claims of decline were based on a “species optimum” of Anglophone developed nations of the 1970s, which the researchers argued was scientifically unsound. The GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements.
> Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?
When a professor of linguistics decides it is appropriate to write a paper criticizing a study about falling sperm counts, I don’t think that is a safe bet.
The data being insufficient because it focuses on white men only, because that's where we have the earliest data, which is "colonial" and "white supremacist". Who's the mob again?
This isn’t about anyone’s hurt feelings. This is about an ideologically motivated author wading into a subject in which they have no obvious domain expertise and then making irrelevant assertions that the original research is “colonial” or “racist.”
It is completely reasonable for people to point out that your linked rebuttal to the original topic is garbage. I think you’re the one with the hurt feelings.
It’s going to be a real adjustment for a lot of these people to grasp that young American men are in really difficult situations socially, academically, and that it’s a key factor to underemployment, violence, etc… the concept of men’s health or men suffering feels like an attack to these people instead of a separate legitimate issue to other social topics they find important
Curious if you have sources for this. I agree wholeheartedly that there are some difficult issues affecting men, socially and academically, but always struggle to back that opinion up with any meaningful facts/figures.
As one of my friends said, "Positions of power are still predominantly held by men, but the average man is lagging behind the average woman". Not sure if this is necessarily true, but sometimes it feels true. It's also unfortunately a rather un-PC opinion to share.
Men have no reproductive rights at all. Women can rape underage boys and these boys are then forced to pay child support to their rapists including back pay for the missed years.
Men don't have a single federally funded organization positively helping them compared to 1000s for women.
Men/boys don't have bodily autonomy in US. They are forced to fight in wars and are genitally mutilated at birth against their will.
DV laws are anti male.
Custody laws are anti fathers.
Rape laws are gendered.
All the typical major indicators are favorable to women instead of men. Ex: age expectancy, education, drug addicts, suicides, homeless, police shootings, prison inmates...
The thing is, all of these issues stem from patriarchal systems.
(assumption) men will be employed (therefore) child support is their responsibility.
(assumption) men are strong independent (therefore) there is no need for assistance.
(assumption) men are made for war (therefore) men are to fight war.
(assumption) men are stronger, more aggressive [see war], etc (therefore) women [being weaker] must be the victims.
(assumption) fathers are severe and disciplinary (therefore) mothers are nurturing and better suited to child rearing.
(assumption) sexual intercourse is an act desired by and initiated by men who are defined by their ability to penetrate (therefore) women can only be penetrated [see also aggressiveness] and men who are penetrated are lowered in status to be nearer the category of woman.
Patriarchy hurts men too is a weak and out rightly laughable argument. Because that's not how oppression works, at all.
Let me give you some examples. White masters thought they were stronger than black slaves yet slaves had to do all the dull & dangerous work. Same with the colonial masters they thought their underlings were weak and pathetic so they doubled down on oppression and plundered even more wealth through additional taxation and other means.
All the laws were out rightly favoring the oppressors in every case except magically when it comes to patriarchy. Imagine if Nazi Germany worked like patriarchy. Aryans were the all supreme, the strongest and the most independent race so they would've had almost all laws in favor of Jews right? Nope instead they gassed millions of Jews.
The anti-male circumcision movement is overwhelmingly male, despite supposed opposition to male circumcision by feminists.
If we leave that issue up to Feminism, feminists, and their long tradition of embracing critical theory, we will have to endure this evil for a whole lot longer.
It will take a large, ultimately male movement to displace it. I simply do not buy that the traditional notion of "patriarchy" is even the most important component of why it continues to exist today.
Given how it massively impacts a mans ability to feel pleasure during sex, it seems like "patriarchy" would have removed it long ago.
What if some of the parts of the bible, or other religious texts, such as this one, weren't designed to be "patriarchal" but were instead created by people who hate pleasure, hate nature, and hate the sensual world? I claim this group of pleasure haters is shockingly gender neutral
Educational attainment is going backwards for boys, while girls are doing great and have far surpassed them. I think they passed them some time back in the very early '00s, IIRC, but it's been a while since I looked at that stuff—this is all mainstream, they've been talking about it in education-academia for quite a while and it's uncontroversial, it's openly discussed among teachers et c., though proposed solutions aside from "try to hire more male teachers" are thin on the ground—bizarrely, "restore all that recess you cut over the last decades, in the name of more butts-in-seats time" doesn't seem to have much traction, and, call me crazy, but if I were in charge, that's the first thing I'd try.
Boys/men in general are exposed to a far higher likelihood of worst-case outcomes in a variety of ways, and there seems to be little societal attention to improving that. If women had the incarceration rates, the "successful" suicide rates, or the lagging lifespan that men have, it'd be all we'd hear about. Instead we figure that's just how men are, so, whatever.
I've got two girls and a boy and I'm a lot more worried about the boy's future than the girls', for sure. Seems a much finer line he'll need to walk to avoid a downward spiral, with fewer off-ramps available from such a spiral. Like, I reckon he's 75% of our risk of one of the three having a very-bad outcome, without even seeing any especially bad problems with him yet.
Girls on average get higher grades. The modern education system is by and large assembly line busywork, or child daycare. From my personal experience the grade gap should be attributed to the average female being more willing to play the systems game, while the average male calls bullshit
Within my extended family and larger social orbit, I've watched maybe 20 kids grow up. The girls are uniformly successful and seem to have significant support from family, school, and society. The boys have been struggling and have experienced limited support to a degree that I find shocking. Perhaps half will never achieve regular employment, and sadly several seem destined for addiction and early deaths.
This is just anecdote, but for me, I'm inclined to believe 20 data points I can personally observe.
I'm not sure exactly how new this is. Even decades ago, my experience of growing up male is that to a fair degree it's like being thrown off the dock. "Hope you learn to swim before you drown!" The idea that boys are privileged over girls seems like a cruel joke.
Society made religion optional through scientific inquiry. It can make America optional too as no theory of science suggests it’s existence is immutable law.
It’s going to be a real adjustment for you to accept a lot of people are without sufficient this or that in our society and you’re not really going to bat for them.
You have freedom to choose without coercion. Nothing makes your sensibilities sacrosanct to anyone else.
As a young American man myself, I am constantly being told that my problems either don't matter or aren't real. I don't need anybody to go to bat for me, but how about just acknowledging that young American men do indeed face real problems instead of saying "we don't need Americans, actually."
"The extraordinary biological claims of the meta-analysis of sperm count trends and the public attention it continues to garner raised questions for the GenderSci Lab, which specializes in analyzing bias and hype in the sciences of sex, gender, and reproduction and in the intersectional study of race, gender, and science,” said Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab, and a professor of the history of science and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality."
"In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies"
I get that everyone has their biases, but this sounds like it's up there with the feminist approaches to rocket science that claim rockets are shaped the way they are for Freudian reasons. The only specific claim your linked article is making against the actual studies/data is that there is not nearly as much data for Asian, African, and South American countries as there is for Europe and North America. Which is a great point, we need more data, but it doesn't really undermine or debunk any of the other claims being made.
That article is not saying sperm counts are not dropping, but arguing that that is not linked with dropping fertility (and that the original study is racist for only including western countries or something).
To be fair I think it is kinda racist to categorize sperm as either "Western" sperm vs "other" sperm. They couldn't do the bare fucking minimum and at least separate by continent or wealth? Health?
It is really weird the original study decided to categorize it this way. Especially because there are potentially drastic environmental differences between say the US and Australia. Same goes for the "Other" category. How are China and Brazil similar?
Maybe it's not the bare minimum? Maybe they had limited funding, largely access only to "Western sperm" (which actually is a reasonable category I would argue because we share a lifestyle to a greater or lesser degree), maybe they had sparse data that covered simply "not the West".
If they had access largely only to "western" sperm then they could separate it out by country, or income, or something more sane. It's not like the rest of the world shares a lifestyle!
Not a biologist, but that kinda makes sense: you only need one single healthy sperm to reach the egg in order to fertilize it, so even men with pretty bad sperm counts are probably still able to have children. So the average sperm quality may drop for some time without a corresponding drop in fertility. But then the drop in fertility will be all the worse...
A study not written by a scientist to oppose scientists. Allowing literature/philosophy people to publish on everything is as bad as allowing antivaxxers everywhere.
It's not saying the study is flat-out wrong. It's critiquing specific aspects of its reasoning and categorization. Not at all comparable to antivaxxers.
>This framework is designed to take into account a wide range of locations, individual conditions, and other data that can contribute to changing trends in sperm counts.
So, just count everyone and diminish the geographical factor in a problem. OK, let's ignore the problem until everyone is affected. Seems pretty un-legit.
I've heard a lot of theories about what is causing this, the most common being plastics, increased sugar consumption, more people worldwide being overweight/obese, more people worldwide being sedentary/less physically active, exposure to various harmful chemicals, and more. I'd assume it's probably a combination of several factors, but similar to plummeting male testosterone (which likely has similar and potentially related causes) I don't see this as likely to get anywhere near the amount of attention and funding from various governments and organizations around the world as it would if it were affecting female health.
BPF is a common used in packaging, water bottles, etc. "BPF exhibits similar estrogenic and anti-androgenic effects on the mammalian endocrine system to those of bisphenol A (BPA)"[0].
I'm very curious how large a factor this is. Personally, once I realized how much plastic I used - from water bottles to food containers - I became very concerned and stopped using it.
More intuitive explanations make sense to me, like unhealthy, non-active and stress filled lifestyles.
> I don't see this as likely to get anywhere near the amount of attention and funding from various governments and organizations around the world as it would if it were affecting female health.
Which is understandable in the end, male expendability is a thing. As long as it doesn't affect literally all males, it's a health issue and a social problem, but it's not a "humanity will cease to exist" problem; the men who are less affected can father more children.
If reproduction was limited because women's infertility exploded, it would be a different issue. The ones who are fertile can't simply bear 50 babies in a year to make up for it.
I think it's frankly weird to see what is clearly a male health issue and make a jab at women's health funding when its not like the article was talking about comparing to women's issues. This is very whataboutism.
When you've seen women's issues get tons of attention and funding for decades and any attempts to do the same for similar men's issues get ignored at best, you can get kind of bitter. This image kind of encapsulates the entire dynamic for me:
But like, why are we griping about women getting more attention, literally on a comment chain about male issues? We're just giving the attention back to women, which is what you had an issue with in the first place??? If your problem is that men aren't focused on enough, let's talk about men in this study that studied men.
> “Levels of testosterone have been reported to be declining during the same period of time that the sperm production rates were measured in this meta-analysis.”
I'd be interested in reading more about this. I'm curious if that correlation is due to people with lower bodyfat being more likely to exercise regularly which, in turn, would increase testosterone levels.
Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.
I would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.
In principal, known toxins (when at anything even close to toxic doses when used normally) should be just not allowed in consumer products in the first place.
In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.
The good news is that the FDA sets "acceptable levels"[1] in food, for things like animal feces, insect infestation, mold, rodent hairs and filth, maggots, and so on, beyond which enforcement is mandatory. The bad news is they are nonzero.
That's a pretty clever idea. I like it! There is limited package space on items, this would allow producers to document a whole lot of info and allow consumers immediate access.
The idea actually comes from when I followed CJ Chivers (expert on weapons and war correspondent) A lot of his work is done by gathering spent munitions on the battlefield and then tracing it back to its source. The life of a weapon and munitions is usually well documented (and can go back decades!)
People have the capacity to learn and scanning a QR code once you’ve seen it done once is pretty straightforward. during covid QR code menus replaced physical menus in NY for most restaurants. People complained (i don’t particularly like them either) then adapted.
Different strokes for different folks and all that but I'm a bit of a picky eater and love being able to unambiguously mark what I don't want on my food on the ordering web apps some restaurants use now. On the other hand those places that have the QR code link to nothing but a PDF menu are just annoying.
Those people wouldn't be able to interpret the data anyway. You forget that most people don't have basic competency in science, and basing decisions on that data would be extremely difficult to start with.
Your proposed requirement would have a nice side benefit of making supply chains much easier to trace for other purposes (e.g., why are some shelves bare in my grocery store).
I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.
The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.
> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board
These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not
This is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.
Corporations are human constructs; they exist in whichever reality we create for them. You don't have to give in to their demands. They have to give in to ours.
For non religious people, the ones who don't believe in the invisible hand, regulations could take care of that, although given the current dynamic we're getting further from that by the day
I 100% agree. It blew my mind that vanilla extract is not extracted from vanilla, and they're allowed to label artificial vanilla as vanilla extract because real vanilla extract tastes different, and people are already used to the other flavor matching the name. There are tons of examples and loopholes like this.
"Ignorance is bliss" is safe, zero-effort, and anxiety-free - until it isn't.
And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.
For what it's worth there are people working on this problem! I work for one - https://choosefinch.com/ - which is a Chrome extension that scores products on amazon.com (and other retailers soon!) for, among other things, harmful compounds.
People should be free to draw their own conclusions, as idiotic as those conclusions may sometimes be. But obfuscation only creates more space for conspiratorial thinking. More transparency is the solution, not the problem.
I have a friend who gets irrationally angry about stuff like this. “People should just do their own research!” I’d like to think I’m of above average intelligence and I have no idea how I would ever go about verifying the safety of every item I buy for my family. It’s just not feasible. What if, instead, we have a group of people who enforce safety standards and we can place some trust in them to help keep us all safe?
Why not both? Mandating companies maintain a comprehensive list of ingredients, processes, countries of origin, etc, that is readily available to the public does not prevent agencies from also enforcing standards.
Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.
People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.
I think a majority of people do care, but there's not really a way for them to express that in the market. You can't just buy the more expensive product and trust that it's going to be more ethically produced.
It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.
Non-regulatory solutions also doesn't empower the market to optimize cost in a productive way (which would cut into profits). In the current economy for the vast majority of products we have two options 1) a cheap option made in horrendous inhumane conditions and 2) a luxury good made in a process that's inherently limited in aim and scope. Globalism basically exports the suffering of the most unregulated markets to the entire planet.
> Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments.
I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.
Fair, I should have said "Swan's statement in the quote" - the intention was mainly to avoid being misinterpreted as disagreeing with DoingIsLearning anyway, not to dunk on my namesake.
Consumers can't compete on an individual level against giant mega corporations actively obfuscating information from them even if they had lots of free time and weren't overburdened already. And corporations can lobby to even get obvious terms redefined (Assembled in America) so everyone needs to understand lawyer speak to even make sense of the information they do receive.
And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.
I did not say anything about stupidity. Nobody has the time, energy and even financial means to individually tackle all the issues out there. Putting the burdens on consumers is an excuse used by companies to externalize costs to the buyer, plain and simple.
I agree with you, but I don't know how helpful this will end up being.
Endocrine disruptors are airborne and globally ubiquitous in the form of micro-plastics. All drinking water in the world is contaminated with it. [1]
I'm really not meaning to be dramatic on this, but we've completely missed the boat on this one while we were arguing about climate change, and it's much too late to do anything about it now.[2]
I'll not be here to see either way, and it's unlikely anyone else currently alive will unless Ray Kurzweil was right this whole time, but IMHO (I.e. take this with the pinch of salt a random Internet comment warrants) it's likely humanity as a species only has a few hundred years left at most.
This isn't meant to be doom-mongering, it's just that while we worry about some dramatic cataclysmic event like a nuclear war, a pandemic or a meteor strike, the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.
It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300 [3] - I just don't see that the science backs up this claim, especially given recent understandings of fertility decline.
I'll let the chemistry people comment on this one but phtalates are used as a 'plasticizer' they are not plastic itself as in a micro-plastic bead
I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination.
In this case there is mounting evidence against phthalates and bisphenols as endocrine disruptors. This is the stuff getting into your blood stream through ingestion or skin absorption mostly from plastic containers, hygiene products, etc.
This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.
>This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.
This is why I hate when people compare climate change to other problems (like GP did).
Sure, there's a lot of microplastics out there, but the science is still out on what that means for us. Meanwhile we know how bad Climate Change is, so if we have limited resources to fight problems, definitely fight the one you know is bad, even if it's not as engaging as thinking about your own sperm.
Only thing I’d add is that at no point was I claiming that climate change was not serious or urgent.
My point is that people at large generally don’t care enough to be really bothered by climate change, so there’s no budget in the limited attention we as a species are willing to set aside for inconvenient truths to consider much else.
Same thing I heard for decades about AGW. And still do. In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.
I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.
Are you trying to give a masterclass on logical fallacies?
>Same thing I heard for decades about AGW.In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
People can deny the science, but C02 concentration is the mechanism for global climate eras and we've known that for almost 200 years [1]. I don't care who believes in science because that has no impact on whether it is correct or not (only you, my fellow scientist, can determine that for yourself).
There is no agreed-upon mechanism for how microplastics harm humans, but again to the point of science, if you can point me to proof, I'd love to see it.
Long story short, you are very likely making a false comparison between those two topics.
>We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.
Sure, and again, show me the proof/model that this is going to lead to the end of mankind. I's love to see it.
>I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.
We have a 1,000,000x better chance of convincing them that Trump is an immortal demigod, doesn't mean we should do it.
Again, we should dedicate effort to things that we know matter even if it requires effort.
>the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.
You didn't include a link to support the claim that humans only have "a few hundred years left at most". I think this is extremely unlikely to be true. What is your recommended reading?
As another commenter pointed out, plasticizers are not plastics. It's disingenuous to link health issues with plasticizers to microplastics. Additionally, we should not extrapolate concerns with BPA plastics releasing chemicals when placed under specific stressors (e.g. heat) to all plastics in the environment. There have been no studies I'm aware of that link microplastics to endocrine disruption. Even the first article you linked specifically states that the primary concern with microplastics is likely a physical (not chemical) one.
The slowdown in population growth has been a topic of world leaders for quite some time. This isn't a topic of interest because world leaders are somehow concerned about the cause (e.g. chemicals in the environment). In fact, the cause is well known and due to fairly straight forward anthropologic factors. As quality of life improves, population growth declines. This happens in nature as well. Populations under stress tend to reproduce more. World leaders are interested in modeling/understanding this as it has macroeconomic effects (e.g. Japan's decade long struggles with stock market decline). This is also why the US and the west in general has went so heavy on quantitative easing for the past decade. They are trying to stave off deflation. Unfortunately, COVID and the associated supply shocks caused that plan to go off the rails a bit...
Finally, I'm not sure what climate change policy has to do with any of this.
Environmental may be one such reason but we should never omit obesity as a cause for any health problem.
> A bidirectional relationship between testosterone and obesity underpins this association indicated by the hypogonadal-obesity cycle and evidence weight loss can lead to increased testosterone levels.
Yeah trying to avoid toxic chemicals as a consumer is nearly impossible. We've been doing a home renovation and have been attempting to use zero or low VOC products and it's incredibly difficult and expensive. The effort it requires to do the research and sourcing for every product you use in your life is basically impossible for most people.
I can't count how many times I have ordered a mineral water (to avoid chlorine in tap water to which I am sensitive) and received it in a glass contaminated with a PFAS-coated paper straw.
Additionally that water probably came from a plastic bottle.
Lately I've been seeing straws made from a compostable plant based polyester. It's unclear whether they are still using problematic plasticizers in them.
Isn't this just pure BS tho? No "savvy consumer" can really avoid these chemicals. Merely by being outside in a major city or indoors in a modern home or wearing modern synthetic fiber clothing, etc, etc you are likely getting exposed. Short of literally making your own wool clothing in the middle of the woods you can't reasonably escape this stuff.
Blaming individuals is the most successful strategy for keeping status quo while allowing activists to flourish. So go buy metal straws, recycle your plastic, eat less meat, cut up six pack holders, and be "a savvy customer"!
This is a "non-constructive proof". It's trivial to say "regulators need to get serious" but it's non-trivial to actually get that to happen. With the current corrupt+uninformed regulators in place, just pushing them to "regulate more" results in a mix of regulatory capture and/or uninformed regulation made by non-technical experts. How do you propose that actually useful regulation get enacted?
Consumers can voluntarily reduce their exposure to phthalates AND the industry can be regulated. Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint.
> Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint
That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?
Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.
I've been a very health/environmentally conscious consumer for 30 years, but I don't have time to keep up with every possible thing, nor do I want to be exhausting myself trying to urge other consumers to shift their buying choices ever so slightly. Expecting consumers to do everything is market fundamentalism and it's often a meme put around by industry to shirk responsibility. My environmental footprint is already way below average. I'm tired of sacrificing my life on the altar of market economics waiting for everyone else to catch up, while industry pours money in lobbying, PR, and advertising to maintain an increasingly dystopian status quo.
Why do people even buy "most hygiene products"? They're all bullshit, bad-smelling chemical industry effluent. A gallon of concentrated Just Plain Old Soap® retails for $40 and stands dilutions 10-to-1, is enough for all personal and household uses for an entire family for years.
It is interesting, I have a friend group that consists of about 5 married couples all of whom have been having issues conceiving and have been trying for a while now, but are still having issues. Curiously enough my wife and I just had our 4th and every time we've conceived within two months (even when I was hoping it would take a little longer).
From what I hear our friends story is not unusual and many in our age bracket 20-30 year olds are struggling to have children.
Don't really know what my point is except it is interesting and I am wondering what the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is.
Interesting. Our first took about 4 or 5 months? I think my wife stopped her birth control at the end of July and we conceived in December. Our second took 2 months, my wife stopped her birth control in September and we conceived in November. We're both in our mid-30s.
Anecdotally, my wife's sister and her husband have been trying for almost a year? And they've had one miscarriage and nothing else.
My wife’s sister got pregnant her second time before she even had her period after their first baby. My wife and I tried 3 years with several IUI rounds and eventually had to resort to IVF.
I think a higher rate of miscarriages also limits post-30s fertility for many women. A miscarriage is at least one and often multiple months of time lost, while the clock is ticking.
> the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is.
Less people in the world. Look at Japan and South Korean population projections out 50 to 75 years -- they may cut their populations in half, and it could keep going? Hard to extrapolate trends out that far though...
Sorry, but isn't that a good thing? Putting aside the fact that we're (at least in Europe) paying for a pension fund we'll never have, isn't reducing the amount of people on earth the right solution for basically all problems long term?
Not if it’s unequal, and infertility is a cruel way to lower the population. Wanting kids and struggling to have them absolutely wrecks you emotionally, and it’s even worse for women.
But also, if it’s chemically related it might hit first world countries harder than third world countries. Imagine what would happen if all aid was cut to Africa.
Basically every major economy completely relies on the fact that there will be more workers/consumers in the future when you break that trend you break the economy. Expect South Korea, Japan and others with demographic inversions coming to have major major issues in the future.
If there are less kids, the ability to pay for your pension fund in 40 years time will be much much harder than it is today. So barring other fundamental changes, more kids will help.
Most other problems on earth will be solved by more technology.
This is an issue with the pension system. I don’t believe we’re overpopulated but it is clearly a bad system when it relies on a constant flow of more children
Growth helps, but it's not required. What is actually required is stability in the age pyramid. The problem is we transitioned suddenly from high growth to a population crash. Now the age pyramid resembles more a propane tank shape, and the pension system went haywire. A very slow transition would be easier to adapt to.
Not what I said. That it requires an increasing number of children to adults to continue is the issue. Personal retirement accounts is a much better alternative.
Population reduction is good, but once the world population falls to say 500M and you want to maintain it, you need ~2 babies per woman on average. If conceiving becomes difficult, we may not achieve that and hypothetically end up in a Children Of Men situation.
Good or bad depends on too many other variables to easily forecast.
We could, in principle, if we really were all willing, rapidly transition to a beautiful solar-hippie future where all the food was either vegan or GM bacterial derived milk [0] or vat-grown cultured flesh. The Earth can support hundreds of billions this way using only land that is currently desert.
We almost certainly won't do that, but we could.
Conversely, rapid depopulation can mess up our economy. How rapid is too rapid? I don't know.
This outcome is IMO more plausible than the solar-hippie outcome. Still not certain, as 75 years of technological change is a lot and could very plausibility give us medicine that seems like magic today — the last 75 includes the eradication of smallpox; the first of each of kidney, heart, heart-and-lung, liver, face, uterus, womb, penis, hand, arm, and leg transplants; first each of pacemaker, cochlear implants, artificial heart; first CT, PET, medical ultrasound, and MRI; first stem cell therapy; robot assisted surgery; organ culture for lab-grown (some of the are still experimental) noses, ears, skin, kidneys, liver, and bladders; the defibrillator; oral contraceptives; genetic engineering; and too many vaccines to bother listing.
The next 75 years could, not implausibly, give us anti-aging drugs that keep us in peak health until whatever kills us; or give us external artificial wombs; or at the very least, turn skin cells into healthy sperm in-vitro.
[0] why isn't this already a thing? Vegan cheese substitutes are 45% mediocre, 45% just bad, and 10% single use case things like smoked tofu
n=1 but with my daughter we had issues and ended up resorting to IVF.
During the "issues" phase my count was tested and was considered good...problem is/was on my wife's side...all to say conception issues aren't all down to sperm counts (not that you implied that, just wanted it out there).
That’s true, but keep in mind there are issues that can happen on the women’s side where you having twice as many sperm could brute force their way past it. One example would be her immune system attacking your sperm.
I wonder if it's because this is probably the only place they feel they can get away with bragging, but have been "proud" of their "accomplishment" for some time now.
In no way was my intention to brag. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the parent commenter's intention either. Just people reflecting and commenting on their experiences on this topic.
I'll keep in mind how comments like that come off in the future.
I was surprised at what the other clients looked like in our IVF clinic’s waiting room. I was expecting us to be the only youngish, fit couple. Instead they all looked like us other than one woman who was maybe 35 or so.
This seems scary to me. Imagine a world where children have to be conceived in this way: it would be trivial for some authoritarian governments to now control child birth. I don’t mean disincentivizing like China did but actual control.
> many in our age bracket 20-30 year olds are struggling to have children
Wow... I would have thought you were referring to people that were older.
I wonder what the common denominator is there, or if your experience is an outlier. It's obviously noteworthy enough to share. Maybe people that conceive without issue aren't commenting on it as much?
Some fertility problems go unnoticed for a decade. I suggest to my younger (25-29) female friends to have their egg reserve estimated, even if they at that point are not thinking about ever having children. This is because the original issue can be upstream of the couple: a parent who had early menopause, or low ovarian reserve, may pass similar characteristics down to their female progeny.
After learning about the side effects of birth control, it's concerning that it's the default recommendation for young women, and that they're on it all the time. I understand why. I don't know what a reasonable alternative would be. Abstinence isn't a reasonable alternative.
If abstinence is a reasonable alternative for anything other than sex (don't eat meat, don't use gasoline, etc.) it's also a reasonable alternative for sex. Some won't agree that limiting your "core" desires in any way is reasonable - and I agree. I just disagree that eating, sleeping, or sex are "core" desires. They are secondary to the real core need - happiness.
Your examples are not comparable to abstaining from sex.
It would be like saying "don't eat any food" and "don't use locomotion to move from point A to point B."
> I just disagree that eating, sleeping, or sex are "core" desires.
I may not be understanding this. Eating and sleeping are obviously requirements for anyone's life, and sex is required for the continuation of all life.
It is definitely possible to go your whole life without having sex. Much like it is possible to go your whole life without loosing your temper. It may not be easy, but it is definitely possible.
But all of them appear to be "core" desires to us because they are immediate, potent forces. But just because these appetites are strong doesn't make them necessary. Everyone has to eat something but (in the general case) "you don't have to eat that *right now*" is true. Same with sleep - you don't need to sleep as much as you think you do (and you probably should be sleeping some times when you don't feel like it). So we come to sex. Is sex necessary for the continuation of the human race? Yes. Is it necessary for you to have sex at all? No. (Again, in the general case).
Sex is not required for individual survival. Food and transportation are necessary for individual survival.
You are conflating species and individual survival. Sex is required for the continuation of the species, but not for the survival of an individual in that species.
I'm a Catholic and fairly traditionally minded and am surprised by what you're saying since at my church, couples in this age range are on their fourth or fifth kid by the time they're 30.
Even amongst the newest married couples, most are expecting within the first year.
I understand we have different beliefs and such but since we're all in the same environment, how do we explain the simultaneous existence of the seemingly normal-to-hyper fertile?
Surely there is more than just 'its environmental'
> I understand we have different beliefs and such but since we're all in the same environment,
Interesting you mention that the group I am referring to and myself are all members of religion generally associated with large families as well.
I should also clarify all of them have at least 2 kids at this point. Which is another interesting data point of many of them didn't have difficulty with their first couple of kids but now are struggling.
Okay, well you didn't mention this. This is certainly more interesting. I've heard of one couple that I know who are having issues, but they are now much older than they were. I'll have to wait and see. I don't really have any anecdata to confirm or dispute here.
I wish them the best of luck.
I will say, the first couple of kids make it harder to conceive the rest. Logistically speaking... And also , men's and women's stress levels with young children cannot be good for fertility
In what sense? My wife and I certainly planned our first child very young (for the US at least; internationally, we were on the late end, like most Americans)
I suspect the increasingly shrinking demographic of churchgoers is different in this regard from the rest of the population. I think they're right in saying people who plan typically don't plan children for before 30, I don't know anyone near my age (early 20s) who is doing that; many don't want children at all.
My wife and I plan to have all our kids before 30. We're doing well above average financially, and we want to be young while our kids are young. She is currently pregnant with our first.
It helps that she is not very career-minded, I have the opportunity to work from home, and I'm working a role where I earn well and never need to do overtime.
Age matters massively. People getting married in their 30s and trying to conceive in their mid-30s are going to have a much harder time than young people in their early and mid 20s. It's really not a linear drop off in terms of difficulty either - it's fairly exponential.
I think people assume that since a woman who had her first kid at 20 can still have kids at 40 that you can start anytime along that line - I suspect that's not the case for various reasons.
The comment I responded to was about 20 - 30 year olds though. Age .. I totally get that, and the effect in this very group is also obvious. Children are typically front loaded and then the youngest are born in a more spaced out fashion.
Some of it may be psychosomatic - of the "Catholic group" I know of only two couples have had issues, and one resolved after they adopted (and immediately got twins and have three girls that are the same age).
You may also have the age issue - starting at 20 is a lot different than starting at 30.
Anecdata also Catholic. NFP and hormone therapy worked but it was a journey. Tried for 2+ years before realizing we had an issue and did NFP to conceive. Lots of other Catholic couples struggling with it go that route as it is a church-approved method.
Tried for 6 years (age 25-31). Finally considered adoption and then got pregnant and lost the first baby in a miscarriage. Had a healthy second baby at 32. Now have a third healthy baby at 34.
I think a lot of factors combine, but will state that we moved an average of once per year until age 30, so subconsciously we probably didn’t feel settled. It’s a very complex topic with too many variables to effectively model. And even when pregnancy occurs miscarriage rates are high.
I’ll note that young couples with kids are much more obvious in church (they make noise) and more likely to be at masses with other families. Young couples without kids often go to the later masses (in cities sometimes 9 PM).
Not sure why your comment is downvoted but you have a point..
The difference is that religious couples should always be open to life so in a sense they are always "trying" as contraceptives are not allowed (except for NFP) hence their chances go up. Further they are encouraged to married sooner than later sense they should abstain from sex until then.
It makes sense that younger couples having lots of sex without contraception will end up having more children than their counterparts.
Yeah that makes sense to me. I also think a lot of fertility doctors are hoodwinking couples into thinking something is wrong with them if they haven't conceived within a year. I think it'll happen for most people eventually (and the stats agree). Of course, it eases nerves if your 'eventually' is longer because you're younger.
In my experience it was a stress issue for the couples that were having trouble that I know.
One friend and his wife gave up alcohol, caffeine and meat, it seemed like there was just a ton of stress they had put on getting pregnant for 6 months. It wasn't until after they took a break from trying that they got pregnant one night after drinking.
I think modern medicine somewhat ignores how powerful the human mind is. It is possible that my friend wasn't actually performing as well as he thought he was, also possible that the wife had 'calculated' the exact day that conception should happen. Instead of listening to her body, evolutionarily it would be advantageous for women to be horny while most fertile in the cycle.
An all-meat diet I would bet is the best to conceive, because it's the best for hormonal health, judging by the countless anecdotes (e.g. women regaining their cycles after many years) I'm seeing.
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out, it's still shocking to me that people still believe that meat is detrimental to health.
Ahh, anecdotes about consuming meat, I can't think of anything more scientifically rigorous and less influenced by sentiment.
My own anecdotes tell me that eating meat vastly decreases your fertility rate. Some anecdotes add that it's because of the animal hormones you consume, others state that it's because meat-eating is associated with other health conditions which interfere with conception (obesity, high cholesterol, cancer), and yet other anecdotes don't assign a cause to the increased fertility from leaving out meat.
As anecdotes, these are all of course, incredibly scientific.
When the anecdotes all seem the go completely against the prevailing narrative ("meat is like smoking!") and there are huge numbers of them, that has got to pique your interest https://carnivore.diet/?s=cycle (try different search terms, YouTube is also a great source).
This thread is full of anecdotes so I'm just the messenger of some I know of. I don't care about science when our bodies are burning because of the terrible advice some of the "science" has been giving us.
- dietary cholesterol is good and cholesterol is not the problem, triglyceride/cholesterol ratio is
- hormones from meat... that's just not having a sense of scale, don't know how to put it, of course everything is going to have some tiny amount of hormones, even the vegans' beloved soy
I think it's a great resource, these are personal testimonials, real people (many of them have interviews on YouTube). I would think it wouldn't change your stance anyway.
Only slightly taken out of context, but telling I think.
Anecdotally (again), all the healthiest people I know get lots of exercise, eat a reasonable amount of carbs from wholemeal/wholegrain and vegetable sources, some fat and some protein. This is the "official" recommended diet by most authorities, and has a lot going for it, apart from being boringly conventional (so therefore unattractive to people who are excited by these threads).
The unhealthy people I know jump from diet to diet in an attempt to take a shortcut to fitness, singing the praises of the most recent one (...but if the last one was so great, why did you have to change it again?)
There are problems with the carnivore diet, including lack of fibre, micronutrients, red meat association with colorectal cancer, and so on. In addition it's bad for the environment and would be unsustainable if we all switched to it.
> Only slightly taken out of context, but telling I think.
I always wonder how do these people get to Hacker News? This is a somewhat sophisticated audience but nonetheless we always have these meat-obsessed comments on tangential topics.
Just counterbalancing people making the same outdated claims about meat being unhealthy. I've personally and know of many people who greatly improved their health by eating meat, so I'm sharing.
The thing is, no one asked, and it was completely off topic.
The gist of the post you originally replied to was that some people stopped doing things presumably unhealthy, and couldn't conceive. One of those things was eating meat. Then they started doing those things again, and, presumably due to reduced stress, their fertility improved (OP hints they suspect correlation, in this case, is from causation).
If anything, this almost suggests it was healthier for these people, in this situation, to eat meat. Same with resuming alcohol and caffeine. The added stress from avoiding those things may have been worse for them. No claim of meat being net unhealthy was made in that post.
But I'll make it now, since we're here and you haven't stopped. There are many studies showing excessive meat consumption has negative health effects.
I'm not saying it's always healthier for everyone to cut out meat entirely, just that the average diet includes a decidedly unhealthy amount of meat. There's nothing "outdated" about this claim, it's based on heaps of modern research. Your anecdotes don't mean anything, and are no doubt cherry-picked. I know lots of people who claim adding meat back to their diet (or adding more meat to their diet) has improved their well-being also. And if I had an axe to grind with the suggestion that I eat less meat, I might regurgitate those anecdotes too.
FWIW I also know plenty of people who feel healthier when they eat less meat, but again, I don't consider anecdotes useful in this conversation.
Meat has been a staple of the human diet since recorded history. Its basically a science experiment spanning millenia with favorable results for meat-eating--no anecdotes necessary.
My guess is luck. In my little circle of friends, nobody had any trouble conceiving. Heck, some were provably one-and-done (sad though it may sound, one of my friends only had sex with his wife when she was ready for them to have kids. Do it, wait a few weeks, try again, but they didn't have to try twice for either of their kids). One of my friends had two kids and his wife really wanted a third, then they had twins. Ha, whoops!
Many old people tell us about all types of fertility ceremonies etc available to us at a local shrine in order to help my partner and I get pregnant if we needed it.
I don't think it's all that new to be honest, else these ceremonies wouldn't exist.
Yup, part of it is definitely that millennials have had it bashed in to them that it's super easy to get pregnant so never have sex without precautions and only stay thinking about having kids when you're "ready".
Many millenials wait until they're thirty and probably think that they should be able to get pregnant in one or two months, when it can easily take half a year. At least that was my own personal experience trying to get pregnant. It became pretty stressful after trying a few cycles with no result.
One tip - get some ovulation sticks. My wife and I never realised but the egg is actually only around for a single day - it must be fertilised in those 24 hours. If you have sex after that there is zero chance of conceiving, sperm can hang around so you can conceive with sex a few days before. But outside that really small window you are wasting your time. The actual accurate window is massive guess work - some women are not that regular with ovulation. Ovulation sticks tell you exactly what’s going on - tell you when ovulation is coming, so that’s when you have lots of sex.
Before we used them we basically had sex loads (outside this window) which was worse than nothing as it makes you less likely to be going hard in the right window. First time we used the sticks she got pregnant immediately.
We had a friend who had been trying for 8 years to have a kid, told us she was just about giving up and thinking of adoption. We asked if she used the ovulation sticks - “what are they??” We gave her the rest of ours and a couple of months later she was pregnant, now has a baby. So yeah, these things don’t seem to be as well known as they should be, and can be a massive help.
The woman's libido should be really high when she is fertile and men can tell as well; She smells better, and mechanically the sex works better as there is there is more lubrication and it just feels much better.
To add to this, home sperm test kits can help rule out the man as well. Some men don't know to avoid vigorous exercise, hot showers, and jacuzzis until they realize how low their sperm counts actually are. (The below kit isn't the only kit. Shop around if this is pertinent to your interests because I don't want to feel like I'm shilling this specific one).
The lack of federally funded research on this topic is astounding. It's been like this for a long time, but ignored.
Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia.
They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse.
Edit:
The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the issue. This is a topic that should elicit more curiosity than it does, and we should ask ourselves why it doesn't.
I worked in intel/defense for over 10 years, and part of our post Iraq WMD training was looking for signs of bias/motivated reasoning that are a sign of the group think that allowed for a war to be started based on false pretenses. One of the biggest indicators:
"A lack of curiosity about a phenomenon/event/factor where it should be expected."
Well I mean, given the public discourse of the past decade...it seems to me that they want the population to decline. So it makes sense that no one has in interest in investigating this.
There are plenty of people who are so desperate about anthropogenic global warming that they're willing to forgo having children and proclaim that the disastrous decline in fertility rates in places like Korea (see recent HN thread) are actually good and necessary because we need fewer humans on this earth.
Yo. Number 1 reason I'm not having kids is I don't like kids. Number 2 reason is I don't think it's ethical to intentionally bring a child into a world that's going to be torn to pieces by climate disasters & wars.
People throughout history continued having children through wars, disasters, and climate changes (ice age) worse than anything that our children will experience. Climate change is a problem, but a manageable one. No need to panic.
> The majority of scientists reacted negatively to The Skeptical Environmentalist and he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book; the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited." His positions on climate change have been challenged by experts and characterised as cherry picking.
If we were actually on a positive trajectory with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I might agree with you. But we're not. Things are bad and the trends are only getting worse. Many places will become uninhabitable; the residents will emigrate elsewhere; the places being migrated to will react by electing right-wing nationalists; some resource or border conflict will result in war. It's gonna be bad. I'm not going to feed more lives into that meat grinder.
Wikipedia is heavily manipulated and not considered a reliable source on scientific issues. Do you have a substantive criticism of Bjørn Lomborg's positions?
I mean unless you're a climate scientist yourself, at some point you have to choose your experts to trust. Almost every climate scientist disagrees with this guy. I'm far more likely to trust the IPCC and their hundreds of experts than I am this single guy.
> People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
I'm definitely not predicting extinction, however massive climate-driven impacts are unavoidable, and large-scale war seems an almost inevitable consequence of those impacts. Large-scale war has definitely happened before, quite a few times.
He is an "apocalyptic environmentalist" in the sense that he believes climate change is going to be such a catastrophic event that human existence will be miserable. When I was a kid, he was an evangelical Christian who believed the end times were coming any day. He had a nasty divorce, a mid-life crisis, met a woman who worked at PETA, became a radical vegan, and then, surprise surprise, once again embraced a new form of apocalypse to replace the End Times one: climate apocalypse.
He's a mathematically illiterate narcissist, a psychological subtype who is known to be the most prone to apocalyptic ideologies.
Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Climate change is real. Excess CO2 caused warming is going to create major challenges for the planet. Humanity will go on, we will innovate our way out of it, and like every Malthusian cult throughout history, you and your fellow apocalypse believers will be proven wrong until you find a new reason to ruin everyone's dinners with negativity.
The churches my dad had me in when I was a kid taught me how deranged people can be, and how good it makes them feel to be part of a heroic tribe trying to warn everyone the world is ending. I know what it looks like, I've seen it Christians, I've seen it in hippies, and I see it in yuppies now too.
> Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Can you point to me where I said the apocalypse is coming?
> Humanity will go on
I agree.
> we will innovate our way out of it
Too late for that, the impacts are here and more are coming. The question is whether we will be able to deal with the upcoming climate refugee crisis without war. It seems unlikely to me.
> ruin everyone's dinners with negativity
FWIW this isn't like, a major facet of my personality. I'm just explaining in a thread about having kids why I chose not to have kids.
World population is still growing. It seems ironic you are casting aspersions towards people desperately trying to fight climate change, when you are desperately worried about population decline, when it isn't declining.
It IS declining in western countries though, which is where all the “stop having children, you’re killing the earth!” propaganda is concentrated. ALL the population growth is happening in Africa and parts of Asia, that’s it. But curiously, no one is chiding poor Africans for having so many children.
Its the same with obesity, which has been sharply increasing in much of the world since the 1970s, but pretty much all the conventional explanations (increased availability, excess sugar, excess carbs, excess fat, decreased physical activity, etc.) don't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
Hypothesis: the cause in both cases is likely industrial contaminants considered essential to the running of modern civilization, so nobody wants to, or is encouraged not to, look too hard.
I read an interesting study on this. It showed that obesity rates were lower in places like Colorado, and theorized that the reason was that they were at the headwaters of their water source, so there was less opportunity for contaminants to enter their water.
That is interesting, but probably the reason is the highly active/outdoor culture of Colorado leads to lower obesity rates and people who are less obese move to Colorado.
The science on this altitude effect has been pretty thoroughly conducted, with potential correlating factors accounted for in multivariate regression models.
Denver and its suburbs are FILLED with people who are as unhealthy and inactive as the rest of the country. Even in these places, in the poorest neighborhoods, they are less obese.
I have an identical twin brother who lives in Portland, and since I've moved here I've stayed about 10-15 lbs lighter than him. It's a single, anecdotal data point, and completely unscientific, but he swears he eats healthier than me lol.
In the article series I think parent is referencing[0] they talk about Colorado along with a bunch of other things people come up with based on "common sense".
Notably higher altitude alone seems highly correlated with lower obesity and diabetes rates regardless of physical activity. Again, this points to environmental factors.
Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story? The staple bodybuilding foods are rice and chicken breast. That's about as industrialized as you can get.
If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
> Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story?
No? Genetics is the best predictor of obesity, but as with drugs any contaminant would have varying degrees of effect on the population, including sometimes a paradoxical effect.
> If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
And a whole lot of people are not getting fat at all eating foods like and barely exercising. Why do some people have to pay attention to what they eat and others don't? Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Paradoxical effects are rare and tend to happen only with psychoactive medications. I see very little evidence for paradoxical effects playing a major role, but obviously it can't be ruled out entirely. I don't find paradoxical effects a convincing explanation for anorexia because of how people develop anorexia. You can become anorexic merely by changing your social circle or even your desired social circle, so why would a paradoxical effect occur in that situation when presumably the environment hasn't changed in terms of chemical consumption.
> Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat. Genetics seems to play a role in that some people can eat junk and feel full but most can't.
There can be more than one cause for a trend increasing. The way to look at it would not just be to observe anorexia but also whether or not there has been an increase in the merely underweight in the same time frame as the obese. People who eat and are just sated with very little intake. I am not aware of any data on this.
> Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat.
And as I said I don't think this stands up to scrutiny, and I said why already. Additional: obesity is increasing in wild animal populations too.
On a personal level, I have eaten diets of only foods like you've mentioned and I would still have gone well over my calorie limit if I had done so until sated. As far as I can tell 'satiating foods' is a term with no real science behind it. Believe me, if I was aware of something aside from hardcore stimulants that would actually keep my appetite in check I'd have been eating it for the past 15 years instead of suffering.
The wild animals that become obese are ones that have access to human food and garbage. It's not like fish swimming in the runoff from chemical plants become obese (they develop other disorders but not obesity as far as I'm aware).
There is the idea of a "lipostat" which is the mechanism of the body to regulate it's weight. In a person with obesity or anorexia, the lipostat would be off, so the body would be trying to maintain a higher or lower than regular weight. (I think I read about it first on the slimemoldtimemold blog).
The interesing thing is, in case of underweight, the lipostat might not just cause reduced hunger and increased body temperature for example. It might also affect self-image and cause you to feel you are too fat. This is still speculation of course, and I can imagine that it makes people uncomfortable, since we like to believe our self is in control of our body and not the other way around. But it is entirely possible that "socially transmissible" or seemingly "cultural" disorders are intertwined in a complex way. (What if you need certain widespread contaminants, or microbiome deficiencies, plus trauma experience or unhealty body images in media to cause anorexia.)
How do you determine that? As far as I have heard from people working in fertilization clinics, they can help pretty much all couples that have problems with conceiving due to male fertility issues. You need to go there in the first place, but once you request help, you get it.
No, you do not understand. What I am saying is that we understand very well what is happening. 'The science is there'. What does not exist is the policy (to prevent it) and we only react when absolutely necessary. Like with poverty, to give another example.
I can't remember the last time I talked to a gay man who wasn't on PrEP. It's arguable that in reasonably responsible circles, HIV these days poses little-to-no risk, even among sexually promiscuous people. And most other common STDs are completely curable. The big exception is herpes, the spread of which is not prevented by condoms.
If a sore is outside of the area covered by a condom, a condom doesn't do anything. But I am reading that it is recommended to use condoms to prevent the spread of herpes generally, even without an outbreak.
I don't have the source to share, but I read that some types of STDs are more and more resistant to antibiotics, to the extent that they need combinations of multiple, last-instance antibiotics to cure it.
Along with the rise of age of adulthood and general hysteria, i would think they are all correlated.
But whether sperm counts are falling or not we need more funding towards artificial reproduction and extracorporal pregnancies, it s such a non-brainer for our fragile and unique species.
> But whether sperm counts are falling or not we need more funding towards artificial reproduction and extracorporal pregnancies
Seems like a pretty extreme solution to the problem of declining birth rates. Perhaps we’d be better served by encouraging people to reproduce through financial incentives and, frankly, positive propaganda.
Part of the problem is that young folks feel like raising children is financially burdensome (fine), but IMO a bigger part of the problem is the presence of negative propaganda (having kids is destroying the earth, having kids sucks, wouldn’t you rather chase your career and party with friends every night?, etc.)
those things are popular in america but the US doesnt even have a big birth rate issue. Some of the most pro-welfare countries are having the worst crisis in europe. I dont think financial help would do. People really now consider children to be more somewhat a burden to things they want to do in life. I think it was all deliberate, not a forced hand
It's not a negative propaganda but truth. Having a child today means your life does not have anything else in it besides being a provider. At most you can argue that it's something extremely good, but you can't refute extreme amounts of time having children takes.
When it comes to issues that affect one of the genders, the structure of academia tends to basically ignore things unique to men. I think this is because every University researcher has a brigade of gender activists who only care about female issues ready to raise hell.
The delta between likelihood of attending college between males and females is higher now than it was before title IX was enforced. It's simply shifted in the other direction where females are far more likely to go to university than males.
Males are far less likely to graduate high school. They are far more likely to commit suicide and use drugs.
Nobody cares. There are tons of programs like "girls code" but nobody bothers to volunteer for programs like "boys graduate".
I have both a son and a daughter and it's obvious which one the school system is designed to cater to versus the one who is essentially flawed by design.
Our society and academia are fixated on inequalities amongst the top top tier of high status humans. As if the fact that a disproportionate number of Fortune 500 CEOs are males means anything to the 99.999% of males who will never be remotely that status.
It's just very odd that we have decided to divide humans into categories we care about based on identity.
Essentially, women want someone who is their equal or “higher status”. With big inequality, men at the bottom can’t get women, while most women compete for the small group of men at the top.
In the US, you aren't supposed to accept handouts and are expected to work, because work is a virtue. However, it's OK and totally virtuous for someone to give you a job, or maintain a company structure to keep a job around so a person who "needs it" can keep their job, such as positions that tend to be filled by elderly.
So structuring to give out jobs like rewards is not something exclusive to giving them to women, it happens to the elderly and politically connected all the time.
I'm not sure what you're implying and how you're relating this to my point, so I can't address it in relation to that unless you'd like to elaborate.
Society is structured in a way that marginalizes women (among others) and denies them opportunity, and feminists have fought to enfranchise women economically and politically for more than a hundred years. As this movement picks up steam, people who were privileged under this system (mostly men like myself) can perceive this as "losing" rights. But what we're actually observing is increased parity.
Let's say there are two objects moving parallel to each other, one moving faster than the other. Let's say we impart a force on the lagging object and it starts to catch up. If you're looking from the frame of reference of the leading object, than without anything else to compare to, you might look at this object catching up and perceive yourself to be slowing down. But we know this is an illusion, because we imparted no force to the leading object; it's moving at the same speed.
I suspect males tend to have a wider bell curve in income so when you combine the data from both sexes males will dominate the winning end (e.g. CEOs) as well as the bottom end (e.g. prisons). Nobody pays any attention to the bottom of the pyramid so all they see is a distorted view of a few alpha males dominating in the top half of the pyramid.
I always wanted to have a family but I'm straight up too mentally ill to. And I reckon any woman that I'd lock down would be more mentally ill than me. I really think we're in a weird transitory period that child bearing is going to look a lot different in the next 10 years, seeing the age of marriage in the west is almost 30 for women, where > 35 is considered a geriatric pregnancy. There's going to have to be solutions if we want healthy offspring.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadIn all seriousness this is a mainstream-ish opinion in some religious circles.
It’s true. Christians are the most likely group to have kids. The most likely Christians are Mormons, then Catholics, and Evangelicals are tied for second.
The group least likely to have kids are agnostics, with atheists being very slightly more likely.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/male-infertil...
Not that I think this is what's going on, but I think rejecting it outright is too hasty.
IDK how long we'd expect it to take for most of humanity to become dependent on a high-tech society to reproduce, under those circumstances, but it'd seem really weird to me if that's not the direction we're going. But maybe that takes hundreds or thousands of years to have a pronounced effect, rather than tens.
Fun part is that I have some crazy (non-scietifically backed) theories that they are the cause of behavioral changes in humans which became more prominent in our society in the last 10-20 years. Unfortunately this is unresearched territory, as the only important article I came across were related to animals thus far [3][4]
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/22/micropla...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32629346/
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31673028/
Of course the availability of pornographic material has increased, but previous generations seemed to do fine with sears catalogues so I'm not sure that is a big factor.
The modern retirement system is merely an additional layer of indirection over the traditional system of kids taking care of their elderly parents.
If later they learn something unpleasant about nursing homes, or pension plans, or something else relevant to their expected quality of life at their old age, then that might tip the scale towards having children, even though it is only one of many reasons.
The last reason that tipped the scales towards a decision is not necessarily the only one or even the most important.
Similarly, if I go into vegetative state I hope someone will use my organs for some good cause, not try to keep me alive by any way possible.
If your answer is that you are not planning on counting on it for the future then a lot of people will ask why not stop paying into it and keep the money taxed for yourself? It is a significant tax. You CAN actually stop paying into it and then make yourself ineligible for payments out which includes spousal benefits being cancelled. You CAN conscientiously object, it is a provision of the SSA law.
If a lot of young people saw that, they would withdraw from it and put the trust right now into a deficit which would adversely affect the people withdrawing from it right now.
I think there is a non zero probability of this happening regardless for different, uglier political reasons but it doesn't make a lot of sense for people to be forced to pay into something with no promise of ever getting something back.
At a societal level, is an imbalanced population pyramid a problem? Yes, and many countries are solving this by opening up immigration options.
Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.
Unless they are getting immigrants from off world, that is at best a game of musical chairs. Birth rates are plummeting globally.
Sure, you can still find nice big numbers in places like Niger in sub-saharan Africa, but even they are starting a sharp decline. And they are starting with a low base. Their entire national population is only the size of the greater NYC area.
People often say you shouldn't have kids for your own retirement. In the ultimately hypocrisy, they often mean kids will be for everybody's retirement (when they're forced to pay social security taxes as adults).
The economic incentive is to let others have kids and shoulder disproportionately the costs, while you can free ride and "not have negative consequences." Immigration doesn't solve this problem at the system level as removing children from foreign tax pool into our domestic pool shifts benefits from one elderly person to another.
The question is then who will care for these people when they get old? Other people's children? So other people should have children, put the effort to raise and educate them for your benefit? This is a very egotistic view.
Also neither is yourself getting children or other people getting some a guarantee for a dignified existence in a future nursery home nor is such utilitarian thinking a good basis for deciding on whether or not to bring someone into the world.
Humans will eventually go the way of the Dodo - and that's okay. Because we are not special. Not at all.
I remember visiting for the first time my great grandmother when I was 6 years old. She was 99. When she saw her great grandson topless with shorts (hey it was the tropics) she reached forward and gave me a massive purple nurple and laughed. She was still shopping daily and moving around.
So I'm not really sure what scare mongering tactics in favour of parenting you are trying to propagate here.
Don't have kids just because you are expecting them to take care of you in old age. That's just cruel.
Here is a better reason: You'll be dead quite soon in any case, so unless you're in agony, you may as well enjoy your final days here. Think of some of your favorite activities and pick one. Rinse and repeat.
Sound shallow? Maybe, but I've spent an awful lot of time contemplating the question.
In the future when people have real options this is less likely to be an issue.
Assuming you at some point want to be alive when no longer young this is something to be alarmed by, as there simply aren’t going to be enough work-capable people around to keep the machinery of society functioning while still supporting those who have aged-out of the working aged population, unless your plan is to Logan’s Run anyone that shows signs of senescence (which probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time).
From my perspective (I'm in my 50s) things have been spiraling out of control for a while now. Do we really need a couple of dozen flavors of Mountain Dew? Must I be inundated with advertisements for crap I'll never buy even when going to extraordinary lengths to minimize them? Do we all need a three bedroom house with a three car garage? Do I really need a 200 game backlog on steam?
To be fair, and I’ve said this elsewhere, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see consistent declines in real estate prices over the next five decades anyway - solely because of the steady tide of newly-vacant houses coming to market due to the collapsing replacement rate - so I doubt the constant construction of new and bigger houses can continue anyway.
Old people could just accept their death, and pass away peacefully instead of burdening the society with their existence while actively causing harm to younger generations with votes on matters whose consequences they will not experience.
If we give up on withering away, and instead learn to accept death with some dignity instead of becoming a parasite to our offspring, euthanasia is a good way to go.
The fact that the older, non productive population will be more than the productive population in the not so distant future suggests that we need to rethink the way we go about doing things.
If life expectancy moves past 100, and people retire at 60-65, society will need to feed and take care of people for 35 or so years, that is far far more than the time and money it invests on its children, for a much larger segment of the population, which suggests that the old exploit the young.
As a young adult, I am asked to reconcile paying and working for old people, most of whom despise my very existence because I am not cis-het, people who repeatedly called for my death, people who go on twitter tirades about how LGBT people shouldn't exist and in the process making a their base of borderline functioning adults more rabid, my taxes and work pay so that said rabid animals have healthcare while they vote to deny mine.
I have to fund the pension of people who tried to indoctrinate me into their religion by instilling fear into a younger me, telling me that I will go to hell every single day for being a non believer, or for being different.
With all due respect, humanity is a steaming pile of garbage.
And remember when they said we can't listen to cool music like https://youtu.be/VVzod3oTyhk
Never forget who ur enemies are `3´
To be completely clear: Taking testosterone will actually worsen fertility. TRT will severely reduce fertility.
Lifestyle changes that improve testosterone (diet, exercise, physical activity of any kind) are correlated with increased fertility though.
How does one do that exactly?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07397...
Now I fee like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Moving while pumping dumb bells is one the greatest exercises ever designed.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/dont-j...
Here is one more article on this.
Don't just lift, lift and move.
If it was valid for showing what you think it shows I would think my doctor, a urologist who attends medical conferences, would know about it.
What my urologist said is also backed up by a book for laypeople I read on men's health written by a urologist named Aaron Spitz called "The Penis Book". I just double checked and it says "Contrary to popular belief, lifting weights does not boost your testosterone in a meaningful way."
While I am not a doctor it's my understanding people who do this for a living know individual studies are unreliable. Scott Alexander wrote on his blog "I think a useful epistemic habit is to be very skeptical of individual studies, and skeptical but not too skeptical of large randomized trials, good meta-analyses, and general medical consensus when supported by an evidence base."
But frankly, I doubt it's worth my time to read the study. Either you posted the study without having reviewed the literature, in which case you don't appear to be genuinely curious about this topic, or you linked to the study after reviewing the literature, in which case you should already be familiar with the conflicting evidence and shouldn't be asking me to present it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6406961/#!po=9....
Testosterone (17β-Hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one) is the main sex hormone in males. Maintaining and enhancing testosterone level in men is an incessant target for many researchers. Examples of such research approaches is to utilize specific types of food or dietary supplements as a safe and easily reached means. Here, specifically, since 1967 until now, many research studies have revealed the effect of onion on testosterone; however, this link has yet to be collectively reviewed or summarized. To accomplish this contribution, we searched the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases for full articles or abstracts (published in English language) from April 1967 through December 2018 using the keywords “onion” versus “testosterone”. In addition, a number of related published articles from the same databases were included to improve the integrity of the discussion, and hence the edge of the future directions. In summary, there is an evidence that onions enhance testosterone level in males. The mechanisms by which this occurs is mainly by increasing the production of luteinizing hormone, enhancing the antioxidant defense mechanism in the tests, neutralizing the damaging effects of the generated free radicals, ameliorating insulin resistance, promoting nitric oxide production, and altering the activity of adenosine 5′-monophosphate -activated protein kinase. However, this effect requires further approval in humans, mainly by conducting clinical trials. Keywords: onion, testosterone, luteinizing hormone, oxidative stress, antioxidants
Sunlight or LLLT both work, and the latter has several studies showing it helps with sperm directly from what I remember. I did it when we were trying to conceive.
Isn't this contradicting? What were your test/free-test levels?
Not that it is bad or dangerous. It just points to the OP being at the stage where their hormones needs to be medicinally managed.
I'd be keen to what normal levels are and what you were instructed to do to get them to normal levels?
Do you believe you were already as healthy as can be? Those seem like reasonable suggestions. If you were already very fit, the doctor's suggestion might have been discouraging. If you weren't, sounds like there's a lot that can be done.
A sedentary lifestyle with poor nutrition can have a big impact on your health.
EDIT: unfit = zero resistance training, zero cardio, and more "food products" than "real" food.
> Research has not shown a clear relationship between abnormal sperm shape and tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine use, though some studies suggest that smoking can impair fertility.
https://www.reproductivefacts.org/news-and-publications/pati...
The vitamins suggested are Vitamin C and L-Carnitine, correct?
This response sounds like real science for sure.
A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!
Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?
> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions because it categorized data as “Western” sperm counts or “Other” sperm counts.
> Further, the claims of decline were based on a “species optimum” of Anglophone developed nations of the 1970s, which the researchers argued was scientifically unsound. The GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...
When a professor of linguistics decides it is appropriate to write a paper criticizing a study about falling sperm counts, I don’t think that is a safe bet.
It is completely reasonable for people to point out that your linked rebuttal to the original topic is garbage. I think you’re the one with the hurt feelings.
As one of my friends said, "Positions of power are still predominantly held by men, but the average man is lagging behind the average woman". Not sure if this is necessarily true, but sometimes it feels true. It's also unfortunately a rather un-PC opinion to share.
Men don't have a single federally funded organization positively helping them compared to 1000s for women.
Men/boys don't have bodily autonomy in US. They are forced to fight in wars and are genitally mutilated at birth against their will.
DV laws are anti male.
Custody laws are anti fathers.
Rape laws are gendered.
All the typical major indicators are favorable to women instead of men. Ex: age expectancy, education, drug addicts, suicides, homeless, police shootings, prison inmates...
(assumption) men will be employed (therefore) child support is their responsibility.
(assumption) men are strong independent (therefore) there is no need for assistance.
(assumption) men are made for war (therefore) men are to fight war.
(assumption) men are stronger, more aggressive [see war], etc (therefore) women [being weaker] must be the victims.
(assumption) fathers are severe and disciplinary (therefore) mothers are nurturing and better suited to child rearing.
(assumption) sexual intercourse is an act desired by and initiated by men who are defined by their ability to penetrate (therefore) women can only be penetrated [see also aggressiveness] and men who are penetrated are lowered in status to be nearer the category of woman.
Let me give you some examples. White masters thought they were stronger than black slaves yet slaves had to do all the dull & dangerous work. Same with the colonial masters they thought their underlings were weak and pathetic so they doubled down on oppression and plundered even more wealth through additional taxation and other means.
All the laws were out rightly favoring the oppressors in every case except magically when it comes to patriarchy. Imagine if Nazi Germany worked like patriarchy. Aryans were the all supreme, the strongest and the most independent race so they would've had almost all laws in favor of Jews right? Nope instead they gassed millions of Jews.
If we leave that issue up to Feminism, feminists, and their long tradition of embracing critical theory, we will have to endure this evil for a whole lot longer.
It will take a large, ultimately male movement to displace it. I simply do not buy that the traditional notion of "patriarchy" is even the most important component of why it continues to exist today.
Given how it massively impacts a mans ability to feel pleasure during sex, it seems like "patriarchy" would have removed it long ago.
What if some of the parts of the bible, or other religious texts, such as this one, weren't designed to be "patriarchal" but were instead created by people who hate pleasure, hate nature, and hate the sensual world? I claim this group of pleasure haters is shockingly gender neutral
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...
Boys/men in general are exposed to a far higher likelihood of worst-case outcomes in a variety of ways, and there seems to be little societal attention to improving that. If women had the incarceration rates, the "successful" suicide rates, or the lagging lifespan that men have, it'd be all we'd hear about. Instead we figure that's just how men are, so, whatever.
I've got two girls and a boy and I'm a lot more worried about the boy's future than the girls', for sure. Seems a much finer line he'll need to walk to avoid a downward spiral, with fewer off-ramps available from such a spiral. Like, I reckon he's 75% of our risk of one of the three having a very-bad outcome, without even seeing any especially bad problems with him yet.
Girls on average get higher grades. The modern education system is by and large assembly line busywork, or child daycare. From my personal experience the grade gap should be attributed to the average female being more willing to play the systems game, while the average male calls bullshit
This is just anecdote, but for me, I'm inclined to believe 20 data points I can personally observe.
I'm not sure exactly how new this is. Even decades ago, my experience of growing up male is that to a fair degree it's like being thrown off the dock. "Hope you learn to swim before you drown!" The idea that boys are privileged over girls seems like a cruel joke.
It’s going to be a real adjustment for you to accept a lot of people are without sufficient this or that in our society and you’re not really going to bat for them.
You have freedom to choose without coercion. Nothing makes your sensibilities sacrosanct to anyone else.
As a young American man myself, I am constantly being told that my problems either don't matter or aren't real. I don't need anybody to go to bat for me, but how about just acknowledging that young American men do indeed face real problems instead of saying "we don't need Americans, actually."
"In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies"
I get that everyone has their biases, but this sounds like it's up there with the feminist approaches to rocket science that claim rockets are shaped the way they are for Freudian reasons. The only specific claim your linked article is making against the actual studies/data is that there is not nearly as much data for Asian, African, and South American countries as there is for Europe and North America. Which is a great point, we need more data, but it doesn't really undermine or debunk any of the other claims being made.
At least they are open about the fact that they have determined the conclusion beforehand.
So, just count everyone and diminish the geographical factor in a problem. OK, let's ignore the problem until everyone is affected. Seems pretty un-legit.
I've heard a lot of theories about what is causing this, the most common being plastics, increased sugar consumption, more people worldwide being overweight/obese, more people worldwide being sedentary/less physically active, exposure to various harmful chemicals, and more. I'd assume it's probably a combination of several factors, but similar to plummeting male testosterone (which likely has similar and potentially related causes) I don't see this as likely to get anywhere near the amount of attention and funding from various governments and organizations around the world as it would if it were affecting female health.
I'm very curious how large a factor this is. Personally, once I realized how much plastic I used - from water bottles to food containers - I became very concerned and stopped using it.
More intuitive explanations make sense to me, like unhealthy, non-active and stress filled lifestyles.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28741210/
Which is understandable in the end, male expendability is a thing. As long as it doesn't affect literally all males, it's a health issue and a social problem, but it's not a "humanity will cease to exist" problem; the men who are less affected can father more children.
If reproduction was limited because women's infertility exploded, it would be a different issue. The ones who are fertile can't simply bear 50 babies in a year to make up for it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeE3J_jXoAABWXi.jpg
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/03/09/womens-health-research-fda-tr...
[2] https://www.everydayhealth.com/womens-health/womens-health-w...
[3] https://theconversation.com/gender-bias-in-medicine-and-medi...
[4] https://www.northwell.edu/katz-institute-for-womens-health/a...
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/08/24/the-surprising...
Testosterone is the new canine tooth.
May explain a large portion of this shift. I wonder if they normalized for bodyweight in this study
Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582534
I wonder if it gets as many upvotes? Or if hacker news prefers to get its fertility analysis from theoretical physicists.
Right now it's averaging 2 upvotes a minute. It was pretty obvious at the time you wrote your post that this will indeed get more upvotes
EDIT: thanks for fixing the link
Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthalate as 'Parfum'.
What we need is not savvy consumers what we need is regulators to get serious.
Industry plainly lists potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, and sodium nitrite, which are known carcinogens.
On top of that, the packaging matters: PET is a phtalate which is an endocrine disruptor.
In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
Especially with mold, zero is very very difficult to attain.
But fairly, limited:
> Articles containing substances of very high concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List at a concentration above 0.1% weight by weight (w/w)
They also have an app that can scan UPC codes.
I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.
The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.
These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not
I tire of being the fool buying expensive tasteless natural organic foods and spices!
And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.
Your comment was heavily upvoted.
Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.
They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.
It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.
I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.
And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.
Endocrine disruptors are airborne and globally ubiquitous in the form of micro-plastics. All drinking water in the world is contaminated with it. [1]
I'm really not meaning to be dramatic on this, but we've completely missed the boat on this one while we were arguing about climate change, and it's much too late to do anything about it now.[2]
I'll not be here to see either way, and it's unlikely anyone else currently alive will unless Ray Kurzweil was right this whole time, but IMHO (I.e. take this with the pinch of salt a random Internet comment warrants) it's likely humanity as a species only has a few hundred years left at most.
This isn't meant to be doom-mongering, it's just that while we worry about some dramatic cataclysmic event like a nuclear war, a pandemic or a meteor strike, the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.
It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300 [3] - I just don't see that the science backs up this claim, especially given recent understandings of fertility decline.
[https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents...]
[https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/bpa-plastics-harmful/]
[https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...]
I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination.
In this case there is mounting evidence against phthalates and bisphenols as endocrine disruptors. This is the stuff getting into your blood stream through ingestion or skin absorption mostly from plastic containers, hygiene products, etc.
This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem.
This is why I hate when people compare climate change to other problems (like GP did).
Sure, there's a lot of microplastics out there, but the science is still out on what that means for us. Meanwhile we know how bad Climate Change is, so if we have limited resources to fight problems, definitely fight the one you know is bad, even if it's not as engaging as thinking about your own sperm.
My point is that people at large generally don’t care enough to be really bothered by climate change, so there’s no budget in the limited attention we as a species are willing to set aside for inconvenient truths to consider much else.
Same thing I heard for decades about AGW. And still do. In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.
I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.
>Same thing I heard for decades about AGW.In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
People can deny the science, but C02 concentration is the mechanism for global climate eras and we've known that for almost 200 years [1]. I don't care who believes in science because that has no impact on whether it is correct or not (only you, my fellow scientist, can determine that for yourself).
There is no agreed-upon mechanism for how microplastics harm humans, but again to the point of science, if you can point me to proof, I'd love to see it.
Long story short, you are very likely making a false comparison between those two topics.
>We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.
Sure, and again, show me the proof/model that this is going to lead to the end of mankind. I's love to see it.
>I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.
We have a 1,000,000x better chance of convincing them that Trump is an immortal demigod, doesn't mean we should do it.
Again, we should dedicate effort to things that we know matter even if it requires effort.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S163107131...
In any normal universe, the onus of proof would be on you to prove dumping it into our environment is safe.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where your world-view in Congressionally safe. Enjoy.
So yes?
And again, I'm not saying it's good/safe, it's just in a resource-limited world the only problem is global warming.
You didn't include a link to support the claim that humans only have "a few hundred years left at most". I think this is extremely unlikely to be true. What is your recommended reading?
“It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300”
I’ll clarify above regardless.
The slowdown in population growth has been a topic of world leaders for quite some time. This isn't a topic of interest because world leaders are somehow concerned about the cause (e.g. chemicals in the environment). In fact, the cause is well known and due to fairly straight forward anthropologic factors. As quality of life improves, population growth declines. This happens in nature as well. Populations under stress tend to reproduce more. World leaders are interested in modeling/understanding this as it has macroeconomic effects (e.g. Japan's decade long struggles with stock market decline). This is also why the US and the west in general has went so heavy on quantitative easing for the past decade. They are trying to stave off deflation. Unfortunately, COVID and the associated supply shocks caused that plan to go off the rails a bit...
Finally, I'm not sure what climate change policy has to do with any of this.
> A bidirectional relationship between testosterone and obesity underpins this association indicated by the hypogonadal-obesity cycle and evidence weight loss can lead to increased testosterone levels.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/
It has nothing to do with being savvy.
Lately I've been seeing straws made from a compostable plant based polyester. It's unclear whether they are still using problematic plasticizers in them.
That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?
Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.
From what I hear our friends story is not unusual and many in our age bracket 20-30 year olds are struggling to have children.
Don't really know what my point is except it is interesting and I am wondering what the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is.
Anecdotally, my wife's sister and her husband have been trying for almost a year? And they've had one miscarriage and nothing else.
Less people in the world. Look at Japan and South Korean population projections out 50 to 75 years -- they may cut their populations in half, and it could keep going? Hard to extrapolate trends out that far though...
But also, if it’s chemically related it might hit first world countries harder than third world countries. Imagine what would happen if all aid was cut to Africa.
Most other problems on earth will be solved by more technology.
We could, in principle, if we really were all willing, rapidly transition to a beautiful solar-hippie future where all the food was either vegan or GM bacterial derived milk [0] or vat-grown cultured flesh. The Earth can support hundreds of billions this way using only land that is currently desert.
We almost certainly won't do that, but we could.
Conversely, rapid depopulation can mess up our economy. How rapid is too rapid? I don't know.
This outcome is IMO more plausible than the solar-hippie outcome. Still not certain, as 75 years of technological change is a lot and could very plausibility give us medicine that seems like magic today — the last 75 includes the eradication of smallpox; the first of each of kidney, heart, heart-and-lung, liver, face, uterus, womb, penis, hand, arm, and leg transplants; first each of pacemaker, cochlear implants, artificial heart; first CT, PET, medical ultrasound, and MRI; first stem cell therapy; robot assisted surgery; organ culture for lab-grown (some of the are still experimental) noses, ears, skin, kidneys, liver, and bladders; the defibrillator; oral contraceptives; genetic engineering; and too many vaccines to bother listing.
The next 75 years could, not implausibly, give us anti-aging drugs that keep us in peak health until whatever kills us; or give us external artificial wombs; or at the very least, turn skin cells into healthy sperm in-vitro.
[0] why isn't this already a thing? Vegan cheese substitutes are 45% mediocre, 45% just bad, and 10% single use case things like smoked tofu
During the "issues" phase my count was tested and was considered good...problem is/was on my wife's side...all to say conception issues aren't all down to sperm counts (not that you implied that, just wanted it out there).
Friends in late 20's to early 30's have had a lot of trouble conceiving, i.e. they needed to do IVF.
Not sure what's going on with that, and this is purely anecdotal, but I've been hearing people having troubles having kids a lot it seems.
What’s your secret? Is it the microdosing?
I'll keep in mind how comments like that come off in the future.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tennessee-republicans-abortio...
Wow... I would have thought you were referring to people that were older.
I wonder what the common denominator is there, or if your experience is an outlier. It's obviously noteworthy enough to share. Maybe people that conceive without issue aren't commenting on it as much?
(Source: conversations with IVF team)
hmm... yeah, this would be an interesting biomarker for those in their twenties. It could be valuable later in life.
I was surprised to learn women are born with 1-2 million eggs. By 20 years old, they only have 200k-300k left. They lose more every year.
After learning about the side effects of birth control, it's concerning that it's the default recommendation for young women, and that they're on it all the time. I understand why. I don't know what a reasonable alternative would be. Abstinence isn't a reasonable alternative.
Your examples are not comparable to abstaining from sex.
It would be like saying "don't eat any food" and "don't use locomotion to move from point A to point B."
> I just disagree that eating, sleeping, or sex are "core" desires.
I may not be understanding this. Eating and sleeping are obviously requirements for anyone's life, and sex is required for the continuation of all life.
But all of them appear to be "core" desires to us because they are immediate, potent forces. But just because these appetites are strong doesn't make them necessary. Everyone has to eat something but (in the general case) "you don't have to eat that *right now*" is true. Same with sleep - you don't need to sleep as much as you think you do (and you probably should be sleeping some times when you don't feel like it). So we come to sex. Is sex necessary for the continuation of the human race? Yes. Is it necessary for you to have sex at all? No. (Again, in the general case).
You are conflating species and individual survival. Sex is required for the continuation of the species, but not for the survival of an individual in that species.
Even amongst the newest married couples, most are expecting within the first year.
I understand we have different beliefs and such but since we're all in the same environment, how do we explain the simultaneous existence of the seemingly normal-to-hyper fertile?
Surely there is more than just 'its environmental'
Interesting you mention that the group I am referring to and myself are all members of religion generally associated with large families as well.
I should also clarify all of them have at least 2 kids at this point. Which is another interesting data point of many of them didn't have difficulty with their first couple of kids but now are struggling.
I wish them the best of luck.
I will say, the first couple of kids make it harder to conceive the rest. Logistically speaking... And also , men's and women's stress levels with young children cannot be good for fertility
That's the difference. Couples that plan explicitly typically don't plan their firstborn before 30.
It helps that she is not very career-minded, I have the opportunity to work from home, and I'm working a role where I earn well and never need to do overtime.
You may also have the age issue - starting at 20 is a lot different than starting at 30.
Most professional couples don't even marry until 30s, and even if married sooner, don't try for kids until later.
My wife and I struggled, yet my wifes sister keeps having kids. Difference was wife's sister started early, whereas wife and I were married at 35.
Tried for 6 years (age 25-31). Finally considered adoption and then got pregnant and lost the first baby in a miscarriage. Had a healthy second baby at 32. Now have a third healthy baby at 34.
I think a lot of factors combine, but will state that we moved an average of once per year until age 30, so subconsciously we probably didn’t feel settled. It’s a very complex topic with too many variables to effectively model. And even when pregnancy occurs miscarriage rates are high.
I’ll note that young couples with kids are much more obvious in church (they make noise) and more likely to be at masses with other families. Young couples without kids often go to the later masses (in cities sometimes 9 PM).
The difference is that religious couples should always be open to life so in a sense they are always "trying" as contraceptives are not allowed (except for NFP) hence their chances go up. Further they are encouraged to married sooner than later sense they should abstain from sex until then.
It makes sense that younger couples having lots of sex without contraception will end up having more children than their counterparts.
One friend and his wife gave up alcohol, caffeine and meat, it seemed like there was just a ton of stress they had put on getting pregnant for 6 months. It wasn't until after they took a break from trying that they got pregnant one night after drinking.
I think modern medicine somewhat ignores how powerful the human mind is. It is possible that my friend wasn't actually performing as well as he thought he was, also possible that the wife had 'calculated' the exact day that conception should happen. Instead of listening to her body, evolutionarily it would be advantageous for women to be horny while most fertile in the cycle.
Probably just took them a long time and they happened to conceive after making those changes.
Certainly they tried many methods over time, and with a low% chance per attempt, they'll conceive after a bunch of 'interventions'.
one of these is definitely not like the others...
An all-meat diet I would bet is the best to conceive, because it's the best for hormonal health, judging by the countless anecdotes (e.g. women regaining their cycles after many years) I'm seeing.
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out, it's still shocking to me that people still believe that meat is detrimental to health.
My own anecdotes tell me that eating meat vastly decreases your fertility rate. Some anecdotes add that it's because of the animal hormones you consume, others state that it's because meat-eating is associated with other health conditions which interfere with conception (obesity, high cholesterol, cancer), and yet other anecdotes don't assign a cause to the increased fertility from leaving out meat.
As anecdotes, these are all of course, incredibly scientific.
This thread is full of anecdotes so I'm just the messenger of some I know of. I don't care about science when our bodies are burning because of the terrible advice some of the "science" has been giving us.
- dietary cholesterol is good and cholesterol is not the problem, triglyceride/cholesterol ratio is
- hormones from meat... that's just not having a sense of scale, don't know how to put it, of course everything is going to have some tiny amount of hormones, even the vegans' beloved soy
Only slightly taken out of context, but telling I think.
Anecdotally (again), all the healthiest people I know get lots of exercise, eat a reasonable amount of carbs from wholemeal/wholegrain and vegetable sources, some fat and some protein. This is the "official" recommended diet by most authorities, and has a lot going for it, apart from being boringly conventional (so therefore unattractive to people who are excited by these threads).
The unhealthy people I know jump from diet to diet in an attempt to take a shortcut to fitness, singing the praises of the most recent one (...but if the last one was so great, why did you have to change it again?)
There are problems with the carnivore diet, including lack of fibre, micronutrients, red meat association with colorectal cancer, and so on. In addition it's bad for the environment and would be unsustainable if we all switched to it.
I always wonder how do these people get to Hacker News? This is a somewhat sophisticated audience but nonetheless we always have these meat-obsessed comments on tangential topics.
The gist of the post you originally replied to was that some people stopped doing things presumably unhealthy, and couldn't conceive. One of those things was eating meat. Then they started doing those things again, and, presumably due to reduced stress, their fertility improved (OP hints they suspect correlation, in this case, is from causation).
If anything, this almost suggests it was healthier for these people, in this situation, to eat meat. Same with resuming alcohol and caffeine. The added stress from avoiding those things may have been worse for them. No claim of meat being net unhealthy was made in that post.
But I'll make it now, since we're here and you haven't stopped. There are many studies showing excessive meat consumption has negative health effects.
I'm not saying it's always healthier for everyone to cut out meat entirely, just that the average diet includes a decidedly unhealthy amount of meat. There's nothing "outdated" about this claim, it's based on heaps of modern research. Your anecdotes don't mean anything, and are no doubt cherry-picked. I know lots of people who claim adding meat back to their diet (or adding more meat to their diet) has improved their well-being also. And if I had an axe to grind with the suggestion that I eat less meat, I might regurgitate those anecdotes too.
FWIW I also know plenty of people who feel healthier when they eat less meat, but again, I don't consider anecdotes useful in this conversation.
The fact that it has happened for a long time is not evidence that it is good or beneficial.
I don't think it's all that new to be honest, else these ceremonies wouldn't exist.
We had a friend who had been trying for 8 years to have a kid, told us she was just about giving up and thinking of adoption. We asked if she used the ovulation sticks - “what are they??” We gave her the rest of ours and a couple of months later she was pregnant, now has a baby. So yeah, these things don’t seem to be as well known as they should be, and can be a massive help.
https://www.amazon.com/YO-Android-Description-Compatibility-...
Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia.
They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse.
Edit:
The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the issue. This is a topic that should elicit more curiosity than it does, and we should ask ourselves why it doesn't.
I worked in intel/defense for over 10 years, and part of our post Iraq WMD training was looking for signs of bias/motivated reasoning that are a sign of the group think that allowed for a war to be started based on false pretenses. One of the biggest indicators:
"A lack of curiosity about a phenomenon/event/factor where it should be expected."
Who is "they"?
There are plenty of people who are so desperate about anthropogenic global warming that they're willing to forgo having children and proclaim that the disastrous decline in fertility rates in places like Korea (see recent HN thread) are actually good and necessary because we need fewer humans on this earth.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/bjorn-lomborg/false-alarm/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg
Ehh.
If we were actually on a positive trajectory with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I might agree with you. But we're not. Things are bad and the trends are only getting worse. Many places will become uninhabitable; the residents will emigrate elsewhere; the places being migrated to will react by electing right-wing nationalists; some resource or border conflict will result in war. It's gonna be bad. I'm not going to feed more lives into that meat grinder.
https://lexfridman.com/climate-change-debate/
People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
See especially pages 16-17 of the Summary Report for policy-makers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
We're well on track to blow past 2C of warming, where every single risk/impact category as at the top of the scale ("Very High").
A popsci summary, if you prefer: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/ipcc-report-the-next...
> People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
I'm definitely not predicting extinction, however massive climate-driven impacts are unavoidable, and large-scale war seems an almost inevitable consequence of those impacts. Large-scale war has definitely happened before, quite a few times.
He is an "apocalyptic environmentalist" in the sense that he believes climate change is going to be such a catastrophic event that human existence will be miserable. When I was a kid, he was an evangelical Christian who believed the end times were coming any day. He had a nasty divorce, a mid-life crisis, met a woman who worked at PETA, became a radical vegan, and then, surprise surprise, once again embraced a new form of apocalypse to replace the End Times one: climate apocalypse.
He's a mathematically illiterate narcissist, a psychological subtype who is known to be the most prone to apocalyptic ideologies.
Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Climate change is real. Excess CO2 caused warming is going to create major challenges for the planet. Humanity will go on, we will innovate our way out of it, and like every Malthusian cult throughout history, you and your fellow apocalypse believers will be proven wrong until you find a new reason to ruin everyone's dinners with negativity.
The churches my dad had me in when I was a kid taught me how deranged people can be, and how good it makes them feel to be part of a heroic tribe trying to warn everyone the world is ending. I know what it looks like, I've seen it Christians, I've seen it in hippies, and I see it in yuppies now too.
Can you point to me where I said the apocalypse is coming?
> Humanity will go on
I agree.
> we will innovate our way out of it
Too late for that, the impacts are here and more are coming. The question is whether we will be able to deal with the upcoming climate refugee crisis without war. It seems unlikely to me.
> ruin everyone's dinners with negativity
FWIW this isn't like, a major facet of my personality. I'm just explaining in a thread about having kids why I chose not to have kids.
Really? Most people acknowledge that it's very bad.
Hypothesis: the cause in both cases is likely industrial contaminants considered essential to the running of modern civilization, so nobody wants to, or is encouraged not to, look too hard.
The science on this altitude effect has been pretty thoroughly conducted, with potential correlating factors accounted for in multivariate regression models.
Denver and its suburbs are FILLED with people who are as unhealthy and inactive as the rest of the country. Even in these places, in the poorest neighborhoods, they are less obese.
I have an identical twin brother who lives in Portland, and since I've moved here I've stayed about 10-15 lbs lighter than him. It's a single, anecdotal data point, and completely unscientific, but he swears he eats healthier than me lol.
Notably higher altitude alone seems highly correlated with lower obesity and diabetes rates regardless of physical activity. Again, this points to environmental factors.
[0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
It's definitely not a topic that's examined enough.
If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
No? Genetics is the best predictor of obesity, but as with drugs any contaminant would have varying degrees of effect on the population, including sometimes a paradoxical effect.
> If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
And a whole lot of people are not getting fat at all eating foods like and barely exercising. Why do some people have to pay attention to what they eat and others don't? Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
> Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat. Genetics seems to play a role in that some people can eat junk and feel full but most can't.
> Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat.
And as I said I don't think this stands up to scrutiny, and I said why already. Additional: obesity is increasing in wild animal populations too.
On a personal level, I have eaten diets of only foods like you've mentioned and I would still have gone well over my calorie limit if I had done so until sated. As far as I can tell 'satiating foods' is a term with no real science behind it. Believe me, if I was aware of something aside from hardcore stimulants that would actually keep my appetite in check I'd have been eating it for the past 15 years instead of suffering.
The interesing thing is, in case of underweight, the lipostat might not just cause reduced hunger and increased body temperature for example. It might also affect self-image and cause you to feel you are too fat. This is still speculation of course, and I can imagine that it makes people uncomfortable, since we like to believe our self is in control of our body and not the other way around. But it is entirely possible that "socially transmissible" or seemingly "cultural" disorders are intertwined in a complex way. (What if you need certain widespread contaminants, or microbiome deficiencies, plus trauma experience or unhealty body images in media to cause anorexia.)
"This thing that humans have done for eons without medical assistance now requires it and that's totally fine. Nothing to see here."
Really?
You can extrapolate this on pretty much all human existence.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
So is the flu or COVID or the common cold, but they are inconveniences which can last for 20 days or more.
If a vaccine were to become availible then the inconvenience would be limited to the day of the shot.
But whether sperm counts are falling or not we need more funding towards artificial reproduction and extracorporal pregnancies, it s such a non-brainer for our fragile and unique species.
Seems like a pretty extreme solution to the problem of declining birth rates. Perhaps we’d be better served by encouraging people to reproduce through financial incentives and, frankly, positive propaganda.
Part of the problem is that young folks feel like raising children is financially burdensome (fine), but IMO a bigger part of the problem is the presence of negative propaganda (having kids is destroying the earth, having kids sucks, wouldn’t you rather chase your career and party with friends every night?, etc.)
I think that goes back to decades of negative propaganda.
The delta between likelihood of attending college between males and females is higher now than it was before title IX was enforced. It's simply shifted in the other direction where females are far more likely to go to university than males.
Males are far less likely to graduate high school. They are far more likely to commit suicide and use drugs.
Nobody cares. There are tons of programs like "girls code" but nobody bothers to volunteer for programs like "boys graduate".
I have both a son and a daughter and it's obvious which one the school system is designed to cater to versus the one who is essentially flawed by design.
Our society and academia are fixated on inequalities amongst the top top tier of high status humans. As if the fact that a disproportionate number of Fortune 500 CEOs are males means anything to the 99.999% of males who will never be remotely that status.
It's just very odd that we have decided to divide humans into categories we care about based on identity.
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/
Essentially, women want someone who is their equal or “higher status”. With big inequality, men at the bottom can’t get women, while most women compete for the small group of men at the top.
So structuring to give out jobs like rewards is not something exclusive to giving them to women, it happens to the elderly and politically connected all the time.
Society is structured in a way that marginalizes women (among others) and denies them opportunity, and feminists have fought to enfranchise women economically and politically for more than a hundred years. As this movement picks up steam, people who were privileged under this system (mostly men like myself) can perceive this as "losing" rights. But what we're actually observing is increased parity.
Let's say there are two objects moving parallel to each other, one moving faster than the other. Let's say we impart a force on the lagging object and it starts to catch up. If you're looking from the frame of reference of the leading object, than without anything else to compare to, you might look at this object catching up and perceive yourself to be slowing down. But we know this is an illusion, because we imparted no force to the leading object; it's moving at the same speed.
It's important to broaden one's perspective.