Just another common correlational study with giant confidence intervals that don't convincingly exclude the null hypothesis. Also, "Associations with PFOS in the first/only samples were weak and not statistically significant. Elevated concentrations of perfluorononanoic acid were inversely associated with TGCT, whereas results were null for other PFAS."
Scientific consensus is built up around a body work. It is only really in modern times that laymen have started reading scientific articles, and usually only one here or one there.
There is no perfect scientific study, if you critique all of them to the point you critique this one, you will dismiss more-or-less all science.
Scientists who study the effects of various forever chemicals on health have read hundres of studies on the matter. And from those scientists I've talked to the overall consensus is definitely leaning towards these so-called forever chemicals having associations strong enough towards negative health outcomes that it's worthwhile to keep looking.
> Scientific consensus is built up around a body work
Yes, and that process is supposed to include judging the merit of the individual studies that make up the body of work. A hundred shoddy papers don't make a convincing body of work all of a sudden, they make a pile of inconclusive trash.
I'm not disagreeing with the consensus you point at, I wouldn't know, but you can't use "consensus arises from a body of work" to argue inclusion of anything in that body of work.
> There is no perfect scientific study, if you critique all of them to the point you critique this one, you will dismiss more-or-less all science.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it has to convincingly (to some degree) reject the null hypothesis, as per GP's own words. And that doesn't dismiss more-or-less all science, it more or less sets the lower bar for what constitutes science in the first place.
If I shit in a box and give it to you saying "here's evidence of something you believe is likely true," the right response isn't "that's progress," it's "stop shitting in boxes and giving them to people."
This comment does not merit wide attention. You've cherry-picked a quote from the abstract in a highly misleading way. The adjusted p-value is <0.01, which is a perfectly reasonable confidence interval. Odds ratio is 4.6 ffs.
>Associations with PFOS in the first/only samples were weak and not statistically significant.
The "first/only" samples were controls, they had generally very low levels of perfluorinated sulfonic acids and so no correlation was detected.
>Elevated concentrations of perfluorononanoic acid were inversely associated with TGCT
Only perfluorinated sulfonic acids were associated with testicular cancer. Perfluorononanoic acid is a carboxylic acid which is likely used as an alternative — i.e. those who were exposed to it were likely exposed to fewer perfluorinated sulfonic acids.
>whereas results were null for other PFAS.
This is the most dishonest part of your comment — you left out the preceding sentence about positive association of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid and perfluorohexanesulfonic acid with TCGT, and by omitting that context you made it look like there were no associations.
This is how progress is made. It starts out with observations and looking for clues and links. What the study shows is that these chemicals have decidedly not shown to be safe and therefore ought not be used. Further study is warranted and if the number of correlations increase substantially then we will have learned something new. If no new correlations are found then we have learned something new in this case too.
What you are objecting to is the precautionary principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle. It is used by many if not most agencies dealing with foodstuff, environmental protection, drugs, workplace hazards, etc.
"Not shown to be safe" is about the weakest claim that you could make.
> Absolutely not. And the fact that people think that kind of thing after reading sensationalized articles like this causes real problems.
Are you trying to say that this study did show these chemicals to be safe, or were they not shown to be safe? Believing the first would be a real problem.
I suspect the confusion is over the difference between "not shown to be safe" and "shown not to be safe". The former is saying that "we haven't yet determined for sure that they're safe", and the latter states "we've concluded for sure that they are not safe". It's unfortunately super easy to misread one for the other despite their very different meanings; I had to re-read the original sentence twice before being sure that I read it correctly.
Funny you should say that, because I managed a water show in Macau. The 17 million liter, 10m deep pool had hydraulically actuated lifts in it, and we went from normal hydraulic fluid to vegetable oil for leak and contamination issues. The vegetable oil hydraulic fluid had issues, so we switched to a PEG-based fluid. Toxicity reports were great. I had over 400 technical dives in the pool servicing equipment. When we switched over, the performers were concerned about the PEG-based fluid. Some claimed they had a rash after a small leak (5 gallons in a 5m gallon pool). Others joined in on the fear and I had to address the technicalities to a mostly lay audience. I asked them to check their body moisturizers and hair conditioners they all used before and after each show. One of the top half of the ingredients were PEGs. I am not saying someone couldn't have a sensitivity to PEGs, but in this case it seemed like fear over rationality when they were putting more ppm of PEG on their bodies via their care products than they could have been exposed to in the pool.
I think they should be banned because it makes no sense to me to extensively use chemicals that have not been shown to have a reasonable chance of being safe. Why extensively use something about which we know very little what the environmental effects are?
No. What you wrote is completely wrong. Besides, it would be better for the environment and humanity if we did not progress so fast in the area of releasing massive amounts of toxic chemicals and detritus.
This already happens in high-risk areas with the likes of the FDA requiring approval for drugs, since they are more likely to be immediately and/or grossly harmful as a direct result. We don't have evidence that many of these chemicals or even microplastics are directly responsible for any long-term physiological effects (but we know for certain that they exist and are being ingested and distributed throughout the body), so it's not like people are dropping dead from (mis)use of forever chemicals.
The first link is "High exposure to perfluorinated compounds in drinking water and thyroid disease" but the conclusion in the abstract is
> In total, 16,150 individuals had ever been exposed. The hazard ratios did not indicate any excess risk of hyperthyroidism among those with contaminated water. For hypothyroidism, the risk of being prescribed medication was significantly increased among women with exposure during the mid part of the study period (but not men). However, the association with period of exposure was non-monotonic, so the significance is considered to be a chance finding. Our research was limited by the relatively simple exposure assessment.
The second one as well
> No association between serum PFAS and fecal zonulin was found. In conclusion, the present study found no consistent evidence to support PFAS exposure as a risk factor for IBD.
> Why extensively use something about which we know very little what the environmental effects are?
Because burning jet fuel in an enclosed interior ship space while hundreds of miles from land is a bigger and more immediate threat?
It makes sense to phase out dangerous chemicals wherever we can, but sometimes their use is a chemical imperative because there are no equivalent alternatives.
The X-37 reportedly uses hypergolic nitrogen-tetroxide + hydrazine fuel, which means everyone wears spacesuits around it on the ground. But it solves an engineering challenge that more mundane fuel mixes don't. Ergo, they use something toxic and dangerous.
I think the standard for using a chemical that never breaks down and exists forever is that you to the best of research ability have shown it to be safe. It's crazy that we allowed companies to just make this stuff and we are stuck with it forever. How do you realistically expect to compensate someone who gets some adverse health effect from these chemicals in 2000 years long after the life of whatever company made them? We make it far too easy for companies to create massive negative externalities and it should be harder.
> the companies have to prove beyond doubt the harmlessness.
There must be a reasonable balance struck somewhere. One cannot prove a negative, after all, and if anything new must be proven beyond doubt that it has no short, medium, or long-term effects on human health, you are not going to have anything new, period.
Acetaminophen, for example, has been in use for a century and a half, yet we still don't know how it really works[0]. If we don't know how it works, how are we to know that it won't harm us in some insidious way?
The counter point is that the vast majority of produced stuff is absolute useless garbage no one actually needs, or a gazillion of ripoffs from each other. Consumerism is a plague not only for people but also for the environment.
I think we can see a „dry-run“ of some product launch, point out dangerous flaws, and repeat until something actually useful is proposed that is not some profit-extraction tradeoff that makes something else worse.
This is rather extreme by intention, the truth probably is somewhere between, but I think most people can’t see how a more regulated system can actually thrive much better than putting people into poverty death loops and destroying the planet in the process.
Your premise is flawed -- these chemicals can of course be broken down. It may or may not happen in nature and may or may not be economical (yet), but there's nothing magic here.
Your prescribed solution is also flawed. It is impossible to prove a negative, so you are arguing we should stop inventing new things. These kinds of (Neo-)Luddist arguments always fail to take into account the huge upside of materials science over the past 100 years.
The parent comment didn't claim they couldn't be broken down, but that they "never [break] down". The (obvious) intended meaning is that the chemicals will not break down with regular use or normal exposure to common environments.
> It is impossible to prove a negative, so you are arguing we should stop inventing new things.
This is such a disingenuous line of reasoning that I almost wondered if you were intending to be comedic.
The parent comment was clearly advocating for policies that require companies to actually put forth effort to demonstrate safety over time. The longer a compound is expected to remain intact under regular conditions, the greater the guarantee of safety demanded. What you are advocating for is essentially what we already have: companies should not need to go to great efforts to demonstrate long-term safety because "innovation" and "progress", though of course when the companies say this they really mean "profit".
It is unclear what stake you have in advocating for such a position, but a good argument it is not.
You're reading generously into GP's very short statements and mine relatively uncharitably. That's fine, but I don't think we're ready to have an interesting discussion.
The original comment was quite clear in its intent. The only interpretation of your response was that you wanted to play devil's advocate --- something we could really use less of these days.
Just because we can’t prove a negative doesn’t mean safety testing is pointless. Doing a couple animal studies to check for obvious problems is likely better than pure anarchism.
GP appears to be calling for a total ban on use of new substances. For example, we've studied PFAS extensively (not "pure anarchism") and still do not have convincing evidence of harm, yet commentators in this thread and others repeatedly argue for PFAS bans.
The critical point is whether we studied PFAS _before_ it was used extensively. I may be wrong but to my knowledge of historical chemical production is that we generally use a chemical for a long time before we do extensive research into safety.
PFAS is kind of unique because it is politicised: there are lots of groups who claim harm and therefore don’t want to look at the science skeptically. And if harm actually exists, governments want to reduce liability so are happy to ignore any signs of harm before a cheap solution becomes available.
I don't think arguing for some safety standards proportional to the life of the thing being used is arguing for stopping all invention. I think the most charitable reading of your critique is that you are using the Slippery Slope Fallacy to argue that any restrictions on invention means no invention at all. I do agree it's impossible to prove a negative which is why I qualified it, but you can demonstrate a few negative results like "Doesn't substantially increase the risk of Cancer X" for various types of cancer. Etc. I'd leave it to the experts to choose which risks should be tested for and shown to not be an issue.
On the other hand you're arguing for a very unfair world where people are unfairly exposed to hugely damaging chemicals and don't get any remediation for those damages because we don't ensure the profits from those chemicals actually offset their long term consequences and we don't require companies taking on such risks to adequately fund future lawsuits. I agree that's kind of been the norm in US-style capitalism, but I think there is a strong case it shouldn't be.
If this is true then with bio accumulation we have effectively a steady degradation where for each generation Male offspring present increasingly decaying sperm counts.
Three 95% confidence intervals not quite overlapping with no effect is plenty evidence to believe this is true unless someone does a bigger study showing otherwise...
Testosterone and sperm counts have been decimated in modern times. Plus we are already seeing the vast majority of countries heading to births below replacement rate, yes even Africa. This could get deadly serious in terms of sustaining complex systems and ensuring resource production that can maintain relative comfort and security for everyone.
I don't understand why this isn't a topic being vigorously discussed, even if it's not to fix things but even just to prepare for a shortage of new workers and tax payers.
I doubt lower sperm counts or health, if true, have anything to do with lower fertility rates.
The topic gets danced around because the biggest change is women achieving independence and being able to completely control when and if they have a child, and incentivizing them to want to have children means quite a bit of wealth transfer, or rolling back their independence and access to birth control. Obviously, men would also need to be convinced to have children too, but that seems secondary.
It's so ridiculously Orwellian (or should I say Atwoodian?) that I can't imagine anyone except in the most deranged countries is going to roll back access to birth control.
The obvious long-term solution is that we do nothing and the fact that a desire for children is partially genetic solves the problem on its own.
>It's so ridiculously Orwellian (or should I say Atwoodian?) that I can't imagine anyone except in the most deranged countries is going to roll back access to birth control.
My country is, apparently, one of the most deranged then. While all forms of contraception are currently legal across my country, it's harder to gain access to it in some places than it is in others:
However, some places in my backwater country have attempted (but not yet succeeded) to limit various forms of contraception, despite its legality[0] nationwide since 1965:
And hundreds of elected representatives in the national government voted against[1] and finally blocked[2] nationwide legislation ensuring access to contraception. What's more, some members of our highest court have indicated that they'd like to revisit the issue[3] with an eye towards revoking such access.
I wish I didn't live in such a backwards country. :(
While true, any western reduction in birth rates can be trivially explained by changes in child-raising. Children's critical hours of self-raising/peer-raising have been sharply degraded thru danger-culture & the erasure of free-roam areas. All of that is being forcefully replaced with adult micromanagement.
In short, we've swapped much of the joy with stress and stunting.
Thought exercise: functionally speaking, how similar is ~compromising the quality of high-school sex education (i.e., getting rid of it, making it elective, giving parents any control or veto over the curriculum, converting it to an abstinence-only curriculum, ensuring it's taught by prudes, etc.) to rolling back access to birth control?
(Edit: not really directed at parent poster. Just something you made me think of...)
Not sure how long parental leave we have, but here in France most [0] of your other points are available, yet birth rate has still been below replacement for 20 years [1]. So something else may be going on.
[0] While childcare is technically free, my understanding is that, in practice, places are limited, especially in big cities.
Same in Austria. Theoretically we have very affordable childcare. But in cities there are too few places, so only a small fraction of parents can actually use them. On the country side opening times of childcare are so limited that they are incompatible with most jobs (childcare Mo-Fri 8-12 is better than nothing, but there are very few jobs that are compatible with those times).
The result is that most mothers pause their careers while the kids are small. The consequence is that most couples only have one or two kids.
There is no correlation in practice between these benefits and greater birth rates. Countries with some of the most friendly policies to parenting have the lowest birth rates. In the past, people with much more difficult lives had many more children. This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't hold up in the real world.
That's going to be very rough on small business. I think it all sounds fantastic don't get me wrong, but most mom and pop shops can't float employees for 12 months while paying in full for their child care and other services.
This is basically what Finland does, but it doesn't seem to result into larger baby count. These are very humane policies and I'm all for them but they don't solve this particular problem.
I think the aim is rather to raise few well-balanced kids who are taken care of by professionals so parents' work is not FUBAR. Motivating modern parents to have >2 kids takes a bit more than that.
The simple fact is, parenting these days is effin' hard. Even if you have place to put your kids in 5 days a week. I mean hellishly hard for few years, people go very close to mental breakdown regularly, or sometimes quite deep into it - seeing it a bit around us.
The bar to call yourself a good parent ain't about kids simply surviving. We know that ignoring child's cries whole night, every night messes them up badly for later life. Day naps effectively ruin your weekends. Diapers, fights for toys, lack of sleep which alone will fuck up most people badly but here we talk about all of this and much more, for years, while work doesn't wait. No help there.
The fact is, most folks simply have enough after 2 kids, we sure as hell do. There is very little additional 'parenting satisfaction' after 2 kids, yet costs and stress mounts. Also seeing quite a bit of fertility issues after first child around us, but that's not what people like to talk about.
I think you are onto something, although we've got three :). Raising well-balanced kids, who then become well-balanced adults isn't for nothing of course, but it's way harder to measure than the raw count of babies.
Oof, each one of those sounds like it might cost more than 10 dollars, much less all together.
Guess I’m going to vote for going with the dystopian choices or the more palatable one of sticking our heads in the sand and not deal with the problem until it’s a catastrophe
I suspect that the decline in birth rates in developed nations have to do with raised expectations. The amount of resources and time that parents are expected to devote to each child are quite high.
While the GOP now literally has candidates in its primaries that explicitly position themselves in favor of "maybe some people should have access to abortion sometimes and we shouldn't put people in prison for it", prior to the catastrophic failure of its so-called culture war, the GOP actually had very vocal factions explicitly framing contraceptives as abortion - starting with the "morning after" pill, which literally prevents impregnation rather than inducing abortion in any sense of the word, but up to and including the regular "pill", which simply prevents ovulation at all.
Sure this is still not at the level of banning all forms of contraception, but it's not a long shot and given the historically evident incremental nature of this combined with the focus on "abstinence only" sex ed (i.e. no sex outside marriage, i.e. no need for easy access to condoms or any other OTC contraceptives) I don't think this can be dismissed as a "slippery slope" fallacy either.
You are spreading misinformation about basic scientific facts. You should do some more study.
The Pill prevents birth via two major methods. One way is preventing ovulation, yes. The other main way is by preventing the fertilized egg from successfully implanting. That is also how the morning-after pill works.
A fertilized egg has its own unique DNA, and begins development and dividing immediately. By the time it implants, it is made up of 200-300 cells.
You're conflating the two things I said. The pill interferes with the menstrual cycle to prevent ovulation and, usually, menstruation. The morning-after pill acts similarly in that it interrupts ovulation but additionally prevents any blastocysts from implanting, yes. That's why I'm saying it's usually the rhetorical gateway when trying to attack contraceptives before doing so is rhetorically viable.
A blastocyst has 200-300 cells, yes. But if you hadn't stopped reading the Wikipedia article (or high school biology textbook) you'd have noticed that it also says that a blastocyst begins to form about five days after fertilization and implants two days later. Also even without chemical intervention only 30% of fertilized eggs survive to develop into blastocysts and successfully implant -- with implantation failure being the most likely outcome even if the fertilized egg develops to that stage. A lot of the lead-up treatments in IVF processes only exist to ensure that a blastocyst can develop and sucessfully implant itself.
Note that the literal "morning-after" pill (effective within 72 hours after intercourse) available over-the-counter in most countries including the US often only contains a progestin, i.e. it's just a higher dose equivalent of the regular pill. What you are talking about are pills containing an antiprogestin, which indeed can also act as an abortifacient, even though I've never heard any medical professional refer to a failure to implant as an "abortion".
That you're conflating all three of these pills (the Pill, the OTC morning-after pill and the one containing an abortifacient) is a good demonstration of the "incremental contraceptive ban" strategy I described.
A blastocyst that is intentionally prevented from developing further by making the uterine environment inhospitable is precisely the same thing both in intent and outcome as what happens with a medication abortion (RU-486):
The pill works at times by thinning the uterine lining, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg.
You can talk about what changes have or haven’t taken place in the body of the mother, but these are the same thing, just accomplished by two different means. We have other means as well.
You're focusing too hard on conflating the actions with the outcomes. A woman using preventative medicine to decrease the chance of a pregnancy is by definition not an abortion.
You're argumentation would also imply that if a man has a nightly emission he is performing abortion because a child could have been created, then listing the biological comparisons between a nightly emission and abortion claiming similarities make them the identical.
In this case no one is pregnant yet, so it is not an abortion by definition. It so deliciously ironic that you accuse them of spreading misinformation.
We could argue about the meaning of the word "pregnant," but let's be plain. contrary to the original comment, fertilization does occur still at times, and then biology tells us that a new life with its own DNA has entered the picture. (This is why nightly emissions have nothing to do with this, bringing in your other comment.)
That life is intentionally terminated by birth control and the morning-after pill in almost the same exact method as RU-486, which we know as the "abortion drug." Both cause the thinning of the lining of the uterus, preventing attachment or causing the loss of attachment to occur, respectively.
Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion.
In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.
>>We could argue about the meaning of the word "pregnant," but let's be plain. contrary to the original comment, fertilization does occur still at times, and then biology tells us that a new life with its own DNA has entered the picture. (This is why nightly emissions have nothing to do with this, bringing in your other comment.)
That life is intentionally terminated by birth control and the morning-after pill in almost the same exact method as RU-486, which we know as the "abortion drug." Both cause the thinning of the lining of the uterus, preventing attachment or causing the loss of attachment to occur, respectively.
I wish your comment included the importance of sperm and eggs individually to the process of creating life. Any argument you make about life creation should be made hollistically, and drawing the line at the pregnancy because that is near the time medication is administered is a mistake, particularly since that is likely temporary and we will see many other solutions in the future. I'm not sure what you are trying to say by comparing the morning after pill to RU-486 other than you view them the same. That's like saying calling out of work sick the night before and calling out 5 minutes before your shift are the same thing because you used a phone and the result was you didn't go to work, so I'm not sure if that's really what you're implying.
>>Most people who work in the field of abortion know this, and that is precisely why they bring up the loss of birth control as one of the (either intended or unintended) consequences of outlawing abortion.
>In other words, both pro-choice and pro-life people know this is true, and acting like pro-life people are ignoramuses for believing this reveals a real lack of understanding of the science, not to mention the politics, and the moral questions involved.
I don't think most pro-choice or pro-life people know much at all about the subject and are opinionated anyway. As with most contentious political topics.
It would be a mistake to assume that all pro-life people are ignoramuses or lack understanding of science. This bias comes from the media showing pro-lifers purposefully rejecting science historically. The media has also shown many years of pro-choice pretention and that is why none of this reveals a lack of understanding of science as much as it reveals our laziness towards learning truths and our reliance on others to provide talking points that confirm our naive suspicions; especially if they allow you to uninvolve yourself directly with the problem, and that's on both sides without a doubt.
The United States is literally in the middle of doing exactly that right now. And I don't think too many reasonably impartial observers would put the US in the top few dozen most deranged countries, for all its many serious flaws and faults.
Between 1961 and 1974 in USA birth rate per woman dropped from 3.6 to 1.8.
The early 1960s witnessed the approval and widespread availability of effective oral contraceptives (birth control pills). This revolutionary advancement in contraception allowed women greater control over their reproductive choices and family planning.
The 1960s marked a period of cultural and social change, characterized by the rise of the women's liberation movement and changing attitudes toward women's roles and family dynamics. Many women began to prioritize education, careers, and personal pursuits over traditional roles as homemakers and mothers.
As educational opportunities expanded for women, more of them pursued higher education and entered the workforce. This often delayed the age at which women married and had children, which in turn contributed to smaller family sizes.
Women can only "completely control when and if they have kids" if they have no criteria about the father or have the money to pay for artificial treatments. I know several women who couldn't meet anyone to have kids with.
Sperm counts, morphology, motility, etc. all affect male fertility, as do testosterone levels, because testosterone affects sperm counts, etc. I suppose the question is whether the drop we're seeing in male fertility is enough to explain some of the demographic decline. Perhaps some, but the dominant effect is going to be the widespread use of contraception and the rise of hedonistic, (rationalized) antinatalist attitudes.
However, construing childbearing in the manner you have is not only an incredibly cynical take, but an incredibly preposterous one that is insulting to women and motherhood. It is shot through with the hermeneutic of suspicion. Contraception, and population control, are the norm. They have been promoted in film, media, and schools for a very long time and from a very young age, shaping our sensibilities (notice how many Westerners today respond to big families; instead of joy, it is often disgust or horror). The contraceptive paradigm recast sex in hedonistic terms, which has not only impacted fertility rates dramatically, but deranged human relationships, especially those between the sexes. Sexual exploitation is facilitated, not ameliorated, as sexual predation is now unburdened by the inconvenience of pregnancy (the fundamental reason sex exists in the first place). Well, not entirely, as contraception isn't perfect, hence the rise of abortion as more "unwanted" pregnancies now occur as a proportion of all pregnancies. Sexual confusion is rampant as the paradigm has downstream logical effects, alienating us from a proper understanding of who we are as male and female. And in the end, we're not even having sex. Gen Z, for example, doesn't even sleep around much compared to millennials, Gen X, or boomers. They're stuck fapping to porn in their parents' basements.
We embraced a culture of death. We've are depraved, dehumanized psychopaths.
The deadly contraceptive paradigm, more than contraception itself, that's saturated our culture and our minds, is what's responsible for most demographic decline. Contraception is but an instrument by which it is realized.
This is a completely deranged and disgusting partisan rant, and paints a much rosier picture of what reproduction throughout most of history was like. If you think sexual exploitation is only enabled by contraception, you have completely drank the Kool aid. It is also laughable to claim this is actually the take that doesn't patronize women. I can assure you plenty of people have slept around throughout history, it's just that the men would abandon their children. Contraception has saved women from the diseases and consequences of the predatory men in their life
The weird stuff about sexual confusion is also unwarranted. You might think this is a measured take, but it's Q-ANON level nutso.
Yeah this person is not living in reality. I don't believe any modern argument framed around generations are poignant, accurate, or worth discussing seriously. People just use this pop-topic to signal, its so boring. These conversations are brimming with generalizations and bias.
I'm unsure as to what extent I agree or disagree with your viewpoint, but I appreciate reading an alternative perspective to the more mainstream ones expressed in this thread.
These are the type of thought-provoking comments that I visit HN for. Just wanted to give you some positive feedback amidst all the knee-jerk negative reactions.
This is preposterous. If people want to have children, they are free not to use contraception. To suggest that demographic decline is a bad thing while also suggesting that it is due to people voluntarily not having children would be to suggest that people should be forced against their will to have children, which is horrifying.
>notice how many Westerners today respond to big families; instead of joy, it is often disgust or horror
I don't want to live in a world where everyone is forced to be excited that you wanted spread your seed 10 times. Bringing more mouths into the world is not automatically incredible, magical, or special.
A lot of people showcase cynicism towards family life because family is a very personal thing, no one should be expected to jump for joy except hopefully the family, friends, or small community.
There is enough research to show that testosterone is still much higher in modern societies than in tribal communities. Likely linked to the abundance of calories in modern societies.
There's also a very wide range for "healthy" testosterone levels. Turns out endocrinology is more complicated than looking at one value and saying higher is gooder. Fertility is not directly linked to testosterone levels or even meaningfully so: when my wife and I were trying for a kid, my doctor actually suggested that despite my T-levels being a bit low he would suggest delaying any treatment for that until after our family planning was complete, my testosterone levels weren't affecting my fertility (tho other complications can arise) but increasing them actually would have had a chance of impacting it negatively.
Yeah we don't need more people. Arguably the amount of people we have now is leading to global ecological damage, even collapse.
"complex systems" -- whatever those are; global trade was a thing long before industrialization -- will survive slow declines. Japan is still a modern country even with a demographic decline.
Oh no. Maybe we should finally do something about our system being set up to expect an ever increasing supply of new workers then? Even without declining birth rates that doesn't sound very sustainable given the finite resources of the planet?
For a start, we'd need to find a way to run industry without expecting an ever increasing growth of profits (i.e. surplus value) and structure society in a way so we don't let individuals hoard resources at the expense of everyone else. If we didn't try to squeeze water from stones, maybe that would also allow industry to sacrifice some cost efficiency (i.e. ability to generate surplus value) in order to use safer materials and cleaner processes that don't poison us and improve our survivability and fertility? Heck, we might even create circumstances that make it easier for people to raise a family and have more support if they want to have children while at the prime age for both working and reproducing rather than having companies literally pay for their high value employees to freeze their eggs and sperm to delay having kids until they're less economically useful.
Oh sorry, I just did an anti-capitalism again. Nevermind all that, line must go up. Let's find ways to make more kids. Maybe Elon Musk has the answer after all and we just need to have billionaires sire more children with their female employees until the net population growth rate looks better.
No, of course we need to act and continue to act. We need to reduce the amount of Co2 emitted to prevent aggravating the crises and then we need to turn it back.
The climate crises is one which will take more than one generation to fix. But the fight is worthwhile and not impossible to win.
I’m really curious about the incidence of PFAS in adolescence and the relationship with lower testosterone levels. A relationship with testicular cancer seems to point to some relationship with PFAS and the reproductive system.
I do not believe it is the first occurrence of such a link that I've seen a study shared on HN about. PFAS seem to be regarded as a boogeyman but in actuality may be a lot worse than anyone understands as of yet.
Sperm count has been declining for decades, and evidence suggests that the rate of decline is accelerating. Men today have 50% lower sperm count compared to 1970. In a way it'd be better if this link was true, because at least then we'd be on the right track to reversing the damage.
We’ll I mean maybe but we’ve still contaminated huge swaths of habitable land with these chemicals. So I guess you’re putting a positive spin on it but it’s still a catastrophic fuck up.
>Men today have 50% lower sperm count compared to 1970.
Sperm count/testosterone level is strongly correlated with body weight; if you account for how much fatter people are nowadays the reduction is much less (e.g. compare a healthy weight person from 1970 to now). Similarly a lot of the reduction in fertility is explained by people nowadays being fatter.
AFAIK, body can detect poison or infection in the blood and then reduce reproduction rate, to reduce spread of infection or birth defect rate due to intoxication.
Most of these were only revealed 20-50 years after the fact, no? I think we don't know yet in how many ways we're being poisone, because the policy seems to be use random chemicals now, ask questions later.
I’m pretty sure they were all known to be extremely toxic the whole time they were used but the population didn’t care that much about being slowly poisoned.
Well, those still poison everyone to this day, we've just gentrified it so most people in the Global North are less affected. Forever chemicals and microplastics on the other hand seem to affect everyone globally because you can't really filter them out once they're in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe.
Maybe those billionaires obsessing about constructing their survival shelters weren't preparing for social collapse after all but just trying to create a habitat for themselves that isolates them from all of this?
I agree. But we also need to stop introducing new ways so this doesn’t become a treadmill of needless suffering. We need to review and test the chemicals we allow onto the market far more rigorously.
Wow, the amount of willful ignorance in some comments here is astonishing. It's so strange to see people argue for the continuance of something harmful to mankind as a whole. It really feels like seeing an argument on behalf of leaded water. What's the next leap? Trying to justify 3M/DuPont/Chemours/Corteva not paying for destroying the environment, even though they're profiting tens of billions a year from doing this? Let's try to stay grounded in factual reality; lawsuits don't happen randomly, and a $1,185,000,000 in damages should be taken VERY seriously!
They knew it was toxic for 73 BLEEDING YEARS[0], yet none of the studies come out publicly. They do it for profit, never any other reason[1]. Stock prices won't drop if people think it's safe[2]. They took a page right out of the big tobacco playbook there. It's as ingeniously profitable as it is evil.
I use reverse osmosis well water, all stainless steel cooking utensils, buy my meat from a farm and only buy fresh veggies. I only drink out of glass and use glass containers for storage. That’s about as much as I can handle and I think that covers all major sources.
Doesn’t your food is a potential major source if the farms you go does not use reverse osmosis for their animals/plants ?
I see you do as much as you can do but I don’t think anyone is preserved because those chemicals are spreads. Wouldn’t be surprise if animals natality degrades too.
What kind of flows do you get from it? I get the impression they convert water very slowly so it's not like an instant open tap. For example could you connect to a dish washer or is it only a reservoir for drinking water.
What is the water waste like, as in how many liters are you spending in the membrane cleansing versus actual drinking water?
What kind of material is used for the tubing and containers it uses? I am a little be sceptical of using flexible tubing (usually flexible because of plasticizers) to then feed and accomulate water into a reservoir.
There is a reservoir so it is instant on. The flow is reasonable, you can fill a glass of water in 5-7 seconds. I have to replace the membranes every 6 months. Waste water disposal is hidden so I’m not sure how much gets discarded. Flexible tubing seems to be used.
Farms that thought they were organic were getting free wastewater sludge -- recommended by the EPA -- and applying it to the land as fertilizer. The tiny fraction of land that they test gets reclassified as permanently unusable for agriculture now. But it was an extremely common practice and they barely test any farms. So do the math. It's everywhere. Particularly in the meat and veggies.
I feel like burning some karma, so here's an unpopular opinion: the recent rise of gender dysphoria can be explained by the increasing endocrine disruptor load of the younger generations.
Nah, trans people have been around a lot longer than this.
It's more like left-handedness (or good old homosexuality), in that the rate of incidence is not increasing but rather that social repression has backed off slightly and people feel a bit more confident being out.
People can be a bit more open about their gender when they're less afraid of being killed for it.
I agree with you, but as far as I know there is a large gender imbalance (Female to Male is much more common than Male to Female - almost twice as common). How would you explain that?
Society is largely still more accepting of Female to Male transition, than Male to Female. Plus the gendered power balance might leave more people adverse to making the shift in public.
I would also 'guess' that those who transition and dress moving from female to male, can 'pass' more easily in society. Even if someone still has female features, if they dress like a guy, no one cares.
> It's more like left-handedness (or good old homosexuality), in that the rate of incidence is not increasing but rather that social repression has backed off slightly and people feel a bit more confident being out.
I hear this exact same argument for autism, adhd, gender disphoria, cancer, heart disease...
I also hear about how hard it is to come out, and how you should believe what someone tells you because no one would sign up for this lifestyle without good merit. And I also hear about the increase of hate crimes, and the fact that it is the topic de jour of modern American politics.
Seems like we are consistently eating our cake and having it too, here.
> in that the rate of incidence is not increasing but rather that social repression has backed off slightly and people feel a bit more confident being out.
I think the problem is that popular culture is increasingly moving towards hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine stereotypes. So people who don't fit the mould end up feeling that they aren't a "real" man/woman.
We know we are adding a lot of environmental estrogens. Establishing a causal relationship between that fact and human behavior is hard, and may or may not exist.
Also I’m sure it would only explain part of the observed increase, since there are social factors at play.
There's a number of flaws with the "thesis" (to put it charitably):
- Not every trans person experiences gender dysphoria
- Trans people have existed historically and widespread non-binary gender identities have been observed in indigenous societies prior to modern pollution
- There are men who take estrogen for health benefits and they generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- Men with low testosterone levels generally don't report gender dysphoria or desire to transition
- There's no literature whatsoever suggesting any link between hormone levels or other endocrinologic factors and gender dysphoria or the desire to transition
- Being openly trans was practically illegal and subject to mockery, harrassment and violence until fairly recently, even more so than being an openly gay man was
- Due to the "underground" nature of trans identities, many elder trans people lacked the language or concepts to express their identity, instead landing on more socially acceptable identities (e.g. gay men or lesbians) or adopted labels like "transvestite" whereas young people are more likely to embrace identities under the queer, trans and non-binary umbrella
- While society and the law has become a lot more accepting of queer and trans identities, access to mental health and medical care like hormone treatments and surgery is often gatekept to "protect" people seeking it (with the implication being that they are likely wrong about thinking they need it) and a diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" is usually one of the most reliable ways to gain access to these even when it doesn't accurately describe the person's experience ("autogynophilia" is the mirror version of this where "gender euphoria" specifically for trans women when allowed to express themselves as women is medicalized and framed as a sexual fetish to delegtimize it)
For the record, I'm not trans but I know and have spoken to trans people in my personal life and have read a lot about it from "both sides".
Your arguments would be more effective if you provided respected sources for each. As a passerby, some don't pass my smell test, but I'm always willing to learn.
Providing good sources requires substantial effort, and doing so seems to have limited, if any, persuasive power. This isn't Wikipedia. If you're genuinely willing to learn you can look things up for yourself.
(note that people demanding sources like this are often selective about what they demand them for...)
Why should I have to do this if what OP said was also provided without context? What is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The null hypothesis is that no, there is no link between these two phenomena. What I'm providing are just alternative explanations, some of which should literally be common knowledge (spend 2 seconds looking into how Pride parades started and you have all the resources you need).
If you're more inclined to believe technobabble than sociological explanations when you don't understand the facts behind either, that's a bias you might want to investigate further.
EDIT: FWIW most of the medical claims I made are the null hypothesis: I can't demonstrate that there is no literature suggesting a link between "natural" hormone levels and gender dysphoria but the claim could be dismissed by showing literature that demonstrates it.
The closest you can find is the hogwash pseudoscience of "rapid onset gender dysphoria" but that's arguing for a social contagion and it's citing the subjective experiences of parents of trans people and thus defines "onset" as "when the parent found out" (and "rapid" because this is usually close to an open social or even medical transition). To make this even more meaningless, it gathered those reports from a forum specifically for parents who dislike that their kid identifies as trans, i.e. who likely gave the kid no reason to come out to them while they could avoid doing so and thus would likely have been the last person to find out rather than being trusted with this information early on. Again, I don't need to cite sources for this. You can literally look up the "study" and you don't need a degree in sociology to understand the obvious bias and shoddy controls that went into it.
If you don't believe that trans people existed before the 1980s, I suggest you look into the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose research on gender and sexuality fell victim to one of the first book burnings of the Nazis.
If you don't believe there are indigeneous communities with non-binary gender roles, you can literally google that.
If you don't believe people who would have chosen to identify as "trans" had they been born later used and continue to use other terms to describe themselves, there are literally people doing this and saying so, publicly and openly.
By insisting that I give you a thoroughly sourced thesis paper in response to an equally unsourced claim, you're shifting the burden of proof. And you're doing so without pointing out which specific claim you want sourced, what kind of source you'd find acceptable and why you can't do this yourself.
You'd think "correlation does not equal causation" was widely understood enough that I just need to say "piracy prevented global warming" and people would know what I mean but let me reiterate: you can't just say "X happened and Y also happened around the same time, so X likely caused Y" unless you can demonstrate not only that X and Y happened around the same time but also that X directly contributes to Y.
Of course you don't have to. As a reader, the chain went -
OP1 - Here is my unpopular opinion.
OP2 - May or may not be right.
OP3 - Here is a big list of reasons why you're wrong.
The first two didn't provide any sources either, admittedly, but they didn't really make any statements of fact.
I didn't ask to pick on you or because I have some political motive(honestly, I have no idea or opinion on whether OP1 was right), only because it was the first post presented as definitive in the chain.
As OP2, my problem with OP3 is that none of that evidence really refutes OP1, which is why I said that the connection is hard to prove, or disprove. There could still be an environmental cause for some of the increase. But because gender is socially constructed, the effects of social change obviously can’t be discounted.
Honestly I think we should take OP1’s thesis seriously, but not as proven. And as usual cut down on pollutants for the wildlife it does affect.
This is most of the reason why it's become so controversial in recent years, because law and policy are being implemented based on this, rather than the previous, medicalized understanding.
The distinction being dysphoria includes distress, while incongruence does not? This seems like an arguable difference in scope of whether "trans" includes people who aren't distressed about gender incongruence.
The current consensus amongst medical professionals is that gender dysphoria is not requisite for being trans. This was not the case in the fairly recent past.
There is also "gender euphoria" which may be experienced by people who do not/did not experience dysphoria.
I'm not sure whether from a clinical standpoint distress about incongruance is the same as dysphoria.
There are a lot of people who would have failed to meet previous diagnostic criteria but nonetheless are happy to have received gender affirming medical care. I think the best we can do is provide people with bodily autonomy on an informed consent basis.
Layman here. They're just doing this to distance trans from gender dysphoria, making it a "legitimate" thing as opposed to a "condition" like gender dysphoria, because the latter implies treatment.
Side note. Why does Android keep auto-correcting dysphoria as dysphagia. Wtf is dysphagia anyways?
Did you reply to the wrong comment by mistake? None of the accounts in this thread (except one that got flagged to death) are new, and my account is the oldest one in this reply chain.
Why are there more female to male (than male to female) transitions then? Surely these hormones (if they have the affect you describe) would be reducing the number of born women who become men?
Why are you so sure as to use the word “surely”? That might be an obvious conclusion but obvious does not mean it’s correct in biochemistry. Just ask the doctors who spent the last two decades removing the amyloid plaques that obviously cause Alzheimer’s.
The current gender zeitgeist is mostly confined to the western cultural sphere. If it were a biochemical phenomenon you would expect to see it happening everywhere.
Personally I think that the way the media talks about the male half of the population is responsible. Nobody ever says anything good about men, the male brand has become as toxic as Enron, and some people don’t want to be associated with it anymore.
Gender dysphoria is not about lacking a hormone. People born a man with 100 percent of the testosterone they 'should' have, can still have a total need to transition to Female. Giving them more testosterone won't help.
> As you can see, average testosterone in the USA was something like 625 ng/dl in the 70’s, until the early 80’s. This is reasonably high testosterone. But since then it has been falling steadily.
> For the average American man in the period of 2013 – 2016, testosterone was 420 ng/dl. (source)
The reason trans people suffer with their natal puberty and hormones is not because they aren't receiving enough hormone, but because they're receiving the wrong hormones which disrupt the brain and/or cause undesired sexual characteristics (including bodily proportions and bone/fat distribution) which cause existential mental distress. Giving extra testosterone to men with low testosterone may help, but giving extra testosterone to trans women forced through a male puberty is psychological and physical abuse.
But giving hormones to children (who may not recognise the future repercussions of their childhood decisions) to prevent puberty etc is not psychological or physical abuse? How is that not active, literal abuse?
The suggestion I'm making is therapeutic - it is supportive of the biology of the person who is suffering with a unbalanced hormones. At the end of the treatment I propose, it remains a possibility that the person can live a normal life, being able to reproduce etc - as opposed to becoming sterilised.
You're wrong. Trans people don't have unbalanced hormones, they have normal amounts of the wrong hormones, both as teens and adults. Puberty causes irreversible physical effects with lifelong psychological harms, and forcing more of the wrong hormones is even more harmful. And in the vast majority of cases, people during and after puberty who are harmed by natal hormones, continue to be harmed by them throughout their adulthood, and regret going through natal puberty (not hormone replacement therapy). You don't know better than trans people what their needs are, and you demonstrably don't even know what trans people are (given that you think they need extra hormones to be fertile), so stop trying to convince people to poison them by overdosing them on hormones which will cause bodily changes (skeletal changes, voice dysphoria, hair loss) that traumatize them for the rest of their life.
As for whether preserving fertility (banking sperm or eggs) before starting hormones (as teens or adults) is a worthwhile tradeoff on an individual level, that's a choice for an individual to make. In no circumstances is it not abuse to force more of natal hormones into a trans person already harmed by them.
The recovery from that particular procedure doesn't seem to be significantly worse than getting a vasectomy, though the infertility is rather more permanent.
If it's any consolation I know someone who went through that and now wants them back. Ergo, there are problems if you go through that too. Perhaps it's too easy to do it...
Mine is not a philosophy. I'm closely related to someone who has to deal with the fall out of such procedures. The standards being met for surgery are fairly low and the psych evaluations are not always conclusive.
Two years ago I became really interested in optimizing testosterone levels naturally and one of the things that kept coming up in research was the impact of EDCs (Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals) on fertility, cancer, hormone health and testosterone and just how prevalent they are in all our products (clothes use PFAS as water repellent / stain resistance, soaps and creams use parabens as preservatives, anything that has a scent typically uses pthalates for the smell to last longer, etc) .
My girlfriend, who has a background in environmental science and skincare, also got interested in this and ended up starting a personal care brand focused on being 100% free of Endocrine Disruptors / forever chemicals: https://olivercare.co/.
I truly believe as more studies continue to come out strengthening the connection between these chemicals and the long term health and fertility risks, consumers and brands are going to shift to safer alternatives. In fact, there's a chance that "forever chemical" lawsuits end up being bigger than the famous Big Tobacco settlement: https://time.com/6292482/legal-liability-pfas-chemicals-laws... .
Coincidentally: my father, who's been in the hair business for a few decades, has been working hard in this direction for the past few years. He's had a reasonably-natural haircare line since the 90s, but he's put a lot of work into changing suppliers and reformulating to push further in that direction since being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder (and wondering what role touching hair product several hours a day 6 days a week for decades may have played).
I've been a crunchy granola conspiracy nerd for over 20 years now, eating organic foods and avoiding plastic anything, including clothing polymers and food containers for a long while, having taken a lot of heat for being a tin-foil hat wearing nutjob over the years. My sperm is on fire though - my wife and I have to be extremely careful to avoid pregnancy, having multiple kids and making a couple other unplanned mistakes already. I have many friends around me that have difficulty conceiving, and perhaps not coincidentally some of them are ones who criticized me for my "paranoid beliefs".
My wife and I also found it terribly easy to conceive, to the point that after having three (all planned) kids altogether too easily, I got a vasectomy at age 30 so it would stop there.
And I don't do anything to unduly avoid modernity and her sins, so here's an anecdote to run counter to yours.
This study does not merit wide attention.