> “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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
"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...
>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.
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.
Apple employees have the freedom to create without coercion. You would need to lobby to change law, not preach to the choir here.
That’s what Spotify and Musk are doing; trying to manipulate public perception to influence politicians.
The problem they have is Apple is the crown jewel of US tech corps. Spotify is not and politicians are well aware Musk is a poser with money. Epic, Spotify, like Jobs once said, sell features not products.
Gabe Newell has called generative content “an extinction level event” for traditional media producers and distributors. Epic and Spotify are an AI breakthrough away from irrelevance. Why listen to them except as anything but an appeal to rapidly outdated economic traditions?
They can join the protest rotary phone makers, and horse and buggy businesses are pulling together.
This isn’t true. Science is ultimately the scientific method — make a hypothesis, test a change, observe the results, repeat. It’s an algorithm for learning and broadly gaining information about reality. It can equally be applied to things having to do with humans and things not having to do with humans.
Not gp, but there's a significant kink when this applies to humans; namely, that humans have the ability to reflect on publicly known outcomes, and change their behavior en-masse in light of information so gained.
I put this earler in the phrase "reflection completeness": https://sdrinf.com/reflection-completeness ie there are things which stops working when people know about it.
In particular with A/B testing, this means that the initial A/B test is intermingled from at least 3 effects: specifically it measures how the naive population's behavior changes as a function of new functionality being made available. This is heavily, heavily time-dependent; specifically there's a "novelty effect" (early data collection will not be representative to long-term usage patterns); and there's "reflection effect" (once the outcome of the test is widely known, people can change their behavior based on that). Controlling for the first is difficult, but possible; controlling for the second, beyond just "keeping everything secret", is significantly more so, as the timelines for that might be years in length.
I strongly suspect GP was pointing at this timeline factor, and specifically that market engineering, as currently, generally, widely practiced, is grounded on the immediately available signal of "does it increases sales in 2 weeks of A/B test running". Which, given novelty effects, is heavily biased towards "yes"; and these people aren't incentivized (nor have the time/energy) to measure _very_ long-term effects beyond novelty, and reflection period.
I agree that it can be a difficult thing to analyze. There's also the Hawthorne Effect at play here too. But those are just confounding variables, they do not negate the fact that A/B tests are still "real science".
An A/B test just refers to observing how a dependent variable changes when an independent variable is in two different states, State A and State B.
Most companies (or at least the ones doing things properly) will also have a long running retro test to see if impact persists (new test group = don't use the new changes).
I feel like it's especially bad for any UI changes that have relation to long-term productivity; measuring how given change affect existing users and whether the performance will go back to previous level or get below it after few weeks or month.
Agreed. My point is I am not going to see a marketer as aiming for the same goal “as an experimental physicist.”
To borrow the Lindy effect; whether someone likes the jacket in color A or B is of such short lived value it’s a huge waste of the resources that went into the pipeline needed to come to the conclusion.
Here’s an A/B test; rethink logistics to increase customization of outputs or continue to create design jobs who define what’s trendy and acceptable?
I think we're are getting caught up on what's being tested.
In the context of what we're talking about, you can A/B test more than marketing, you're can test variables like UI/UX.
Yes clothes fall in and out of fashion, but changing the placement, color, size of the "add to cart" button isn't something that's going to be changing frequently.
Another example might be adding a "trending" tab the top navigation of a page or whether the "what's trending" vs "what you like" provide more engagement as the default page.
Youtube recently tested randomly lowering people's video resolution to see who changed it back to gauge the importance of the resolution to their customers.
> Youtube recently tested randomly lowering people's video resolution to see who changed it back to gauge the importance of the resolution to their customers.
I wish they start gauging how frustrating such tests are, particularly for the test group. I've been cursing at YouTube many times over the past weeks because of this very issue - and now I learn it's not even a bug, but an A/B test.
Half the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth).
Not many of those countries have any interest in 'intentionally sacrificing to slow climate change'. They are mostly being exploited by rapacious 'green' capitalists for rare earth minerals etc as their populations explode..
Eight countries will make up over half the projected total population increase by 2050:
India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Philippines and Egypt.
India is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year (2023), when China’s population is expected to start declining.
(Source: United Nations Population Fund, 2022)
These places are ground zero for environmental concerns imo
Meanwhile, companies require us to come into work, commute hours, burn fossil fuels, etc.
Companies and governments talk out one side of their mouth about being green and carbon neutral, then tell people they need to burn fossil fuels to come to work, by unaffordable electric cars to be around people you don't work with in expensive to live city centers that they don't pay enough to live in, much less have a family of one or two children, and nuclear is bad.
I've stopped listening, because it's pointless, all I see is highway construction to add more lanes rather than making viable public transportation. If they really believed any of it they'd be doing something about it. I do my little bit, but having this insane nihilistic anxiety about it is far worse.
Carbon footprint per capita is a poor metric because it incentivizes nations to increase population and suppress quality of life improvements.
If you want to assign blame sure an American might be 10 time more responsible than a Pakistani, a Chinese may be twice as culpable is a French. That doesn't really solve anything though. The problem isn't the amount of CO2 in the air divided by the number of living humans.
Emissions intensity of production IMO is a better one because it promotes efficient industry without exerting the wrong incentives on population or quality of life.
The problem is total amount of emitted CO2. A large extent of it being emitted by a rather reduced fraction of the total population (rich countries).
Seems rational to exerce change of this reduced fraction. Indian or Pakistani are respecting their share in terms of emissions in order for climate increase to stay under 2 degrees. We are not, so we need to change that.
When you say "we", policy that can affect carbon emissions and even population trends to some degree are usually made on a country level. So it makes sense for highly emitting countries to reduce their emissions, not for them to be able to purchase "share" by encouraging population growth.
Pakistan and India have enormous amounts of heavy industries, Nigeria massive extraction. 'Carbon footprint' per person is somewhat irrelevant in this heavily industrialized context. Globalization has shifted unpleasant, grimmy polluting activities to these types of countries, while people sanctimoniously push mice around in the first world...
They didn’t predict global warming. They measured directly industrial emission accumulation and predicted an impact on human health.
Global warming is a colloquialism. The researchers did the science that gives rise to it.
Luminiferous Aether is just another name for electromagnetic field effects. Which do literally exist but our written logic works out better if we talk around it as an idea not a thing.
You’re just arguing semantics to look smurt. Qualitative ideas like survivorship bias are relative in when they apply.
For anyone who wants to dig further on this, http://ponce.sdsu.edu/global_warming_science.html explains the actual reasoning of the paper that came closest, which was an 1896 paper that laid out all of the actual facts behind global warming, minus the prediction that a rapid increase in usage of fossil fuels actually WOULD cause global warming. The author of that paper did come to the correct conclusion not long after, but I'm not aware of any record of his doing so before the year 1900.
In the defense of 19th century scientists, the best approximate solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations really did predict that mechanical aircraft should not be able to fly, curve balls should not curve in the air, and so on.
It was not until 1904 that Ludwig Prandtl published Über Flüssigkeitsbewegung bei sehr kleiner Reibung (On the Motion of Fluids in Very Little Friction) which first discovered the importance of boundary layers. The breakdown of approximations in those boundary layers allows for all sorts of behaviors that came as a surprise. In time science caught up up with practical engineering advances to finally understand how airplanes can fly, pitchers can throw curve balls, and so on. And even so, those old approximations are still used because they are mostly right!
So they were wrong, but it wasn't gibberish either.
For a similar example of a mostly correct scientific theory producing wrong results, until near the end of the 20th century the linear wave model predicted that rogue waves were impossible. Today we can look back at shipwreck records and laugh at their stupidity. But in fact you can spend a week looking at every wave that passes a point and probably won't find even a single wave that doesn't fit the theory.
Scientific overconfidence in well-tested theories is a systemic error that we are likely to always be prone to. Most of the time it is well justified. But we do nobody a favor by dismissing past examples of this as "gibberish".
So a code monolith I can just dump on a Linux box is in again?
Our figurative ideas, ephemera, seem to be in a loop of taking a simple mental model, branching it into a mess, feeling over extended, circling back to a simpler mental model, branching it into an over extended mess.
Monotheism versus polytheism, and dozens of flavors of a religion rooted in a central umbrella idea.
Nation states allow creating over leveraged branches of economic Ponzi schemes.
And we’re all certain this is net new and never before seen of humans because the labels are all different!
Just nitpicking, but code monolith does say nothing about the way it's deployed. Could be a massively distributed system, fwiw (we did that and were quite happy with it).
Extensive dependency chain of brittle logic that needs tons of planning and preparation to update and manage is not unreasonable description for microservices architecture from an ops perspective.
Sure generated book sales, crowning of thought leaders, and busy work to soak up easy money for anyone paying attention.
> Extensive dependency chain of brittle logic that needs tons of planning and preparation to update and manage is not unreasonable description for microservices architecture from an ops perspective.
I've seen monoliths that fit that description.
Once you've automated the deployment and configuration of load balancers, firewalls, caches, proxies, and have a DB with automatic failover, that is also sharded for performance, spreading the code out across a few machines is not the hard part.
Maybe it’s a bit literal but I see lots of people at computers planning updating just like I did 20 years ago.
From the IT workers context a lot has changed but the end user outputs are still; video game, chat app, email app, todo app, fintech app, dating app, state management DSL.
AI isn’t going to change the outputs so much as minimize the people and code needed to generate them. Because we’ve mined the value prop of desktops and phones to death.
Materials science, additive manufacturing, biology, are outputting actual net new knowledge. Consumer facing IT is whittling a log into a chair leg, grabbing a new log, whittling a chair leg… but faster!
> From the IT workers context a lot has changed but the end user outputs are still; video game, chat app, email app, todo app, fintech app, dating app, state management DSL.
All of those are working at scales 10x-100x what they were 20 years ago.
Back in 2002 people had to worry about how many emails they had on their machine. Searching unlimited emails? Not happening.
Now with SSDs, better search indexes, more memory, more CPU, handling instantly searching gigabytes of emails on my laptop is not even considered to be a "problem", it just is.
I can drop a hundred 10 megabyte GIFs into a Discord thread and my phone will render everything just fine. Go back to 2008 and, well, there isn't any equivalent because no one was crazy enough to build a platform where you could even try doing that.
OKCupid's backend was written in C++ and was probably the pinnacle of what dating site backend design will ever be, so actually you have a point there. :-D
A good todo apps can geofence[1] your position, remind you to get milk when you are at the supermarket! The amount of tech making that possible is insane. IMHO todo apps have a long way to go, it is sad that Android is going backwards in this regard.
> Consumer facing IT is whittling a log into a chair leg, grabbing a new log, whittling a chair leg… but faster!
That is the entire history of computing.
Our faster whittling has allowed other fields to improve themselves many times over.
Yes! We're doing this at my job for our single tenant cloud offering for a data processing and analytics product.
Monorepo, single Go binary, dump on an instance via cloud init, run it as auto scaling group with count of 1. Only dependency is S3 and database service like RDS.
Super simple for us to build, maintain and operate. Still get a reasonable economy of scale in right sizing the instance / db for the customer workload.
Easy to have a customer set the same thing up themselves for self-managed / any IaaS or on prem version.
More portable than any pre-containerized contraption, because all our enterprise clients all know how to manage instances, and only a few have container expertise, and its trivial to wrap it your container of choosing anyway.
> Our figurative ideas, ephemera, seem to be in a loop of taking a simple mental model, branching it into a mess, feeling over extended, circling back to a simpler mental model, branching it into an over extended mess.
It's pretty standard, the pendulum swings to one side and then eventually swings back to the other. If you stay flexible you can just ride it back and forth throughout your career.
> So a code monolith I can just dump on a Linux box is in again?
Aren't you grossly extrapolating a tad? Nothing suggests there's a "code monolith" involved in the story. Just because the topic is single-tenant instances. Also, single-box deployments are completely orthogonal to "code monolith". Finally, just because a company offers a product that does not mean there's a major architectural shift in the industry.
You can still put it on a Linux box this is more like you enter in a support contract with GitLab and they setup the SaaS for you and the cloud infrastructure instead of being intermingled with their other multi tenant systems.
What this is trying to solve for is companies that can’t buy their other offerings which they said are enterprise companies and or heavily regulated .
Timezones and language barriers eat into the profits fast.
What’s with the idea though that 300 million people can just be ignored? Me thinks you’ve let yourself get lost in the economic philosophy and detached from reality.
There is no just shutting down the US economy because economists can’t make fiat currency math work. Such ideas are ludicrous.
Ludicrous? So how come has the US and Europe relocated a large fraction of their manufacturing industry into low-income countries? Are these companies raking in billions in profit ludicrous?
It takes some effort to understand another culture, and I think it's definitely easier in the US since they have so many people coming in there from so many parts of the world; and also because cultural differences can be overcome, and it's profitable over the long-term, given the wage gap lasts long enough. Language barriers doesn't matter if the whole team speaks the same language and the manager is bilingual.
If that was not the case, why would big tech companies have engineering teams in Europe and all over the world?
What’s ludicrous is the idea they can close up shop altogether in the US and 300 million plus will just sit on their hands and do nothing.
Twice as many guns as people over here. The public will make a new economy without them. Real people don’t just vanish because aristocrats find their demands inconvenient.
Let them eat lead will quickly follow any contemporary version of “let them eat cake.”
Physical reality does not bend to our philosophy. Philosophy always bends to reality.
I know people prefer to forget reality because ew it’s dirty, but reality doesn’t bend to ape hallucinations.
Been thinking about this as well. Working on language native libs to react to eBPF telemetry and scale logic forks appropriately to avoid exhausting the host, motivated by disdain for Docker/k8s. I’d rather just import a dep and develop the behavior.
But I don’t have to time to write all that. So I have actually been writing helper scripts to generate object code and function signatures via ast libs.
This is how I originally “learned programming” in the 90s. The industry zeitgeist shifted to “churn out code” and all that wizardry was lost. I have no idea how to prove it but I sometimes think it was intentional to capture worker agency.
It’s been fun reconnecting to it but the ecosystem of helper tooling … well there is none. Tons of blogs with basics about for loops though.
