Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of social commentary on this thread.

Unanswered however is, "How will this affect relationships between men and women"?

The "MGTOW" crowd laud this development, arguing that once control of fertility is in the hands of men rather than women (a woman can always "forget" to take the pill)... something good, as they define it, will happen. (IANAMGTOW - I am not a MGTOW)

In terms of total fertility rate, what does this mean for a country/nation when one population group greatly restricts having kids in terms of moral suasion, societal acceptability, etc. while offering money to those who do have kids? e.g. upper middle class (children discouraged, at least beyond 2 kids) vs. other classes in society (have a bunch of kids).

Living in the USA I have often heard complaints along the lines that we seem to be "discouraging the smart and hard-working people from having kids, while paying stupid people to have them".

View on HN

How is any of that different from the contraceptives that already exist?

Further, your notion of "Idiocracy" (believing that the "smart hardworking people" have fewer kids) doesn't match at all with the fact that IQ keeps rising in every generation in the US, and fewer people are poor or jobless than they were in the 50s or before.

I would point out that you are relying on government statistics for your "poor or jobless" point - and many have pointed out sources of bias that call those stats into question; and also, you are assuming that the Flynn effect will be ongoing rather than just reflecting a topping-up due to better nutrition and more widespread education.

Others have calculated that USA/UK have lost as much as 14 IQ points since Victorian times. see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2730791/Are-S... .

Do you have a more authoritative cite for this than a tabloid article?

In less time than it took you to type this comment, I clicked on the embedded link in the article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329830-400-brain-dr...

The Richard Lynn they quote, has been published in Nature, amongst many other other publications: http://www.rlynn.co.uk/

The Prof. Woodley they quote, is also a real person: http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/cgi-bin/homepage.cgi?email=michael...

As is Jan te Nijenhuis: http://www.uva.nl/en/about-the-uva/organisation/staff-member...

Sorry, but I don't think your comment added anything to the discussion.

You quoted "USA/UK have lost as much as 14 IQ points since Victorian times" and cited a tabloid article.

Presumably the reason that the parent commenter thought it appropriate to to mention that it was a tabloid article was because it used the standard tabloid technique of putting a sensational notion in a headline that is almost entirely unsubstantiated in the text.

You offer as support several links, mostly just proving that people exist. But your first link, with actual information, completely refutes your statement. [1] It refers to the effect that IQ has risen by 3-10 points per decade for several decades, and in the past few years it "may" have leveled off, or dropped by 1.5 points.

The actual author of the study has said that leveling off is to be expected, and any "decline" is quite likely noise due to chance.

But regardless of whether the 1.5 point decline in the past couple years is true, the entire article the opposite of the claim that we have lost "14 IQ points since Victorian times," since you cannot reconcile that with the Flynn effect actually being discussed in the article.

Combing down through the tabloid article, almost every other study refers to a decline of "about 1 point." Your headline claim is one single interesting (though bizarre) study that uses reaction time to try to estimate IQ, and tries to compare it to reaction times in studies from the Victorian era. [2] As you can imagine, published responses to this article from other scientists has been that of skepticism, to put it mildly. [3]

1. http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2014-September/015965.html

2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...

3. http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/nettlebeck201...

I covered this in my original statement with the comment about "topping up" the Flynn effect.

The rest of your comment doesn't apply to my point, seeing as I was pointing out that it was easy to find the actual people at the actual uni's quoted, via simple Google searches, and that their published papers did in fact make the various claims.

Thus the original response of "this is from a tabloid" added no value.

I think the only value it sought to add was to point out that the source cited was, in fact, a tabloid. I don't mean that in the sense of "it's a trashy, tabloid-like article". It may be that, or it may not be. But what I can say for sure is that it appeared under the masthead of The Daily Mail, which is, literally and uncontroversially, a tabloid.

The monotonic IQ increase can be attributed to improved nutrition and schooling. However, most evidence suggests that intelligence is genetically heritable to a large degree. Improved nutrition only goes so far; a really healthy pig still won't have human-level intelligence. At some point, we would expect selective pressure towards being less intelligent to catch up with us. Or, looking at it another way, we might be a lot smarter today if we had both the nutritional and educational advances of the last few centuries and a birth rate that wasn't higher in lower-intelligence populations.

Being poor or jobless has vastly more to do with (lack of) technology and access to resources than it does with your position on the intelligence distribution.

> something good, as they define it, will happen

It's not a conspiracy theory to point out that there are a lot of men out there who are living lives of poverty due to child support payments due to supporting a child they had absolutely no voice in deciding to carry to term. This at least offers them some protection.

Condoms exist and men who don't want children already use them. So, I don't think it is going to change all that much.

You've never heard of people relying on withdrawal? It was still pretty popular when I was in college three years ago, usually when the woman got nasty side effects from hormonal BC.

That tends to end up in big families. It is the least dependable protection.

It's slightly worse than condoms at around 96% per year vs 98% per year.

Hormonal BC is 99.9% in comparison but is not in the man's control :(

If they are used, and if they don't break, etc.

Sadly, among wealthy and famous men, there are even cases where the woman uses the contents of the used condom to impregnate herself - and then successfully sues for child support.

Like female BC, this is something that is completely invisible and does not rely on an external or mechanical method of prevention.

That sound more like urban legend, I would be surprised if pregnancy like that would even be possible. Anyway, you should use condom during random sex encounters due to risk std anyway. Nothing wrong with combining them with something else, absolutely do it. But this new contraceptive wont prevent std whether hiv or syphilis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com