Hacker News Reader

Comment by GDC7 | Hacker News Reader

Testosterone levels are plummeting as well:

https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...

More generally risktaking is down across the board.

Cigarette smoking, stimulants, party drugs use, alcohol, sexual intercourses are also in a freefall compared to the 80s.

As always people laughed at Japan, first it was Japan's economy, then its social trends, finally its sexual trends...

But make no mistake, that's where we are headed. The future belongs to Africa and partially South America.

Men are made to be dumb, reckless and horny, the moment they become cerebral, emotional and scared that's the signal that society is on the brink of collapse.

We are in uncharted territory, men never behaved like they are now in the whole history of the human specie

View on HN

There's no evidence that japan has lower testosterone than an average country. The only study I could find suggested it had a higher average than the US.

That supports what others have commented, which is that obesity is likely the main culprit, at least in terms of low testosterone. The US has a much worse obesity problem than Japan does.

It's consistent with the hypothesis, but way too general of a correlation to show causality.

I don't see why, there's a physiological basis for it. It's well known that fat cells have higher level of aromatase which converts testosterone to estradiol.

As others have said: sedentary lives in front of screens, declining nutrition and rising obesity are all culprits. Western media loves to gawk at Japan from a cultural perspective but I would be careful about drawing social parallels there. It's easy to cherry-pick social trends to confirm bias one way or another. But the physical and material conditions people live in are very tangible and demonstrably unhealthy.

> Men are made to be dumb, reckless and horny, the moment they become cerebral, emotional and scared that's the signal that society is on the brink of collapse.

This statement is wholly unsupported by history or science.

"History" could be renamed "men acting dumb, reckless, and horny" and it would basically be accurate.

It's a fair characterization of the mouse utopia experiments of John B. Calhoun, modulo some anthropomorphism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28555652

Those "experiments" have long since been recognized as broken and invalid. The mice were severely overcrowded, because Calhoun didn't actually understand the animals' need for spread out, large territories, and was more concerned with churning out dozens of ridiculous mouse-panopticons.

Mice have biological processes that are sometimes analogous to humans, making them useful for some forms of experimentation. Their social behavior is anything but human-like.

It is also a favourite far-right bit of ideology.

Given the prevalence of armed conflict in human history, I have trouble agreeing that OP's statement, even if did in jest, isn't supported by history.

It takes a whole lot of dumbness and recklessness to enter wars.

That is because when you look closely at factors that led to those wars, you find people reacting on self interest in situations where going to war is has high chance of being beneficial to them.

It is easy to create slogans and such. But real history when you look at it is not as simple as dumb guys being dumb.

Is there a cheap way to measure ~ Testosterone levels?

In the normal world, it is a very cheap lab exam. In the US probably it costs 10x what it costs in any other place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com