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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I certainly prefer the non-Bowdlerized world for children, myself, having grown up as such. But if there is any thinking superiority to that technique it appears to not be in action considering that California (not unique in America in cultural puritanism) outperforms most comparable European countries. It certainly beats Germany at innovation, maternal mortality, income, and wealth and has comparable gross product, and life expectancy.

Considering that Californian children are no less sheltered, I find it hard to believe that this effect on thought is meaningful.

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Observe the Netherlands' attitude towards sex education and compare, for example, a quantifiable outcome such as teenage birth rates.

There is a solid case that the US morality is harmful to children.

To girls in particular, even, but this aspect of feminism does not seem popular today.

Adolescent birth rate per 1000 women aged 15-19, per year

       2019   2001
  USA  16.7   45.0  
  NL    2.5    7.8

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

For CA, the value is 11 per 1000

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbi...

It's really easy to confuse pet cause X when it's really a proxy correlation for more fundamental things like being poor or having low intelligence, either due to environmental damage or neglect.

That cause is that of https://rutgers.nl (https://rutgers.international/themes/sexuality-education-and...)

I just find it funny when prudish initiatives are promoted under pretence of the same.

Many Europeans live happy and fulfilled lives and die peacefully never having innovated or become wealthy. Perhaps that's not a European measurement.

Right, but the US is happier than most European countries by the last measure I saw https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/happiness-benevolence-... (comparable to Germany, better than France) and when you take a state like mine (California) it beats all but the Scandinavians, which, sure I grant you they seem to have a good and happy society.

So, if you take Germany, Californians are:

- happier

- more wealthy

- more innovative

- have fewer mums die

Now, either this means this better critical thinking described isn't manifesting into any life outcomes, or (and perhaps this is a question worth asking), it isn't better after all.

Perhaps Europeans need to study the stats.

I think another key factor to happiness in California is the weather. It's hard to find a place in Europe that is top-tier economically and has nice weather year-round.

No matter how good life is in other respects, it's tough for some people (myself included) to feel good when the weather is cold, gray, rainy, and dreary for months on end.

While we are comparing irrelevant metrics to the discussed topic: Germany beats California at World Cups but loses out to it at World Wars.

Turns out a country can be superior at one thing without being superior at all the things.

The US is number one is prisoner population, go USA!

Sure, I was asking if it was worth the better critical thinking if it didn't lead to better life outcomes. It looks like, if there is better critical thinking in Europe it's not leading to better life outcomes. So that means one of two things:

* better c-t does not lead to better l-o

* the c-t is worse

If you feel that World Cups are a better measure than maternal mortality rate, then have at it. The measures we choose are arbitrary, so we can just lay them all out. I'm happy to accept relevant metrics if you have them to show. Personally, I think a society with better critical thinking overall would be able to, given resources, reduce the number of dying new mothers but if you believe there is no relationship I am happy to just accept metrics you offer.

California and Germany are both rich and relatively successful. The reasons for it have nothing to do with their respective stance on nudity. It makes no sense to compare metrics here, they are useless, because there is no causation. You just have to look at poorer states from both the US and EU with the same ideas about nudity but wildly different economic outcomes to see that.

Their success is based on cars, an engineering tradition, the US dollar, the biggest local market, DARPA, the protestant religion, competing nation states next door and a hundred other things.

What I personally think the handling and censorship of nudity might actually influence is democratic discourse, mechanisms of what shocks, what should be censored, what works for populism, what is seen as freedom and what ultimately gets elected.

A lot of that can be attributed to the best people from around the world emigrating to California and not culture and education of Californians

Flattery will get you nowhere, mate! :)

But I do think that being an attractive immigrant destination is a thing to aspire to.

> certainly beats Germany at innovation

fair enough

> maternal mortality

Don't know about California, but the US beats Europe in the sense of having 3x maternal mortality

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality-mdgs?c...

> income, and wealth

fair enough

> comparable gross product

higher in the US, though a lot of that is because of more hours worked

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

> life expectancy

US has stagnated recently, and now about 2 years less

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

Perhaps critical thinking is detrimental to GDP ;)

Indeed. Could it be that this is because GDP is not the main measure of happiness, or perhaps even one at all? I wonder. :D

Money is the end all and be all for some people. It's an incredibly harmful ideology that not only hurts citizens but also the environment and ecosystem

I think you'd have to further sub-divide California to get the full picture. LA and the Bay Area are worlds unto themselves in terms of culture, and probably do have more in common with Europe than Iowa. The rest of the state is much more typically American.

Having raised a 3 year old in the Bay Area (SF and Albany/Berkeley), I've anecdotally noticed a lot less of the puritan/sheltering attitude you're talking about than in other places in the US. I'd say a moderate version of 'free range parenting' is actually the dominant trend these days around here.

California is a part of the US last I checked or did you guys finally secede?

Picked an appropriately sized thing to compare considering the variance in US-state laws and EU-nation laws causes whole-US and whole-EU comparisons to be noisy. Also I live in Cali and know it better than I do the rest of the US.

> maternal mortality

it does not

it's 11.7 per 100,000 in California and 7 per 100,000 in Germany.

Despite similar spending per capita in healthcare.

> Considering that Californian children are no less sheltered

They come from families that on average are a lot more wealthy than the average German family and live in a much more pleasant weather.

Bit apples to oranges.

The 11.7 is the PRMR measure from CA-PMSS, which is far stricter than the definition used in Germany. The corresponding rate using the same definition as in Germany was ~6 / 100k in California.

Easy mistake to make, though, since you have to be aware of definitional differences.

A start to that is here: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DMCAH/surveillance/CDPH...

But you'll have to go read the guidelines to read the difference.

It seems like you have written quite a few comments engaging with people here in an attempt to demonstrate that, by your own data, a difference in maternal mortality of 1 in 100 000, when comparing a single American state to a single European country, may be evidence that European nudity-tolerant attitudes to child-rearing may not result in improved critical thinking skills in European adults.

If this doesn't seem like a stretch to you, by all means continue.

The easy mistake is taking for granted US skewed units of measures, I simply posted official stats from International organizations that normalize data across different countries and use standard methodologies.

Anyway your numbers are not better than Germany, but also:

What country has the highest rate of maternal mortality? The U.S. Key Findings: The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries.

Average US mortality rate is 17/100,000

Average European mortality rate is 8/100,000

Remember that in Europe live at least a hundred million more people than in US an it includes much less developed countries than any US State.

Yet the US average is two times worse than EU and 8.2 (EIGHT!) times worse than Belarus (BELARUS!), Poland or my country, Italy.

You know who's got the same stats of US?

Russia. Yes. That Russia.

US maternal mortality rate is the same of Russia, despite spending billions over billions more on healthcare.

Despite being considered a third World country from the American POV.

To put things in perspective for you: Turkmenistan MMR is 10, in Iran is 16, in Tajikistan is 17 (same of the USA).

Can a certain kind of mentality against women bodies considered "unholy" be the cause of it?

Just asking, I don't know the answer.

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