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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> If the people who advocate addressing climate change actually believed this, they wouldn’t constantly be trying to tie it to other unpopular issues. They’d be willing to compromise on everything else to gather the broadest possible support base for solutions.

Question of the strawman variety: if a bill comes about that passes meaningful climate change reform but bans abortion (in the united states) altogether, is your position that such a bill should be accepted by the climate change advocacy groups?

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Arguably if they are single issue advocacy groups they shouldn’t care about the associated riders (and this would go for the anti abortion side too). But all too often you find that they are NOT actually single issue groups and instead just basically a portion of a political side.

"obviously" no one is really a walking talking voting caricature.

yet still there are big groups that care only about a handful issues meaningfully. eg. they usually don't vote, and very few thinfs might move them to do so. but those who vote usually are already well motivated to care for things the parties carry.

If someone believes that climate change is an existential threat this would seem to be a utilitarian no brainer.

And what if someone is not a utilitarian?

Then I don't care much about their analytical process except insofar as I can steer it.

A funny (to me) parody of Utilitarian thinking is in this comic strip:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/420

It's a reasonable parody of EA-style uniform utilitarians, but has nothing on hedonic/non-uniform utilitarians. I also don't take EA-style uniform utilitarianism seriously (specifically because of the type of thing in that strip - I care more about my family/friends/community than random people I don't know or have any relation to).

What if someone feels so strongly about a woman's right to choose they are willing to see the world burn?

I would not call that person a climate change advocate, I would call them a fanatical abortion rights advocate.

Let's change the scenario to explore the framework of your argument.

Suppose Vladimir Puten says he'll nuke the planet tomorrow unless every Apple employee dances naked outdoors then burns their headquarters to the ground.

Apple does not burn their HQ down and the employees refuse to dance outdoors, naked. Are they "fanatical Apple computer advocates and/ or fanatical prudes?" Or does game theory suggest responding to threats is a bad idea?

Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing.

If the US did not have nuclear missiles and Russia had nuked countries before for not running outside and dancing naked then yes I would call you a prude if you were willing to risk the lives of 300+ million people to not dance outside naked.

I have no idea what that question has to do with climate change advocacy.

Since you are confused at what I'm getting at, I'll explain.

You seem to think "What if someone feels so strongly about a woman's right to choose they are willing to see the world burn?" is a reasonable way to frame the issue.

So then I presented the same framing scenario involving nudity and you instinctively refused to accept the framing writing "Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing."

Your framing did not in any way involve what climate change advocates "believe" about their opponents. Considerations of bluffing were not part of your evaluation of choices available to climate change advocates.

When someone presents a hypothetical scenario in a wacky, no relation to the real world matter, sometimes the reasonable thing is to reject the hypothetical. As you just did, when you wrote "Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing".

There's also the fact that your framing requires us to label Apple employees as fanatics rather than the guy who is planning to nuke the planet unless Apple employees dance around naked, which is very weird.

Economics has a concept called "revealed preferences" which is the idea that you can better understand what someone values by what they do as opposed to what they say.

So in a scenario where someone says "climate change is an existential threat" but then acts like it's just one among many issues they care about reveals what they actually believe about climate change.

The problem with your scenario is doesn't reveal anyone's preferences because the threat isn't believable. However if the threat is believable than that does reveal their preferences about the end of the world vs being naked. And I don't mention Putin fanaticism because the entire scenario is not about Putin, Putin is a device to illustrate a choice Apple and their employees would need to make. Just like how if someone asks about the maintenance schedule of the trolly car in the typical trolly car problem they're missing the point.

One aspect of climate change is overpopulation. These issues may be more related than you think.

That might be true in principle but practically speaking whatever population increase caused by abortion bans in the US is going to be dwarfed by the population boom happening in africa/asia.

Soon: abortion wars. The US could invade any nation without an abortion ban to liberate fetuses.

It's ok, hookup culture already fixed that, western societies are below replacement rate. We need to worry about disappearing instead.

You think that “hookup culture” is the reason for the “West’s” low birthrates? This is a well-studied topic and I haven’t heard anyone else making that claim…

Why wouldn't it be related? Women would rather not have kids with random hookups so if they're all having random hookups with everyone on Tinder/Bumble/Whatever then when exactly would they be having kids?

Of course it's related.

Also, look at the levels of estrogen-related compounds in our drinking water due to all of the birth control and think of what effect that might have on male fertility, which we know is the lowest in recorded history...

"Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...

As for "hookup culture" that sounds like something largely made up by conservative pundents and you are describing it as a real thing.

Wtf?… this is the most alarming statistic I’ve ever heard. Why is their estrogen in our drinking water, why does birth control put estrogen in our drinking water and where the fuck is the other 99% coming from?

>Source: American Chemical Society

Yikes.

Meanwhile, nobody has been able to replicate those results in the 10+ years since then, I wonder why.

>As for "hookup culture" that sounds like something largely made up by conservative pundents and you are describing it as a real thing.

Many liberals don't think glorifying hedonism is a good thing. I guess I'm open to hear the argument though, so what is the advantage for society to promote hook-up culture? What good comes from that vs the alternative?

I noticed you just claimed nobody could replicate the results but provided no evidence for your claim that either 1) estrogen in the water is in unhealthy levels due to birth control or 2) nobody could replicate the results.

I think it's pretty clear you don't care about scientific evidence but think women having consensual, nonreproductive sex is icky, so very much want it to be true that birth control is poison, and don't really care about the truth level of what you are posting as long as it feels true.

As for your other point, I already said there's no such thing as hookup culture, that's just an outlandish stereotype you want to box people into.

>I already said there's no such thing as hookup culture

lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookup_culture

I said I was open to hearing the advantages of promoting hedonism in society. And that applies to men or women. What are they?

Consentual sex is not hedonism.

I don't know how to explain to you that the meaning of life isn't to make babies, and that it's morally wrong to optimize society for making babies by treating women as chattel, banning birth control, censoring art work, screaming all day about birth control being poison, or whatever it is you think you are fighting for.

>Consentual sex is not hedonism.

Agreed 100%. Consensual sex is awesome (the only good kind!), but we're talking about hook-up culture specifically though.

And I never said anything about banning birth control, there are many different types of birth control. The ones that add estrogen to our water supply are problematic though.[0]

As an aside, what do you think is causing the massive drop in fertility and semen counts in western men?[1] It's one thing to handwave away things you don't like, but we know semen counts have never been this low, so why do you think that is?

[0] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26454754/

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/health/male-sperm-count-p...

I'm still waiting for your evidence that the study I cited above showing estrogen was a minute presence in drinking water was one that nobody could replicate. That seems a lot more on point than something something bass?

If the medical community has no consensus about the cause of semen decline, how the fuck should you or I know the cause? Linking to something about bass doesn't really suggest to me you have a basic understanding of the facts. Did it occur to you bass don't live in the same environments humans do and they may have a few anatomical differences than humans?

I think you would benefit from less original thinking on the matter and more sticking with what experts say on medical matters in general.

Here's a mayo clinic article on low sperm count, for example:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/low-sperm-cou...

It has a section on environmental causes none of which include estrogen.

A thorough search will show there are no published studies that reference it and replicate the results. If you seem to think it's been replicated and my queries have missed it, please link the study.

It seems to me there is a difference between "nobody has attempted to replicate the results" and "nobody has been able to replicate it".

If nobody has been able to replicate the results you should be able to document the scientists who tried to replicate the results and failed to do so.

To begin with, you haven't even defined "hookup culture," much less demonstrated that its prevalence is significant enough to influence birth rates or, further, proven that its influence on birth rates would be negative in the first place.

That said, why assume a nebulous concept like "hookup culture" is causing declining birth rates when a simple google search will reveal plenty of well-studied factors with demonstrated influence on fertility (not to mention far more cultural universality). For reference, some examples include: increased educational attainment among women, increased labor-force participation among women, increased urbanization, increased cost-of-living

>To begin with, you haven't even defined "hookup culture"

It's pretty well defined and has been for some time. The link was posted in the thread, but here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookup_culture.

As a young-er person in the West, I'm well aware of the term's general meaning. The linked article you provide fails to define it in any way that would be empirically meaningful with regard to the study of birth rates. You haven't given us any reason to suspect that American college students, or their European peers, engaging in casual sex (the focus of the linked article) has any impact on birth rates.

Based on the above, as well as your lack of engagement with any of the fertility-related factors I provided, I'm assuming you're more interested in voicing some sort of cultural critique than discussing actual drivers behind trends in birth rates.

If you think that people are cancer of planet, you probably dont know how many great unhabited places on Eearth we have, ie in Russia.

Overpopulation is narattion for/from pathological politics we have.

You need to ask that question to the climate activists. GP didn't mention himself being one, it might not be applicable to him.

I think climate change is a very important problem, too important to be left to “climate activists.” The environmental movement totally screwed us in the 1970s by lashing climate-change activism to anti-nuclear and degrowth. The only politically feasible way of addressing climate change is to grow and engineer our way out of it. Even leaving aside people in the developed world, people in India and China will not accept that the solution for them is to delay or avoid industrialization and remain subsistence farmers.

> if a bill comes about that passes meaningful climate change reform but bans abortion (in the united states) altogether, is your position that such a bill should be accepted by the climate change advocacy groups?

If the world ends tomorrow and the only way to avert it is to ban abortion then almost certainly yes, otherwise the baseline deal ought to be better.

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