Ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer (2022)
health.harvard.edu
health.harvard.edu
Here is a section summarizing what came before:
> Previous investigations on reported ejaculation frequencies or sexual intercourse and prostate cancer are limited to studies of retrospective design and results are mixed. Nine studies observed a statistically significant or non-significant positive association; 3 studies reported no association; 7 studies found a statistically significant or non-significant inverse relationship; and 1 study found a U-shaped relationship.
Conclusions that come from the aforementioned article, as well as many/most/all others that I have encountered, are mixed and, as others have noted, have issues with determining causes.
I don’t know how it compares to anything else, but the variance of the data is what struck me the most. That, and the low-resolution around a lot of the studies that have been run. I get that science is hard, but I would expect a LOT more detail from publications than what is typically offered.
Kids are the best, most meaningful thing you will ever do. Its worth it to keep trying.
Also by far the hardest. In the best case, it is not all roses.
Actually unless your child has some terrible accident, you're often tired, sometimes angry, but mostly happy.
If your child has no specific issue and you experience terrible sadness and suffering, then you should consult a doctor.
Just coming in from the other side, but this is not universally true.
Mine has been an absolute nightmare, and I’m in pretty intense therapy trying to keep it all together. My relationship with my wife has been wonderful before and after, so that wasn’t a factor.
I’m not trying to dissuade people from having children, but we were completely unprepared for how challenging ours is. Apparently this isn’t the case for everyone.
Your kid is a nightmare?
Your kid is challenging?
Your relationship with your wife has been wonderful before and after what? The birth?
I am in a challenging marriage. I have young kids. My kids are wonderful. I am trying to work things out with my wife for my children's sake. I would be careful with the language you use to frame the problems in your life. How you describe your problems may influence what you see as the solutions.
Are you sure it's a problem with your child? Maybe it is a problem with you and your relationships?
Anyways, good choice being in therapy. A competent therapist will help you unravel your problems better than some asshole on hn (that's me).
> Your kid is a nightmare? Your kid is challenging?
This is hard to explain without a larger conversation, but I think one of the primary issues for us is the huge commitment a child can be. We are in a very rural community (close to nil childcare available), very little family support, and both work full-time (luckily from home).
Deciding to have a child can be a complex decision, and it seemed like a good idea at the time based on the information we had. Close friends in very similar situations have been successful and happy. There are also a small minority of friends that have similar feelings to us.
> Your relationship with your wife has been wonderful before and after what? The birth?
Correct.
> Are you sure it's a problem with your child? Maybe it is a problem with you and your relationships?
I believe the root issue here is a conflict between what we want out of life and the realities young children bring. The things that "fill us up" are generally unsafe for young children (eg. mountaineering in the dead of winter at high altitude).
I'm not looking for criticism (unless it's constructive), because the decision has been made. We're doing the best we can and trying to find new techniques/outside help; we're trying our best given what we have. (it's worth noting that I didn't take the parent comment negatively)
> Anyways, good choice being in therapy. A competent therapist will help you unravel your problems better than some asshole on hn (that's me).
I agree, and I've posted the unfiltered version here. It has helped me mentally reframe our situation in a more positive light, but it's still a journey. Hopefully insight into our specific situation can help someone else along the way.
*edit:
>I am in a challenging marriage. I have young kids. My kids are wonderful. I am trying to work things out with my wife for my children's sake. I would be careful with the language you use to frame the problems in your life. How you describe your problems may influence what you see as the solutions.
This is good advice, and I don't see my child as "the problem" so much as the general situation. The struggle now is recalibrating my world view.
Apologies to anyone reading for being so negative. I know I'm in a tough spot, and it's hard to see out right now.
Really, our planet could do with fewer people. If people want something fulfilling, they should do whatever makes them happy. That's what fulfilment and contentment is.
I don't regret it. I think I would have been a horrible dad. Only now, as I am in my 50s, do I feel like I might become a person who could have been a good dad, if I had known then what I know now.
So, my kids who were never born, and society at large, are probably better off that my wife and I have never had kids.
Hell, given what's happening in the world today, I think maybe my non-existent kids may also be better off never having been born.
Heavy dose of "in my opinion..."
Kids are absolutely the last thing I've ever wanted in my lifetime.
Am I supposed to take your statement as I'll never do anything meaningful?
Come on.
No, you probably aren't to take that statement that way since the statement never said any such thing. He said "most meaningful" which necessarily implies that there are other meaningful things, just lower in a hierarchy of meaningfulness. Respectfully, you seem quite bitter by reading into what was said, perhaps some introspection about the reason for this reaction would be in order.
Bitter defined as 'a sense of unjust treatment', is absolutely correct, but 'angry, hurt, or resentful'... nah, none of that.
In fact, quite the opposite, I'm extremely happy about my decision to not have children.
I'm just not a fan of people who think that it is the most meaningful thing I (or anyone else) could ever do.
In any case, even if one thinks so, I find it quite rude to say that having a kid is the most meaningful thing you can achieve to someone that may not have children ...
I've known people who've dedicated their life to doing charitable work for low pay, it's extremely fulfilling in a way that I will never experience, but I don't get upset when they say that it's the most fulfilling thing they've done.
Remember, their original statement was "Kids are the best, most meaningful thing you will ever do. Its worth it to keep trying." whereas really they should have said something like "Kids are the best, most meaningful thing I have ever experienced. It's worth it to keep trying."
Do whatever people want with their own life. But when it involves bringing someone else to life without their consent and no going back, there should be some checks and bounds and should not be for selfish reasons.
People here are privileged, live in a better country, good income etc. Because they have better life, they expect others also to say it's great. Many children are born without proper thinking by their parents, for selfish reason and suffer every day.
* Androgen suppression treats prostate cancer
* Low testosterone is associated with developing prostate cancer
This paper suggests there is a saturation model at work. Zero T does prevent prostate cancer, but above a certain very low level the risk does not grow.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=test...
I am currently on a big spree trying to fix my diet and sift true information from all those wrong inferences. Turns out, almost everything I have been told and red is a lie based on wrong inferences. Lifetime of avoiding fat... exactly opposite of what I should have been doing...
Since you asked, this is headlines of most of what I figured out:
* Your main goals should be achieving metabolic flexibility, eliminating most of the "bad" stuff (sugars, processed oils, most carbs, etc.), supplying your body with mitochondrial decouplers daily and doing low level aerobic exercise, consistently.
* If you feel hungry at any time you are doing something wrong.
* If you feel cold due to lower basal metabolic rate at any time you are doing something wrong (most likely restricting calories in an improper way).
* Metabolic flexibility means you can can easily get into and out of fasting. You are not driven by hunger and can easily continue your life (work, exercise, etc.) with or without meals, without detriment. This is typically achieved by periods of ample food as well as periods of fasting (calorie restriction is not fasting). On a daily basis you can restrict your eating window to 4-6 hours. On longer scale it is useful to do periodic changes to your diet (for example intermittent fasting with restricted carbs and calories for 2 months, then follow with 2 weeks of higher calories and carbs).
* Bad stuff are sugars and almost everything that is highly processed, refined, enriched, etc. Meat from unhealthy, stressed animals. Getting rid of all or almost all carbs is desirable as long as some carbs are in the diet from time to time to exercise your insulin.
* Mitochondrial decouplers are substances that cause your mitochondria to waste energy. Wasted energy is heat. For example (I think...) by supplying myself with mitochondrial decouplers I have shifted my temperature comfort level by about 5C. I can now walk, run, sleep, work at about 5C lower that I did before at the same comfort level. What are mitochondrial decouplers -- polyphenols, medium chain triglycerides, caffeine, ketone bodies, etc.
* Low intensity training (I started running about 30 minutes daily at conversational pace) causes your body to develop more mitochondria. More mitochondria present better opportunity for the body to waste heat as well as host of other useful adaptations. You don't have to be running -- taking a brisk walk after your last meal of the day is a fantastic way of getting some activity as well as efficiently clearing blood sugar and improving effective insulin sensitivity (insulin sensitivity is your ability to clear blood sugars, exercise does not improve insulin sensitivity directly but helps clear the sugar making it as if insulin was more effective).
* Exposing body to cold. You don't need to start getting cold therapies -- if you live in colder climate like me it is enough to just not avoid cold at all cost. I am running daily regardless of weather and I am wearing clothes just enough to get mostly comfortable after say 15 minutes of running in -2C but maybe a little cold at the start.
* Consistently good night of sleep is a must.
* High stress can cause blood sugar and insulin resistance. Body reacts to stress by releasing sugar (to prepare you for effort). But chronic stress causes chronic blood sugar causes chronic insulin causes you getting fat and unhealthy.
* Carbs cause insulin (duh) which causes:
** fat in your fat stores being unavailable to your body as an energy resource,
** when the fat stored in your body is unavailable to your body you will be hungry even in the presence of hundreds of thousands of calories on you (which is crazy if you think about it),
** your brain is built to seek more carbs when you get hungry.
* Fats don't make you fat. People on keto diets quit keto when they finish losing weight because they find they are unable to eat so many calories as fats and they consistently undereat or change their diets unwittingly.
* If you have to eat carbs, make effort to reduce their impact. Never eat "naked" carbs -- preceding carbs with fats and/or protein can significantly lower glycemic index. Preceding fats with acids deactivates enzymes in your saliva that cause about 40% of carb digestion in your stomach -- effectively lowering glycemic index (sushi has only 40% of glycemic index of same portion of plain rice -- due to rice vinegar added to the sushi rice). Taking a walk right after carb meal helps body clear blood sugar faster (for example 20 minute brisk walk right after a meal can shorten aftereffects of the meal from 5 to 3 hours).
He even linked prostate cancer to insulin resistence. But unfortunately i checked the references the book and the linked papers didn't really support the case. Even after you get prostate cancer, IGF 1 inhibitors don't seem to do much to slow it down( some small sample studies seem inconclusive https://www.nature.com/articles/s41416-020-0774-1)
For me the most compelling connection is that people who are likely to develop insulin resistance are also people who are very likely to have relatively little autophagy. Autophagy is a process where your body consumes protein that already exists in your organism. It will consume all sorts of stuff and what is really important is that it will break down abnormal protein like protein that got misfolded.
Autophagy is promoted when you fast for at least 14-18 hours -- but people who are constantly eating when they don't sleep don't ever reach fasting this long.
It is crazy to take a look at how different people look after losing a lot of weight depending on what kind of route they chose. People who lost weight due to intermittent fasting rather than calorie restriction tend too look much better and have much less loose skin. What happens is, due to IF regime their bodies were regularly undergoing autophagy while they were on IF and during autophay they were essentially "eating" their own protein like unnecessary connective tissue, skin, etc.
Without autophagy to periodically clean garbage from your body various unnecessary things just lie there and cause all sorts of mayhem and inflammation. Misfolded protein is potentially carcinogenic because defects in those protein are pretty much random and if a protein gets broken just right it might be causing damage to pretty much anything else. It increases your chance that a random damage can start cancer going somewhere.
Another way insulin might be linked to cancer is that insulin is a growth hormone and cancer is a tissue with abnormal growth. I don't know the details and I know enough to say that insulin does not necessarily cause growth of everything (how fun it would be to get your ABS just by overeating...) But it seems really possible that if cancer is sugar-loving tissue that needs lots of it to grow and insulin tells your cells to take as much sugar from bloodstream as they can then cancer might "be loving it". And also there are some cancer treatments that rely on starving or at least slowing cancer growth with a high ketone and low sugar levels.
I was fat or at least struggling to maintain for most of my life.
I've essentially learned similar ideas over the past few years and have had great success
Can you elaborate? As far as I'm aware exercise (even moderate) does indeed increase insulin sensitivity. I was told so by my doctor and as type 1 diabetic with 24/7 glucose monitoring sensor I can "see" this. A day long hike (not intense, just long) does incredibly things to my required insulin dosage. It can go down to mere 10% the amount of insulin per carbs that I usually use. Now of course some of this is due to the exercise itself and the muscles taking in some of that energy. But some should be due to a reduced insulin sensitivity.
If you can do things that either prevent or clear blood sugar levels from your bloodstream you can technically live without the need for insulin at all.
With a proper diet and discipline you can theoretically even dispense with continuous monitor. What this would require is observing yourself with a monitor while you test your lifestyle choices to validate you are not making mistakes and then stop using it when you trust what you are doing is effective.
Please, do not misconstrue this as an actual medical advice (I am a software developer and definitely no medical education). But if I was type 1 diabetic I would probably try to ensure correct levels of sugar without external insulin. The problem with external insulin is that the dosage is always delayed, it is a point in time and is never perfect. This is not perfect for your health, it is just the best we can.
Now, I would never recommend this to a person I don't know they can be responsible and disciplined enough not to endanger themselves this way. I think this is critical and I also think that unfortunately most people who have diabetes are not fit mentally to do this.
But lowering your blood sugar without insulin would lead to much better results because you would avoid the spikes altogether and you would not risk getting sensitive to insulin from overdosing it.
FYI when I am on keto diet my blood sugar levels are staying consistently low regardless of how much I eat. I have lower blood sugar levels right after a large meal than most people have before the meal(~85mg/dL or 4.7mmol/L after a meal with ~75mg/dL or around 3.9mmol/L before the meal).
I do not plan to stay on keto all the time, I am using it as a tool to build metabolic flexibility. But if I was diabetic I would probably consider keto very seriously to improve my prospects and break dependency on external insulin, constant blood sugar monitoring and every day decisions on what and how much to eat.
And then there are all the hormone-based reactions. The classic obvious culprit for raising blood sugar out of nowhere is of course adrenaline but even many others can do so. Stress reactions and others will do this. The glucose in this case comes from your liver which stores it as glucagon. Note that your liver will store glucagon even when you have no carbohydrate intake. As mentioned above, your body will metabolize it eventually.
Your advice about keto is downright harmful. Type 1 diabetics should not go on a keto diet. This is actively advised against and will lead to coma and death. The reason keto works for healthy people is that they actually do not go 0 on carbohydrate and, therefore, still have some amount of insulin in their blood (also for other reasons). Even vegetables contain small amounts of digestible carbohydrates that will trigger trace amounts of insulin and protein, through the pathway illustrated above, will do so as well. Please understand that diabetes is an old and very well researched condition. Modern medicine has a trove of long-term detailed data and statistics telling us what works well and will lead to a side-condition-free life in old age and what will lead to long term damage. This is well understood. Contrary to what you suggested, modern diabetes management does not advise to reduce insulin need as much as possible through dietary means for type 1 diabetics.
Edit: Please note that blood sugar is not a "lower means better" metric. A low blood sugar has risks associated just as high blood sugar has. The "band" of good values is well understood and the headroom "upwards" (i.e., higher than normal values that still won't cause damage) is a lot larger than the headroom "downwards". In fact, standard therapy for diabetics keeps them a little higher than the normal person just for safety reasons. Personally, I stay in a "normal person" range but I also have the luxury of fewer trouble managing my values than others.
It is true that EXCESS protein will be converted to sugars. As long as you limit your protein intake it will be used exclusively for housekeeping. That's why keto diet is not only carb elimination, it is carb elimination WHILE restricting protein to about 30% of your calorie intake.
It is exactly this reason why keto diet is so hard to maintain -- because you have to fill the rest with fat and this is a hard thing to do.
> Please understand that diabetes is an old and very well researched condition.
It is funny that you mention it, because do you know what was the actual first treatment for diabetes? Before they were able to produce insulin?
It was actually eliminating carbs from the diet. Yes, in the past, keto diet was the main (and the only) way to treat diabetes.
Except it didn't work. People died. Meanwhile, today, we have a very good understanding about the secondary diseases, long-term damages, and how to prevent those with therapy. And a keto diet is no part of that.
Edit:
>It is true that EXCESS protein will be converted to sugars. As long as you limit your protein intake it will be used exclusively for housekeeping. That's why keto diet is not only carb elimination, it is carb elimination WHILE restricting protein to about 30% of your calorie intake.
While excess protein is indeed converted that way, it will also happen to small amounts of "non-excess" protein. Protein in your body is in a constant flux. Your muscles are not static but undergo constant breakdown and build-up. While gluconeogenesis can be strongly reduced with dietary restrictions, it cannot be completely stopped. In fact, an important inhibitor to gluconeogenesis is insulin and thus, for a healthy person, consumption of carbohydrates.
However, I am starting to be wary of this claim because olive oil has a _lot_ of saturated fats when compared to other food, roughly around 15-16g per 100g.
To put this figure into the context: 20% cooking cream, which is usually considered unhealthy because of its high saturated fats ratio, has about the same amount of saturated fats as olive oil, 14-15g per 100g. Saturated fats in butter are exceptionally high, 51g per 100g.
What was surprising to me is that even the sunflower oil, an oil which is frowned upon because it's refined, has _less_ of the saturated fats than olive oil, roughly around 13g per 100g.
All the rest of the food which we normally consume is in the region of 1-5g per 100g, including the eggs which have 1g of saturated fats per 100g.
By knowing for the fact that saturated fats are unhealthy, these stats seem to suggest that olive oil is not as healthy as it is generally considered.
This is simply not true, much less a "fact". This myth most probably comes from the good old American Heart Association who base their opinion of a study way back in the 1960s which was since proven to have been of extremely low quality. There is a ton of info about this online (including scientific studies, not just blog posts), pro and contra, you can read them yourself and then decide who you believe.
And butter and olive oil are one of the most healthy foods you can consume in my opinion <= there you have another point of view on the internet :)
Thanks for your advice but unless you're willing to share that "ton of info" to support your rather absurd claim, I'll stick to my common sense.
Besides, the AMA also uses the research from all the other decades from the 1960s until now to make their recommendations.
Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture
What I meant is what I tried to communicate in my last sentence: olive oil does not appear to be that healthy when put into the perspective with other food we use in kitchen.
With that in mind, I think that general recommendation and hype around the olive oil can be dangerous if not taken carefully.
I think nutrition is one of the earliest things you figure out that it depends and nobody really knows what their talking about. My mother and wife have a lot of opinions about nutrition that are obviously unscientific, situational and anecdotal.
> Lifetime of avoiding fat... exactly opposite of what I should have been doing...
There is more nuance involved. What kind of fat? What kind of diet? Calorie surplus? What about salt? What kind of metabolism do you have?
It is just impossible to make blanket statements like eat fat, do not eat fat, eat sugar, do not eat sugar. It's your own responsibility to figure it out instead of being told what to do.
That's the problem, we were taught this in highschool:
https://www.disabled-world.com/pics/1/old-food-pyramid.jpg
Eat low amounts of natural fat, eat large amount of grain and cereal to be healthy. It was taught to us in a blanket one size fits all methodology
Why bother having education system if you are supposed to figure everything out on your own?
How is nutrition different from math or grammar?
Well, because 1 + 1 = 2, all the time, and the optimal diet is different for everyone?
1. To "educate" / program you on what to buy to sustain the rest of your life, eg, "breakfast is the most important meal of the day". Which is true if you are a cereal company:
https://www.successstudiopt.com/blog/is-breakfast-really-the...
2. People have arteries clogged with cholesterol. This is bad. Cholesterol is in eggs. Therefore eggs cause cholesterol build-up in the arteries and should be avoided. Eat cereal instead. This has been completely debunked.
Etc.
Does the education system teach kids about debt, why it's so bad, how to avoid it, ways it will sneak up and fuck you over (ARM, variable-rate credit card interest, ...)? Not when I went to school. There was no class on managing money in my entire 12 years of "education". Just another thing to figure out on your own, hopefully after many mistakes that enrich large corporations.
Currently in North America, school is optimized to solve two main problems:
1. Create citizens who work well in companies (sadly these are industrial-era: show up on time, parrot back what is told to you, be the same as everyone else)
2. Babysitting parents who are currently working for companies (this was especially obvious in Ontario’s approach to the pandemic).
If we optimized for population health/wealth things would look a lot different (and from the outside it looks like some private schools in America are already there).
I think OP can be forgiven for not pre-nuancing it for you.
There is a lot of things we can't measure that are worth doing. Like maybe improving your relationship with your wife and kids. Or reducing distraction and improving your focus while you are working.
If the only thing you did and mattered in your life was your diet then yes, you would have to keep measuring it obsessively.
But I don't want to spend my life focusing on my diet to exclusion of everything else. I have lots of other stuff I want to be doing. A healthy diet for me is one that allows me to not have to monitor and measure and weigh myself constantly.
Not measuring is the goal, not the fault of the method.
And what does that have to do with prostate cancer, I wonder?
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. (attributed to Albert Einstein)
What is the potential danger here? I’m not aware of any links to adverse heath for men ejaculate 21 times or more a month. Are you? Seems low risk for something that will potentially give you a 31% decreased chance to get prostate cancer.
>Lifetime of avoiding fat…
That’s too bad. Low fat diets have been debunked for at least 20 years. They were pushed by companies that produce high sugar foods. The thing we should actually avoid.
I don’t think anyone has the same interest with the topic in the article though.
People wasting other peoples time by giving advice that does nothing. Averting focus from things that are productive. Drowning useful information in information that may not necessarily be bad for you but isn't beneficial either.
Technically speaking, sex is productive.
Fairly successfully IMO
I'm quite surprised by how little puns there are under this post.
When people point this out (which they do on every single human-related study that makes the front page), it implies that the article is suggesting causation somewhere. I don't see this article suggesting that anywhere; what I find toward the end is this:
>The studies from the United States and Australia do little to answer these critical questions — but they do open a new avenue for research.
Did I miss where the article suggests causation?
Sure, they use "apparent" as a weasel-word but "protection" is clearly suggesting causation.
There is no ambiguity in the statement "The studies...do little to answer these critical questions," it means the studies are inconclusive and shouldn't be treated otherwise.
The reason a comment is always necessary is because other comments always jump to assuming causation.
I do think my comment was weak, because I think there are much more likely root causes than testosterone. Such as the unsatisfying reproducibility crisis https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis conceived by https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
But the link between testosterone levels and ejaculation frequencys is causal https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12659241/
"The authors found that the fluctuations of testosterone levels from the 2nd to 5th day of abstinence were minimal. On the 7th day of abstinence, however, a clear peak of serum testosterone appeared, reaching 145.7% of the baseline"
It says nothing about testosterone levels vs ejaculation frequency.
I would assume that over certain high frequencies, testosterone would plummet, not increase.
Is this a well known association? I would assume it to be and opposite; don’t anabolics tend to increase cancer risk?
Maybe I have mistaken it for other effects, like some people my age awakening three times a night. More good news, anyway.
Thanks for sharing. When I saw number of dead comments in there I expected to see some serious flame war going on. But actually most of them are quite constructive even if i dont agree with them.
Fortunately it possible to vouch for these comments if you have showdead enabled.
I thought I've read the opposite that porn should be avoided because it's just like the rest of social media (a hinderance overall). Bad from an "over stimulation" perspective. aka the whole "nofap" movement
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/ has 1,100,000+ members
A lot of TikTok users write comments like "stay strong bros" referring to "keep scrolling past this trending submission on the timeline" do not let these young women in skimpy clothing make you succumb to your goals of avoiding the pitfalls that come with being "addicted" to the stimulation of the porn itself and the "pleasure" of masturbating"
It doesn't seem like a good plan.
Edit, to clarify: traditional suppport groups must be helpful for serious addiction, but an online forum with a lot of traffic? It seems crazy. If you have a problem with doing something pasively and anonymously online, go outside and chat with people in the flesh. You need to do something that helps you forget the damn thing, not revolving around it more.
Who's telling the truth? Medical science (ejaculate more to keep your prostate healthier) or the community online telling you "stop masturbating"
I have no clue
Nice to have, but that's not why you do it. Also it doesn't imply to be alone.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-vibrator/
Let’s not forget the kids before puberty. Today’s “hysteria” is alive and well — it’s called ADHD and it involves overdiagnosing rambunctiousness and prescribing amphetamines like Ritalin or Aderall to medicate the “problem” away instead of making the kind of changes to the school system that Finland made. A lot of societies have often chosen to use medical interventions on the individual instead of fixing the underlying problems. In the case of ADHD:
1) both parents work to afford the rent and “self-actualize” themselves 10 hours a day at corporations https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
2) they stick their kids in public schools where administrators treat them as a number and they have to sit down and shut up for long periods
3) many kids (especially boys) have too much energy to just sit still for so long but the system needs to teach them how to be good corporate drones (even though by the time they graduate corps won’t need them to wirk that way due to AI)
4) climbing trees and running around creates liabilities in the US, keeping the kids docile keeps them out of trouble https://www.smartparenting.com.ph/parenting/big-kids/the-sim...
ADHD is today’s hysteria.
According to the CDC, roughly 9.5% of children in the USA have been diagnosed with ADHD, whereas research based in Europe shows that between 3.5% and 5.6% of children in France have been diagnosed with ADHD. Why do you think that is? There has to be a non-medical explanation, don’t you think?
Same goes with the massive rise in diabetes and obesity in the USA, they engineer high fructose corn syrup into many things, people eat lots of things that turn into sugars, insulin resistance is high, but funny that so little of the industry discusses prevention of diabetes and obesity, they simply treat it as a fait accompli — including in kids, once again a new phenomenon. (In fact it has been shown to have a lot of comorbidities with coronavirus complications — but one is a national emergency, the other is not).
I have seen the same kind of reponses on HN when it came to depression and skepticism that SSRIs are the solution. Until all the studies came out last year, any skepticism was met with “you have no idea what real clinical depression is like. It is primarily caused by a chemical imbalance, needs medical intervention and you know nothing! So please don’t participate in the conversation, let the dominant ideology be the only acceptable one.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2022...
Don’t get me wrong — there are real medical cases in kids of ADHD, gender dysphoria, etc. Or depression in adults, or genetically based insultin resistance. But the fact that it is diagnosed now way more than before means that maybe - just maybe - societal and dietary factors play a huge role. This has to deal with human happiness after all. And that includes people on HN.
Whether self-pleasuring with a hand, or with a vibrating device, the societal factors (of hookup culture, or of cost of rent in cities to own your own place and delay marriage, or everyone getting married later because women now want to focus on their career, while gender age gaps remain similar) matter and should be systematically explored. This article or the nofap movement or women's tacit use of vibrating devices, are all quiet ways to cope with many societal structural changes.
The fact that you think it is off-topic to discuss major societal issues upstream of a phenomenon just goes to show how myopic our culture's approach is to these issues.
I am who I am and have strengths and weaknesses. I genuinely believe my 'adhd' is a blessing because there are certain things I am exceptional at that other people are not yet things that many people can do well and easily I struggle a lot with. Every day is painful, it has been a hard journey but I can see the brightness at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and brighter as I mature and learn to use my strengths more effectively. :)
Most stimulant medication is something you can try for a day, see immediately if it's effective or not, then never take again in your life if it isn't for you. Don't suffer needlessly because of misguided bigots like the one above.
Under capitalism, the social networks compete for your attention, by sending you notifications. It's a "tragedy of the commons" where the commons is human attention: if Facebook doesn't get you to click during dinner, then Twitter will, and then it'll grow through those tactics. Thus the market forces these corporations to give you addictive newsfeeds, tell you when someone replied to your comment, etc. There are analyses comparing the brain to pavlov's dogs and the addiction to a slot machine.
In China, internet addiction is classed as a disease but it's also studied from a social point of view, not just prescribing mediation right away. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18681026219931...
Here is what I would recommend:
1) Realize you are NOT alone or atypical. The human attention span has declined because of the system we live in. We now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. https://www.wyzowl.com/human-attention-span/
2) Notice how much of your ADHD is connected to anxiety and investigate the causes of that anxiety, maybe with a psychotherapist or other counsellor. Map out what kind of things you are afraid could happen if you don't react to them quickly. See if you can rearrange your life to diminish the need for quick responses (such as Slack or real-time chats). Consider worst-case scenarios and if you also have OCD, consider ERP therapy.
3) Learn to use "Focus" on your phone, to turn off distractions for long periods of "Flow". Set expectations with people (this may be hard if you work in capitalism for an employer) to schedule times to talk to you, and only allow calls for emergencies from friends and family. It will take you AT LEAST A WEEK after you remove your anxiety of missing something important, to start fully relaxing and not expecting a notification to jump out at you.
4) Watch the movie "the social dilemma" and try out its recommendations (taking 1 day a week off from all electronics completely -- live how people have lived throughout history) and spend it socializing with people, eating dinner, reading a book, etc.
5) Look at your sleep, diet, are you taking walks or exercising? What is your job? Anyway, there is so much you can investigate holistically and take control in your life, before you ever have to consider that ritalin is your only hope. (And if you do want to try a nootropic, you can try modafinil perhaps... it's not an amphetamine... but again, I think medications take away our agency and should be tried only if all else fails)
None of that requires medication, so try that first.
I would definitely appreciate it if at some point in the future (a month, 6 months, or whenever) you emailed me and told me whether what I said made any difference -- positive or negative. You can find my contact info in my profile.
Since your username contains "420," I will add that marijuana is a bad idea if you are struggling with ADHD symptoms. It may make you feel more productive, but it will greatly exasperate your ADHD tendencies.
I do not recall being antagonistic towards people with ADHD. On the contrary, the resources I have linked to (such as the book https://www.amazon.es/ADHD-Hunter-Farmers-Thom-Hartmann/dp/1...) are by people whose kids have ADHD and they opted to embrace them and accept them, rather than saying they have effectively a neurological disorder. You can make similar cases for autism spectrum, gender dysphoria and so on being zealously overdiagnosed and medicated (https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/10/theres-no-autism-epidemi...)
Medication is often a band-aid and the default way systems handle a cog in a machine. One in four middle-aged women is on antidepressants. Do you think they are ALL clinically depressed? And the opiates that men started to take have reached epidemic proportions too... surely, you wouldn't call everyone a bigot who wants to address the underlying societal reasons for this? Or you'd be the guy prescribing vodka to every USSR citizen as a way to deal with issues?
You are redefining the word "bigot" to mean its opposite, it seems. A system that systematically ignores meeting the basic needs of humans, and then dismisses their resulting behavior as "irrational" or "needing medication" is far worse than a bigot. It's like systemic racism or sexism, but directed against non-neurotypical kids, or adults or elderly.
Were people bigots who said "women have real needs that need to be addressed, stop delegitimizing their real issues by labeling them all as Hysterical Women (TM) and sending them to the doctor to get tittilated"? Because today, we agree with all those people, but in the past, we didn't. To borrow another politically loaded term, you could be on the "wrong side of history", just like people who defended lobotomies and medicating hysterical women.
Maybe you should look into the profit motive of doctors and pharma who stand to gain from more medications. And the school administrators who need to cover their own ass before actually caring about the kids and speaking to their parents. I happen to know about such school administrators and cases personally. The SYSTEM doesn't care about the parents, nor the kids, nor the grandparents which they also stick into nursing homes and medicate -- because again, they need to work 10 hour days to pay the rent. Just like under socialism, the capitalist system externalizes costs onto individuals, you should open your eyes. Try looking at some links I posted above. What you call bigotry, I call basic concern that society should have for human beings.
You also create a false dichotomy in which either modern society fails in certain ways to meet all of our needs to the detriment of people diagnosed with ADHD, or ADHD is a legitimate mental illness that benefits from pharmaceutical and therapeutic treatments. Both things are true.
I am raising my eyebrow at this. You want to look upstream at hookups, declining marriage, women's financial independence and their use of vibrators? When that conversation turns to "traditional" gender roles in religion, I win a prize for calling it early.
Anyway, even if there is some tractable upstream problem we can eventually solve, we still have to deal with the people who are already downstream. For them, the diagnosis and treatment of diseases is valuable, even if we deal with the root cause so future generations don't suffer.
If you look at the rest of my comments on this branch of the tree, you'll find that I am identifying a pattern... whenever X vs Y start fighting (women vs men, vaxxers vs antivaxxers, vegans vs meat eaters, ) there is a bigger issue that involves government and corporations working together, while individuals are distracted and blaming each other.
(2021) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Super-processed Foods and obesity, Factory farms and veganism, Plastic containers and recycling, Fossil fuels and climate change, Vaccines and mask mandates
(2017) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 Women in Tech controversy
(2014) https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=194 Net Neutrality controversy
Both Greta Thurnberg and George Carlin are right. The people in charge have not just failed us, but the entire system is pushing the individual around. What you perceive as a medication you have to take is a symptom of an underlying systemic issue.
Just in the last few decades we have had:
an opioid epidemic for men
one in four middle aged women uses antidepressants
elderly in nursing homes are medicated more than ever
a huge rise in diagnosis of ADHD, autism, gender dysphoria for kids
There are many societal reasons I could get into, but let's look at a few other ones:
attention spans of adults have steadily fallen
(not just ADD for kids) to that of a goldfish
stress levels are higher than they used to be
obesity and diabetes has risen tremendously in USA
(including in children)
Yes in some ways I am a social conservative. But it seems to me, just like "postmodernism", my views are more progressive than "progressives" LOL. I want the government and industry to stop dominating our lives, our time, making us work and telling us that "having no time" is a badge of honor. You're right that I want most women not to "lean in" at work, but I also say that exact thing to the men... if we had a UBI, we could all "lean out", and spend more time with our kids an elderly parents who took care of us, instead of sticking them in nursing homes, that would be a start.
> In 1807 William Wordsworth wrote, "The child is father of the man." With respect to prostate cancer, though, sexual activity in adolescence may be a predictor of risk in adulthood.
Wouldn't adolescent sexual activity be the form-determining-factor (aka "father") of the prostate cancer risk statistical profile in adulthood?
How is this different from the last sentence being analogous to the quote?
Thanks in advance for humoring me.
Less frequent ejaculation correlates with higher rates of prostate cancer
People will still click through
But also, we shouldn't forget this:
> The studies from the United States and Australia do little to answer these critical questions — but they do open a new avenue for research
This isn't a fully understood area of research yet.
> Yet it would be naive to ignore that there’s significant overlap between the general ideology behind NoFap — and, to a degree, No Nut November — and that of the far right, which has increasingly coopted the principles of masturbation abstinence. Because the challenge is associated with abstaining from porn, some people associated with the movement have taken the extra step of harassing adult performers on social media, giving it an additional layer of troubling implications. “In the past [No Nut November] has always been like, ‘Oh, look at this ridiculous thing some people are participating in,'” says adult performer and director Casey Calvert. “This year, people [in the industry] are talking about, ‘Oh, actually this is connected to the far right and maybe we shouldn’t just be saying hahaha, No Nut November.'”
Was UK Mass Murderer Radicalized in Anti-Porn Groups? - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/2021...
> Like the incel groups, online discussions of ways to stop masturbating or cease watching pornography have also been identified as groups filled with hatred towards women, homophobia, antisemitism, and threats of violence. In 2019, I appeared on The Daily Show, describing how these groups radicalize young men by teaching them to fear masturbation.
> Since that appearance, I've regularly received threats, death threats, and intimidating emails, including troubling messages from Gavin McInnes, founder of The Proud Boys. Recent research examining the discussions in these anti-porn and anti-masturbation groups has repeatedly documented that they thrive on the rejection of science and embrace extremely conservative, highly religious themes. These groups promote abstinence from pornography and masturbation as ways for men to become more masculine and successfully attract mates. As you might imagine, there is a significant overlap between the incel and these anti-porn/anti-masturbation groups.
That episode is https://www.cc.com/video/bgws7v/the-daily-show-with-trevor-n...
...and oil companies were among the first to predict global warming and might have coined CO2 budgets. Who came up with something doesn't really matter for the thing's merit, especially when it lives a life of its own. People fill in nonutnovember as they want, not per whatever extremist views. I don't really see the point of sidetracking the conversation into a political corner.
Is there is some slightly increased cancer risk necessary to enjoy life, so be it.
With human sexuality in particular there are so many cultural taboos that very little research has been done. Limiting your understanding of your own sexuality to peer reviewed research is just silly, you will miss millions of obvious things, and also miss the fact that people are individuals and experience and respond differently to the same things.
It’s crap and in bad faith.
I'm not familiar with the arguments used to 'recruit' people, as I've had Reddit blocked on all of my devices for years.
Nofap like many things has been turned into a brand, and even politicised to the point some idiots attack it saying it's far right ideology. On the other hand there are teenagers with serious porn-related issues that think nofap will turn them into superhumans. But the smug nerd on the internet doesn't stop to consider the nofap movement that's become a caricature of its former self, still is a major indicator of the emotional and physical problems porn is causing to many men and women. It's an epidemic.
Go crank all you want because a popsci article said so, but if you haven't seen how widespread and destructive porn addiction is, this must be your first day on the Internet. I already imagine the retort "well, just don't watch porn then." Because only idiots and weak-willed people get addicted.
Sorry, I'm in a cranky mood because I've struggled with porn addiction myself, I have had someone confess they suffer from it just a few hours ago, and I'm bitter how what was a porn addiction support group like nofap managed to turn itself into a joke—and they have themselves to blame, yet porn still is something people laugh about for internet karma.
/rant
Made me look up the word cranky and found “crankshaft” - a shaft driven by a crank that turns reciprocating motion into rotating motion. Legit.
What are the physical problems one can get through watching porn? If this study is accurate, it seems batting off more often may be a good thing ?
It has nothing to do with porn consumption and is physiological.
I read somewhere some people have "performance anxiety" after watching a lot of porn and lose their boner before penetration, but that's completely different to "never getting a boner".
Dealing with that cognitive dissonance is extremely difficult for some, and seeking a place where not engaging in it is "cool." It's a place for the group to exist with in-group loyalty and mutual reassurance. I feel bad for the folks in nofap, but religious folks will always be with us.
whenever groups of young men engage in sexual self-repression that almost always has a political component. And pay attention to the "men" part, because nofap is almost exclusively a male phenomenon. Religious sexual repression is not, if anything the opposite. Also religious sexual repression is compliance with religious law, not necessarily an act of voluntary discipline.
"nofap" in contrast is essentially an extremely online version of Fight Club, and the political undertones are pretty obvious. It's mostly disaffected guys deciding to undertake some Yukio Mishima-esque training to combat their low self-esteem.
Yet I believe porn is one of the worst addictions, and masturbation, even without porn, should be moderated, but these days the two things work in concert.
It's not a religious book that told me that, it's real life experience.
And one thing I haven't seen mentioned a whole lot, the release of Stable Diffusion has made my problem way, way worse. I've been magnetized to the screen for weeks on end reading up on machine learning concepts and training on dozens of datasets, just to fuel my addiction and the inner weaknesses that prop it up
I sometimes wonder if this is the future, if this kind of irresistible, infinite ultra-personalization is here to stay, and the paper writers will continue to keep their "Ethics" sections to a maximum of five sentences each buried in the back
All of this is in the site guidelines, so if you'd please review them and stick to them in the future, we'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: We already had to ask you this just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34528453
Married men seem more likely to have frequent (ahem) both due to literally living with their partner, as well as having a lower likelihood of depression, higher testosterone (the higher test generally would lead to the marriage) etc.
One thing I actually prefer (ironically) about the single life is that the schedule of your sexual release, which has a big influence on mood, energy, and sleep, is totally under your control.
I still believe that the main reason for the iPad's success (ahead of letting it babysit your kids) was married men taking it into the bathroom to masturbate.
There’s a bell curve for frequency of sex among couples, but far more consistent is a spouse encouraging her husband to go to the doctor.
I worked on a project years ago that was pretty disturbingly accurate at predicting health outcomes by looking at behavior. The most at risk for anything were divorced males, even more than alcohol or drug abuse. Basically that event makes a wide variety of bad outcomes more likely. They are also east to spot and market to with destructive products ranging from alcohol to gambling, you name it.
For women it was different, the caretaking trap was a major risk factor for health issues - the catalyst was often a sick parent.
"The scientists found no evidence that frequent ejaculations mark an increased risk of prostate cancer. In fact, the reverse was true: High ejaculation frequency was linked to a decreased risk"
Give your money to OnlyFans!!1!
Trust the soyence!!!
I don't think this is a good argument against censorship at all.
I doubt there are people/bots spamming about jerking off on HN.
It makes me wonder why this rule was implemented.
I'm not a free speech reductionist, it should be clear. I think pragmatically speaking that if the filters were made, there was a reason and if the filters can be turned off, there's very little of substance here to comment on.
I agree it’s more than zero. But it’s likely several orders of magnitude fewer than the number of comments that were filtered by it — which is to say, if those comments had no effect on readers, or didn’t make them want to come back, then by definition it was a net positive for the site, and thus the community.
Their duty is to the community. The decisions they make are for that goal alone: to collect as many smart people together under one virtual roof as possible, without us tearing each other to shreds. This is as hard as it sounds. The grim reality is that no other community has ever pulled that off.
I believe HN will hit the 100 year mark in longevity. It’s already been around for something like 17. But to get there requires manual intervention at a scale not previously seen. Reddit is on autopilot compared to HN, and although it’s popular, few of us want to stay there.
So when you rally people to fight them for censoring a word, what you’re really doing is claiming to know how to do their jobs more effectively than they do. And they’ve been doing it for many, many years. I once tried to launch an HN clone that for a time achieved small-scale popularity, and it took everything I had in me — all day, every day, mostly curating stories. I could do it, but it’s not fun (though it’s fascinating).
So, try to cut them a little slack and look at the big picture. Are you sure that this is worth rousing everyone up in arms about? Then think it over for awhile, and ask yourself a few more times. If you really try to put yourself in their shoes, as if it was your full time job, then I think you’ll be forced to conclude “It’s complicated.” Or at least that’s the reality that I eventually accepted.
There’s another word that was banned long ago, involving a circle of men. But as pg himself once said (paraphrasing), “I doubt we lost many valuable comments from it.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825942
The coolest part of HN is that you can have an effect. If you see a dead comment that you think will make readers want to return to the site tomorrow, click on its timestamp and then click “vouch.” It only takes one to unkill a comment. But use it sparingly, since it’s a privilege. It was a feature designed for just this sort of situation.
And even the circle word you mentioned, especially in the VC tech world is a pretty legit metaphor for a lot of stuff.
Throwing out comments because they use a specific word is really low effort imo, on the same level as banning the f-word. I'd be surprised if it isn't mostly generating false positives.
But it's so easy for us to sit here and say all that when they're the ones in the field doing the work. If they added masterbation to the list, it's likely because they saw a lot of comments correlated with it -- comments that, again, would drive the average user away from HN over time, rather than keeping us together as a community. The false positives are "for the greater good" in that sense, i.e. the cost of doing business.
It took me a long time to accept this, but there's honestly nothing wrong with that. I used to feel strongly that they were treating users immorally by taking such a callous attitude with them.
What changed my mind was seeing how moderation is done on all the other websites. It made me appreciate that Dan is consistent – and especially that he's consistently clear with his expectations.
The mod team has undoubtedly grown beyond himself by now (he's said as much), so it's also impressive that he's trained his team so well. All of the other mods enforce his same rules, which is no small feat. Just look at how hard it is for Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid) Twitch to get their mod team to be consistent. Dan's crew is so good that the moderation is almost invisible, which is as it should be.
I guess all I'm saying is, similar to a canary in a coal mine, I'm highly sensitive to whether the mods seem to be overstepping and suppressing people or ideas. And if I had to point to a specific case of that happening since 2018, I don't think I'd be able to.
Offtopic from moderation, but Dan's a talented hacker too. https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el seems to be his only public-facing work, and it wasn't till I studied it that I saw just how capable he is at designing large systems. There are very few unnecessary parts in that codebase.
I hope I get a chance to show him my Arc keyword args implementation someday. It dramatically simplified the printing routines https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d... and the dynamic form generators https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d....
Anyway, it just makes me feel a bit sad to see people saying he's low-effort. His efforts are concentrated in specific high-impact areas, which is as it should be. And most of it tends to be mostly invisible -- when he writes code to fight upvote rings or fend off DoS attacks, we don't see it at all, because he was successful.
Time spent reconsidering whether "masterbation" should be banned is time not spent doing those other things. Or spent with his family, and having a life outside of work.
It's somewhat expected when you're commenting a lot and your recent comments have been being downvoted or flagged. It's rather infuriating, however, when neither of those are the case but one of your comments happened to trod on a mod's personal fixation.
If that's not enough or you're seeing an especially egregious case, you can also email mods. I'll do that occasionally, though usually simply vouch dead comments if I feel that's warranted. It apparently takes a few vouches to overcome a kill.
Also Hacker news: you should be crankin' it more.