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The issue is that you are not getting proper hormone replacement therapy with those. You are getting random levels of chemicals that mess up your hormone balanc

The issue is that you are not getting proper hormone replacement therapy with those. You are getting random levels of chemicals that mess up your hormone balance. Ask anyone on hormone replacement therapy what happens when they skip a dose or mix up the dosage. Depression, headaches, migraines, suicidal thoughts etc. Not something you want the entire society to experience.

smt88 8y ago
Another major difference between the pseudoestrogen problem and proper hormone replacement: consent. The general public has not consented to poorly-understood, poorly-controlled hormone therapy. Most of us are already nonviolent, so the proposed decrease in violence isn't even possible for us. The only net effect, therefore, is likely negative. It's kind of like saying that a minority of men have a testosterone deficiency, so let's put it in the water supply. Doesn't it sound more insane when formulated that way?
tlb 8y ago
The entire society is, in fact, experiencing it today, with 1000s of chemicals, as the Lancet article describes. Most are harmful. But if there are some beneficial ones in there, the medical literature doesn't seem to have a way to account for them.
nostrademons 8y ago
Somewhat playing devil's advocate (I don't particularly buy the specific pseudoestrogen example here), there's a real reporting bias in these random environmental studies. Assume that the environment is always changing, and that some of these changes will be good, some of them will be bad, and most of them will be neutral. If a change is bad, then eventually some study will discover it, there will be a widespread press cycle, and outrage will eventually attempt to revert it. If a change is good, however, it will probably never get published, and if it does it will likely not generate much notice. This is as much a statement about psychology than about biology, and what the definitions of "good" and "bad" are. Us paying more attention to potential negative consequences than positive ones is an example of loss aversion, and the resulting pressure to repress change (because negative changes get more airtime than positive one) is an example of status quo bias. They're often rational from the POV of an individual - you exist by virtue of being well-adapted to the present environment, and so any change in the environment is more likely to harm your own fitness function than individuals who do not yet exist - yet they're irrational from the POV of the system, where you would expect good and bad changes to occur in equal numbers and individuals who are no longer suited to the current environment to be replaced by ones who are. Come to think of it, this may be behind the observed effect where any radical technical innovation or societal change that happens in your teens and twenties is an awesome opportunity to be capitalized on, while any such change that happens in your thirties or later is a threat to the natural order of things. In your late 20s and early 30s you typically make (nearly) irrevocable commitments in life that are the best adaptations you have to the world as it exists then; any change that happens afterwards will relatively benefit younger people who have not made such commitments more than it will benefit you. For biological changes the benefits are shifted even earlier: any change in the environment that affects relative survival rates will benefit people yet to be born more than people already born, because the latter have already won the evolutionary lottery while the future winners among the former still face selection pressure.

smt88 8y ago

Another major difference between the pseudoestrogen problem and proper hormone replacement: consent. The general public has not consented to poorly-understood, poorly-controlled hormone therapy. Most of us are already nonviolent, so the proposed decrease in violence isn't even possible for us. The only net effect, therefore, is likely negative. It's kind of like saying that a minority of men have a testosterone deficiency, so let's put it in the water supply. Doesn't it sound more insane when formulated that way?

tlb 8y ago

The entire society is, in fact, experiencing it today, with 1000s of chemicals, as the Lancet article describes. Most are harmful. But if there are some beneficial ones in there, the medical literature doesn't seem to have a way to account for them.

nostrademons 8y ago

Somewhat playing devil's advocate (I don't particularly buy the specific pseudoestrogen example here), there's a real reporting bias in these random environmental studies. Assume that the environment is always changing, and that some of these changes will be good, some of them will be bad, and most of them will be neutral. If a change is bad, then eventually some study will discover it, there will be a widespread press cycle, and outrage will eventually attempt to revert it. If a change is good, however, it will probably never get published, and if it does it will likely not generate much notice. This is as much a statement about psychology than about biology, and what the definitions of "good" and "bad" are. Us paying more attention to potential negative consequences than positive ones is an example of loss aversion, and the resulting pressure to repress change (because negative changes get more airtime than positive one) is an example of status quo bias. They're often rational from the POV of an individual - you exist by virtue of being well-adapted to the present environment, and so any change in the environment is more likely to harm your own fitness function than individuals who do not yet exist - yet they're irrational from the POV of the system, where you would expect good and bad changes to occur in equal numbers and individuals who are no longer suited to the current environment to be replaced by ones who are. Come to think of it, this may be behind the observed effect where any radical technical innovation or societal change that happens in your teens and twenties is an awesome opportunity to be capitalized on, while any such change that happens in your thirties or later is a threat to the natural order of things. In your late 20s and early 30s you typically make (nearly) irrevocable commitments in life that are the best adaptations you have to the world as it exists then; any change that happens afterwards will relatively benefit younger people who have not made such commitments more than it will benefit you. For biological changes the benefits are shifted even earlier: any change in the environment that affects relative survival rates will benefit people yet to be born more than people already born, because the latter have already won the evolutionary lottery while the future winners among the former still face selection pressure.