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A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males
- lannisterstark 3y agoWhat an absolutely random thing....
- globular-toast 3y agoIt's most certainly not random.
- lannisterstark 3y ago"what a random thing to research" more like.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoOr a design feature
- webwielder2 3y agoThe effort to untangle a 500 million year old codebase with zero comments leads to some strange discoveries.
- greenbit 3y agoWith janky disassemblers, for an incompletely understood massively parallel processing environment, featuring non-deterministic execution into the bargain. Yeah. Going to need more coffee..
- laszlojamf 3y agoPlus no tests, no original developers, and most of the time - _but just most of the time_ - it "just works"...
- sigmoid10 3y agoI'd say the coding and testing toolchain doesn't work most of the time. In fact it rarely does. But since we only see code changes that didn't kill the entire system permanently, we're left with a a huge amount of legacy trash and a few things on top of it that worked out by amazing coincidences accumulated over millions of years.
- astrange 3y agoThere's an integration test called natural selection.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Netcob 3y agoAnd you do NOT want to get the "unbounded replication error"
- inglor_cz 3y agoBiology is probably the most obvious example of a maze of Chesterton fences all around. The systems evolved spontaneously, with no design plan beforehand, so they often don't make immediate sense to us, logical creatures. Many of the features are weird, but we must be careful around them, because we don't know which purpose they serve or once served. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
- hasty_pudding 3y ago[flagged]
- wuiheerfoj 3y ago[flagged]
- shutupnerd0000 3y agoAverage HN front page headline
- notahacker 3y agoTo be followed by a Show HN listing for someone's Women's-Tears-as-a-Service startup
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seaparter 3y agoThere should be a brand of poppers called Women's Tears.
- branon 3y agoConceptualize the aroma
- Horffupolde 3y agoCompletely reasonable when understood from an evolutionary point of view.
- imtringued 3y agoOnly if male aggression leads to the death of the woman. Otherwise you have to explain how producing tears and sensing tears leads to more offspring.
- Horffupolde 3y agoMale aggression brings retaliation by her relatives and society in general. Extreme aggression is sub-optimal. We are social beings.
- donquichotte 3y agoSo the inverse of the final scene in Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum" is plausible? 1) collect women's tears from donations (kickstarter.com) 2) spread them as a fine mist at G20 3) world peace Edit: maybe this is what Hugh Laurie was singing about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoCould create an unstable equilibrium where too much peace leads to a world wide lady tear shortage.
- PedroBatista 3y agoBut then we can't have woman leaders. Only men and a steady supply of women tears and my guess is they'll create an OPEC for that miracle liquid ( which was never used to manipulate anyone, 100% )
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago> But then we can't have woman leaders How did you reach this conclusion?
- renewiltord 3y agoThe whole exercise is facetious but in that world a woman leader would be all powerful. Immune to aggression-suppression by tear mist. She'd conquer all. Unless stopped by other women. The war would be total.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoWouldn't it mean that there will only be female leaders? If man could be suppressed by tears, they are not strong enough to compete with someone who can't be suppressed.
- karolist 3y agoSpraying some into opponent's corner before a fight match to increase chances of winning a bet?
- booleandilemma 3y agoDoes it only work with women's tears, or would the same effect happen with men's tears? So interesting! I see they compared women's tears with saline solution, they should compare male tears and female tears next!
- rahimnathwani 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743921
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThese were sad tears. I wonder if there are “angry” female tears that increase male aggression. Anecdotally and historically, there have been times when female tears were the cause of male aggression against the person who had caused the female tears.
- hyperpape 3y agoFrom the study: > Moreover, although we tested tears from women donors, we speculate that all tears would have a similar effect. This becomes particularly ecologically relevant with infant tears, as infants lack verbal tools to curb aggression against them and are therefore more likely to rely on chemosignals.
- kevinmchugh 3y agoIt's not like infants cry silently
- trelane 3y ago> Twenty-five men So, not a very large size. I think I'll wait for some replication before taking these results as established.
- asplake 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409
- oldtownroad 3y agoThe headline is technically accurate but miscommunicates the conclusions we should draw. The subjects sniffed women’s “emotional” tears but the control was an odourless liquid. Therefore what they actually validated was whether smelling something before engaging in a game designed to illicit anger reduced anger. What if they smelled perfume? The tears of a man? Non-emotional tears? Freshly cut grass? There’s zero evidence that women’s “emotional” tears were important.
- nmarinov 3y agoThe first mention of this indeed does not specify that both are odorless but the second sentence does: > Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing.
- mcpackieh 3y agoIf both are actually odorless then what's the mechanism? Magic? Obviously if there is any effect then the tears aren't actually odorless.
- exizt88 3y agoCarbon Monoxide is odorless, but it’s effects are still real and well-understood.
- mcpackieh 3y agoIf they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.
- mrits 3y ago
- A_non_e-moose 3y agoIt's only a matter of time now until the military industrial complex picks up on this and puts it in a missile. I can see it already "M-249 Mistifier - wide area pheromonal aggression reducer. Safely pacify opposing forces with no civilian casualties and no reputational damage."
- A_non_e-moose 3y agoMarketing drove up demand, production had to be ramped up, and that's how we ended up in the dystopian nightmare of dozens of single women in open warehouses watching tragic romantic comedies, crying into a trough.
- A_non_e-moose 3y agoVice then released the following documentary "How low-income southeast Asian single cis and trans women are paid 3$/h to cry" 5 years later Prof. von Tränenberg is awarded the Nobel prizes of Chemistry and Peace for the discovery of synthetic female tears.
- wintorez 3y agoMiranda!
- arp242 3y agoSniffing women's tears reduces aggressive behavior in men - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725595 - Dec 2023 (14 comments) A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735409 - Dec 2023 (8 comments)
- DonHopkins 3y agoThe downside is that it's difficult and troublesome to collect them in quantity. How could they mass produce ethically sourced human female tears? Could they pay women to watch sad movies and harvest their tears? Would baby tears be as effective? They might be cheaper and more ethical to produce, since babies cry all the time. A big enough cry-baby might be able to collect enough tears to pay its way through grad school!
- lockywolf 3y agoThe comments are brilliant and nail this idiotic research perefectly. One more thing to note: 6 women aged 22-25, so the title should have included "young fertile women". And still one more: a research on 25 subjects is laughable. 25 000 would make a little more sense.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoThis is exactly the kind of the study that created the replication crisis in social psychology. It's an absurdly large effect size, a very small sample size, with no plausible mechanism. They also used unusual statistics -- a bootstrap rather than a straightforward unpaired t-test -- and got marginally significant effects (p = .029). This will not replicate.
- Attic_ 3y ago>subordinate male blind mole rats cover themselves in tears to reduce dominant male aggression toward them. Is this an established fact?
- 6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago[dead]