Ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer (2022)

Wouldn’t be the first time a self-pleasuring tool was widely regarded as a wondrous medical device … there was one that treated a catch—all disease called “hysteria” in the other half of the human population:

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.

You might say the back and forth in this comment thread has spun me out of control.

> One obvious correlation could be testosterone: higher testosterone leading to less prostate cancer.

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"

I’m all for pushing back against the mods. Lord knows I’ve done it more than I probably should have. But one thing I came to understand after my long slugging match with them is that they have a lot of concerns that are very hard to balance. In this case, here’s the calculus: how many valuable comments do you think were lost as a result of killing that word? The kinds of comments you’d read and think “I really want to come back here.”

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.

> Even so, the apparent protection extended to all age groups. In all, men who averaged 4.6–7 ejaculations a week were 36% less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer before the age of 70 than men who ejaculated less than 2.3 times a week on average.

Sure, they use "apparent" as a weasel-word but "protection" is clearly suggesting causation.