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Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

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Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#61

Post by freemint »

thrown_22 wrote: post #56
klodolph wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has got to be one of the worst takes on IRBs I’ve ever heard. The basic argument here is that rules are ineffective because bad actors ignore them. - Before IRBs, unethical experiments were done by professors and grad students with disposal to all of the resources they normally have. - People don’t always know what the ethical implications of their study is, or how it could negatively impact participants. - The…

That's a very naive view of the expanding bureaucracy which must grow to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. IRBs don't need to be ran by anyone more competent than a 5 year old to catch the cases you're talking about. What they have metastasis to today is just another part of the administrative industrial complex which has strangled academia.

The question is how do we get 5 year olds between planning an unethical experiment (consciously or not) and the means to such experiments financed with tax dollars?

Turns out 5 year olds might catch all the bad experiment but due to lack of understanding in the field they will also reject a lot of valid experiments. Domain experts and people who have thought a lot about ethics might have better false positive and false negative rates.

Regulating constraints which impose a prevention paradox is though and is vulnerable to over bureaucratisation. I am unaware how this is handled but you told me nothing convincing which indicates that there is no back pressure limiting how much bureaucracy can be created by IRB.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#62

Post by ETH_start »

taylorius wrote: post #2

Interesting. A possible mechanism for the legendary passion of people from "hot blooded" countries?

If anything, people who originate in cold climate countries visiting hot-blooded countries would receive more UVB due to less skin melanin, and thus be more hot blooded than the natives of hot blooded countries when interacting with them, and vice versa, so that would't explain the association.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#63

Post by whyoh »

derefr wrote: post #27
numpad0 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how reduced UV exposure is supposed to be more attributable to sunscreens than to office labors. Most industrial materials block roughly 100% of UV rays, except viewing windows which allows as much as 1%. Therefore, just staying in any modern building alone cuts down UV exposure by 99% at very least. There is absolutely no way some translucent face painting does that.

People have been working white-collar jobs indoors behind UV-reflective windows for 50+ years now. Birth-rate decline — especially to below-replacement levels — begins much more recently than that; and is only happening in certain countries. The set of countries experiencing birth-rate decline is not 1:1 correlated with the set of countries with high/increasing white-collar employment; but, AFAICT, it is 1:1 correlat…

>but, AFAICT, it is 1:1 correlated with the set of countries that have strong avoidance of tanning / strong interest in skin-whitening.

I'm not seeing that. The countries that are most into avoidance of tanning are probably in Southern Asia, or Asia in general. Their birth rates are not that low, with the exception of Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#64

Post by inglor_cz »

klodolph wrote: post #60
pas wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institut... classic feature creep + bureaucratization (so it's now done by a special class of IRB administrators, not really by peers, etc)

I would normally be a bit skeptical of anything published by CSPI.

Given that American universities now routinely have a lot more administrators than teaching staff (still very untypical elsewhere in the world), wouldn't you at least agree that the bureaucratic bloat is real?

This is, after all, what the students are paying in their tuition, which is becoming a major burden on the American middle class.

(Ironically, "tuition" as a word promises that the money is mostly spent on teaching, not on administration and amenities.)

There is a strange reluctance on the American liberal left to criticize greediness in academia or even acknowledge that such thing exists. Politically, I get it, the academia is overwhelmingly liberal-left, so there is an instinct not to alienate it. But there surely must be some upper bound to the growth of tuition costs, after which the burden becomes unbearable.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#65

Post by nottorp »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #6
derefr wrote: post #3

Implying that a primary causal factor for globally-declining birth rates could be... increased adoption of sunscreen, leading to decreases in libido? (I'm only half-joking; the countries that are most obsessed with keeping skin white — and so are likely the highest sunscreen users — are also the countries with the lowest birth rates.)

> the countries that are most obsessed with keeping skin white — and so are likely the highest sunscreen users Isn't it rather more about avoiding skin cancer?

I use it to avoid burns?

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#67

Post by southerntofu »

_9xrb wrote: post #14
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the countries that are most obsessed with keeping skin white — and so are likely the highest sunscreen users Isn't it rather more about avoiding skin cancer?

While American and European sunbathers tend to seek the perfect tan, many Indian and East Asian women avoid it at all costs, through sunscreen and a whole bevy of skin-lightening products: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18268914 https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005927/chinas-quest-for-fair... Such standards of beauty are quite old and largely predate Western colonialism. My impression is that they were often linked…

> My impression is that they were often linked to caste or class, where higher-class people spent more time indoors while lower-class workers spent more time out in the sun.

I'm no expert on the topic, but i heard people refer to this sort of social symbol and discrimination as "colorism".

For anecdote, in France, "sang bleu" (blue blood) used to refer to the nobles and higher classes, as they didn't work the fields, and their thin and pale skin let see through the blue-looking veins. From what i hear, it appears before the revolution this biological distinction was formally racialized: the higher classes with their never-sighted "blue blood" was another "race" as the lower peoples whose spilled blood we could confirm was red.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#68

Post by hackerlight »

davesque wrote: post #44
littlestymaar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as we know, humans are a tropical species, which means reasoning about summer and winter is likely to be more misleading than anything.

Doesn't it seem like a common misconception that evolution takes eons? Without being an expert, it seems plausible that we've adapted biologically since venturing out from the tropics.

But that "we" includes people that didn't venture out of the tropics, who presumably are impacted the same way by UVB, which if true would refute the hypothesis.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#69

Post by jvanderbot »

samename wrote: post #12
arbol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly answering your question but related: "early sunscreen formulations were disastrous, shielding users from the UVB rays that cause sunburn but not the UVA rays that cause skin cancer. Even today, SPF ratings refer only to UVB rays, so many users may be absorbing far more UVA radiation than they realize." https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-...

How can you know if it does both? Look for UVA on the bottle?

Zinc Oxide does. Kid sunscreen is almost always zink oxide to prevent hormone disruption from the nasty stuff they put in adult sunscreen.

The term "broad spectrum" is used to denote UVA/UVB protection in the US, and is an FDA-regulated term.

Re: Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior

#70

Post by wongarsu »

hackerlight wrote: post #68
davesque wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it seem like a common misconception that evolution takes eons? Without being an expert, it seems plausible that we've adapted biologically since venturing out from the tropics.

But that "we" includes people that didn't venture out of the tropics, who presumably are impacted the same way by UVB, which if true would refute the hypothesis.

At a glance the study doesn't seem to investigate that at all.

The authors are from Israel, so I guess the participants are Israelis too. That's one of the more ethnically diverse places, but only 12% of Israelis are of African origin. Of course not all of Africa is in the tropics, but there are a couple of Asian Israelis who are from the tropics, so let's estimate it at about 12% with mostly tropical ancestors. That might just vanish within the noise of the data unless you specifically look at the correlation to ethnicity.

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