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Sniffing women's tears reduces aggressive behavior in men - 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 - Dec 2023 (8 comments)
So 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
Could create an unstable equilibrium where too much peace leads to a world wide lady tear shortage.
But 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% )
> But then we can't have woman leaders
How did you reach this conclusion?
The 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.
The 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.
If both are actually odorless then what's the mechanism? Magic?
Obviously if there is any effect then the tears aren't actually odorless.
My first thought was whether:
1. women react the same way 2. men's tears have the same effect
Babies produce a chemical in their heads that reduces aggressive behavior in males but does the opposite in females. It’s called HEX[1].
https://www.science.org/content/article/chemical-emitted-bab....
Maybe but men don’t cry so your hypothesis is hard to validate.
The effort to untangle a 500 million year old codebase with zero comments leads to some strange discoveries.
With janky disassemblers, for an incompletely understood massively parallel processing environment, featuring non-deterministic execution into the bargain.
Yeah. Going to need more coffee..
Plus no tests, no original developers, and most of the time - _but just most of the time_ - it "just works"...
I'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.
There's an integration test called natural selection.
Biology 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.
And you do NOT want to get the "unbounded replication error"
This 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.
From 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.
It's not like infants cry silently
> Twenty-five men
So, not a very large size.
I think I'll wait for some replication before taking these results as established.
Sample size isn't holy.
Indeed, the prior probability is important too. That's quite low for this study so it needs an even larger than normal sample size to be believed. 25 is definitely insufficient.
It'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."
Marketing 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.
Miranda!
Completely reasonable when understood from an evolutionary point of view.
Only 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.
Spraying some into opponent's corner before a fight match to increase chances of winning a bet?
These 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.
The 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!
There should be a brand of poppers called Women's Tears.
>subordinate male blind mole rats cover themselves in tears to reduce dominant male aggression toward them.
Is this an established fact?
What an absolutely random thing....
It's most certainly not random.
Or a design feature
Conceptualize the aroma
Does 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!
The 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.
Average HN front page headline
To be followed by a Show HN listing for someone's Women's-Tears-as-a-Service startup