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I usually hear collectivism used as a broader term for any system where the welfare of the group is put before that of the individual. Everything from ancient Scandinavian societies up to modern Marxism. Collectivism is egalitarian and seeks to achieve economic equality through control of production and distribution. Decisions always defer to a group rather than an individual. If it's a company, workers share in profits and participate in decision making as equals. Statism specifically means, IIRC, a system where a central power structure controls social and economic affairs. Authoritarian governments tend to be statist. They can be a perversion of an egalitarian collectivist society, in many instances, with power concentrating centrally. In thr original collectivist meaning of communism, the concept of a "communist party" would tend to be contradictory.

Agreed. Things will change over time, and we should not assume that testosterone level is the only factor that can go into making competition equitable and ensuring XX athletes can remain competitive. Throughout this thread I have tried to envision a multifaceted approach evolving over time as we learn more. I think testosterone levels alone will have a limited ability to encompass all of women's sports. Testosterone probably have a larger impact where you have individual sports and reliance on muscle mass (e.g. weight lifting) and less of an impact on team sports that rely less on muscle mass (e.g. synchronized swimming). You wouldn't even have to check testosterone levels (theoretically) for weight lifting if you introduced handicapping. For instance, add 'x' pounds to the bar for the transgender woman to accomplish the same lift as a cisgender woman.

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Hardly. These observations have been standard stuff for most of my lifetime (I'm 68). That's why you find the better run economies in Europe tend to practice a form of mixed economy, sometimes referred to as social democracy. In short, people have learnt what to take from the ideals of socialism and blend those with regulated market economic mechanisms to get the necessary feedback from consumer to producer. What has become equally clear over the last couple of decades is that inadequately regulated market mechanisms can also fail to deliver for citizens. The water and railway companies in Britain are examples, as is the health system in the USA. What we are also now seeing, with the new transnational IT entities such as Amazon, or Zuckerberg's empire, is that it is becoming a struggle to prevent the development of international monopolies which hand an unacceptable degree of control to producers, while disempowering consumers, just as much as any state-planned enterprise in the old USSR. It seems to me issues like these are the real food for thought nowadays.

Socialism is a thorny topic for many people. What comes to your mind when I mention the word? Some might think of horrendously mismanaged nations like Venezuela or Cuba. Others might leap to the idea of wealth redistribution. But what is socialism? Fundamentally, it is a system in which the means of production (factories, farms, etc.) are controlled by society at large (i.e., government), as opposed to being privately owned. Ultimately, this means what to produce, and how much of a given thing to produce is managed centrally. The first obvious question is, how do central planners make these decisions? For a socialism on a national scale, the question of how much to produce requires an immense amount of essentially real time data and analysis to be able to make appropriate decisions. In terms of what to produce, things are even trickier. Sometimes it’s difficult to see the potential applications of a new idea / product. Lasers are an example of this; when lasers were first invented, nobody really knew what to do with them. It took years for somebody to figure out that we could use lasers to scan a printed code, giving us the barcodes we use every time we scan an item at the grocery store. Other applications like optical discs and fiber optic communications would soon follow. But what if a central planners saw no merit to the laser, and decided to shelve the project? There’s always the possibility that a private individual could continue thinking on the problem, but without government or corporate funds for research and development, this becomes quite difficult. My next observation regards the propensity of socialist nations to devolve into horrifying dictatorships. The issue can be boiled down to a single word: power. In socialism, political and economic power are merged. Anyone familiar with the phrase “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” might be able to work out how this would lead to problems when concentrated into the hands of a few people. Democratic Socialism has its own problems; polling people on every little issue takes time and effort. For useful decisions to be produced, it requires that the populace be well informed on a broad array of topics. In both cases, it requires that the decision makers (the few, or the majority) be “benign” in the sense that they don’t abuse their power to harm a particular subgroup, an ethnic minority as an example. Ultimately, when taking these issues into account, it becomes clearer as to why socialism is often looked down upon in the West. It also becomes easier to see how the inefficiencies of central planning combined with the potential for abuse of power directly leads to the issues we see in nations like Venezuela and Cuba. Food for thought.

The odd behavior of a subatomic particle may shake up physics (msn.com)

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which could be translated as Union of Collectivist Socialist Republics.

I agree with others here that contraception access and elimination of poverty are both core to achieving a reduced frequency of abortion, but I came to say EDUCATION itself is even more fundamental. Not just sex education, either… Education. Period. It helps solve all of the other referenced problems concurrently.

The original vision for the "society at large" was not a government but a hierarchical structure of "collectives" (called, Soviets).

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Fallacious reasoning is your enemy here. It's insulting when someone bothers to explain something to you and then you reply using logical fallacies or some twisted version of what they said. This, for example, is a classic strawman: I found this extremely insulting. This got you 4 downvotes. It reminds me of the nationalist zealots who respond to any criticism of war with "If you think our troops don't need any support, ok, whatever". As a response, it seemed petulant and childish. Nobody suggested we already know everything about space. And btw, science is NOT about finding answers to questions. It's about finding the explanations that have the most evidence to support them, so we can trust those explanations, and keep looking for better ones. If you think you've found the answer to a question, you stop looking, and we definitely don't want that.

Yes that's fair. And in fact I think that sometimes happens, in cases where a risk was not reasonably foreseeable by the company that made the product.

What @studiot said above, plus, in connection with a "primitive socialism" mentioned earlier, there exist a modern variety in the form of socialist kibutzes in Palestine / Israel.

It doesn't. Ignoring the answers can result in negative points. Asking the same question over and over while ignoring the answers that people took time to write will definitely give you negative points. Making up spur of the moment conjectures to answer your own question, because you don't like the answers you received is also an excellent way to get down votes.

Physics ? Maybe you are looking at the wrong Science ? I am not a social scientist but I understand that (early) Christianity is scientifically classed as "Primitive Socialism". How dows that play out with your definition of Socialism? +1 by the way for actually offering a definition of a term you are intending using. This necessary courtesy is all too often omitted.

But this is ad-hoc cherry-picking, rather than a scientific approach to what the data points indicate. Earlier in the thread @Ken Fabian posted a curve showing the effect of LOESS (or LOWESS) smoothing on the data. I looked that up and found this description: https://www.statisticshowto.com/lowess-smoothing/ That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends. It makes sense to include a good data set from before the suspected influence starts to manifest itself, in order to see whether there is any kind of baseline, from which the trend starts to depart.

I enjoy your questions and your quest, M. My OP answer is a bit simplistic, and immensely complex in the implementation: fix poverty. But it's the answer I keep circling back to. It seems to me that most of the problems that people are pinpointing here flow from impoverishment. Both economic and informational. Empower young women with knowledge, self-confidence, freedom to choose their path...and abortion would be rare. Teach young men respect for that process.

Some said, if we would have condoms, we would not have Hitler, some said, if we would have condoms, we would not have Stalin, some said, if we would have condoms, we would not have Putin..

Well that is the keystone to the whole issue, though. I.e. without contraception, you basically have no control when and if to get pregnant. And that will inevitably leave abortion as the only alternative if a child is not wanted. This is part is extremely complicated as it requires basically a complete overhaul in society. For example, if women want a career in a competitive field, it often means the end of it. Dropping out of a field and then getting back in after a while can be extremely hard. The main crutch that folks have been thinking about is better childcare, but even so, mostly women spend more time on children and household than men, for which children are less associated with progress in a career. There have been various attempts (including obligatory paternity leave) to even out the field and change perception, but it is a slow process with a lot of backsliding. But again, when it comes specifically to avoid abortion, the answer is obvious, improve control regarding when or if to get pregnant. If your question is how do you get folks to have more children that is a rather different issue.

You can't dodge the obvious. Prevention is so much better than cure in every health area that I'm aware of. I do get where you're coming from, I don't like abortion, I support the right to it reluctantly, it's a no-winner situation, and there's no right/wrong, just shades of grey as usual. A full term abortion really is killing a baby, I can't argue against that, but where it stops being a fetus and starts being a baby there is no answer to. I think the current rules in this country (UK) are neither right or wrong, but are as good a compromise as it's possible to reach.

Free contraception for all, no questions asked. Free contraception advice for all, no questions asked. Free counselling for anyone who wants it. The world is overpopulated. All that stuff should be free. Tax religious organisations to pay for it all. They've been tax-free for far too long.

I take my ignorance as an article of faith.?(not just faith,experience) Everything I encounter is an ephemeral acquisition of knowledge that is true to the extent that it makes sense of my contemporaneous perceptions. I also sense something is coming down the road and expect that it will be similar to the road already traveled. So,to answer the OP might we say that discovery is the nature of existence?(at least for living entities) As an aside definitions are so important but so constricting and when faced with an unanswerable but interesting question like this one we may have to indulge in flights of fancy at times.

The reduction in abortion rates translates into a change in the projected lifetime prevalence of abortion from one in three women in the United States to one in four. Such a rapid reduction is of tremendous public health importance, and careful consideration of the causes of the decline is merited

A large quantity of ammonium nitrate exposed to intense heat can trigger an explosion. Storing the chemical near large fuel tanks, in bulk in large quantities and in a poorly-ventilated facility could cause a massive blast. The larger the quantity, the more risk it will detonate

And I have another question: If Earth is moving at a speed of about 30 km/s around the sun, shouldn´t we see the milky way more red shifted when it is moving away from us compared to when it is moving towards us? If we can detect the effect of gravity in a little tower on the red shift of light, I think we should also be able to detect this difference every year. And if we move at a speed of about 300 km/s around the center of the milky way, shouldn´t we see the galaxies behind us on this journey more red shifted than the galaxies in front of us? Unfortunately, it seems that we can still not confirm in what direction we are moving around the center of the milky way, but what if we are moving towards Andromeda and this galaxy therefore appears to be moving into our direction because it is more "blue shifted"? By the way, you can give me a -1000 too, I really don´t care about this "reputation" or whatever that should be. If asking the wrong questions means a lower reputation then something is wrong here. Bad reputation should be if I insult somebody or if I do not let others speak or if I post racist text or pornography. So this reputation is just that you do not like somebody showing up with different ideas or asking questions that "apparently were already answered". So the lower my "reputation" gets while asking questions in a civilized manner, the lower the reputation of this website gets and the less credibility I have that people here are objective and open-minded. I am really lucky for not beeing one of your children.

This "reputation" seems to be only related to resentment the guys here have lol How can asking questions reduce your reputation? This definitely does not make any sense, but it´s funny and shows me where human science stands today. This would have been totally different 30 years ago. This page does not seem to be serious. I came to this conclusion: "If asking questions reduces the reputation, then this is the wrong place to ask questions." "And if this is not a place to ask questions, then it is not a "scientific" forum at all."