@urusan This is going to sound weird, maybe oversharing. But... I grew up in an industrial town that didn't have the greatest air quality. Into my early 20s, I always had irregular monthly periods.
Moved away in my mid-20s, half way across the country, to a city with little hard industry and beautiful clean air. Periods immediately became as regular and predictable as the morning sunrise. And stayed that way. Kind of disconcerting.
@lulu_powerful@WhippoorwillSong I work in the life sciences and the issue is that we haven't really had the tools (mental or physical) to really understand what's going on.
Our bodies aren't non-deterministic, but they are chaotic, which is similar. It's like an enormous pachinko machine.
Traditional science only has statistics to deal with this kind of system, they need huge numbers of samples to do anything, and each sample is a person's life, so our tools are weak and expensive.
The data we're getting is way better nowadays because of improving physical tools. Genome sequencing, constantly improving labs, better cheaper scans, etc. We also have improving ways to make finer changes so we can see what happens.
Then we also have the data analysis part of the equation: we have such powerful computers now and hugely improving data science techniques. We have a lot more capacity to cut through the chaos.
If you are exposed to a lot of hard radiation, your risk of cancer goes up, but predicting who gets cancer and who will be just fine is next to impossible.
In comparison, not exposing people to hard radiation is an easy and effective measure to avoid cancer.
We need a different strategy. Instead of understanding how things are we should focus more on what we want them to be.
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