161–170 of 204 posts
Not sure how to reconcile this with the fact that suicide rates in rural areas of the US far exceed suicide rates in urban areas. Do the availability of guns in rural areas really offset this effect that much?
> The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm. This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
That would also remove other things from the air, which ruins the experiment. The only way to measure if a particular type of pollution is responsible is to only filter that one out, which is basically impossible, or to increase the amount of that one, which is unethical because it's potentially harmful.
1. Does adding an air filter in peoples home improve health outcomes? 2. Does pumping a suspected noxious element into a room in lab harm some small group of people in some limited testable way?
Question 1 is better than 2. Why? Because there are more people like those in question 1. Answers to question 1 inform my future choices, answers to question 2 do not. I prefer answers that improve health to those that harm health.
Always prefer observational studies done in the field (in situ). Demanding experimental studies done in a lab will give you less bang for your buck. Let's all do our part to drive down health care costs, please.
No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.
Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America. https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself. According to this, it is also true…
I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not true of asthma. Outdoor air quality in the United States has improved over time [1] and asthma rates has increased. [1] https://www.epa.gov/air-trends
Auto immune diseases as a whole have increased over just the past 30 years; I'd speculate asthma is a part of this. It will be interesting to see the driving environmental causalities behind these autoimmune disease increases if pollution is not a key variable.
Buy a personal HEPA air filter on Amazon and get purified water delivered. Quit trusting your city officials with your health.
If your air or water quality suck, take it to city hall
Also worth noting that the city can only do so much. A factory 3 counties over could spew noticeable smog, and you don't have any recourse outside of moving.
No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.
Our brains spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire
"Our teeth spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that scrubbing them with unnatural mint-flavored pastes and plastic bristles would make them go haywire"
"Our eyes spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that covering them with unnatural lenses would make them go haywire"
etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America. https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself. According to this, it is also true…
That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age ranges, etc. I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally…
The algorithm to pursue truth:
1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
2. Reduce those differences however you can.
3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
4. That's the whole thing.
Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.
A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.
Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".
An example: Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.
> The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm. This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1408795
Personally, I'm down with harm reduction even if it doesn't teach us anything. As a goal it seems pretty good on its own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice! But no mention of depression there.
Spousal death is a big cause of depression. Is that sufficient to convince you of a causal chain? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4119479/ I wish I had as many advocates as the devil did.