Does gaming also use similar spatial skills?
[deleted]
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
221–230 of 303 posts
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#222> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
They have to memorize 25,000 streets. The test is no joke. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur61kzXjvN8
Test may be no joke. But the test is also a joke in the world of GPS and Uber.
I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations constraining supply to bring a service with drastically more supply.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#223Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79. People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
| After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.
They claim to control for these factors in the 5th paragraph of the article here. Which is a standard thing to do in these kind of studies.
So you're point is either not relevant or that they didn't control for age correctly?
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
There weren't a lot of taxis outside of major cities. I think widespread GPS allows ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft to exist in suburbs and other places where taxis weren't a thing before, because it dramatically lowers the bar.
> There weren't a lot of taxis outside of major cities What? In my country at least (France), taxis have been a thing even in the countryside for as long as cars existed (or rather, as long as the telephone has). And I'd be very surprised if that wasn't also the case in most of Western Europe. In fact it's a much easier job when it comes to routing and knowing your passengers' destinations than doing it in a metropol…
I guess countryside France is still only 2 hours from Paris or Marseille, while countryside USA is maybe 8 hours or more from a metropolitan area. Not to mention that the population in this usa countryside is already way lower then any population density in the whole of France.
Operating a taxi corp there would simply be not viable on a financial term.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#225> In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
Correlation and causation and all that. A number of the women in my wife's family have been diagnosed with Alzheimers. All of the women I know in her family also hate driving, because they find it very stressful. It's plausible that people prone to Alzheimers are less likely to be comfortable driving.
Best wishes for your wife's and your continued health.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
It pains me to see such a low-effort contrarian comment at the top: as stated in TFA taxi drivers are below other profession when controlling for age, and there are multiple professions with lower life expectancy that still have significantly higher Alzheimer rate than taxi drivers.
Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study. Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
A distinction is that Alzheimer's is in an uncommon category of mystery diseases.
If a study found people who swim regularly are are less likely to get heart disease, that wouldn't be very surprising because know a lot about why people get heart disease. Therefore it would be valid to insist on more rigour for accepting (swimming => less heart disease) because the only use of that information is for health advice.
However even weak statistical correlations can be a valid lead for further research into Alzheimer's disease if they suggest where to look. You don't need to prove that signposts are correct in order to use them.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study. Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
The comment insinuates that the study did not control for age. The study controlled for age. It's not terrible to not make a good point, but it's not a good point. The not good points should not be ranked highly.
But after the study controls for age the starkness of the effect more or less disappears (eyeballing Fig 1, the 2nd graph).
It turns out that there is a profession with a lowest risk of getting Alzheimer's (duh, one had to exist) and it looks like a slight outlier (it's the lowest, we'd expect that one to look like a slight outlier). As outliers go it isn't that impressive, it looks like it is part of a fairly boring distribution. We just plotted 400 data points on the graph, the 1/400 chance weird data point is going to look a little weird. We're actually just reading a lot into the fact that the 2nd data point in ambulance drivers which isn't all that convincing.
Not to knock the study, I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that. But the study appears to be telling me that Alzheimer's is random with respect to occupation and ideally don't spend so much time on the road if you want to live to see old age.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#228> rarely
> roughly 1 in 100 compared with 1 in 60
I guess the broad population also rarely dies of Alzheimer’s?
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It pains me to see such a low-effort contrarian comment at the top: as stated in TFA taxi drivers are below other profession when controlling for age, and there are multiple professions with lower life expectancy that still have significantly higher Alzheimer rate than taxi drivers.
Fella has read the article, has an argument and some stats. What more do you want from a comment? He isn't running a study. Besides, the point is a good one. There are a lot of professions. If we glance at the underlying study [0] Figure 1 suggests that we'd probably expect to see an outlier or two in that mess just through chance, we're expecting a few p [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
> Fella has read the article
Then not closely enough? The study adjusts for age, which is the core of OP’s criticism.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables " 'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/ Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/
Also https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/26/stop-confounding-yours...
About that old Slate Star Codex article, I find it amazing that no one in that 70+ comment section of presumably smart and Rational people, bothered to look up to see if there were interventional studies on bullying.
Dan Olweus did several of them in the 70s and 80s, and fought to his dying day against programs which didn't have casual intervention studies backing them.