I think in the future more cases of Alzheimer's are gonna be present
e.g with the potent use of marijuana that's present these days, excess drinking & lack of reading + dumbing down of population via use of llms.
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
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Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#262[dead]
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
The study accounts for that. Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.
Alzheimer's is an entirely different beast than normal mental atrophy and there are plenty of stories of otherwise intelligent people ending up with it. I'm not saying you shouldn't try using your brain more but this is just like saying Stephen Hawking should have tried exercising more.
The article doesn’t say taxi drivers are immune to Alzheimer’s. It specifically talks about having more cognitive reserve, which means having “more brain” to atrophy. Essentially Alzheimer’s makes their hyper-developed hippocampus become that of an average’s person because they started off higher up.
Being intelligent doesn’t mean you still learn new things as you age. Using your brain doesn’t do anything, it’s using your brain in novel ways.
That companion is also bunk. Two entirely different diseases.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am glad Uber plowed through various stupid regulations What like safety checks? London had a huge minicab system, which is very much not knowledge based. Addison lee also had internet booking of cabs way before uber, but with the advantage that cars were roadworthy and the drivers were safety vetted. TFL came down hard on uber 1 for safety and 2 for clogging up the fucking roads and making busses slow. (see https…
It's very comforting when your cabbie knows exactly where you want to go with one prompt, versus being with some uber droid who can't look past their phone.
100%
"which $generic_street_name? the one near covent garden, or the one near Bow?"
saves both time and money
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#265Taxi 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.
From the article: > 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. Does that answer your concern?
No. There are a lot of other comments on why many do not believe it.
There is no reason to believe they have enough data to adjust for any of their controls. It looks to me like they plotted everything and then found the "outlier" which statistically we know will exist in a true random sample.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
My 2019 car had the cardinal directions in the mirror (N, NE, E, ES, S etc). My 2025 does not anymore. I hate it. I think it helps to get that baseline of orientation, and then you look at the street numbers, and it all starts to come together.
Suction cup compasses are ~ $10 on amazon if it bothers you. Won't be in the mirror though.
They have been reality for many years. A compass built into the car didn't exist in the 1990s (it probably did in luxury cars - I never drove them), then moved into mainstream cars, and now the fad is dieing.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Uber famously pulled out of Austin for a year because Austin wanted to require background checks with fingerprinting on Uber drivers. I don't really like their style of "plowing through" regulation.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But after the study controls for age the starkness of the effect more or less disappears (eyeballing Fig 1, the 2nd graph).
Adjusting for age, Alzheimers deaths were 1/100 for taxi drivers, and 1/60 for the general public. That's extremely significant. However you feel about the graphs means nothing compared to the actual numbers presented here.
> I'm sure it is a great study. Lots of science done. They do good graphs and all that.
Your choice to be dismissively anti-science helps to explain the bad point you're making.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#269I think in the future more cases of Alzheimer's are gonna be present e.g with the potent use of marijuana that's present these days, excess drinking & lack of reading + dumbing down of population via use of llms.
The dumbing down has started way before llms, way before social media. I never thought I would miss the TV and magazines era.
Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plausible, but then you'd expect to find the same effect in other people who passed similarly demanding tests once. For example in people who studied something geometry-heavy. Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career. If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a r…
The Test is repeated every day you get in the cab. If you get into a black cab in London and ask to be taken to any location, anywhere within 6 miles of Charing Cross, that driver will know immediately the right route to take without satnav. To get to that point they need to know 25,000 streets and many, many landmarks - statues, museums, galleries, restaurants, hotels, and so on. I used to regularly drink with a cab…
One of the things that seems effective in reducing Alzheimers is a "flushing action" inside of the brain (Glymphatic system). I wonder if this spatial reasoning maps into a spatial activation in the brain. It would be interesting to put London cabbies in an fMRI machine and have them plan routes.
It would also be interesting to look at sleep traces of cabbies.