Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's • Hacker News Board

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#291

Post by Zak » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

deaton wrote: post #267

nojvek wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An open question is whether the rideshare model, where the service provider knows which passenger was with which driver at which time and place solves the problem that regulation was trying to address.

I would have expected someone to publish research comparing crimes against passengers by rideshare drivers versus taxi drivers by now, but a quick attempt to find that came up short due to lack of data about taxi drivers.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#292

Post by dekhn » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:38 PM UTC

RIMR wrote: post #268

roenxi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gra…

Comparing 1/100 and 1/60 doesn't mean anything in terms of statistical significance (you would need to know more).

They aren't being anti-science and it's low-quality to suggest they are.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#293

Post by Mawr » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC

brandonmenc wrote: post #107

coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the typical cheap HN reaction to a paper, along with "correlation is not causation", and as usual, for things already factored in into it.

Hilarious, because accounting for this stuff is drilled into your head when you study the softer sciences (like psychology) even as an undergrad.

I like how for example if I say contractors can be bad or even awful at their jobs and we'll all nod and agree, but to merely suggest a doctor or someone with a PHD may be, it's blasphemy.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#294

Post by segmondy » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

older taxi drivers from the past I guess, these days the modern taxi drivers are almost all GPS reliant.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#295

Post by jambalaya8 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #290

bluGill wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They definitely were in (some) cars in the 90s. Probably in the late 80s too. I did IT work for my school district in the 90s and I remember our vans had them. Realtime (digital) MPG displays were showing up around the same time. My parents had the same model van, but an earlier year; we didn't have the fancy digital compass mirror, just a suction cup compass ball.

they used to sell the suction cup things in my neighborhood in the early/mid-80s. I remember having one to go take a walk in the woods nearby.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#296

Post by jambalaya8 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 10:20 AM UTC

cortic wrote: post #30

Taxi 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.

I am pretty sure that a dataset controlling for that would (laughing here) not negate the fact that fewer people who lived past the mean date that are taxi drivers died of a related disorder.

That said, suggesting it is related to the career as opposed to, say, the fact that a higher percentage of taxi drivers carry some other set of genes or genetic markers that either led them in some way to become a taxi driver or contributed to a lack of development of the disorder, is pretty weak. In the United States and I think a few other countries the number of taxi drivers which are immigrants from a handful of countries outnumbers any other type.

And, the world has changed a lot. Are 1980s cab drivers and 1950s cab drivers and 1965 cab drivers and cab drivers from 2007 comparable? are car service and livery drivers?

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#297

Post by tsoukase » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #261

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.

A primitive risk factor of Dementia is the lower cognitive effect lately due to any modern cause: drugs, mobile phones/LLMs, stress of war or climate crisis, job burn out. Even the reverse Flynn effect measured at early adulthood predisposes to earlier dementia diagnosis.

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#298

Post by pier25 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

sixo wrote: post #173

pier25 wrote: post #172

Does gaming also use similar spatial skills?

I have a feeling gaming is quite harmful for spatial skills in the long run, because you learn many different maps (often transient ones in rng-ed games), rather than one fixed one. I would not be surprised if an epidemic of early mental decline begins to show in gamers in coming decades. I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.

> I'm 36 now and feel like my spatial reasoning is declining in a strange severe way.

How do you know this is caused by gaming?

Re: Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

#299

Post by Forgeties79 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

jmull wrote: post #258

nylonstrung wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting hard to find any study posted without a kneejerk "correlation does not equal causation" take as if that's not something researchers have to control for in order to even conduct the study in the first place, let alone publish

> kneejerk "correlation does not equal causation" The article (and apparently the researchers too) advances the idea there's a causal link here, even though one is not shown by the research. They go so far as to generally prescribe spatial reasoning training as a way to reduce Alzheimers risk. You might be tired of hearing "correlation does not equal causation", but it needs to be said here.

On hackernews I really don't think it needs to be said. Call me arrogant/too generous to this community, but I think most of the users here know the phrase and its meaning. Seeing 8000 variants of it doesn't contribute, and since it costs nothing to say "I bet they made a mistake" while elevating your own intellect people default to it far too much.