Never waste a midlife crisis

A mid-life crisis is not necessarily a bad thing!! It's probably one of the most important spiritual experiences a person can have. We are told that Mohammed used to spend long times in the Hiraa cave kinda meditating or thinking about things that are not part of ordinary life.. Somebody with midlife crisis is one who has questions and searching for answers! They are asking: "Who am I? What am I doing in this world!?"

Did you accidentally paste the same link twice?

Looking at the "Medical Specialty and the Incidence of Divorce" article, my first thought on reading "Scores on these [psychological characteristic] scales were grouped according to quartiles for analysis" is that the researchers aren't experts in statistical methods, or else are hiding something by bucketing arbitrarily. It's a widespread problem in life sciences. They don't explain (not by this point in the article, at least) why they chose quartiles. I'm skeptical of any analysis that reduces the fidelity of the data without explanation. It smells like p-hacking.

My second thought regarding their model is wondering why they didn't first build a model predicting divorce for the general population. I've heard (received wisdom) that financial stress is the primary cause. It seems unlikely that medical specialty is unrelated to household finances. Ignoring a likely confounding variable is sloppy. It makes the effort seem like a novelty article intended for amusement rather than serious research. It's in the "occasional notes" section of the periodical, which suggests less rigor.

They do little to address the question of causality. They muse that, "One explanation is the longer work hours required in some specialties," but never bothered to analyze the hours worked.

My conclusion: That article is literally a joke, published to give the community something to laugh about over beers after the conference.

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If I were to perform the analysis, I'd first build a model of causes of divorce for the general population. Some candidate variables: household income, household income as a ratio to each person's childhood household income, cost of living where the household lives, frequency of attending religious services, number of children, number of hours worked per week, age when married, etc.

I'm skeptical of psychological characteristic surveys, so I'd spend some time considering alternatives, but I'd want to include some measure of characteristics that might drive the choice of a medical specialty which might also be correlated with divorce. We want to isolate the choice of specialty as the cause as separate from confounders that cause both the choice and divorce.

If medical specialty holds up as a factor after controlling for everything else, then I'd investigate further.

Thanks. My first reaction is that this one is much better. Larger sample, better methods.

Again, I hate the arbitrary bucketing. There's no benefit to creating age buckets, as if there's some magical change that happens at 40, 50, and 60. I did have an atypically large birthday party, compared to other years, but I don't think that had a dramatic effect on my likelihood to divorce. Maybe some people have such spectacularly intense decade-related birthday parties that it increases divorce incidence for those years? Income doesn't benefit from bucketing, either. Having $199k annual income isn't much different from $201k annual income.

They do a decent job of controlling for confounders. Considering, among other things, that "if the annual rate of divorce was identical across occupations but physicians marry later in life, then at any given time physicians would be less likely to report ever having divorced compared with people in other occupations, simply because they were at risk for less time."

However, their inclusions of state and year fixed effects could have been more considered. These are proxies for other things, like cultural characteristics and neighborhood income levels. I'd like to see some discussion of why they chose to use state and year proxies instead of searching for more specific explanatory variables. Especially state, because some kind of urbanization measure might be more helpful. However, because state medical licensing regulation might affect the choice of occupation, the use of that variable is easily defensible.

Ugh! Bucketing again! Hours worked should be a continuous variable. Inexcusable, unless they feared misreporting. Perhaps they saw some banding at 40, 45, and 50 hours, so they figured it's not really a continuous variable anyway. Again, that needs explanation. Any rationale for bucketing should be thoroughly discussed.

Finally, the effects. First, with this population size, I'd be surprised if these weren't "statistically significant". I'm looking more for practical significance. Check out the estimates for dentists. Dentists appear to have lower incidence of divorce, based on the last year, yet higher prevalence of divorce. Strange. That means that dentists in past years had a higher annual incidence, but the rate has been declining, or declining relative to physicians. Has the practice of dentistry, relative to general medicine, changed that much over those years? This suggests spurious results, at least for the physician vs dentist comparison.

Hispanics were more likely to divorce? Bogus. I'll chalk it up to sampling weirdness. The CI includes 1 anyway, so they're saying it doesn't matter. They should put some asterisks in to highlight the variables we should pay attention to. It looks like they're including Black and Hispanic just to explain what Other means, because Other is the only significant one.

Wow! Income is irrelevant. Weird again. Maybe bucketing at work, turning 1 continuous variable into 4 binary variables, diluting the impact. It should have been log(dollars).

If you work more than 60 hours, you're more likely to get divorced. Makes sense. Again, log(hours) would have been better, though maybe a threshold at 40 hours would have been useful.

I enjoyed the article, but if I were the journal editor, I'd have returned it with some suggestions for improvement rather than publishing it.

Anyway, I hope my commentary was interesting/useful. This article doesn't say anything about psychology, so we've gone off on a bit of a tangent.

No, I don't think I can make any inferences about psychiatry from those articles. My Bayesian update is the opposite of yours: because the evidence presented was weak, I'm more skeptical of any relationship between psychiatry and divorce. I was quite ready to believe it, and was disappointed to see such weak studies. It suggests to me that it's difficult to find positive results with stronger analysis.

You seem to be suggesting I'm philosophically a Frequentist. Somewhat true, but I am, like basically everyone, a Bayesian when it comes to practical decisions. Also, I have no fear of logical deduction when statistical inference is infeasible.

Nullism is a good term. I'm of the opinion that most things are random and that humans' imaginations frequently mislead us. Absent better evidence, I'm unlikely to believe any link between psychiatry and divorce.

Someone downvoted you but it wasn't me. We possibly shouldn't carry this on too long in case people feel its gone way off topic, but.. these are important subjects. To address some of your points :). "if your religion needs 200 yr of theologians" ... its not the religion, its the Bible. Big difference. Its hardly surprising if a book written 2000 yrs ago, totally different time, culture etc, needs expertise to be understood , and going to it directly and trying to make sense of it cause confusion, right? Pretext for genocide etc... well, terrible things have been done in the name of religion, but terrible things happen with or without religion. Look at Russia/Ukraine. I'd argue its not religion causing it. People that want to hate will find something to fight about be it religion, resources, power, football teams etc. I do agree actually that where people's beliefs are incoherent this is the source of many ills. But I'd argue against that being the fundamental religion being incoherent. Regarding abuse by clerics, I do agree, and I think a lot of Christians would, that the rule of celibacy for priests is extremely unhelpful, and has led as you say, to deviant behaviour and abuse that has wrecked people's lives. The response by church(es) has been severely lacking, often appalling, and the main reason for that would seem to be that the hierarchy themselves are celibate, not having normal healthy relationships and haven't a clue how what to do. So I, like many others would advocate ditch the celibacy requirement ASAP. The hierarchy don't necessarily think they can do that though, they think they'll alienate churches in the developing world, cause a schism etc, its a mess. But, and you may think I'm an idiot to say this, I argue again, that's human failings, and doesn't mean that the religion should be thrown away as unworkable. I would believe, that's not what Jesus would have wanted. Now, maybe you don't believe, and that's absolutely fine. No-one should ever be pressured into having any beliefs or religion (yet another thing unhelpful people have done within the church, and again, nevertheless not a reason to disband it IMHO). But I would say, maybe stay away from the church if you don't believe, but if you have any hint of belief, try to fix these problems. By, like I say, challenging people. Regarding Judaism, Christianity and Islam being the source of oppression of women, that's certainly an interesting one, I'd have to go away and think about that. Gut feeling , its unlikely to be the only source of that, but I know what you're saying there's certainly been structural oppression of women within organised religion. To summarise I think a lot of things that anger you about the church its absolutely fair to be furious about, and these issues massively frustrate people inside it who still regularly go to church. Where we differ is indeed that you say people should stop being Christians whereas I do indeed say people should be better Christians. Hope you can find happiness and purpose anyway whatever route you take. :)