Comment by PittleyDunkin
2 years ago
> It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out.
Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved.
Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep"
It's difficult to blame people for emotionally attaching more to the latter than the former.
It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"
I agree - an obvious connection would be "Lower income jobs tend to have less control over their schedule", be it shift workers, hourly service jobs or similar. There also may be links to worse healthcare due to lack of insurance in those jobs.
It might just be another "Poorer people don't live as long" correlation.
The source data is from the UK so it has nothing to do with the health insurance attached to specific jobs. Healthcare is covered via general taxation in the UK.
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They at least tried: "Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors."
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Also: "people in poor health don't sleep well". That's really hard to fully control for, because a lot of problems will affect mortality at sub-clinical levels that don't satisfy diagnostic criteria and won't appear on your medical records.
I would presume that they somehow controlled for this most obvious confounding factor. almost every experiment I find that they are naysayers (as important as they are) that assume someone just simply plotted a chi-squared distribution.
> presume
Okay
The issue is that almost all human behavior is correlated and, even if you have an easy-to-see [sic] method of action, e.g. “brain gunk”, that doesn’t automatically negate a nearly-infinite set of other possible causes from correlated behavior. Just a random example: those with high stress probably sleep poorly. You can think of a number of possible explanations that link high stress to shorter lifespans: more likely to commit suicide, more fat retention, less time for healthy activities, etc.
Sure, but things that make narrative sense can easily fall down when examined - that's why the statistics are important and not just a rubber stamp. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
No disagreement here, but equally you can't be surprised when people can grapple with the narrative easier than statistics. If you want the statistical understanding to propagate you need a narrative.
99% of people die from causes other than "brain gunk".
I think the parent is talking about Alzheimers, which is the accumulation of brain gunk.
Alzheimer's is the fifth-leading cause of death among Americans age 65 and older.
Brain gunk could accelerate those causes, no?
Eh, you gotta be careful with One Weird Trick medicine.
Once you get past painfully obvious problems, everything not currently easily fixed by modern medicine tends to be "well it's really complicated" sets of problems; there's not one Cancer, your blood pressure can be elevated for many reasons, syndromes like chronic fatigue are almost certainly a mix of dozens of problems binned together by common symptoms but will have different causes and treatments.
Anyone saying they have one treatment to fix dozens of problems is a huckster, and trying to come up with a medical Theory of Everything to explain large swaths of disease is your origin story for how you become a huckster.
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...or those causes could accelerate brain gunk buildup.