Comment by ssgodderidge
9 hours ago
Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?
Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
9 hours ago
Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?
Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average?
As someone when a poor sleep schedule, the inability it stick to a routine in this area tends to show up in every area… exercise, diet, etc.
I would imagine that someone with a very regimented life tends to stick to a lot of healthy habits. They aren’t going out to the bar every night, then waking up at 6am for their morning routine.
I my younger self had a terrible sleep schedule. I suffered pre-occupied thoughts of either what did or was about to happen.
I have a very consistent sleep schedule now and it is a real pleasure. I my sleep schedule has 2 or 3 3-4 hour stretches of solid sleep. I make my own schedule now so sleep is usually available when I'm ready.
The article never says anything about causation. It says sleep regularity is a predictor of mortality. That means if you find someone who already has poor sleep regularity they're more likely to die sooner, not that if you force someone into a bad sleep schedule they will become more likely to die sooner.
>Couldn’t this effect be classic cause vs correlation?
Sometimes changing the correlated item, also affects the cause, through a link of causual changes.
E.g.: "Night visits to the fridge linked to high cholesterol".
Now, that's just correlation: it's not the visiting of the fridge, it's the snacking.
But if you read that and stop visiting the fridge, you likely reduce your snacking too as a side effect, and thus lower your cholesterol, without consciously trying to address the primary cause.
I feel like your example is flawed, I just can't put my finger on it.
Maybe it's because I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge, or maybe its because I don't see why people wouldn't just eat more before heading to bed.
It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
>I don't see how sleep regularity is a factor you can change as willingly as visits to the fridge
In some cases it might be hard (e.g. insomnia), in others it might be as easy as e.g. changing your schedule, or stopping binge-watching/gaming/doomscrolling late, or some such change.
>It could also just be that I find a treatment of symptoms to be less desirable than causes.
It is more opaque.
But the point is not that it's necessarily easy. It's rather than even if X -> Y is mere correlation, by forcing yourself to fix X (even if hard), the resulting changes might also help with Y.
And technically "bad sleep" here isn't necessarily a symptom either. It can be a co-effect of the same symptom.
tfa: "Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors"
Sometimes it is a cause vs causation. Sometimes the scientist didn’t adjust for a variable that clearly would impact both fields they were measuring. To make such a claim, I think it’s appropriate to name that hypothetical third variable. Otherwise the comment is so general it applies to all statistical studies.
Considering the importance of the subject, it still seems important to bring this out, especially if there's conclusions that if you have irregular sleep you are significantly increasing your odds of dying earlier. I think intuitively we can know how important sleep is and I desperately want to sleep better. It's fine to speak of it being predictor etc, and all that, then they end the abstract with "Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.", which is technically fine since they use "may", although later articles based on the study will likely make the statement more confident.
But I guess what might be slightly triggering is claiming that it's a "simple" target. Don't I wish I could sleep on command and better?
So a clear question is - why do people choose to sleep or why do they naturally sleep irregularly?
Because for that there must be a logical cause in the first place. They say they control for mental health and all that, but is it then that ultimately it comes down to preference in their mind? I'd think most people want to sleep in healthy way.
Basically - if they were able to control for all possible confounding variables, what exactly was the cause of irregular sleep?
Anecdotally I can say that I sleep more irregularly the more stress there is, and stress could easily affect health, but if they controlled for stress, what then?
I guess ultimately they are saying it's a desirable target to measure, so it's fine in that sense. They are not really saying that choosing to sleep irregularly is what is causing the issues.
But you can just apply this to anything. I feel unlike unless you're an insider with skin in the game, your criticism doesn't land other than a generic surface one.
To be clear, I apply an equal deep skepticism to most fields that aren't math (in the sense of a priority) or physics (in the sense that you aren't trying to study the entire world, but a specific set of phenomena that you can reliably control enough + repeat to run intervention on), whether the results agree with me or not. Maybe a bit of intellectual closed-mindedness. But then that means that me, personally, I can't in good faith use the criticism as a proper 'debunk' argument - at best it's a heuristic to avoid spending cycles to evaluate it (which is 'rational' behavior, as much as I hate that word, IMO).
1 reply →
Would love to see a causal model [0] to help better understand all of the mediators considered as well as confounders. I'm close to finishing up an interesting read from Judea Pearl/Dana Mackenzie - The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect [1]. Talks alot about Causal Models, Causal Inference, the 3 ladders of causation, etc. I liked the graphical approach to help outline exactly how one thinks about direct and indirect effects and how it facilitates counterfactual analysis and causal mediation analysis.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_model
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Why
McElreath's Statistical Rethinking is also a great reference for causal thinking and modeling.
What I wonder is even if they did the perfect adjustments, what would have been driver for different sleep regularity.
E.g. considering some common causes like work stress - if they did the causation and compared people who did the same type of work, and they controlled for stress levels then why did one group of people have sleeping regularity issues more than compared to others?
Like there has to be some other driver then that they didn't control for, as in personality, environmental or physical difference?
Most people do want to have healthy sleep, the ones who don't usually have something causing those issues.
Did they explain how exactly they adjusted those results?
Do you even bother to click on links before asking a question?
There is a whole paragraph on "Statistical analysis" that even provides five supplementary methods (S1.5, S2.2 and S2.4-6) if you want detailed information.
Or maybe if you are sick you don't sleep as well.
Pretty much my thoughts. People in lots of pain don't have a regular schedule to do anything, including sleep.
> Perhaps someone who has a consistent schedule is hypothetically more likely to make healthier choices on average
At least they aren’t shift workers