But does it control for family/relative income? One could be poor but could travel and maintain a safety net from their family.
Too many variables to control for imo to abductively say the sun helped. Once you start controlling for enough variables to start teasing out causation, degrees of freedom and the power of the tests become precarious.
Not to mention issues with data dragging/p-hacking: we don’t know if they just tested a bunch of random things and are only reporting the interesting finding.
But regardless, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt regarding p-hacking, this paper has not reached a sufficient level of abduction to convince me of anything. Even if there is a correlation between sunlight and health, this correlation doesn’t deduce the mechanism, meaning I can’t prescribe myself any solution. Is it because going outside and enjoying yourself causes less stress? Then video games would be just as good. Maybe it’s the vitamin D? I could then just supplement. Maybe people who go out more are more connected to family? I could spend time with them inside. One could argue the mechanism is not important, but that ignores that sun damage dramatically increases skin aging and skin cancer risk, and also ignores that I could expose myself to the sun and unintentionally avoid the real mechanism behind the desired effect.
Teasing out causation with empiricism is near impossible without eventually needing to rely on occum's razor to some extent or another.
Reliance on occum’s razor would probably be less needed if this was a random control trial, but still the study would be correlative with alternative explanations still plausible.
Regarding health, focus on calorie control and getting enough fats/carbs/protein. Eat whole foods that are high enough on the satiety index because they make calorie maintenance more intuitive so you don’t have to count calories if you don’t want to. Those (and maybe a few other tips) are the only things that have a large enough effect for one to determine with almost (only almost, because everything empirical is a confidence interval/correlation) certainty that they’re effective.
Any study saying that blueberries are “superfoods” or any other hyper-specific food recommendation, I immediately don’t trust it. There just isn’t any organization that would fund a RTC of such a niche finding, especially considering you would need to pay and surveil thousands of people over the course of their whole life to change their diet and stick to it. I don’t think even the NIH is giving out millions of dollars to a research team to find out if blueberries are superfoods.
Efficiency does not necessarily mean lower costs. More efficient workers could mean more valuable workers, and thus something employers are willing to pay more for in a competitive labor market.
Bell Labs was at its peak from 1960s-1970s. Since the 80s, corporate governance has completely changed due to Jack Welch’s short-term shareholder maximization ideology taking over the corporate world.
I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.
Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.
It’s silly. MLB players are unionized and they make more money than tech workers. The reason why management don’t need a union is because they have much more say in determining their own wages.
If you live in SF, you can get a cheap degree from a California community college. It will be 10-50 dollars per semester. You can even transfer the last year of the degree to a UC if you care for a name-brand school, but I don’t think that would be necessary with work experience.
The FDA was founded in 1906. They are the reason we don’t have formaldehyde in our meat nor chalk in our milk. Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair to understand why people defend the FDA.
I think there are negative externalities if the data is sold to insurance firms — who can use the genomic information in litigation and policy rejections — or if the data is sold to some sort of powerful, pro-eugenics political organization. The insurance externalities likely can be mitigated with minimal legislation (protecting consumers in a similar manner to how we protect those with pre-existing conditions) and it is reasonable to assume pro-eugenics political groups wouldn’t be any less dangerous without this genomic data available.
Thus, I struggle to see how this data changing hands would be especially detrimental to society. One could contend a moral dilemma will arise from future developments in cloning, but would it? We already have clones in the form of identical twins, and their existence does not seem to create many, if any, especially problematic moral dilemmas. Maybe people are worried that society will start cloning celebrities and famous intellectuals instead of having babies more naturally — creating a world of designer babies where the diversity of thought and talent shrinks in a “tragedy of the commons”-esque dilemma — but I don’t think this is people’s issue because most people frame their qualms as more of a personal privacy issue. Moreover, designer babies issue I describe would likely become an issue with or without cloning.
There are issues that come to mind regarding genomics in commerce — such as the ethics and market incentives of patenting certain genomic patterns — but again I don’t see how this 23andMe data changing hands make this issue any more pressing than before.
On the other hand, my instinct (which I have learned to never blindly trust) is that making the data more widely available may make it cheaper and easier for researchers to make impactful discoveries. Therefore, my biggest worry with the change of ownership is that the new owners may keep the data behind a bigger wall.
I agree with this point to some extent, but insurance before protections for preexisting conditions used acne as a reason to reject cancer treatment claims: obviously fraudulent behavior. If insurance is deregulated and any regulations aren’t going to be enforced regardless — a path we are going down — insurance firms will weasel out of claims with or without this genomic data
Too many variables to control for imo to abductively say the sun helped. Once you start controlling for enough variables to start teasing out causation, degrees of freedom and the power of the tests become precarious.
Not to mention issues with data dragging/p-hacking: we don’t know if they just tested a bunch of random things and are only reporting the interesting finding.
But regardless, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt regarding p-hacking, this paper has not reached a sufficient level of abduction to convince me of anything. Even if there is a correlation between sunlight and health, this correlation doesn’t deduce the mechanism, meaning I can’t prescribe myself any solution. Is it because going outside and enjoying yourself causes less stress? Then video games would be just as good. Maybe it’s the vitamin D? I could then just supplement. Maybe people who go out more are more connected to family? I could spend time with them inside. One could argue the mechanism is not important, but that ignores that sun damage dramatically increases skin aging and skin cancer risk, and also ignores that I could expose myself to the sun and unintentionally avoid the real mechanism behind the desired effect.
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