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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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On the other hand, people who get more sun live years longer.

Observational studies without clear mechanisms of action are almost completely worthless. Reading the study it's just the classic thing where they controlled for a handful of factors that they thought of and then declared whatever was left over the effect of the thing they're studying. Rather than it being any of the countless variations across the population that aren't included in the arbitrary list of controls. (I think Scott has a post somewhere where he mentioned how little he trusts studies like this.) For instance this is how they controlled for comorbidity:

As a measure of comorbid illness at the start of the study, we created a dummy variable termed ‘comorbidity’ to identify women who had been treated with antidiabetic or anticoagulant drugs or medication for CVD for more than 1 month.

I wonder if any illnesses not prescribed those drugs might both increase mortality and decrease sunbathing? Or general variation in health below the level of actual illness?

This is in contrast to the skin cancer risk where the mechanism of action is very straightforward. It seems like a serious failure of both science and science communication that this sort of largely-meaningless observational study gets put on the same level.

I agree that it's very hard to tease out the direct impact of sun exposure from all the other things that come with it, but if that's really the case then clearly it isn't a big deal and it's definitely not worth shifting your attitude to favour indoor activities over outdoor ones.

Fair point about observational studies.

But I'll still take a huge effect with an unknown mechanism vs a tiny effect with a known mechanism.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. When the effect size is large, we can get still get use from observational studies. For example, I believe that observational studies would be fully sufficient to demonstrate the harms of smoking, even with no other knowledge.

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