Thursday, December 10, 2015
One correct, a million still wrong
For the first time in the history of "science", a study about human characteristics gets the chain of causation right! After 200 years of perfect wrongness, somebody accidentally mistypes the usual shit and publishes a FACT.
A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded. “Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.Meanwhile, other social "scientists" still run merrily along the standard track of idiocy:
The authors of the latest research – led by Susan M. Resnick, the National Institutes of Health’s chief scientist on brain aging – attribute the long-term effects of negative attitudes toward aging to stress. Live long enough in the belief that older people are afflicted with physical, cognitive financial and even sexual woes, and the stress of believing you are marching toward the same end takes its toll.Nonsense. If you have a more negative image of aging, it's because you've SEEN** people aging badly. Unless you work in a nursing home, the people you SEE are YOUR RELATIVES. And if YOUR RELATIVES age badly, there's an increased chance that you will age badly. Hmm. This is an interesting possibility. I wonder if humans could be intrinsically DIFFERENT? I wonder if there's some mysterious way that parents could pass DIFFERENT characteristics to their kids, other than the scientifically proved way of choosing the correct Party-owned daycare and the correct Party-owned schools? Nah. No scientist has ever seen such a connection. Everyone knows that all humans are passive identical mechanisms, and the only way we can become different is through government-funded Party-approved training from birth to death. = = = = = **Sidenote: Aging badly is one of the very few subjects where the media are NOT an important influence, leaving direct perception as the sole input. TV spends very little time on this subject, and you won't find a lot of Facebook pages creating self-sustaining bubbles of delusion. There are all sorts of delusional subcultures based on race and gender and various diseases, but there isn't a subculture of teenagers who think they're 95 years old.
Labels: Blinded by Stats
¶ 3:39 AM
