Hacker News Reader

I was just going to ask about evidence of increasing disease. The OP's claim smacks of rosy retrospective bias.

Even if the numbers did increase, most of the time this is due to improved detection, or shifting age distributions, ie. an older population will necessarily have more health issues.

View on HN

> Even if the numbers did increase, most of the time this is due to improved detection, or shifting age distributions, ie. an older population will necessarily have more health issues.

Other than what you say about older people, it is pure conjecture to say that "most of the time" these are the causes.

Yeah, not really. If what you said were true, mortality would be increasing dramatically. This clearly isn't the case, therefore any apparent increase in disease rates must be due to improved detection. Or disease rates aren't really increasing at all.

> rosy retrospective bias

Is exactly the term I was looking for :)

I feel like some of the love people have for: natural medicine, organic food, natural coloring, flavors and preservatives are somewhat similar... Granted there are environmental benefits to some of it for sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com