Risky business: linking Toxoplasma infection and entrepreneurship behavior | Hacker News Reader

Risky business: linking Toxoplasma infection and entrepreneurship behavior

royalsocietypublishing.org

126 pointsXnoiVeX30 comments

There's so much BS around toxoplasmosis online. Here's corrections for two common misconceptions:

1) Almost everyone who has it got it from eating undercooked meat, not from cats. France has the highest rate of toxoplasmosis in the world because of their propensity for rare meats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5312802/.

2) Unless your cat lived a long part of it's life as an outdoor cat, it is very unlikely to have the parasite (like any parasite).

This second point really surprised me. I’ve had 5 indoor cats over the course of more than 20 years and cleaned all of their litter boxes. All were adopted as stray kittens, so presumably they spent some time outdoors. And yet I tested negative for toxoplasmosis. As I understand it, you basically have to ingest the stool of a cat who recently hunted a rodent with the disease. If your cat stays indoors and you wash your hands after cleaning the litter box, that’s unlikely. In fact, you’re more likely to get it from gardening because cats will pee in the soil and you’re probably more likely to touch your face if you have touched soil than if you’ve just cleaned a litter box.

Somewhere there now has to be a person thinking "Hmm, I've been eating cat poop for a month now and have not seen any increase in business revenue - am I not eating enough?"

This new product is certainly entrepreneurial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2yWAD5OzhM

>a person thinking "Hmm, I've been eating cat poop for a month now and have not seen any increase in business revenue

probably he has been mistakenly taking BS instead.

The answer is yes.

This trait and disease was discussed at length on the Joe Rogan podcast with Mcauley Culkin.

Apparently rats which catch toxoplasmosis are attracted to cat urine, which is an evolutionary reason for its development.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyb1xz7waY8

Toxoplasmosis is smart enough to spread through the Internet as well: https://vimeo.com/69181785

https://medium.com/@andrewhayes/correlation-does-not-imply-c...

So saying you have the entrepreneurial bug is a real thing? Seems like correlation without causation, to me.

This is just p-hacking. It's really sad that in 2018 researchers are still pumping out garbage like this. All of these toxo behavior studies have been very poor quality. For example, there's been a few studies purporting that folks infected with toxo have significantly higher rates of schizophrenia. However, this is false, because toxo rates differ by 2-3x between first-world countries but yet the schizophrenia rate is mostly consistent.

> However, this is false, because toxo rates differ by 2-3x between first-world countries but yet the schizophrenia rate is mostly consistent.

I'm not going to say that the original studies are correct, but this is a fallacious analysis as well. You can't use broad, population-based observations (which are subject to countless possible confounding factors) to dismiss a targeted study that attempts to isolate a single cause and effect relationship.

No, it's not. The effect size that purportedly occurs according to this research (double-digit percentages of cases caused by toxo) would have been detectable on a population level. There would be marked differences in schizophrenia rates, but there aren't. You'd be right if small effect sizes were claimed, but that's not what's being claimed.

Suppose a large portion of schizophrenia cases are caused by toxo. We know the toxo infection rate differs massively between countries, but the schizophrenia rate is consistent. Therefore, there must be another cause of schizophrenia such that its prevalence as a cause of schizophrenia is almost perfectly anti-correlated with toxo infections. More toxo infections, less of this other cause. Or there could be a correlated factor that prevents schizophrenia. Maybe having a cat, in and of itself, prevents schizophrenia.

That seems extremely improbable, considering that a priori we should think that a particular amoeba causes schizophrenia is not probable.

It could still hold if only a small percentage of schizophrenia was caused by toxoplasmosis.

These studies have usually showed a large effect size and a small sample. That doesn't explain it.

I have seen (but not read or vetted) other studies purporting a relationship between toxoplasmosis and other mood/behavior alterations like depression. Is it all junk, or is there any merit to it?

Time constraints + hyper competitive publish or perish environment = lots of bad or low effort research to pad publication totals.

Can someone explain the math behind the ‘p hacking’ for this study?

I think the best way to explain it is with this link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

Thank you, this is both awesome and terrible.

Alternatively, in comic form: https://xkcd.com/882/

Smells more like poop-hacking to me.

Can we extract the prasite and sell it as entrepreneur drink now?

I thought this was the concept behind raw water? Expose yourself to all of nature's risky and risk-taking-inducing fecal transmitted parasites!

i got water poisoning in the backcountry... the delusion is not that dissimilar to a psychedelic experience, and actually intensified by the pervasive and unavoidable actual fear of death.

is this site almost unusable for anyone else? hmm just seems to be in chrome.. smooth in ff

The only thing I have to say about this is, meow!

The "jokes" in this thread really underscore how painfully humourless tech people are

It's a fair tradeoff. You can't have everything.

There's like...two. Come off it.

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