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Comment by ja3k | Hacker News Reader

The article acknowledges that the study does not show causation and it seems a little strange to think a causal arrow in this direction is more plausible than the other direction. It seems like people who do better at thinking and memory tasks should also do better at their jobs and interviews and therefore be less likely to experience an income drop. To speculate on income drop's effect on mental acumen one would want to measure intelligence at the beginning of a career and in middle age and then correlate the delta to number and size of income drops.

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The best thing to do when you see a study that counters your opinion on the causality of something, just swap the causality, and move on. Many association papers are just written to confirm the investigator's prior beliefs.

"The best thing to do when you see science you don't like, is pretend it reinforces your already existing biases"

What?

This totally makes sense. If the paper shows that A correlates with B, and interprets this as A causes B, but doesn't show it; and if you think B causes A; then this is a great explanation for their result.

There is a big big big gap between an individual newsworthy article, and science tested by multiple replications.

Only 62% of articles published in Nature and Science actually replicated: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06075-z About a coin flip if you can believe a given headline at all.

A single article is a data point, not ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact.

I would argue that the DNA paper by W&C was an ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact. The nice thing is that you could take their structure, run it forward through the scattering algorithm, and see that the simulated data looked identical to the measured data. Further, the simple prediction the paper made (that duplex DNA could form a template for DNA replication) turned out to be so audaciously true...

(I could quibble and say the W&C structure is technically wrong, because it was done in non-physiological conditions, and subsequent studies did find very minor structural details for B-DNA when done correctly...)

Did I say that no authoritative papers have ever been published?

The cognitive impact of wealth has been pretty well studied, and there is already a very good population being studied for this - farmers in some places are pretty well off immediately after harvest/sale, and just before the next harvest, are usually back to a baseline state, or even struggling to pay bills again. Not only do they exhibit better long-term thinking when they are flush with cash, they tend be overall more cognitively capable.

But farmers also have a self-selection bias in them. The average person is not a farmer.

Exactly. There are a lot of articles getting posted to HN that raise this same question. Beyond the 'how did this get posted here!' I'm starting to wonder how all of this gets funded and then published. I was the stupidest person in my department of 'hard' science, the self-righteous anger that these incite in me makes me feel better about that.

Agreed. It seems far more likely the population with income swings suffered from latent, "sub-clinical" cognitive issues that merely became more pronounced later in life.

> should also do better at their jobs and interview

Would this apply to group layoffs from blue colar industries, or general downturn in specific industries ? (for instance drivers as Uber/Lyft entered the market, and now that revenues are also lowering)

It seems to me there could be an awful lot of cases where income drop has little to do with a worker's brain health or memory capacities. We are contemplating automating whole industries, subsequent layoffs will also be par for the course, whatever performance the worker was showing.

Here's the thing about statistics: the effect doesn't need to be seen across everyone. If 50% of people with low cognitive skills experience high income volatility, but only 20% of people with high cognitive skill do, then you'd get results consistent with this "study"

All this tells me is the real percentage of people on this Math and Science Forum who don't read the article before making some politicized comment. It shocks me.

Actually, we could remedy most of these comments by thinking about the title for a couple seconds.

> people on this Math and Science Forum

This is not a “Math and Science Forum”.

The worst thing about this Politics and Rachel by the Bay Forum is how people don't even read the site description.

Can I engage in friendship with your heart?

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