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Comment by papito | Hacker News Reader

It's like when they say "wine is good for your heart". And then a study analyzed over three million grocery receipts..

"The people who bought wine were more likely to place olives, low-fat cheese, fruits and vegetables, low-fat meat, spices, and tea in their carts. Beer drinkers, on the other hand, were more likely to reach for the chips, ketchup, margarine, sugar, ready-cooked meals, and soft drinks."

Schatzker, Mark. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (p. 155). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

EDIT: What I am saying is - yes, television shuts off the thinking part of your brain, but then you also don't move, don't exercise. Causation here is VERY flaky.

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The authors of the study are clearly and explicitly aware of this (and other) confounding issues. Do you have reason to think the authors made stronger claims for causality than can be supported by their evidence?

In these sorts of study, causality is not simple and is rarely established in one go — it is approached incrementally, as one potential factor at a time is investigated.

> Do you have reason to think the authors made stronger claims for causality than can be supported by their evidence?

They made no claims for causality.

Maybe. What are old people watching? If it’s anything like what I see at my relatives and at assisted living facilities, it’s also of cable news and weather.

Staring at repetitive, content free crap cannot be good for your brain.

Totally. But who's to say that watching dumb television causes most of the decline, versus a neglected brain taking the shortcut to comfortable brain-dead TV?

I would wager it's more of a vicious cycle, with other factors at play.

That’s a great question, and the conclusion I draw from observations are just conjecture.

The thing that bugs me about these genres of dumb TV is that the constant attention grabbing and little dopamine hits of whatever the crisis de jure is has to have some impact.

My in-laws called me this summer genuinely concerned about thunderstorms approaching some place in Alabama. We live like 1500 miles away.

Over 50, would like to believe content matters. After buying my first large screen, I tune in a bit of HDTV. Cooking shows or NHK - which is ironic because that channel is filled with science/documentaries related to the aging population. Their 72 Hours episodes are amazing.

And stopped criticizing parental units over holidays for watching too many old westerns/noirs. There was an ancient Audie Murphy movie on that could be plopped into modern day anti-corporate/rich messaging but the plot was so complex it would never get made today.

We LOVE NHK. Best app on the Apple TV. Just watched a documentary about Edo fires from 400 to 200 years ago, last night.

> Staring at repetitive, content free crap cannot be good for your brain.

"Good for your brain" is an incredibly loose criteria. I think for many definitions of that statement there's no clear evidence to to support it.

Furthermore there's a huge cultural bias towards believing that statement - which makes me even more wary of accepting it unconditionally.

There’s obviously some sort of spectrum regarding these things. If you were forced to sit in front of a screen for 4 hours a day showing you horrifying content or extreme slogans or content for hours, I think there would be no question that doing that is not good for your mental health. (Think of the anxiety reported by social media content screeners)

News isn’t that, but where does it lie on the spectrum? I’m not saying I have proof, just presenting conjecture, and I’d love to read about research in this area.

They did also mention that video games were better for cognition, so it could be that passive activities are worse than active. Not necessarily to do with exercise.

It totally makes sense that video games are good for cognition - reaction training, problem solving. BUT, when you are younger, your body can take a hit if you abuse it.

Younger people binge-drink and watch Netlfix for hours, and can still be sharp and fit. But then activities become much more important after 30, as you've drained the gift of genes and youth.

I bet there is not a lot of info on the results of 70-year-olds playing half-life :)

Either way, I always skeptically view these studies that take two random things and tell you that they somehow directly relate to each other. Especially with humans, where the number of variables at play is nearly infinite.

> yes, television shuts off the thinking part of your brain

Is there any scientific evidence to support that? At the MRI/brain activity level?

I swear I've read about it in one of the books I had but I recently did a house cleaning of my Kindle collection and now I can't find it. But it had to do with shifting brain activity to the right hemisphere when watching the box - the left side is responsible for logic. So.....

Don’t forget to mention what people are actually watching on tv. Quite difference between documentary and Oprah

A lot of documentaries are even worse than Oprah in terms of bias and misinformation.

Sure there is bias and misinformation in everything. But if you watch enough different (sources), you can make a balanced opinion yourself. Point I tried to make however was there is a difference in what you watch on tv.

Says the guy who didn’t read past the title. “Hard to prove” doesn’t mean “impossible to prove.”

Maybe television is the reason they don't move?

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