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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

I would differentiate between “working” and “sitting in the office”. My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. Sourcing wood, visiting clients, organizing everything, etc. He was in good shape and died at 92 years age. Being forced to sit in the office 45 hours a week I don’t think that I reach age above 60 years. This sitting whole day in the noisy environment was destroying my health. Luckily pandemic came and I was able to work from home.

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Ah yes, the good old "my anecdote trumps science" post on Hacker News. If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse.

"Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the latest evidence were conducted for this study. Data from 37 studies on ischemic heart disease covering more than 768 000 participants and 22 studies on stroke covering more than 839 000 participants were synthesized. The study covered global, regional and national levels, and was based on data from more than 2300 surveys collected in 154 countries from 1970-2018."

The study has nothing to do with sitting in an office, despite what you claim.

> If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse.

Is there any reason to assume HN should be better then anyone else?

Generally, HN people are more educated and better trained in logical thinking (most being engineers of some sort or in other professions that require a bit more thinking). Hence, the GP's expectation, I assume.

However, this is just my impression from reading comments here for a few years. I may as well be wrong. Smart people do have their own blindspots, too.

Edit: I noticed you were downvoted, and I disagree with that. Your question is reasonable.

Whether logical thinking gets you to correct result strongly depends on assumptions you make and model you apply the logical thinking on. And my impression is that HN is not really good at those. It also starts to fail when the assumptions are only sorta kinda true, with many asterixis, because logical implications then treat them as true.

Very very often, people start with very wild assumptions and then make wild implications on them, even the ones that are directly contradicted by article they comment on or simple search.

That's how you get conversations, and eventually progress. To me, that's the attraction of public forums like HN: people (including myself) make assumptions, and conversation often (or sometimes?) leads to corrections. If we'd all be working with perfectly correct assumptions, we would not need forums anymore. We'd just be fed information, process it in exactly the same way and reach the exact same conclusions. In my experience, this is not really possible with humans.

What it primary does instead is to disseminate feel good assumptions. Because the people don't state them as assumptions, they claim them to be facts. The conversation does not lead to corrections often enough in programming and business unrelated topics.

That is fairly normal, group of people talking about something they dont know much about is not supposed to randomly pivot to correct conclusions. But, HN is uniquely convinced HN is superior in this regard.

I take it you are also uniquely convinced that you are superior in this regard, then. :)

But here's an honest question: why are you on HN, then? Sure, it's a decent source of tech&related news. But there's no reason for you to spend time reading and writing comments, if you truly believe it's as bad as you say.

It is light tech adjacent news with a taste of drama and arguing, but not too much drama. Because I wait for tests to run and want to idle kill time. Cause I am procastinating.

I use it same way as reddit, basically. Except this don't sends notifications so it is less pushy.

> Generally, HN people are more educated and better trained in logical thinking

The main effect this has is that HN people have an overinflated sense of their own competence, and are more blind to their own ignorance.

I do not disagree, and I hoped it was already visible from my initial comment. But, on average, you probably still get better results from HN crowd than from other crowds, in matters that require knowledge and logical thinking. Do you disagree?

Absolutely disagree. I think HN is massively blind to its own biases, and makes the wrong calls very often as a result.

Ok, I can accept that as a possibility.

But here's a curiosity: why are you here, then? What do you derive from reading all the comments from people that are by default wrong? Isn't it a massive waste of your time to read large number of comments, just to occasionally find one that you agree with as being correct?

I am here to get thoughts on tech, tech news, and tech related things. I am outside of that world, and want to get an insider's perspective on my own views.

When it comes to education (my field), HN is generally very, very similar to any other large online group such as facebook or reddit - the biases and areas of ignorance are the same.

So, in other words, I come here to read and learn about the things this site should know about - technology and related fields. Whereas comment sections such as this one, I consume much the same as 'opinion articles'.

Not who you were originally replying to, but I find myself in a similar boat. I don't necessary add any more weight to a comment simply because its on HN.

But I do find HN useful in terms of randomly coming across topics that may be of tangential use in my work. Also, it tends to have more discussions that I'm interested in if I just want to blow off some steam on a forum and tends to have less vitriol than, say, a sub-Reddit

I am here for similar reasons, and I don't spend much time anywhere else, again for reasons similar to yours. On average, I found HN to be good, and that I believe is due to the people who contribute here. And I am rather surprised to see that some people have such a bad impression of the overall quality of the contributors.

Maybe it's due to my approach to HN comments: if I find something interesting, I read, upvote and dive further into the thread; sometimes I comment. Otherwise, I move on.

The problem is that “other crowds” is an amorphous and meaningless concept. In one context “other crowds” means the US/EU population as a whole, in which case sure, HN readers are on average probably more educated and better-informed. But in another context “other crowds” might mean “experts in the humanities and social sciences,” compared to which the average HN reader is hopelessly ignorant unless the question is specifically about programming. And indeed it is the humanities and social sciences where HN’s blindness and ignorance is most obvious, and its arrogance most undeserved.

For esoteric topics, HN can’t be beat. For specific topics, like medical issues, Reddit or Facebook are often amazing.

Have condition X. Doctors say Y, which doesn’t actually help.

Support groups will have a long list of things to try. Questions to ask doctors lifestyle changes. Up to date info on diagnosis/ treatment.

What tests should be run, how to interpret tests.

Medications side effects doctors don’t know about.

I always assumed a Facebook medical support group would be all nonsense. Instead it’s got tons of people who have spent years researching and experimenting, and have amazing advise to give.

Simple example. Was going to the bathroom 10+ times a night. Years of doctors were zero help.

Someone suggested aloe Vera freeze dried pills. 3 days later I was sleeping through the night.

Medical community is both amazing and full of major gaps.

I found http://n-gate.com/ helpful.

Well yes. They most certainly have a higher rate of tertiary education (and thus exposure to scientific method) than the general population.

Higher education does not make you less prone to cognitive bias. And education in one field does not make you accurate in another field.

I don’t believe you. Can you back that up?

Daniel Khaneman has done extensive work in cognitive biases and still admits it doesn't improve his ability to avoid them in himself. If someone well-educated in that specific field can't improve much, I doubt there can be claims that education in general is much help.

Still the point above is valid. A good 'job' is a source of well being. A bad job will kill you faster. The former might be very rare though.

I wonder if that's true. A good job is still a job. If you enjoy it and that leads to you spending more time working because it's "fun", it's not hard to imagine that good job could actually lead you to die younger than a job you dislike and only work the minimum amount possible at. That's not to mention the fact that you might also sacrifice more time commuting, lower salary, and less benefits for the sake of a "good" job doing what you enjoy.

There's plenty of reasons to imagine a job you enjoy could lead to a shorter life.

Maybe it doesn't though. And even if it does, is prolonging your life for as long as possible actually a noble goal in the first place?

Then it's unrelated to the nature of the task. I thought it was meant to attest of working + time (which I don't believe in[0]). You will probably die faster if you're a passionate climber than if you're a library clerk even if you despise books.

Commute time is also part of the blend btw, it's a balance.

[0] for instance I have money and am jobless but my actual context is unhealthy as hell (social, emotional needs unmet to the fullest)

Job or not, humans spend all of their waken hours doing something.

It may be that the name we give to those things is enough to make them harmful, but I do find that very unlikely. If it's not calling it a "job" that makes it stressful, then it must be some properties, and it's pretty much possible that some jobs lack those properties.

I also wonder a lot how daily life (aka what 'modern' society call work) felt like in a group. It seems that in smaller places (villages, tribes) you're linked to everybody, your efforts are giving visible benefits to people you know, it's to make the group thrive. Maybe more motivating than an abstract duty for some big corp in a large field.

I think you’re confusing the map for the territory. The study pooled all workers together, but that doesn’t invalidate the hypothesis that certain types of workers were more affected. Unless the study explicitly broke out the purported subdivision, we can’t say for sure.

For example imagine 50% of workers are office workers. And say heart attack risk is twice as high for overworked office workers but 10% less for non office workers. The study would find a broad-based 40% increase in risk for all workers, despite OPs original hypothesis being exactly correct.

The parent comment shoots from the hip, though. He has one anecdotal case of a more active career living to 92, then he postulates his inactive career will lead him to an extremely early death (60 is young in modern economies). That's just not the depth of discussion HN is designed for, does this ignite curiosity or push the discussion further?

Yes, it does. This is exactly how you pick holes at research. What factors didn't it look at? That helps us understand the limits of what we can deduce from the data. Can we think of an intuitive story about why those factors might have a causal relationship to the thing being measured? If so, we have especially good reason to be skeptical of any conclusions from the study that don't address that possible explanation.

Somewhere in the last couple of decades, the SCIENCE WORKS, BITCHES people seem to have forgotten how real science is actually done. Intuition, anecdote, common sense, hunches are very important parts of the process.

Science works that way in the minds of scientists, whose vast experience gives them dozens of actual data studies they've read to speculate from. Researchers have read about thousands of cases, they're the ones with the refined intuition, not forum readers.

Specifically: Is it productive for HN users to have anecdotal evidence rise to the top, or actual peer-reviewed evidence from studies with N=100 or N=10,000? I'd argue if layman HN users have time to read only one comment, we should upvote the N>1 comments, not N=1.

From the guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

We went from an international article (N=745k) to anecdata, which is a downgrade of substance in my view.

I'm not sure what's the point of coming up with farfetched theoreticals disconnected from the actual study when it is transparently obvious the OP was just reacting to a headline with a preconceived notion.

They found the biggest effects in Southeast Asia. I live in Southeast Asia. If you think office workers make up a significant part of workers in Southeast Asia....That's just not a "let's assume" I'm going to join you with.

If you think office workers are the cause then do the hard work of actually looking at the data and use that to make your case.

None of this stuff is definitive. A lot of self-directed craft work like trades and farming doesn’t have an easy “work” vs “not-work” mode.

They also are roles with a lot of agency and variation in schedule. A carpenter may be working 60 hour weeks in June, but is usually partially idle in January.

Did you read the study? I did. It aggregates scores of other studies with orthogonal datasets, widely disparate abstracts, and what appear to be dramatically different outcomes, then applies what appear to be arbitrary and AFAIK undefined models to achieve its probably unfalsifiable outcomes.

Not saying the conclusions they came to are wrong. I’m saying you can’t possibly determine whether it’s right from the data they present. I’m not sure they could replicate their own conclusion if you sat down at a desk with them.

Statistics by definition lose information, and part of understanding if you’ve lost the “right” information is to look at the individual cases that are excluded by the model. So yes, in those cases the anecdotes do trump the “science”, if by “science” you mean a lossy, probably-biased model of the real world.

What you can’t do with anecdotes is generalize them to the entire population, but taking an honest look at them is an excellent way to find methodological gaps.

Maybe it's you who doesn't understand the epistemology of science. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27185221

My grandfather was a carpenter. Died at a good old age... with missing fingers, arthritis, back problems.

I fucked my knees working in construction, actually every single person I know in that line of work has health problems.

Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body.

Tbf, it's possible to do it in a trade, too, but it's much more rare because people are usually pushed to the limit (and many take some weird sadomasochistic pride in that).

>Wear and tear is just part of existence, at least an office job gives you the choice to keep physically healthy without overusing your body.

That entirely depends on time requirements and stress levels. When you need to work 50-60 hours in a week and/or have high stress, exercise may be a 'choice' but there are many who it's not a choice for.

After a long or stressful week, I absolutely cannot get energy and motivation to exercise appropriately. I usually want to do absolutely nothing but relax and do incredibly low mental/physical stress activities. If you have a lot of these sort of weeks, no matter how much of a choice exercise may be, it's not a viable choice for many people. It's not a matter of laziness, when times are relaxed I get a good bit of healthy exercise and living habits in. When stress is high they all suffer.

True, but the same applies to physical jobs.

And you'd think that you "exercise" at work, but no, using the same muscles over and over again for 8-12 hours a day seems to have different effects than exercising properly for 1-2 hours a day.

Exercising in the morning and then going to the job made me feel much better, but after a while I was too tired to wake up.

After a day of mental work, biking, stretching and basic exercises (no weights or anything) is "low effort", sort of, because it's the brain that's tired but the muscles are fine. It's hard to start, but I feel refreshed after ~30 minutes.

But yeah, 50-60 hours a week is just bad, no matter what job it is.

Well and for most people its harder to drag themselves to a work site or even an office and do something physical than it is to drag themselves to a desk and move their fingers a bit.

Pretty much this, my friend circle mostly exist out of construction, army or farmers. And everybody had either knee or back problems before they reached 30.

I have a few anecdotes like that:

- 39h/week at a truck dismantling warehouse (very heavy duty stuff) I was fresh like a dolphin (was doing pushups during pauses to get ready for the next shift, pretty telling), had to leave after harassment, missed that job a lot.

- part time gig as morning newspaper delivery, couldn't be easier on paper.. couldn't last more than 2 months due to very peculiar stress that driving and stopping constantly while running after the clock. It made no sense but it was incredibly harmful mentally and biologically.

- clerk at a court house: constant passive aggressive colleague interactions, everybody is bored, nobody cares. Very often you end up with your gut twisted due to the absurdity of the environment or the petty bosses ordering you around to feel powerful.

'work' is a subtle topic, you need a quality task, with quality people. In which case it's not a job, it's a life, a pleasure, a source of pride and joy.

Love those extremely varied anecdotes, esp and tragically the courthouse one. What was the nature of the harassment?

Very rare kind of ~boss, old timer mechanics who had a military style of management, which I don't mind as long as you don't lie, but he started accusing me of shit. And with his persona you'd quickly feel gutted every time he speaks to you. It was extremely petty stuff like not finding screwdrivers but he made it a humiliating session and insisted that you did a wrong job. In reality it was an open warehouse and people from other services come and go and take tools they need regularly. I knew that after the fact. Also colleagues ended up threatening me because I had the balls to complain about the lack of organization. A lesson in tribal dynamics.

The court house is way sadder than this, people go there because it's public guaranteed job so paycheck motivation only, people some times would sigh at the simplest movement (grabbing a pen). It also has social implications.. this delays lawsuits by years. It's stockholm syndrom institutionalized.

Those are both just painful to hear about. Sorry.

If you are paid for it, it's a job.

It's an important factor. How does this affect people.

For the same task t:

You're paid a lot

You're paid a little

You're volunteering for zero benefits

How does this impact your emotions and we'll being long term ?

I can add to this:

-server at a restaurant crappy bosses, crappy work environment, many awful interactions with customers, terrible pay, 0 benefits

-full time auto body painter - hard work, mixing chemicals all day can be extremely dangerous to lungs, pay was low but I enjoyed it

-sales @ verizon decent pay, hostile regional manager, constant push to improve sales and sell more data plans(few years ago), quite stressful in general as the 2008 crash destroyed our sales and few months later i was laid off

-installing siding lasted one day, turns out I hate heights and people that work at this company had little to no care about safety

-machine operator at a manufacturing company, one of the crappiest things I have done, brain numbing 8-4, awful on the body, after injury I was unable to lift heavy so went on disability for a while

-software dev stimulates my mind and I learn new stuff, pays the most, my work environment is decent and I have been remote for over a year, boss respects me and company is very flexible. Best job in my life.

Yeah I forgot how unsafe simple gigs are most of the time. Very sad realization.

When I was delivering newspaper, a small detail came to my mind too.. I have no toilets. And at 6 in the morning chances of finding anything open are slim. First time in my life I had fantasies of offices with an actual bathroom.

Happy that you found a great spot in dev.

The study doesn’t FWIW.

Anecdotally I’m in my late-thirties, fit, don’t work crazy hours or live unhealthily and I had a heart attack a week ago today.

Being sedentary obviously doesn’t help matters and I’d suspect in terms of risk factors working long hours without moving much is worse than working long hours whilst active but we can’t defend that with anecdotes.

Wow, I hope you're alright now. Can you share a bit more about what may be the reason for the heart attack? Your diet or fitness habits?

I'm in my mid thirties, I think I'm fit, but constantly hear of "fit" people suffering heart attacks at this age.

Sure, the heart attack itself was caused by a thrombosis that fully blocked the left coronary artery. It actually came on whilst I was doing my morning swim. Results wise I got lucky and got fixed with a stent early enough that there doesn’t seem to be any (noticeable) damage to the heart. Right now the doctors don’t know precisely why I got this clot. Other than having it I’m in good health with no signs of chronic disease associated with heart attacks. They also tested for genetic clotting conditions and I’m waiting on hearing back about immune system issues. The other suspected issue could be a undiagnosed hole between the two sides of my heart.

Fitness wise I was swimming five days a week at a pretty good intensity. I’m pretty competitive so tend to push myself and as a sense of exertion my breast stroke pace is faster than most people’s freestyle. But this is just a local pool not some crazy swimming club. On top of that I make sure I do all the usual things like getting up from my desk regularly, take a walk at lunchtime and I have two young kids so usually we are going on hikes and bike rides at the weekend.

I don’t smoke, I eat reasonably healthily, I don’t drink loads of coffee, I work from home, my job isn’t too stressful and so on.

The only related history is that my father had a TIA aka “mini-stroke” at a similar age.

I’m back at home now but was in hospital for five days. So far recovery seems to be going well, lots of resting with a couple of walks each day that get progressively longer. It’ll still be a few weeks before I’ll be doing anything more. Emotionally I still feel very raw, much more so than any of the other times I’ve knowingly come close to dying.

I basically bottom out the risk factors for heart attack yet here we are.

Is there any chance you were exposed to COVID at any point? I know there’s an association between COVID-19 and clotting events (even for otherwise asymptomatic individuals)!

It’s possible although my wife has been tested weekly for her job so maybe unlikely.

Alternatively exposure to some COVID vaccines seems to also increase risk of clotting

Yeah my doctor says I’m only to have the Pfizer vaccine now.

The heart damage stories have been debunked* (but don’t expect the media to cover that)

* https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/14/setting-the-record-strai...

It seem so, lets see if that study is confirmed. We can't believe anything COVID related that has not been reproduced independently many times by independent groups, there is too much fear and convictions.

Read the link. There have been numerous studies.

> Over the ensuing months, numerous research groups published studies that refuted the early concerns and provided reassuring evidence that SARS-CoV-2 had no extra toxicity to the heart

I did read it. We need to wait and see if their meta-study approach is sound and didnt introduce bias. And from what I understand they didnt study a lot of the people that got really bad covid.

{Anecdote warning}

I have clotting issues. Genetic problem. Factor 5 + autoimmune.

I get a lot of symptoms if I lapse on blood thinners, so can easily tell when I’m having a mini stroke.

Covid dramatically worsened the situation. That was six months ago.

Before I could go off blood thinners for 3 days before symptoms started.

Now if I’m late by six hours problems start.

Thank you for sharing your story, it helps a lot. Hope you come back to full fitness soon and resume your regular swims :)

Thanks. :)

Hope you recover well!

Just concerning the breast stroke: I started to go swimming half a year ago and for lack of technique I did breast stroke instead of freestyle. After a couple months of 30min of swimming every day, I suddenly got terrible back pain during swimming (due the the backwards bent spine I guess). I started to learn freestyle and did not encounter the problems again. Just yesterday I did some breast stroke and I almost instantly got the pain again. Did you ever encounter this kind of back pain, or is it only my physiology?

I’d say you’re almost certainly not swimming the stroke correctly. You can definitely get into the habit of overarching your back and neck to get your head out of the water. I’d get someone who knows what they’re doing to check your stroke.

Switching up stroke is generally a good idea though.

Breast stroke gave me really bad lower back pain. I surprised to hear that’s a common thing. I thought it was just me.

Your father having a mini stroke at a very young age does sound to be like a pretty important risk factor. Family history is super important in these situations.

Definitely my point was rather that after investigation there is still no clear answer as to what caused the clot and/or what that familial problem would be. After all familial risk is going to be inherited or through a shared environmental hazard.

My grandfather was a passionate carpenter. His workweek was always at least 60 hours. [...] He was in good shape and died at 92 years age.

A friend of mine had to get a new carpenter to work on his house when the previous one died of a heart attack aged 45.

My grandfather did 90% of work in his own workshop. No work on somebody’s house.

There were injuries on fingers, but he died with all of them in place. If I remember it right, only 2 nails were gone.

Maybe that had an impact, but maybe it didn't. We don't know.

Taking a single data point and extrapolating from it ("Carpentry is safer than desk work because look at my grandfather") isn't useful.

Maybe? Most likely. Easily, heat is problematic for heart health. then there’s enjoyment. perhaps his grandfather enjoyed working in a woodshop. someone laying siding is likely just making ends meet.

The problem lies in the assumption that work you enjoy is better for your health than work you don't enjoy. I question that assumption. They're both work, they both take the same toll on your body, but one releases a neurotransmitter to tell you it's fun. Why would that difference make it healthier?

For the same reason laughing helps you live longer. Walking around constantly miserable does take a toll on your body.

With today's technologies it's absolutely possible to work outside:

A lengthy meeting where your role is a listener? - jogging

Programming? - park, garden, beach

Make breaks, walk, swim, run, enjoy fresh air, no need to stay indoors.

Any advise for how to work outside if

1. It's boiling hot

2. Air is dangerously polluted

3. No swimming pools in the vicinity

4. Mosquitoes in the parks and gardens will give you dengue

Emigrate.

Where to?

I don't know how people do this. I can't even work on the balcony, because it's either too bright, too hot, too cold or too loud. And it's in moderate climate.

Also not sitting at a proper desk with a full size keyboard, mouse and monitor will cause you all sorts of back/neck/arm/hand pain.

There's no such thing as sitting on a beach with a laptop coding. You can only do that for a few days at a time. People who say otherwise are lying.

A few days? I wouldn’t be able to do it for 1 hour probably

Thats just for their social network bragging most of the time.

> Being forced to sit in the office

I don't think it's the "sit[ting] in the office" part, rather it's the "being forced". If you love what you do, the mental strain of working long days is... at least different. You can still be physically destructive (skipping meals, skipping sleep). Unfortunately, many people do not love what they do, and I am so sorry for them.

Physiologically our bodies are not optimized to sit all day and stare at screens.

I'd love to read / write about this. People talk about economy or material aspect of societies .. but when the spirit is not there everything plummets quickly. I feel like there's a lot more joy and output possible if we readjust a few things in how organizations operate.

A close person suffered a stroke before 60 because of just that. It's the fastest way to die: Work in an office your whole life. Of course, now he's depressed and feels like he lost out on life by working too much, which is true.

He started training really hard and got very fit. But the source of the depression will never go away.

Did the training start after the stroke or before ?

It was after the stroke. He really started enjoying mountain hiking and he still does. He keeps telling me that I need to take care of my body. That we aren't made for office life.

It sounds like you are describing the source of his depression as being his relationship to the memory and impact of what was, for him, relatively too much time working throughout his life.

While the history here cannot be changed, the way he is relating to it can be changed. This is not necessarily very easy to do, but for most humans, a distinct possibility, with the right tools and resources.

The source may be able to be de-potentiated, the emotional charge these memories carry in his system may be unwound, which can have a great effect on his quality of life.

My tinsmith workaholic grandfather had his first heart attack in his mid 50's and I've been watching him lose metaphorical and sometimes literal pieces of himself due to his poor cardiovascular health for the last 30-ish years.

So does this mean that the two anecdotes balance out, or that it's possible we shouldn't consider single cases as data?

I spent 76 hours/week working in a factory for a while as a machine operator and on the line. I guarantee you it's not healthier in the long term than programming work or stock trading at a desk and in conference rooms for 45 hours a week.

I think there are huge differences between being a carpenter and being an assembly-line worker though.

What was harmful for you ?

I dont think average stats really confirm that conclusion. People working in white collar professions have higher life expectancy then blue collar professions.

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