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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Or: living-longer is a predictive factor for sun exposure.

Or: people who live a long time, often go outside.

Or: non-sedentary lifestyles predict long-life.

Or: to quote the paper 2/3rds in,

    "We acknowledge several major limitations of this study.
    First, it is not possible to differentiate between active sun exposure habits and a healthy lifestyle".

This isn't doing the cultural perception of science any favours.

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I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment. Well, I don't understand _why_ you choose to comment. The study itself identifies, acknowledges and presents some major limitations. It does not hide them. It's not like the study was concocted in some content factory in the Balkans, to make a couple of quick bucks on Facebook or whatever. The authors are very serious researchers and the study itself was supported by funds from prestigious organizations (that you can find in the "Acknowledgements" section).

It does my head in why would you choose to cast aspersions on the science method. It's literally an example of science done by the book, published in a peer reviewed magazine. It's not amateur work, it's not fake news. It's ground breaking science: "We found this interesting thing and here we present it to you, with caveats, after some other people in the field did a quick sanity check on it".

I'm sorry for the tone, but I'm quite exasperated by people doing this kind of low key, subtle, disparaging of science under the guise of scepticism. It always happens when studies are posted on HN (or reddit), people seem to find a perverse joy in finding weird gotchas that the study already mentions and then saying: see, science is such a mess.

Err.. people actually posted in this section creduously thinking that sunlight would extend their life.

The study spends 2/3rds of the time ignoring the obvious analysis which is already established -- this is common in journalism. The title is "what if?", the article spends most of the time imagining what-if, and then at the end says "probably not".

why i chose to comment is that people do not weight parts of articles evenly, the read what they want to read into things. It is the responsibility of honest communication to make the most plausible conclusion the easiest to infer, and the least plausible, the hardest. If you want to think this study shows that more sunlight = more life, you should have to do a lot of cognitive work to get to that mumbojumbo.

This paper does the opposite. It toes the line of dishonesty, making deeply implausible pseudo-science an easy conclusion to infer.

> This isn't doing the cultural perception of science any favours.

But they're acknowledging the limitations of the study. As it is, it's a jumping off-point to do more research on the subject. They even mention confounding factors in the abstract.

I'm curious what alternative you'd propose, other than more funding on larger and more complex studies.

But the media isn't going to read the study before they publish all their cute headlines about getting some sun to extend your life. And everyone get dumber.

Sounds like that's an issue with the media and American attention spans rather than the scientific method

It is an issue with the media. It's also predictable. If you name your article in a way you know will get blown out of proportion in that way, you are complicit.

Nah, but I do agree all scientific text should be rot13 encoded, and only let the “real” scientists in on the secret.

Why specify Americans?

Not to mention the exceptionally high correlation with low education and low income.

The same data could be used to conclude that low income and lack of education are risk factors for death similar to smoking...

I really don’t think that is a surprising result, as compared to time in the sun being a direct cause of long life.

I don't have time to read the study but if you want to have a look yourself, the terms to look for are "confounder", "confounding factor", ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding

An unsophisticated person looks at this and says golly I better get tan!

A somewhat sophisticated person says something like the above.

People who change the world will wonder there’s something there. especially given the sober and candid examination of possible confounding factors and mechanisms of action.

someday we’ll build better tools to monitor the human body and we will directly be able to determine the various effects of many of these variables.

the future is an exciting place.

in the meantime, “study finds…”

Anecdotally, skin cancer is a real killer that got my outdoorsy uncle in the not that sunny PNW before he turned 60. Australia has a very stringent hat wearing culture because of their above ozone hole. The sun can take as much as it gives.

Not to mention that we know excessive sun exposure to be associated with a variety of cancers.

But it does the scientific perception of science well enough

Who cares what these development delayed children think, we have another 15 years of hegemony

You can also stay inside all the time and be physically active.

And take vitamin D supplements to compensate.

I hate these types of headlines. They're akin to "Coffee is a carcinogen", "Chocolate makes you live longer", "Making your child listen to Mozart 30 minutes a day boosts his IQ", etc. I.e. the results are probably either outright wrong, non-reproducible, or statistically insignificant.

Avoiding the outdoors won't shorten your lifespan if you take care of your health in general. Just live your life the way you want to and all will be well.

They controlled for exercise and the effect size decreased by 40 percent but was still significant. My biggest criticism is, as usual in epidemiology, there's a bunch of confounders that weren't controlled for and are very difficult to control for. Vitamin D levels, social life, psychiatric disorders for example.

However I'm sceptical that vitamin D deficiency explains the entire effect given it is quite large. If sunlight itself isn't relevant I expect other confounders to be stacking on top of vitamin D deficiency.

Seems an overreaching and incorrect statement. Lots of studies on the correlation of outdoor time and well-being. This study itself, though imperfect controls for some of those variables like exercise.

It might not be true for everybody (sounds like you're fine sitting inside, popping vitamins, and grinding on the Peloton or whatever -- good for you) but don't make the mistake of thinking your experiences are others'.

Clearly there are things about "the outdoors" that can't be replicated indoors. Smells, the sheer size and variety of environs, O2/CO2 levels, etc. Unless you are living in some kind of enormous, elaborate bio-dome.

> Avoiding the outdoors won't shorten your lifespan if you take care of your health in general.

You write this as if you somehow know this for sure. It’s well known that indoor air is significantly more polluted in most cases than outdoor air, at least in the west. Fresh exposure to outdoor air is also important not just exposure to the sun. I would definitely not want to spend most of my life breathing indoor air, and opening windows only gets you so far.

> . It’s well known that indoor air is significantly more polluted in most cases than outdoor air, at least in the west

Source on that? It probably vastly depends on the "outdoor", because i highly doubt next to an American highway the air is cleaner than the average housing away from that highway, like i don't doubt a house next to the highway has worse air than a forest in the middle of nowhere.

I thought it was common knowledge. Here’s some information from the Environmental Protection Agency:

> Americans, on average, spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors,1 where the concentrations of some pollutants are often 2 to 5 times higher than typical outdoor concentrations

There’s been so much research on this by so many different organizations around the world, as far as I’ve known almost everybody was aware of this as fact.

There is an extraordinary amount of data online about this, should be easy to find. On average, outdoor air is healthier than indoor air, often by a wide margin. The above is from the EPA site: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality

Also https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/indoor-air-can-be-deadlier-t...

> indoor air is significantly more polluted in MOST cases

> indoors [...] concentrations of SOME pollutants are OFTEN [...] higher

Those two statements don't seem to be the same to me?

Everyone can make their own decisions about how much time they want to spend outdoors versus indoors. I encourage you to do the research yourself if it’s important to you, and make appropriate lifestyle choices. From the second link:

> World Health Organization has said that household cooking with coal or biomass-burning stoves led to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, compared with 3.7 million deaths from outdoor air pollution.

And that’s just talking about one of many different sources of pollution. There are so many sources of pollution indoors, sources that are very close to you physically, that you should carefully consider these factors and the statistics surrounding them.

For example, I don't live in a country where "household cooking with coal or biomass-burning stoves" is even a thing. I have an induction stove. In fact the air outside of my house is almost certainly worse because of a nearby highway.

Again, you are focusing on one specific source as an example. Feel free to ignore a decade of research on this topic -- but it's worth getting informed IMO.

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