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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry HN, you're safe.

I don't suspect any of this applies to people who isolate specifically so they can do something with their brain: study something, or make something. If you're at a party, and people basically like you, but you're thinking that you'd rather be finishing some debugging session that you left half done, this is not about you.

Rather, those who are shunned by others for being dullards.

Imagine they made an analogous study about running, following thousands of participants in distance running events. What would the finding be? "Runners who are separated from others are uncoordinated, inefficient and unfit, and have a higher BMI than those who stick with the pack". But, of course, front-runners are separated from others; there are necessarily far fewer of them in the study, leading to a misleading generalization.

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I'm only half-buying this, because social interactions are clearly important, a lot of our brain is involved processing it, so if you don't exercise those parts there must be consequences. The question really is whether doing something else with your brain is a viable substitute, and also exactly what works as social interaction for your brain.

If you are on HN you would believe that all studies are wrong due to trivial sample issues, but the researchers are usually aware of the issues and try to control for it. For your analogous study nobody would mistake the cause for the effect like that.

Sorry, but this is cope. Feeling intellectually superior does not make you exempt from human biology.

not to mention who's to say people like HN users at parties, lol. being a karma farmers doesn't make you appreciated, it makes you vain.

> Sorry, but this is cope.

Sorry I don’t understand this sentence. Are you saying he is not coping with the findings of the experiment? Did you typo “crap”?

If it’s slang for “You are misinterpreting the facts to support your own biased opinion” it’s not slang I’ve seen before

"(slang) A coping mechanism or self-delusion one clings to in order to endure the hopelessness or despair of existence."

- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cope#Noun

The article only makes assumptions and I guess a debugging session would also stimulate brain regions needed for higher thoughts. Perhaps different ones of course. But there certainly are people that basically do nothing when alone and very creative people on the other hand. It would be surprising if the negative effects were the same.

On the other hand even as a passionate programmer I see some form of mental decay in people describing debugging as fun. It can be fun but it probably shouldn't.

I wouldn't even show up in the kind of data they used:

"We, therefore, investigated data from nearly 500,000 people from the UK Biobank, with a mean age of 57. People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly."

"Our study also included neuroimaging (MRI) data from approximately 32,000 people. This showed that socially isolated people had poorer cognition."

They focused on older people, severely isolated, for whom brain MRI data was available.

If you're not already having some sort of brain problem, you won't be listed in a database where your brain MRI data is available. "People with brain MRI data" is biased toward cognitive problems.

Well of course finding the correlation in groupings is what these studies attempt to uncover

You don't think they controlled for that?

I don't know. The web mag article doesn't mention it; the abstract on the NIH website doesn't mention it; and the link to the full text isn't working.

For instance, I suspect that the raw data which was used by the study could be examined in ways such as: find the top 5% cognitive performers and determine how many of those socially isolate compared to the average.

Also, the study's definition of isolation is rather severe: "People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly." The mean age in the data is 57, too; the investigation is focused on those who are getting on in years.

The source of the data would almost certainly have to be self-reporting, rooted in the answers to some questionnaires. A following problem could occur there: some of those who have a full-time job could answer yes to having daily social contact, whereas others could interpret social as anything but work. That would then cause a bias: over-representation of the unemployed in the isolated category. Speaking of work, based on the mean age, there is going to be a bunch of retirees in there too. Retired old people who don't see anyone not doing well mentally is hardly a secret.

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