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Comment by isaacfrond | Hacker News Reader

Let's do it one more time.

Correlation != Causation

Could the causation conceivably run the other direction? People with beginning dementia exercise less? Yes, that is quite conceivable actually.

Could there be a common cause explaining both? Yes, if you are in good health, with good genes, a good job, leisure time and money, then probably you are the type of person who'll live longer, sport more, and be cognitively healthy for a longer time. It doesn't mean the causality runs in the other direction.

In other words, this study shows what we all know. The 'good' people have all the good stuff. But what we want to know, will an intervention that causes people to exercise more do any good?

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Sometimes I wonder if commenters in this forum will do anything to try to disprove that exercise is good for health.

There is an undercurrent of skepticism and contrarianism bordering on anti-intellectualism on this forum - especially with those accounts started after the pandemic.

This is just one of dozens of studies that have shown that good cardiovascular health (a side effect of "vigorous" exercise) has a downstream positive effect on health.

And I personally can attest to that - the days I don't vigorously exercise (run, swim, BJJ, MT) are also the days I see the biggest cognitive declines - and I'm fairly young.

This should be quantifiable. Use an LLM to help identify this undercurrent you’re referring to in maybe 10,000 conversation threads using the API from the footer. A thread being a reply to a topic, and a singular chain of replies.

Then use that to train an RNN for sentiment analysis based on the values you’ve just described.

Then run the entire HN corpus through your RNN and chart the values over time.

For bonus points, incorporate the score of replies in the weighting of values.

You don't need an LLM for sentiment analysis.

I also don't want to pay for scraping and data ingest costs out of my personal pocket.

Feel free to do it if you want - it would make a nice blogpost.

I wasn't suggesting you need the LLM to perform sentiment analysis. The problem the LLM overcomes is generating the training data you need without having to trudge through massive amounts of material to mark a comment / thread with a 1 or a 0.

There's no scraping cost, the API is free. Your message, for example, is here: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/40801233.json?pri...

Processing 10,000 threads is probably not more than a few dollars on OpenAI's GPT API.

The reason I don't do it is I don't see the trend you see.

Yes methodology here seems suspect. Also: Activity levels were self reported. Could just be that early stages of dementia cause individuals to forget - either that they exercised or to exercise or to report.

>Let's do it one more time. Correlation != Causation

No, please let's not.

This almost automatic HN reaction to every research is the lowest tier of facile dismissal.

> Baseline self-reported frequency of VPA was categorized into low VPA (<1 session/week), and high VPA (≥1 session/week).

So yeah, this is a mere correlational study, and a self-reported one at that. So technically, it could even be that people who think they exercise harder have better health outcomes.

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