Don't Blame Sitting — Yet — for Shorter Lives of the Sedentary | Hacker News Reader

Don't Blame Sitting — Yet — for Shorter Lives of the Sedentary

online.wsj.com

67 pointsforgingahead35 comments

Step 1: Flurry of fearmongering articles that appeal to the prejudices of the target audience with logical hole large enough to drive a freight train through (usually correlation=causation/post-hoc reasoning or statistical silliness.)

Step 2: sell tons of papers, products, and ads to the credulous.

Step 3: point out logical flaw.

Step 4: sell tons of papers and ads to the incredulous.

Step 5: profiles of the people who were influenced by the original story, painting them as crazies (or are they visionaries? You, the reader, decide!)

Step 6: sell tons of papers and ads to the gawkers.

Final disposition: People get stupider as a result of reading the paper than they would have been by completely avoiding it, and they completely dismiss everything they read, relying instead on their prejudices and what they heard from a guy once.

edit: I've noticed the successful garbage health panics seem to be structured like sympathetic magic (like-with-like, metaphors, symbolic connections.) For example, "Study Finds Depression Causes Death in Close Relatives" won't work, but "Study Finds Depression Causes Heart Disease" does. I think of this one as "Study Finds Standing Up Prevents Lying Down."

Step 1: throw all your newspapers in the bin, cancel your subscriptions and point all of the major news sites' URL's to 127.0.0.1.

Step 2: start reading scientific journals and other high quality sources of information.

Step 3: call all of your friends idiots for not doing the same.

Step 4: begin to hate your life more and more because you can't identify with the appaling ignorance that surrounds you.

Pessimistic step 5: throw yourself off of a tall building.

Optimistic step 5: build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

Final disposition: you are no longer a part of society at large.

Step 6: Realize that, however well-informed you may be in some narrow field, we are all woefully ignorant of so many other things that said knowledge is, in a broader scope, quite trivial, and that separating from society at large is just another symptom of said ignorance;)

Tried this, don't have enough time to get past step 2.

Avoid step 3. Separating lies from truth in the media is a full time job. Most people have other full time jobs, children, and mortgages. Be trustworthy and explain without condescension instead of calling people idiots.

Caveat: this will help you to inform the people around you about what you think is true, but it will work even better if what you are saying is silly and appeals to everyone's prejudices.

Uncritically reading every scientific paper you come across and taking the information in there for absolute truth is dangerous and a problem many untrained journalists have.

You need to have a background in sciences and a minimal understanding of statistics to properly judge the results - is the sample-size large enough, is it varied enough, did they use the correct statistical test for correlation - lots of papers out there are absolute crap (either unrepeatable results or missing mountains of needed information), published just because someone was friends with the editor or all peer-reviewers were asleep that day.

Note: Even the mythical Open Access doesn't help with this problem, as there too are editors deciding in favor of their friends and peer-reviewers gone fishing.

This is exactly why people are skeptical of science. They view it almost exclusively through the mass media filter. When you see massively conflicting stories on a monthly basis it's easy to conclude scientists are just 'making it up as they go' and believe what you want to believe.

The problem is there are plenty of scientists who are willing to lend their credibility to these sensationalist stories.

Every story has an interview with some expert from some university backing up the premise, because scientists are people too and some of them want their 15 minutes of fame like the rest of us.

I take it you've never spoken to a journalist.

Their job is not to present the findings in a balanced way. It is to present sharp, punchy, telegraphic prose that grabs a reader's interest and holds it long enough to justify the cost of the adjacent advertising.

Oh! And they need it done by 4pm sharp.

Conversations can go along these lines:

Journo: "What does the study say, Doctor Bloggs? Will people who sit more die sooner?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Well it's too early to say that for sure. It's only a preliminary result. There's no full randomised trial, it's a meta-study based on a few dozen other studies. "

Journo: "But what was the conclusion? Does sitting shorten life?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Well when the researchers controlled for known risk factors like age, heredity and so forth they found a correlation between sedentary time and lifespan. But it's only an early result, much more work has to be done."

Journo: "What does that mean in lay terms?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "It means that based on this study, people who sit for longer had a shorter life expectancy."

Journo: "Would you say that means that they died sooner than they otherwise would have?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Sure, that's one way to put it."

Next day:

SITTING IS KILLING YOU SAYS DOC

Prominent local medical scientist Dr Blogg said yesterday that people who sit too much "die sooner".

"People who sit [have] a shorter life expectancy", he said.

His comments come after the publication of a report...

At no point has the journalist strictly lied about what Dr Bloggs said. He just left out that tedious fluffy sandbagging scientists always insist on and cut to the heart of the matter. The journalist here can source every word in the report.

Everything you ever say to a journalist can and will be published.

They are not your friends. They are not normal people who keep normal confidences. They do not observe social niceties or politeness in conveying what you said.

They will print only what makes for an interesting story. And that will only rarely be what you, the source, had in mind when you spoke to them.

The WSJ previously wrote an article titled "Sitting for More Than Three Hours A Day Cuts Life Expectancy," and now they backpedal by writing an entire article summarizing that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Unfortunately, the damage is already done. The Illusion-Of-Truth effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory#Illusion-of-tr... ) is a cognitive bias that states people will believe familiar statements, sometimes even after being told they're false.

Speaking of correlation, it would be interesting to see if there is one between the publication of these two WSJ articles and the sales of standing desks.

These studies on sitting on completely overblown. One of the most consistent findings that holds true across all cultures is that the more years of schooling people have, the longer they live. If sitting was really all bad for you, this wouldn't be the case since not only is schooling a highly sedentary activity, but people with more schooling are also much more likely to have sedentary jobs.

You're ignoring the possibility that sitting is bad, but the negative impact is outweighed by the other advantages accompanied by education.

(Not saying that's the true explanation)

"You're ignoring the possibility that sitting is bad, but the negative impact is outweighed by the other advantages accompanied by education."

I mean that's basically what I believe to be the case. Even if sitting is bad for you, which I'm not convinced of but which wouldn't especially surprise me, I'm sure that for many people the good effects of sitting can outweigh the bad, not just in school but all throughout life.

Those aren't "good effects of sitting", they are good effects of other things which typically involve sitting. The place most people I've talked to went, when seeing the original article, was talking about standing desks. If it is in fact the sitting-as-opposed-to-standing that is having an impact, that would be a good way of having the benefits of a desk job without the sitting. I don't think anyone read it and said, "Oh, I'd better quit my cushy desk job and become a coal miner."

I made my own standing desk and I've been using it for a year now. I won't go back because just by doing that, I have more energy through the day. Who cares what the flip-flopping WSJ keeps saying.

You are very possibly harming yourself far more with a standing desk than you would by sitting. Sitting is correlated with fat metabolism issues, but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease; standing was shown in studies to correlate with increased stress hormones and increased blood density.

You are better off setting a timer and, every 20-30 minutes or so, getting up and moving around (you don't have to exercise strenously; just walking for a couple minutes from one spot to another seems to do it).

You sound quite certain for what appears to me to be equally ambiguous; Can you elaborate if you have some evidence which points to the hazards of standing far outweighing those of sitting?

Sitting is correlated with fat metabolism issues, but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease; standing was shown in studies to correlate with increased stress hormones and increased blood density.

[Citation needed]

This isn't meant as a threat, either: I'd be quite interested in a comprehensive literature review of this stuff.

It reminds me a bit of the brouhaha around barefoot running: some decent evidence suggests barefoot is "better," while some suggests that forefoot striking is really the key. Expert opinion is split.

I always thought the main argument for barefoot running was that it makes heel strikes and other things noticeably unpleasant, thus encouraging proper technique (forefoot striking).

Source: I don't run, but I read an article once.

but standing for periods of just 10-15 minutes is correlated with vascular disease;

Just 10-15 minutes? Where did they find subjects for a research study that didn't stand for at least 10-15 minute spans during the day?

Isn't it obvious that sitting for prolonged periods of time is completely unnatural? We have evolved to run, jump, climb, not spend 8 hrs a day compressing our spines - it is only in the last 100 or so years that sedentary occupations have become the norm

All it means that at some point we'll evolve to be really good at sitting. I'm doing my share to make that happen.

Sure, that will happen at some point. Don't hold your breath though; evolution works over extremely long timescales (hundreds if not thousands of generations)

The evolutionary pressure of people dying at 65 instead of 66 (completely made up numbers) is pretty small, especially in a modern society where their dependents will not usually starve as a result.

How can you say it is completely unnatural?

First, have you ever seen cheetahs? Even in their natural environment, they laze about almost all day.

Second, we are intrinsically lazy, and not because "the modern world has corrupted us".

Notice I am not claiming that our bodies were in fact designed to sit forever, but can we really declare it is "obvious" that sitting for a long time is against our nature?

> Second, we are intrinsically lazy

From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that we would preserve energy. Food wasn't always plentiful, and unnecessary calorie burning would work against survival and propagation of the species.

Precisely.

Safe drinking water is completely unnatural too.

Do you suggest that is bad?

Wow, that viral campaign to sell standing desk begins to get really weird.

This is the same old “correlation is not causation” thing that the press never seems to understand.

Move along; nothing to see here…

They understand it well. Problem is, you rarely produce big headlines without jumping to conclusions.

This mis-characterizes the article. "Correlation is not causation" can be said about anything. The article has a number of specific findings which weaken the original finding.

Just about every strong and weak scientific finding involves correlation. "Correlation is not causation" comes into play most strongly when a correlation seems assign causation to something with no clear underlying physical mechanism - leap years and stock market behavior, etc. But one could imagine a number of plausible physical mechanism whereby sitting could be back bad for one. That still doesn't prove it but it different lines of reasoning could appropriate.

But the obvious correlation is that of the million situations that could cause someone to sit more, more of them lead to early death than extended life. For example, asthma, arteriosclerosis, and obesity are known to lead to both situations.

When a study comes out that exhaustively controls for at least all of known factors that cause both situations being correlated, give me a call.

What commenters never seem to understand is that the "press" are commercial for profit ventures, and to a first approximation get paid for page views (on dead trees or web sites). It is in their interest to publish whatever furthers that goal, up to the point they drive readers away.

If readers punished the press for this then they would stop doing it. But readers don't, and as such the stories in the press reflect on what people want to read. And as much as people claim to be high and mighty, only want good news etc, they actually read all the salacious erroneous stuff.

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