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Comment by throwaway27727 | Hacker News Reader

Correlation or causation? The article doesn't specify whether the subjects' brain sizes were measured prior to the study.

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I understand the difference, but in this case it’s not a good look for TV viewing regardless

What does that even mean? If people with cognitive deficits have a powerful idiosyncratic preference for pineapple juice, that's not a bad look for pineapple juice.

Last I checked, pineapple juice isn't a highly-utilised behavioural manipulation channel.

The other mechanism is.

Even were the relationship not causal, it is at the very least likely exploitable.

Pineapple juice is exploitable as well! Sweetened beneverages are highly caloric and hyperpalatable and preferentially consumed by lower-SES customers. This is an actual criticism people have of our food supply! The point isn't that they're not exploitable, it's that you have to show that they are, otherwise we're not talking about a study anymore, and instead simply telling each other just-so stories.

Hyperpalatability and propaganda are at best distantly related.

Though a fair effort.

In a way, that's true. Drinking a lot of juice, or soft drinks, is not ideal, and when I see an overweight person drinking straight from a large juice bottle, that reaffirms my belief. It would be socially unacceptable to judge this behavior as being caused by cognitive deficits, but you could argue that such people are acting against their own interests (which is a very human thing to do, we're not machines).

The case of watching a lot of TV is a bit different though because it's about attention. Time is limited and it makes a difference whether I do something intellectually stimulating or not. If I spend 8 hours per day creating things, writing software, learning languages, etc., that is going to develop my brain in a different way than 8 hours of watching TV does.

Now to the point about the bad look: even if the study could not prove a causal relationship, why would you even risk it? There is little to gain from watching lots of TV and you'll end up healthier and happier by prioritizing other things.

This is like saying "there is little to gain from reading lots of books". Television is becoming in many ways a more vital art form, at least in the formally-mainstream productions, than film.

We all recognize that there is a form of television consumption that is unhealthy, or at least unhelpful; sunrise-to-sunset viewing of cynical unscripted shows on reality networks, whatever. There's a kernel of truth to the observation, but it's being wildly overgeneralized by settling on "television" as the problem.

The linked paper suggests brain sizes were only measured once at visit 5.

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