4 ms·
Is it correlation or causation tho?
by diqwndwqiond 6y ago
Is it correlation or causation tho?
- jedberg 6y agoLooks correlative but it highly correlates, and they did seem to eliminate a lot of confounding factors.
- pmichaud 6y agoOn priors and given how they sample, I'm guessing it's just p-hacking.
- mdtancsa 6y agoI cant find the episode now, but a few years ago an episode CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks interviewed a researcher that found being bilingual seemed to delay the onset of dementia by a couple of years. Although it doesnt sound like much, from a public policy pov, its pretty significant when you look at what that can mean for quality of life as well as costs for our public health system.
- diqwndwqiond 6y agoI wonder if knowing one language delays the onset of dementia by X. then being bilingual delays dementia by X/2. then being trilingual delays dementia by X/3. and so on ...
- golem14 6y agoUnfortunately, you can't take an 50-something english only American and tell him to "go learn Italian", for health. It's hard enough to make people eat less, exercise, or quit smoking - picking up new language without another motivation than "for health" is going to be even harder. Most schools introduce more languages today, no ? And I guess there is no motivation to keep language skills active beyond school, so any skill here will likely atrophy like me French :(
- 082349872349872 6y agoHas NAFTA not meant that one can, even without internet, practise french and spanish from food packaging? I enjoyed Bon Cop Bad Cop (2006), a bilingual flick which IIRC can be found with either english or french subs.
- mdtancsa 6y agoits been a while since I heard the doc, but I dont think it was so much a "lets all learn another language" as opposed to looking what might be happening in the brain to cause such an odd disparity in how the disease manifests itself.
- another1oror 6y agoAnother study in Italy that found a similar result. This one included brain scans that apparently indicate structural differences https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2018-05-15/bilingual-brains-are-more-resilient-dementia-cause-alzheimers-disease https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2018-05-15/bilingual-brai...
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoYou can't get causation from an observation study. You can however get a lot of attention for "finding" a causation. So to answer your question, it's quacks selling correlation as causation.