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I agree with your first post but to call the title a lie is not right. It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logica

I agree with your first post but to call the title a lie is not right. It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logically consistent with your proposed rewrite, “people who are depressed early in adulthood have higher chance of dementia” On reading the title alone, I assumed a university marketer was trying to reframe in an interesting way what had been found in the study (something akin to your proposed summary)

joconde 5y ago
> It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logically consistent with your proposed rewrite, “people who are depressed early in adulthood have higher chance of dementia” Saying "the moon is white" is logically consistent with saying "the moon may be made of white cheese". Logical consistence isn't an excuse for a major university to make people believe that research supports something that isn't actually supported by their work. > On reading the title alone, I assumed a university marketer was trying to reframe in an interesting way what had been found in the study (something akin to your proposed summary) Yes that's definitely the reason. I couldn't find the article on the journal's website, but I imagine that the paper was honest about this being a correlation. We can debate whether the title (and some of the article) fits the definition of a lie, but it's 100% clickbait that will make some people believe something that has no basis in research, and they are exploiting that for PR reasons. And I actually wouldn't be surprised if the causality they suggest is true... But that kind of exaggeration makes it impossible to follow what we actually have evidence for, which is the opposite of what this kind of popular science articles should be doing.
therealcamino 5y ago
To me it's not the same statement: it's one thing to say that people who might be prone to be depressed as early adults might have higher risk of dementia later. To say that happiness at that period is protective, suggests that if you cheered them up at the right time, they'd no longer be at higher risk. Is it something about their brain structure or approach to adversity, or is it specific, moment to moment lived experience? If it's the latter, then a dementia prevention strategy could be giving out free amusement park tickets to 20-somethings. I'm being facetious, but the "happiness" title really does shift the focus. So I didn't think it was equivalent. As a general statement, these university press releases on research findings are some of the lowest-quality posts on HN.

joconde 5y ago

> It seems to me that “happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia” is logically consistent with your proposed rewrite, “people who are depressed early in adulthood have higher chance of dementia” Saying "the moon is white" is logically consistent with saying "the moon may be made of white cheese". Logical consistence isn't an excuse for a major university to make people believe that research supports something that isn't actually supported by their work. > On reading the title alone, I assumed a university marketer was trying to reframe in an interesting way what had been found in the study (something akin to your proposed summary) Yes that's definitely the reason. I couldn't find the article on the journal's website, but I imagine that the paper was honest about this being a correlation. We can debate whether the title (and some of the article) fits the definition of a lie, but it's 100% clickbait that will make some people believe something that has no basis in research, and they are exploiting that for PR reasons. And I actually wouldn't be surprised if the causality they suggest is true... But that kind of exaggeration makes it impossible to follow what we actually have evidence for, which is the opposite of what this kind of popular science articles should be doing.

therealcamino 5y ago

To me it's not the same statement: it's one thing to say that people who might be prone to be depressed as early adults might have higher risk of dementia later. To say that happiness at that period is protective, suggests that if you cheered them up at the right time, they'd no longer be at higher risk. Is it something about their brain structure or approach to adversity, or is it specific, moment to moment lived experience? If it's the latter, then a dementia prevention strategy could be giving out free amusement park tickets to 20-somethings. I'm being facetious, but the "happiness" title really does shift the focus. So I didn't think it was equivalent. As a general statement, these university press releases on research findings are some of the lowest-quality posts on HN.