4 ms·

It’s always interesting to reverse the direction of causality in these kinds of articles and see if it’s plausible. Could it simply be that people with heart pr

• waterhouse 5y ago
  Yup. Or: people who have decent jobs and are conscientious about them are more likely to decide to drink coffee daily to make themselves more productive, and these traits also make them more likely to (a) be more conscientious about their health, (b) have health insurance and be more able to pay medical bills. I don't have numbers on this, but I have the impression that many people drink coffee on weekdays in order to be awake for their job—and they probably wouldn't make it a daily thing if they didn't have a job—and therefore daily coffee drinkers will contain a much higher proportion of people who are healthy enough to hold down a job.
  • ludicast 5y ago
    This is always my thought as well. I believe coffee drinkers are less likely to commit suicide too, which definitely would align with the purpose a job gives you (fwiw).
  • Jedd 5y ago
    Prima facie this seems an unlikely causal direction. After about ten days of drinking {an amount} of coffee, your tolerance adjusts, and you're aligned to someone who does not drink coffee at all. You're effectively just maintaining a new baseline, but have developed a regular expenditure / tactile ceremony. The 'make themselves more productive' claim would need some citations to back that up, as I suspect most is self-reporting anecdata.
    • anyfoo 5y ago
      > After about ten days of drinking {an amount} of coffee, your tolerance adjusts, and you're aligned to someone who does not drink coffee at all. Is that really true? I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, but then that's a very strong statement with non-obvious validity to me. I know that substance tolerance exists (at least it's a very common idea), but is it so generic that it applies to a) all effects and each of those effects in its entirety, and b) to all effective substances that make up coffee? And as a more specific example, I don't think I've ever taken something like "heroin addicts need to take heroin just to feel normal again, and more to feel a high" so literally that I thought they would function "normally" as in exactly like a non-heroin user would when taking an exact dosage to counteract their tolerance.
      • Jedd 5y ago
        > Is that really true? Good question. There was a spectacular long-form article, I'm sure I read via HN, about 7 years ago, that included a delightfully lurid dive into the chemical and biological effects of caffeine, on humans, over a period of a few weeks, and that fond but slightly hazy memory is where I'm getting that figure from. Regrettably I've not been able to find that particular article again. I did find this, however: https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-quit-caffeine-in-one-week-e041892698ec https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-quit-caffeine-in-one-week-e0... .. and in the Addictive Potential section they cite this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27762662/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27762662/ .. which, if I'm reading that precis right, blows it out to 4 weeks (but it sounds like they were testing the presence of the dependency / tolerance / baseline effect, not trying to determine minimum timeframe to achieve). The list of Similar Articles at the bottom of that second link suggests there's some body of research out there to back these styles of claims up. The considered wisdom, as far as I can intuit, is to use caffeine strategically rather than frequently, if you want to enjoy the advertised 'energy' and 'focus' benefits. Of course, if you just like the flavour or the ceremony, knock yourself out.
    • nonameiguess 5y ago
      It doesn't have to work. The simple fact that they care and try is already a correlate of higher conscientiousness. As in, some person always trying the latest productivity hack may be more productive than a normal person even if all the hacks do nothing, simply because they're the kind of person who tries to be maximally productive. Another example is caffeine is widely used as a pre-workout supplement. In high doses, without tolerance, it actually does demonstrably improve top-level strength. But the way most people use it results in tolerance and doesn't actually help. Nonetheless, the sheer fact that they're working out all the time already results in better heart health, even if the caffeine isn't doing anything on top of that.
  • chillwaves 5y ago
    I drink coffee on the weekends.
    • brailsafe 5y ago
      Ya why wouldn't you!? It's great
• novosel 5y ago
  Yes. But I always assumed causation is direction-agnostic. I tend to think of it as a topological structure.
  • waterhouse 5y ago
    Well, the point (I think?) of researching causation is so that you can make use of it. If I know that doing X makes me healthier, that's valuable for my decision of whether to do X; if doing X is merely associated with being healthier, but causation is not established (and in fact it's possible for doing X to harm you while still being associated with better health—consider "any harmful activity that young healthy people like to do and old people don't do"), then that's not useful for me. I dunno, I guess you could be interested in learning to classify people. If they do X, then that increases your estimate of their current healthiness regardless of the underlying causation. If you're an insurance company, an actuary, etc., then maybe that's all you need to know.
  • dTal 5y ago
    In that case, I caused you to write that comment. I apologize.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    Rain causes wet streets. Wet streets do not cause rain (directly).