5 ms·
This particular parasite infection is oddly specific to another oddly specific behavioral trait. This is either a very well done research or it’s a sham.
by 1-6 3y ago
This particular parasite infection is oddly specific to another oddly specific behavioral trait. This is either a very well done research or it’s a sham.
- bjornsing 3y agoIt’s well known that TG infection increases risky behavior. So I’m not the least bit surprised that there’s a correlation with entrepreneurship. Or what did you mean?
- gyudin 3y agoRisky people are more likely to make poor decisions and contract any kind of infections, including STDs. Probably they experience more stress and frequently deal with that by getting pets that infect with Toxoplasmosis.
- avalys 3y agoI'm not sure I buy the "risk->stress->pets" connection. In my own experience, anecdotal of course, people who take risks do so because risk-taking doesn't stress them out as much as it would other people. But your point is still valid. The conventional wisdom on why risk-taking people might be more prone to toxoplasmosis in the first place is that they're more likely to eat undercooked or other ill-prepared meat, which is actually a much more significant risk factor for toxoplasmosis than cat ownership.
- manmal 3y agoThat’s a lot of mental gymnastics. T gondii is a highly problematic pathogen, not sure why you are trying to find an alternative explanation.
- thinkingemote 3y agoIf TG can be spread sexually maybe it could be classed as a STD and a scary one that actually changes behaviour to spread more.
- gyudin 3y agoPretty sure they just confuse cause and effect xD
- yarg 3y agoWe're talking about the parasite that sends rodents charging headlong into the mouths of cats; This may have something to do with the suppression of risk aversion; Then you throw a little (potentially a lot) of survivors' bias into the mix, and this is what you get.
- alwa 3y agoThat odd association seems pretty well-established by prior work. But the study at hand does seem like very well-done research to me: exploiting existing data to achieve a virtually perfect snapshot of a well-defined population at the scale of an entire nation. It seems like it neatly addresses all sorts of questions of sampling biases, sidesteps questions of statistical power, and relies on measures that are independently assured to be high-quality and comprehensive. With the added benefit of validating an effect in a wholly different subset of the population than the one where it had previously been measured: prior studies seem to have used mostly convenience samples of mostly men (mostly sourced from explicitly entrepreneurship-flavored environments).