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Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years. The average age a
by cortic 2mo ago
Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.
General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.
The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is 79.
People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
- TacticalCoder 2mo agoThat's very interesting but why do taxi drivers have a job that lowers life expectancy? Is it because they're sitting too much? Or because they're inhaling CO from cars too much? Or staying inside (the car) too much? Or is it just stressful? For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job (btw a brother of mine did years of "VTC": "Vehicule de Tourisme avec Chauffeur", basically high-end taxis without the "taxi" logo).
- wilburx3 2mo agoGetting stabbed in the neck by filthy street urchins.
- smt88 2mo agoProbably not smart to post something like this on the same message board you’re using to get a job
- bezmi 2mo agoA joke?
- Dusseldorf 2mo agomight turn out that the next company they apply to is run by street urchins who don't take too kindly to the stereotype? or possibly humorless scolds who don't want their employees telling jokes in their free time?
- id 2mo agoBecause it doesn't pay very well. Being affluent increases life expectancy.
- inglor_cz 2mo ago1. They are hardly in the bottom quintile, where the income effect is large enough that it could actually shave 7 years off their life. I'd expect nightly work, irregular sleep patterns, too much fast food and maybe a higher frequency of smoking to do their part. 2. The original study didn't just study taxi drivers, but also ambulance drivers. I doubt that their life expectancy is that much lower.
- ChromaticPanic 2mo agoThey are if you consider the amount of hours they work
- coldtea 2mo ago>For from the look of it it doesn't look like an exceptionally hard job Define "hard job". Carrying heavy objects?
- reichstein 2mo agoStressful on the body. Odd hours, sitting too much, inhaling too many exhaust fumes, having people yell at you if _they're_ late. Sounds like a fairly hard job.
- coldtea 2mo agoYes, taxi driving can be hard. There are jobs stressful on the mind too - and some of them have very low "life expectancies".
- apothegm 2mo agoIt’s a very sedentary job, pretty much by definition.
- xhevahir 2mo agoI did it, briefly, twenty-some years ago. Lousy job—sitting all day, irregular pay, danger, nasty fares, drunk fares, belligerent fares, fares who seem to have nothing better to do with their days than to find ways to cheat a driver. But the thing that really sucks is the hours: shifts are twelve hours long, either ending or beginning at 3:00am, and because your rental for the cab is highest at the beginning of your work week, descending every successive day (free on day seven), the compensation is structured so that you're making good money only by working a ton of hours.
- AngryData 2mo agoLower income, little physical mobility in their job, constantly breathing traffic fumes, and tire and brake dust would be my first suspects.
- Barrin92 2mo agoAs the paper points out that's accounted for in the analysis, because shockingly enough to most internet commentators researchers know that they need to control for confounding variables https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194 https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194
- jrflo 2mo agoAlways insane to me how people will just read the headline of an article and point out "flaws" based on what they assume the article says
- cromka 2mo agoPeople jump the gun to show their perceived intellectual superiority. Typically same kind of people are last to admit of a mistake.
- somenameforme 2mo agoIt's not necessarily about intellectualism. Science in modern times is plagued by publish or perish. Researchers just need to get things published to keep working, and negative results don't get published. So I think people often publish stuff without proper controls/missing confounding variables/inversion of causality/etc not out of ignorance, but because they know the conclusion is dubious - but if they don't publish, they're going to be out of a job. I don't think many realize how huge the replication crisis is. You have 75% of studies in a leading social psychology journal failing to replicate. [1] Another replication effort on preclinical medical studies found only 11% were able to be replicated, a replication effort on cancer studies found the average effect size to be 85% lower than published, and much more. If you assume most science headlines, at least outside of the traditional hard sciences, are false - you're substantially more likely to be right than wrong. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psycholo...
- disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
- glitchc 2mo agoThey are likely studying individuals that retired without getting fatally stabbed or shot on the job.
- stackskipton 2mo agoIt's not violence from the job but their job was generally bad for their health in other ways. Sitting all day without getting up and driving around with windows down getting all this UV. Also, older ones were exposed to a ton of cigarette smoke.
- minraws 2mo agoAlso road accidents.
- boelboel 2mo agoI could imagine taxi drivers have fewer fatal/grave road accidents than the average person or at most slightly more. They tend to drive in cities, are more trained, can't drink or do drugs on the job. For London only 1 taxi driver has died in a traffic accident since 2020.
- minraws 2mo agoIf you drive more you are more likely to be in an accident, that's just how roads and accidents work. Sure they might be better and per unit of time they drive they must have miniscule amount of accidents. But if there's a 0.001% chance per hour driven, then over enough hours a few accidents are inevitable.
- boelboel 2mo agoThey don't just add more hours of driving they replace a small amount of risky hours for a lot of hours of low risk if they change location/job.
- minraws 2mo ago
- nuxi 2mo agoDe Niro is 82, no Alzheimer's. /s
- sillyfluke 2mo agoHe was method acting, so I'll allow it.
- cromka 2mo ago" (...) After adjusting for _age_, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall."
- dinfinity 2mo agoYep. "For each occupation, we first calculated the percentage of deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and the mean age at death in years (ie, average life expectancy). We plotted the association between these two variables, with each observation reflecting a single occupation. The purpose of this analysis was to illustrate the need to account for the person’s age at death since the risk of Alzheimer’s disease rises with age and therefore Alzheimer’s mortality would naturally be lower in occupations with a lower life expectancy."
- coldtea 2mo agoAh, the typical cheap HN reaction to a paper, along with "correlation is not causation", and as usual, for things already factored in into it.
- mr_mitm 2mo agoNext up: "I didn't do a statistical analysis but the sample size seems small"
- heckelson 2mo ago... in mice!
- brandonmenc 2mo agoHilarious, because accounting for this stuff is drilled into your head when you study the softer sciences (like psychology) even as an undergrad.
- specproc 2mo agoStudies typically use regression to account for stuff like that. CBA to look at the article, but I bet any money that's controlled for.
- vlovich123 2mo ago> After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. So no indication they accounted for the expected lifespan of the profession.
- j45 2mo agoSeems like a fair point.
- danw1979 2mo agoAdjusting for age seems like an indication to me
- _kulang 2mo agoAdjusting for sample/population age is the simplest interpretation of that
- Revanche1367 2mo agoIndeed. I feel that although many people try to learn new languages, the intellectual stimulation provided by doing so is understated. Especially learning languages very different from your native language (grammatically, morphologically, etc.). It’s almost like finding new ways to think.
- vlovich123 2mo agoIt’s insufficient. For example, the people who develop Alzheimer’s may for whatever reason may be less likely to survive the profession where Alzheimer’s is the cause of death (eg getting into a fatal car accident where undiagnosed early onset is the problem). Bus drivers typically drive the same route over and over and probably have safer trips overall than taxi and ambulance drivers. It’s a plausible hypothesis but it’s really really hard to tease things out and controlling for age is the obvious thing but that doesn’t get you the conclusive result you think it does.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- harrall 2mo agoThe study accounts for that. Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.
- hotstickyballs 2mo agoCollecting a bunch of covariates is never a substitute for recognizing that you can't force people to be taxi drivers for life.
- eru 2mo agoHowever, you might be able to find a natural experiment were taxi drivers were randomly prevented from continuing with their driving career?
- kfarr 2mo agoLearning new languages (and actually using them) is a great way to do this for all ages!
- lelanthran 2mo agoI'm bilingual. Learning new languages is pointless if you have no one to talk to in the new language. Language skills atrophy surprisingly fast.
- kfarr 2mo agoI agree, one must actually use a language for it to contribute to brain plasticity in later ages.
- bluGill 2mo agoThe claim was learning is important. Not the ability to communicate with it. There are more than 7000 known languages in the world, study a different one every week... I have no idea what the truth is here...
- xvedejas 2mo agoAnd how would you control for the causal possibility that those who will eventually develop Alzheimer's early on might tend to have undetectable memory issues that prevent them from becoming taxi drivers in the first place? You can't control for profession, since that's behind the very claim itself.
- boelboel 2mo agoThis is mentioned in the article as well.
- cortic 2mo agoIts even worse than that, i can imagine people with undiagnosed early Alzheimer's self selecting for car accidents and cardiac issues through additional stress of mental fatigue while their brain tried to compensate for loss of function. So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near impossible to adjust for.
- bob_theslob646 2mo agoWhat happens in the age of self driving cars?
- inigyou 2mo agoNo taxi drivers
- simondotau 2mo agoFewer car accident deaths, leading to more elderly people, which inevitably means a higher population of people with Alzheimers. (Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car accidents are also highly predisposed to mudering people who will have, but don’t yet have, Alzheimers. But that seems sufficiently unlikely for the purposes of this hypothetical.) Jokes aside, the serious answer depends on whether the link is causative or merely collerative.
- 2mo ago
- nephihaha 2mo ago>Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years. Where? What country/ies?
- ch4s3 2mo agoIn the US, but you’d likely see a similar effect in other places. Taxi drivers are highly sedentary and occupationally exposed to a lot more road pollution than most jobs.
- christophilus 2mo agoYep. Free solo climbers also rarely die of Alzheimer’s.
- brucehoult 2mo agoBASE jumpers and wing suit fliers too.
- blitzar 2mo agoThat's why I make sure to wear a wing suit at least one day a week.
- fsckboy 2mo ago>People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed not to mention the other devil in these studies: some professions are statistically going to have the lowest rate of every possible disease. you can't just cherrypick outliers and declare "causal!"
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
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- stymaar 2mo agoIt pains me to see such a low-effort contrarian comment at the top: as stated in TFA taxi drivers are below other profession when controlling for age, and there are multiple professions with lower life expectancy that still have significantly higher Alzheimer rate than taxi drivers.
- jvanderbot 2mo agoJust the top one? Every top-level thread is like a multiple choice armchair takedown. Here's an interesting counterpoint. "Unthinkable" presented studies of navigation tasks in 2D/3D and testing/training. Hippocampus measurements correlated with skill and training. Interestingly, this skill and training and measurements all correlated with beneficial responses in a disaster (as in, not panicking). Weird right?
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- shuwix 2mo ago[flagged]
- paxys 2mo agoFirst time on HN?
- ruszki 2mo agoBut on some level I understand the immediate low level criticism. Of course, it’s stupid to criticize something without reading about it. However, I’ve seen waaaay more studies which was made with even lower effort. For example, the other day I wanted to figure out what’s the current state about whether gender equality causes measurable benefits for companies… and the studies are terrible. All of them. Most of them was about Norway, and almost all of them had a reference point in 2008, one of the largest economic crisis, and somehow most of them was even worse than this. They openly distorted statistics. Depending on what they wanted to achieve to one way or another. Even the most cited ones. It’s disgusting. The best ones could prove only that inequality is not inherent of economics, but social. But the agenda was different for them too, so they tried to lie something bigger, all the time, while this would be more than enough to support it.
- mplewis 2mo agodid you read the study
- cyanmoonx 2mo agoIsn't the mean age simply brought down by the number who die at a very young age due to car accidents, robberies, and other reasons? Not that cab drivers only live to 67 - many would still live to 75, 85, 95, but that occasionally a driver dies at 25 or 35 bringing the mean figure way down.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Dannymetconan 2mo ago| After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. They claim to control for these factors in the 5th paragraph of the article here. Which is a standard thing to do in these kind of studies. So you're point is either not relevant or that they didn't control for age correctly?
- HlessClaudesman 2mo agoUnsurvivorship bias.
- lofaszvanitt 2mo agoYepp, they die from circulation related illnesses. Since the sit all day long in the car.
- throwaway2037 2mo agoFrom the article: > After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. Does that answer your concern?
- bluGill 2mo agoNo. There are a lot of other comments on why many do not believe it. There is no reason to believe they have enough data to adjust for any of their controls. It looks to me like they plotted everything and then found the "outlier" which statistically we know will exist in a true random sample.
- geysersam 2mo agoSo many possibilities for error... Is every case of dementia diagnosed accurately? Is there a difference between professions how likely their dementia is to be diagnosed accurately? Is there a correlation between dying early and being pre-disposed to have developed Alzheimer if having lived longer? If there is, then the "correction" for age is not correct, because the correction assumes the fraction of the group that died early were equally likely as the rest of the group to develop the disease if they had not died early. I don't know anything about Alzheimer but it doesn't seem unthinkable that the factors that cause people to die early also could also play a role in causing Alzheimer.
- aetherson 2mo agoYou could imagine that pre-diagnosis confusion relating to Alzheimer's increases the risk of traffic accident and kills taxi drivers, too. Might not operate for truckers as much because they're more likely to survive accidents.
- jambalaya8 2mo agoI am pretty sure that a dataset controlling for that would (laughing here) not negate the fact that fewer people who lived past the mean date that are taxi drivers died of a related disorder. That said, suggesting it is related to the career as opposed to, say, the fact that a higher percentage of taxi drivers carry some other set of genes or genetic markers that either led them in some way to become a taxi driver or contributed to a lack of development of the disorder, is pretty weak. In the United States and I think a few other countries the number of taxi drivers which are immigrants from a handful of countries outnumbers any other type. And, the world has changed a lot. Are 1980s cab drivers and 1950s cab drivers and 1965 cab drivers and cab drivers from 2007 comparable? are car service and livery drivers?