Posted by jader201 12 hours ago
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.
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?
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.
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.
Delay your aging by using your brain a fuck ton, all the time, learning brand new things nowhere near anything you already know.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try using your brain more but this is just like saying Stephen Hawking should have tried exercising more.
So no indication they accounted for the expected lifespan of the profession.
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.
then don't post
Also, older ones were exposed to a ton of cigarette smoke.
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.
Pedestrians are a lot more at risk. So that's unsurprising that annually 1/2 taxi driver might be fatally injured in one.
But I would assume the ratio of other drivers to taxi drivers would be high enough that this number should be zero as well.
That's actually crazy if that's as low as you dare guess. I would have easily guessed it was like, a fraction of a percent. 1 in 10 would be fucking nuts.
'Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work' - https://dynomight.net/control/
Other things that don't work, including four other 'controlling for a variable' entries at items 39 through 43: https://dynomight.net/things/
"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."
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!"
Where? What country/ies?
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).
2. The original study didn't just study taxi drivers, but also ambulance drivers. I doubt that their life expectancy is that much lower.
Define "hard job". Carrying heavy objects?
Location is very important here. London cabbies have to pass The Knowledge which is an extremely difficult memory exam that only people with particular kind of brain can do.
Also, The Knowledge Test is, IIRC, passed only once and then you do not have to retake it for the rest of your career.
If a test passed in your 20s or 30s predicted accurately a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's in your 60s, that would be a remarkably strong early signal. Not impossible, but worth extra scrutiny. For the vast majority of old age conditions, we cannot predict them so long in advance.
That's yours speculation, isn't it?Because if so, it would corroborate the same conclusion, i.e. if you exercise your memory regularly, you are less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
When I was in my early 20s I had a job delivering pizza. I very quickly learned the delivery area, I knew pretty much every street and alleyway and shortcut to get from one place to another. Much smaller than London but I think the human brain is very good at remembering routes and where things are in an area, as this would have been an evolutionary advantage (go out hunting and be able to find your way back). No GPS, didn't even carry a map with me. We had a large map on the wall at the store, and if I had to deliver to a street I didn't recognize I'd find it on the map, see where it was relative to the streets I did know, and then I never had any problem finding places.
What? In my country at least (France), taxis have been a thing even in the countryside for as long as cars existed (or rather, as long as the telephone has). And I'd be very surprised if that wasn't also the case in most of Western Europe.
In fact it's a much easier job when it comes to routing and knowing your passengers' destinations than doing it in a metropolis.
As a bonus you can even set your general location on the mirror for extra accuracy, since the earth's magnetic line directions differ a bit based on location.
But in any case, I found that if you want to remember routes, it is far better to study the route before you begin driving, and then not rely on CarPlay altogether. This gives you much higher awareness of street names and directions.
Today this knowledge is arguably less useful.
My grandad essentially died of alzheimers and he just loved to sit and watch football all day where you don't really need to think much.
> Research on cognitive maps points toward the same conclusion as the study on taxi drivers. In 2023, researchers ran a machine learning model on more than 22,500 people in a national dataset and were able to predict which ZIP codes had higher rates of Alzheimer’s with 84% accuracy based on how complex the environment was. Those living in spatially complex surroundings – the kind that force active map building, such as dense street networks with numerous intersections, diverse points of interest and landmarks, and multiple path options – were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
And the second thing: What about modern taxi drivers that rely almost exclusively on GPS?
Adjusting for educational attainment is an intriguing choice. If higher educational attainment were to decrease risk of Alzheimer's disease, wouldn't this adjustment optimise out the factor that they're looking for?
Otherwise very interesting results and conclusions. Also what's up with the outlying occupation on the left side of the 1st 2 charts on page 3: "Personal care and service workers, all other" with a mean age of death of 50.65?