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pan comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

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Comment author: pan 27 January 2014 06:33:04PM 5 points [-]

Is there a reasonably well researched list of behaviors that correlate positively with lifespan? I'm interested in seeing if there are any low hanging fruit I'm missing.

I found this previously posted, and a series of posts by gwern, but was wondering if there is anything else?

A quick google will give you a lot of lists but most of them are from news sources that I don't trust.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 29 January 2014 08:28:57AM 3 points [-]

Romeo Stevens made this comprehensive doc.

Comment author: pan 29 January 2014 02:30:42PM 0 points [-]

This is really great, do you know if the sources are compiled anywhere?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 27 January 2014 07:18:08PM *  3 points [-]

I found this list of causes of death by age and gender enlightening (it doesn't necessarily tell you that a particular action will increase your lifespan, but then again neither do correlations). For example, I was surprised by how often people around my age or a bit older die of suicide and "poisoning" (not sure exactly what this covers but I think it covers stuff like alcohol poisoning and accidentally overdosing on medicine?).

Comment author: Lumifer 27 January 2014 06:45:04PM *  1 point [-]

Is there a reasonably well researched list of behaviors that correlate positively with lifespan?

Depends on what you'd call "well-researched" but, unfortunately, most of it is fuzzy platitudes. For example:

  • Do physical exercise. But not too much.
  • Be happy, avoid stress.
  • Get happily married.
  • Don't get obese.

and most importantly

  • Choose your parents well, their genes matter :-P
Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 28 January 2014 08:41:22AM *  1 point [-]

Eating a handful of nuts a day.

"Scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health came to this conclusion after analyzing data on nearly 120,000 people collected over 30 years."

"The most obvious benefit was a reduction of 29 percent in deaths from heart disease - the major killer of people in America. But we also saw a significant reduction - 11% - in the risk of dying from cancer."

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/269206.php

Comment author: RichardKennaway 28 January 2014 01:46:18PM 1 point [-]

But:

The researchers point out that the study was not designed to examine cause and effect and so cannot conclude that eating more nuts causes people to live longer.

Indeed, the study consists only of observational data, not interventional, so what causal conclusions could be drawn from it?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 31 January 2014 06:35:48AM 1 point [-]

You act like people never did a valid causal analysis of the data in the Nurses' health study.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 31 January 2014 08:04:20AM 0 points [-]

I know I overstated things. There are such things as natural experiments, having some causal information already, etc.

I'm not familiar with the Nurses' health study, and a quick google only turns up its conclusions. What methods did they use?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 31 January 2014 08:21:34AM *  1 point [-]

Sorry, there are two separate issues: the data itself (which is a big dataset where they following a big set of nurses for many years, and recorded lots of things about them), and how the data could be used to maybe get causal conclusions.

Plenty of folks at Harvard (e.g. Miguel Hernan, Jamie Robins) used this data in a sensible way to account for confounding (naturally their results are relatively low on the 'hierarchy of evidence', but still!) Trying to draw causal conclusions from observational data is 95% of modern causal inference!

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