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Comment by Noseshine | Hacker News Reader

The TL;DR summary from the abstract:

    > For working hours up to around 25 hours a week, an increase in working hours
    > has a positive impact on cognitive functioning. However, when working hours
    > exceed 25 hours per week, an increase in working hours has a negative impact
    > on cognition.

No significant difference between women and men.

Important detail: They only looked at people 40 or older, so no conclusions should be attempted based on this paper alone about differences between older and younger groups (above/below 40). Looking at their tables at the end of the paper I also didn't see any stratification by age within the sampled group, they only listed the sample size for three (15 years wide) age groups (Table II).

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no conclusions should be drawn from a single study period, and especially considering this was survey data.

    > no conclusions should be drawn from a single study period

I didn't see the point in pointing out the obvious - I thought that's as annoying as on reddit's /r/science the inevitable single-sentence comment "correlation is not causation" for no reason whatsoever (i.e. when nobody made that claim). I pointed out the age threshold because there was a comment (of only 6 or 7 total at that point) that attempted to draw the conclusion that older people are doing worse.

From what do you come to the conclusion that older people are doing worse? Worse in respect to what?

The paper more or less confirms from the cognitive domain, that we are working to much. Upto 25 hours are the best. This interestingly coincides with claims from others, eg. UBI folks, to work less for increased productivity. Seems we are getting more and more factual prove that eg. redistribution of wealth should be done not by increasing taxes but by getting more people into the workforce in exchange of others working less (and earning less).

   > From what do you come to the conclusion that older people are doing worse?

What on earth are you asking me??? I don't! Please actually read what people write before clicking on "Reply"!

Not entirely - the work hours were self reported but there were actual, validated measures used to assess cognition. At least that's what the abstract said.

So is it okay to work more than 25 hours if I'm not Australian and/or not older than 40?

I doubt Australianess is a factor but then IANAS I Am Not A Scientist.

> No significant difference between women and men.

The article crisply called out differences between men and women, on page 13.

If your argument is that these differences are not significant, could you point to the part of the paper that justifies that statement?

From the abstract:

"Interestingly, there is no statistical difference in the effects of working hours on cognitive functioning between men and women."

and of course in the paper itself:

"However, we find that there is no statistically significant gender difference in the effects of working hours on cognitive functioning. "

That's just saying that both experience negative effects after a threshold, but the threshold in the paper is different between genders so I wouldn't say there is no significant difference (like OP did), 3 extra hours over 27 total is >10%

I don't get a "Reply" link under your later comment two levels down, so I reply here instead:

    > ...they are saying gender difference results were not statistically significant - 
    > I don't understand why even report them then ?

Because reporting a negative find is information too.

What is the difference between not knowing and knowing there is nothing? Don't tell me there is none... :)

That's not what statistical significance means.

Yes, 10% is "significant" in the sense that it would be enough for people to care about.

The paper is saying that the sample size is too small to have any confidence that you'd still have a difference (or that the difference wouldn't go in the other direction) if you took a different sample of the population.

OP said there is no significant difference, paper says statistically significant.

But you are right it makes more sense that they are saying gender difference results were not statistically significant - I don't understand why even report them then ?

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