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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

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LoSboccacc

Don't worry too much this study is bullshit

Step 1 - be an adult white male graduated at the beginning of an unprecedented and unique economic boom

Step 2 - graduate out of the most prominent college of the period

Step 3 - watch your asset grow themselves

Step 4 - enjoy the life without never have to worry about job security, housing, spending power

Yeah no shit sherlock. I guess being upper middle class does wonder to one life. Meanwhile we have to contend with constant worry about our future, our kids future and one misstep in our career path can and will landslide into a life of regrets.

And this study just say 'socialize' and everything else will magically go away.

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Please don't post snarky internet insta-dismissals to HN. They greatly lower the quality of discussion, even when they have some good points to make. There are several such posts in this thread and that's a problem.

The entire genre of internet comments that dismiss the life-work of others with a contemptuous hand-wave is problematic. Critique is good, but it should seriously engage with what it is criticizing. That takes effort, for which nastiness is an ugly substitute.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14816358 and marked it off-topic.

There are several post of such nature precisely because the whole post is a feel good piece with pretend-science, severe bias and shaky conclusions

Even if that's true, the I-know-better, snark-plus-clichés genre is a problem here regardless of how bad an article is. This sort of comment is common on the internet and poisons the environment it's posted to. By practicing it here, you degrade the community and make it less interesting for all of us. That's the real reason not to do it: for much the same reason you don't litter in parks. We want thoughtful conversation here, not acid. Even about bad articles.

Btw that longitudinal Harvard study has been well-known and interesting for long time, despite its flaws. Previous HN threads have discussed it without sinking into snark and I doubt that the community has become smarter since then.

From the article:

"During the intervening decades, the control groups have expanded. In the 1970s, 456 Boston inner-city residents were enlisted as part of the Glueck Study, and 40 of them are still alive."

"Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants."

The study control for the effects of class. That refutes some of your assertions.

With baby boomers, sure, the second most privileged generation on earth.

Hint: it's hard to develop a social life working 60 hours a week, vice versa, people that can afford a good living standard are more likely to have the time to socialize.

This study does nothing to verify if their ipothesys is correlation, causation or coincidence (because, let's be honest, 500 ppl and without a control group?)

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