Business students more likely to have a brain parasite spread by cats | Hacker News Reader

Business students more likely to have a brain parasite spread by cats

newscientist.com

60 pointsbreitling16 comments

[edited] - I was concerned that they hadn't controlled for country of origin when assessing the students - a lot of business students are from abroad - but on a second reading I couldn't tell if they'd checked it or not - it looked like they might have done, so I'm removing the comment. Don't want to be rude to the researchers.

Nope, I much prefer a world in which business majors are slaves to their feline overlords.

Apparently they have controlled for this obvious possibility:

In each of the three resulting models, our independent variable was the prevalence of T. gondii in a given country (the proportion of people who tested positive for T. gondii exposure) – indicated by published seroprevalence data.

(https://figshare.com/articles/Supplementary_Methods_and_Anal...)

Remember folks, this isn't just any brain parasite spread by cats; it's specifically Toxoplasma gondii which is well known to have a life-cycle dependent on deliberately changing the behaviour of its hosts, reducing risk inhibitions. This has been repeatedly confirmed in studies on rodents, and has been strongly suggested in a number of correlative studies on humans.

Also, if we're in the business of judging the news by who's delivering it, the study was published not in New Scientist but in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The studies that come up about toxoplasmosis are so uniformly strange, weird and remarkable that I have become deeply suspicious about the entire field of study.

Whenever you see strange and remarkable results around some topic like this, it just reeks of academic p-hacking and media attention seeking.

I suspect one day the entire field of toxoplasmosis study is going to get debunked and all of these media friendly studies will get thrown out.

The number of remarkable toxoplasmosis studies is far, far too high and really pushes the limit of credibility.

Could be. As ever, it'd be good to hear about any studies with negative results to get a better perspective, but they infamously tend to get binned or ignored.

New scientist is pretty much a science tabloid... This is just clickbait

Here, have a link to the actual research:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1883/2018...

Are cats more risk averse than dogs? Or other animals? Is that why they lie indoors all day?

Is going to business school an indication of risk averseness?

None of this seems rooted in science. "A and B have correlation, and A is anecdotally known for a characteristic B is attributed to, but no definites folks, so make your own mind"

This looks like a textbook example of spurious correlation, great for introductory courses in statistics.

T. Gondii is known to reduce inhibitions. And business, entrepreneurship, sales, etc are all about reducing inhibitions.

Not saying this is a slam dunk correlation, but maybe it isn't so far from left field to have studied this link.

That would be weird if T. Gondii actually helped to fuel civilization development because of having more risk takers (and maybe more prophets as well). So not really a parasite, but a symbiote for humanity as a whole.

I'm interested, what about it looks like a spurious correlation?

bencollier49 breaks it down pretty well above.

Who knows, this could be valid, but remember: "5% of 95% p-value studies are false positives."

Not true, see "base rate fallacy".

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