Hacker News Reader

Comment by circlefavshape | Hacker News Reader

> For example, what about a hermit who constantly derives joy from listening to classical music?

Something you just cooked up out of your imagination is not a real counter-example

Fine, how about someone who has little or no social life but derives joy from playing video games and other solitary pursuits, and also gets enough exercise (or at least as much as the average person who has good relationships)? I suspect there are some people on this forum who are like that, and more people who might become that if they thought it was the right idea.

Edit: The point is that the title implies that you'd get the significant health benefits just by experiencing joy, but the article says that you need good social relationships, so, if we believed the article, the title would misdirect people.

Most of my gamer friends, game with real people. Not sure if there are statistics on this or not.

For what it's worth this is a correlation study and not causal. I'm sure there are some loners out there that are very happy, but when I've had turbulent times in my life, it was my friends who helped me.

Well if there’s a guy who’s sitting alone in his room all day playing games on his own how would you get to know him?

True but my nephew is a gamer and has his online crew as well. So there's a guy who I know to random genetics.

Here's this survey as well: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235068/online-gaming-so...

Do you have a long term longitudinal study of many individuals backing up your claims, like this study does for claims about the importance of relationships to long term health?

What claims am I making? The article is the one that's claiming causation. I've merely said that its evidence is insufficient, and also that the title misstates the claims made in the article. The point of mentioning "those who get solitary joy with no social life" is that the title says this is good, but the article says it's not good—and therefore, even if we believed the conclusions the article tries to draw, the title gives bad advice.

Social needs vary among people. It's easy to see the benefits of good social relationships. However, I think people with lower social needs, smaller to non-existent social relationships aren't suffering.

A plausible hypothetical counterexample is sufficient in this case to demonstrate logical incompleteness.

You've never met my uncle I see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com