Few Allergies in Unstressed Babies | Hacker News Reader

Few Allergies in Unstressed Babies

sciencedaily.com

25 pointsremyric27 comments

Actual study: http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749%2811%2901159-6/...

Again the correlation vs causation question? May be higher stress levels are caused by allergies?

Stress, at least in family groups, is highly contagious hence the emphasis on Psychosocial factors in the article. It is certainly worth exploring in more detail however.

Knowing other factors in allergy development like air pollution, it's also very likely that both share a common outside cause.

Notice that they never said caused. Finding correlation is the first step towards establishing causation. I don't see any problems with this research.

"And now we've found the same link in infants from families that follow anthroposophic lifestyles, and that they have relatively low levels of cortisol"

anthroposophic apparently means religious.

Actually, antroposophy is a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner. To bring that into perspective, Steiner and Hermann Hesse shared many ideas, and Michael Ende (author of Neverending Story and Momo) was raised in a Waldorf school (based on Steiner's philosophy).

I'm only halfway through Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom book (it's pretty fucking heavy, to use the technical term), but by my best guess it appears to be an (impressive) attempt to derive eastern philosophies' conclusions from western premises. While there's certainly a strong sense of respect for the abstract and the mind (as you'd expect from any philosopher), I wouldn't call it "religious" in the typical sense of the word.

I wouldn't call it "philosophy" in the typical sense of the word. It's esoteric gobbledygook.

This is the other meaning of "philosophy":

  a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour

Are you making an informed judgement? (you may be, I'm just checking)

As I said, I'm halfway through that book, and although its direct usefulness is not clear, I wouldn't call it gobbledygook. Steiner is directly opposing some philosophical movements which were popular or beginning to get popular at the time (like nihilism), and making a pretty strong case for why they're nonsensical. As far as I've read, he seems to be drawing towards a practical, human-centric approach to life which seems pretty healthy and balanced on the whole.

One thing is abundantly clear from reading it, too: Steiner is a very smart guy.

I'm judging it from a rationalist perspective.

Isn't all philosophy gobbledygook to rationalists?

No. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

That's not saying much (and it sounds like you are indeed not making an informed judgement). I'm judging it from a rationalist perspective too. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism : "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification")

In fact, if you bother to actually read the guy's books instead of dismissing him based on a wikipedia entry (hardly a rationalist behaviour), you'll see he's very much a rationalist too.

He arrives at conclusions with "spiritual" consequences by starting from the perspective that the only thing we can know directly is our thoughts, and building a model of the world from that, piece by piece, using reason and thinking. I'd argue that compared to Steiner, you and I are mostly irrational.

So, explaining your dismissal of anthroposophism (literally translated as "love of man") as being "from a rationalist point of view" is a completely empty statement.

instead of dismissing him based on a wikipedia entry (hardly a rationalist behaviour)

I see no problem with it if the Wikipedia entry is accurate. Is it?

It's hard for an intelligent expert in the domain to accurately summarise a philosophy, let alone for a wikipedia editor to do so. Complex arguments tend to require a fair amount of patience and understanding on the reader's side.

Anyway, that being said, the entry is not terrible (at least if you know a bit about what it's talking about). Quoting:

> Anthroposophy postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development. More specifically, it aims to develop faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition through cultivating a form of thinking independent of sensory experience, and to present the results thus derived in a manner subject to rational verification. In its investigations of the spiritual world, anthroposophy aims to attain the precision and clarity attained by the natural sciences in their investigations of the physical world.

Considering this description, I hardly think you can call it anti-rationalist. On the contrary, anthroposophy is an attempt to apply rationalism to spirituality. It is only dismissed as irrational gobbledygook by those who (irrationally) dismiss all of spirituality and anything connected to it as gobbledygook.

Then we need to agree on a definition of "spirituality", since by my definition, any assumption of spirituality is irrational. I consider "spirituality" to be the assumption of the super-natural, and an individual's personal connection to the super-natural. How do you define it?

On a fundamental level, I define it as the stuff in the world that's beyond the purely material, that transcends physicality. Things like Mathematics, Love, Beauty, etc. Things that I believe will continue to "exist" (in some sense) beyond the existence of the universe around us.

As Steiner puts it, "science, religion and art" all try to bridge this dichotomy of the physical vs the spiritual.

So, no, it's nothing to do with ghosts and stuff.

I think of those as consequences of the universe existing, not things that transcend the existence of the universe.

You can choose to think of those however you want - and so can others.

If the Wikipedia page for anthroposophy is accurate, I agree with VMG. It presupposes a spiritual world.

A spiritual world is a fact, even if it's only a neuro-chemical phenomenon in people's brains.

Then you and I have different definitions of "spiritual world."

Just don't be left-handed.

So anthroposophic lifestyles are less stressful than "normal lifestyles"? That seems to be an interesting result in itself.

Be careful there, they have done a study where they have concluded that lower stress levels are related to fewer allergies. And in a different study they have shown that kids following an antroposophic lifestyle also have fewer allergies than regular kids. Both results are correlation, which don't mean causation. And there is also no specific reason (yet) to say that low stress and antroposophy are correlated.

I thought at the end of the article it said that they did the allergy study on anthroposophic kids, that is, again they compared anthroposophic kids to other kids.

Otherwise of course combining the two studies into that conclusion would be invalid.

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