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Comment by ryanklee | Hacker News Reader

If it's true that toxoplasmosis is is present in 1/3 - 1/2 of the population, I immediately find any specific findings like this dubious since the scale of confounding factors must be enormous. Yes, they controlled for some, like malnutrition, but that's hardly the whole story.

It's way more likely that there is something else (maybe many other things!) that explain the correlation.

It's one of those sexy findings that is probably bullshit.

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I don't follow; doesn't a larger affected population make it easier to control for confounds?

If you identify them.

I still don't follow. You don't have to control for each confounding variable if you select your pool at random, like they did here.

Getting a random pool works when your size (n) is not so many magnitudeblevels below of totalvpopulation (N). For example, say we are about to measure X variable on a deer population of 10k. If we capture 100 dears, we are good. Of we get less, maybe too. But with humans, the population is huge. This doesnt mean its impossible.

I thought it was an interesting premise going into the article, but the individual results are all over the map, and vary a significantly between men and women in the study. Correlating those with political affiliation seems dubious to me.

Yeah. My initial thought was "it's going to be very hard to unpick any possible causal relationship of Toxoplasmosis to political affiliation from likely regional and income level variation in Toxoplasmosis, and this study doesn't even control for those.

It's also a study with a low number of participants, and none of the political factors are statistically significant for men and statistically significant for women. Surprised it was published tbh, although I guess it's better to publish inconclusive results to interesting hypotheses than encourage p-hacking...

They say specifically that this is actually a point in favor of the association. The reason being that men and women deal with stress in diametrically opposed ways (they cite two other studies) and that being infected increases the stress response behaviors in both sexes.

Yeah but even if it's not a causal relationship it's incredibly suggestive. It mirrors my own personal experience and what I've seen in others. I'm pretty much a bleeding heart liberal now but I used to be super conservative to the point where my friends had to sit me down and have an intervention. It matches exactly with the time in my life when I was in constant stress, horrible mental health, even worse physical health. It really was, "I'm incredibly lonely and isolated, people suck and treat me like shit, I hate myself, and I have no support why should anyone else get it?" Like damn, I never connected the dots.

It took so long to turn my life around that I never even noticed the shift. It's so obvious in hindsight jesus.

You had it?

If you mean I had support because I used the word friends, I use that term pretty loosely. They were my roommates and tolerated me up until they were tired of my shit.

Edit: No, sorry, I'm referring to the results section of the study where they talk about the fact that this is a small slice of a broader picture where toxoplasmosis -> stress -> political views. Because that seems like it's the "point" of this study. You have a mild chronic condition that affects a lot of people pretty much uniformly and adds stress. So if you see a difference in infected/not-infected then you have a strong case that more stress -> more conservative.

> It was suggested by that these associations might be the results of a mild chronic stress caused by the toxoplasmosis infection instead of the result of the toxoplasmosis itself. The presence of a chronic stress not only explain the presence of behavioral and political differences with the non-infected control group, but also the presence of sex differences in these behavior and ideologies as different responses to chronic stress in the two sexes, involving differences in the immune system response and in the coping strategies used

> previous studies showed that infected subjects scored lower in novelty seeking, a factor that contributes to a conservative and political opinion

No, I mean toxoplasmosis. Your original comment seemed to imply you had a personal experience that lent credence to the study's result.

I believe the parent of your response was asking if you had been diagnosed with toxoplasmosis, rather than support.

> It's one of those sexy findings that is probably bullshit.

Yeah and also one that gets highly upvoted on the sites of people who think a certain way. Social media really has contributed to clickbait confirmation bias brainrot.

There also is nothing about correlation vs causation, people who own cats are a distinct group with distinct behaviors.

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