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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how they jump from correlation to causation.

Like maybe having classmates who have a disorder means, just for a wild example, there's some contaminant in your local water (several have been linked to mental disorders), and that you're also drinking that water and that you may or may not be diagnosed with that problem for decades.

I also think it's possible that seeing people around you being comfortable acknowledging the ways their brain acts differently may make others more comfortable getting a diagnosis. To justify a conclusion this big I feel that you'd want clearly prove that it's not diagnosis that's contagious but the actual disorder.

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> Increased risk remained after adjusting for an array of parental, school-level, and area-level confounders.

Is in the abstract. They literally removed confounding variables. The only variable I can think of is that they are more acute to self check due past experiences.

I mean I'm not gonna pretend I read that whole paper (and I'd be surprised if any commenter did), a thousand papers like this get posted on HN every year and completely forgotten (by HN and academia).

Another thing I'm not sure about -- I think some schools intentionally group troublemakers/slower-students into similar classes either officially or unofficially. I'm not gonna read the whole thing and see if they're accounting for that.

Another weird thing is that "behavioral disorder" isn't contagious if there's 1 other person who has it, but IS with 99.9% confidence if more than 1 other has it. The whole chart of P-values seems a bit odd, tbh.

I don't mean to entirely discredit this paper, but what I've learned is that a lot of academics LOVE datasets that they download and analyze without ever meeting a single person in that dataset (it's the quickest way to get papers out). This CAN be useful, but it can also be garbage-in garbage-out. Over my career I've learned that data, like code, should be presumed broken until proven otherwise.

If you look further down in the paper, they mention the variables they adjusted for:

> [..] all models were adjusted for sex, birth year, area-level urbanicity, area-level morbidity, area-level educational level, area-level employ- ment rate, school class size, school’s ninth grade size, parental educational level, parental income, and parental mental health.

So a contaminant or other environmental factor that didn't correlate perfectly with those factors wouldn't be corrected for. How could it be, without knowing what it is?

> I also think it's possible that seeing people around you being comfortable acknowledging the ways their brain acts differently may make others more comfortable getting a diagnosis

I’ve been willing to believe that, but thats not my current conclusion

I’ve been hanging out in “spiritual” communities, and there is a presumption that everyone there is “healing” from something, and many people are quite emotionally unavailable and emotionally damaged! I thought this was all peculiar and at first concluded that they were solely more comfortable acknowledging their flaws.

and then I went to play parties, where it was the total opposite: everyone is very emotionally available, equally aware of their attachment styles and mental differences as the spiritual crowd, without the odd problems and socialization issues.

More research needed

> you’re also drinking that water

Primarily associated with American shock jock Alex Jones and the so-called alt-right, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog. . .

https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article...

Cursory search confirms that frogs do “turn gay” (change gender) in response to some types of environmental pollution and other environmental factors. Not some crank blogs either. Here’s Berkeley: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/

That was one of the few things Alex Jones said that he was correct about.

> 700 000 individuals in Finland

That would be a very large amount of 'local areas' with the contaminant no?

You could also argue that it could be that it's a quasar pointing at them which is causing it, at some point you have to use Occam's razor and say that the correlation and causation are, in fact, related.

Seems to be a bit of cope in the comments because of what these results would imply for certain demographics. Otoh, contagion of ideas like scientology, other cults and other maladaptive behaviours are completely accepted.

It could also suggest that mental disorders are a societal construction (a product of living in society) ... but there is also a push to do away with disorders anyway. For example, ADHD was adaptative in hunter/gather societies. But it is clearly maladaptive now for school kids (and some workers) so we medicate it.

The bigger problem is a lack of awareness of our emotional states and managing them. This leads to all sorts of major sociological problems.

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