>The Dunedin Study, which began as a study of childhood development, has become one of humanity’s richest treasure troves of data on what makes us who we are.
Maybe I'm quaint and silly but this kind of overhyped byline makes me doubt that there will be any kind of insight here which thousands of years of recorded human thought hasn't already captured.
I am kinda new to hackerrank and I don't know what it means when a comment is grayed out (it doesn't sound like a good thing), but I totally agree with you. I read the first part of the article and I just couldn't read further. It's like the article is about how great of an accomplishment that study is, instead of the data that supposedly came out of it.
In this case the comment was originally at least five times longer than it currently is so many of the reasons for the downvoting are no longer apparent.
Whoa I didn't think I'd see Dunedin on the front page. If you're ever in town the Early Settlers / Toitu museum had a good exhibition on this study the last time I was in there.
Not only did they live much longer, they didn't suffer the effects of aging until nearly the end of their life.
I don't believe in any supernatural phenomena, the afterlife, or fate etc., but I find his concept of the Gift of Men to be a fascinating look at death.
I found that too. I read these as a child, and I remember siding with those elves who thought Illuvatars Gift to Men to be a hard one to accept. Still, I tried to understand it a gift and not a curse, at last in later years, thinking that there must be something to it, when some elves chose to become mortal and receive this gift.
When I thought of the elves perspective, I can see that while they are super cool, they can't live the lives the way we of mankind do. We have the ability to appreciate life and feel life very intensely, precisely because we know with certainty an upper bound to our expiration date.
(For full disclosure I lean more towards the afterlife being a reality than not, this has of course affected how I read Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, for that matter...)
The area of Dunedin has changed over time due to various political changes, we got rid of counties, it's now ~3300 sq km (don't know what that is in bananas, they don't grow here) - that's about 80 times the size of Berkeley (somewhere else I have lived). The population hasn't changed much.
However area is irrelevant since they chose everyone in the original city who was born during that period, the identity of the people they are studying hasn't changed
Remember when these guys were starting the software for this study, they were using cards.
Nature through nuture: "The larger suggestion is that it is the combination of the right environment and genetic cocktail that causes mental illness — not nature versus nurture, but, as author Matt Ridley has written, nature via nurture."
Crime: "The more common antisocial behavior, limited to peer relationships at a young age, she termed “adolescent-limited.” She also identified a less common “life-course persistent” antisocial behavior, which resulted in a persistence of violence into midlife. "
Weed: " unlike tobacco users, marijuana users tended to stay healthy into midlife."
Self control:
""boys and girls with less self-control had worse health, less wealth, and more crime as adults than those with more self-control at every level of the distribution of self-control.”Another related study suggested a 5-item questionnaire at doctors’ offices could identify children who needed motivational counseling to make healthy decisions, which would greatly increase their chances of better health later in life."
As an anecdote, I noticed this in three of my friends who smoked daily for years (2-4 years), out of four friends who did and I didn't notice this at all in friends who smoked occasionally (out of... many friends).
I missed this giant takeaway:
mental illness:
1."Researchers were shocked to find that the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse in the Dunedin birth cohort was more than twice the rate the mental health community predicted. The reason, Dunedin researchers discovered, was a chronic underreporting of these problems by subjects long after their struggles occurred, in the way most previous studies had been conducted.:
2. "method of cognitive testing and digital imaging of the brain through the retina. Using this “non-invasive window to the brain” to identify at-risk children for targeted treatment might decrease a child’s risk of debilitating mental illness later in life."
A comment aside: I just hate, that roughly 20% of the screen on top is taken by the header bar, and that there is constantly a “Open in App” icon on the bottom floating around. That’s really not a nice reading experience on a mobile device
It's a pretty terrible reading experience on desktop too. It goes away if you are a logged in user. Clearly Medium is trying to drive users to signup/signin and it worked in my case.
Someone already commented with the largest takeaways.
However, I ultimately think the biggest takeaway from this study is that it will provide data for researchers in multiple fields for years to come, and will encourage cross-disciplinary study. And, because it worked so well, because there was a high retention of participants, further studies of its kind can be modeled from it, which will give us an even greater perspective on the course of a human life and the events which shape us.
a population studied since birth for 45 years, with data being continually collected allowing future study, and because they don't present that as some easily consumable sound bites it rates a 'meh'?
40 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 94.9 ms ] threadMaybe I'm quaint and silly but this kind of overhyped byline makes me doubt that there will be any kind of insight here which thousands of years of recorded human thought hasn't already captured.
In this case the comment was originally at least five times longer than it currently is so many of the reasons for the downvoting are no longer apparent.
This is hackernews, not hackerrank, and when a comment is grayed out it means more than a few people have downvoted it.
https://www.hackerrank.com/
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAnedain
I don't believe in any supernatural phenomena, the afterlife, or fate etc., but I find his concept of the Gift of Men to be a fascinating look at death.
See: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Gift_of_Men
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Immortality
When I thought of the elves perspective, I can see that while they are super cool, they can't live the lives the way we of mankind do. We have the ability to appreciate life and feel life very intensely, precisely because we know with certainty an upper bound to our expiration date.
(For full disclosure I lean more towards the afterlife being a reality than not, this has of course affected how I read Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, for that matter...)
Population of around 120,000 for people like me who found that less than informative.
0.04 Wales, in standard units.
Source: http://www.justintools.com/unit-conversion/area.php?k1=squar...
After you posted that, I just had to Google it. Crazy that someone has thought of it.
However area is irrelevant since they chose everyone in the original city who was born during that period, the identity of the people they are studying hasn't changed
Remember when these guys were starting the software for this study, they were using cards.
Nature through nuture: "The larger suggestion is that it is the combination of the right environment and genetic cocktail that causes mental illness — not nature versus nurture, but, as author Matt Ridley has written, nature via nurture."
Crime: "The more common antisocial behavior, limited to peer relationships at a young age, she termed “adolescent-limited.” She also identified a less common “life-course persistent” antisocial behavior, which resulted in a persistence of violence into midlife. "
Weed: " unlike tobacco users, marijuana users tended to stay healthy into midlife."
Self control: ""boys and girls with less self-control had worse health, less wealth, and more crime as adults than those with more self-control at every level of the distribution of self-control.”Another related study suggested a 5-item questionnaire at doctors’ offices could identify children who needed motivational counseling to make healthy decisions, which would greatly increase their chances of better health later in life."
> these effects only occurred among those who smoked marijuana daily; more infrequent users suffered essentially none of these effects.
As an anecdote, I noticed this in three of my friends who smoked daily for years (2-4 years), out of four friends who did and I didn't notice this at all in friends who smoked occasionally (out of... many friends).
2. "method of cognitive testing and digital imaging of the brain through the retina. Using this “non-invasive window to the brain” to identify at-risk children for targeted treatment might decrease a child’s risk of debilitating mental illness later in life."
[1]: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
However, I ultimately think the biggest takeaway from this study is that it will provide data for researchers in multiple fields for years to come, and will encourage cross-disciplinary study. And, because it worked so well, because there was a high retention of participants, further studies of its kind can be modeled from it, which will give us an even greater perspective on the course of a human life and the events which shape us.