Is full-time work bad for our brains?
This is a paper on the work that the article cited: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melbourneinstitute.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;working_paper_series&#x2F;wp2016n07.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.melbourneinstitute.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;working_paper_s...</a><p>There is a critical mathematical mistake with their use of statistical analysis which basically, as an artifact, bakes in this &quot;conclusion&quot; into the &quot;results&quot;.<p>It comes about because they manually add &quot;Working hours-squared&#x2F;100&quot; into the factor analysis, and then, low and behold, there is a parabola correlated with the data. It&#x27;s a downward facing one, because an upward facing one, or no correlation will not match as well. But the model is not reality.<p>There are numerous other conceptual problems with the study, like &quot;what is work?&quot; and a lack of real data on the nature of work beyond what is correlated with socioeconomic indicators, like University education, however, it is remarkable that even at the level of statistic analysis, the work is critically flawed.<p>I am also disappointed that nobody else on hacker news seems to have pointed this out.<p>Hopefully, this can serve as yet another example, of how to interpret and understand data the new, be it hacker news or otherwise, presents us with. Statistical data analysis is both hard, and often times misleading.