March 28, 2024

4 thoughts on “Heavy Drinkers Outlive Non-Drinkers

  1. Uhh, no. This study fails to give any reasonable cause for this odd phenomenon. Let’s wait for people to stop getting liver cancer from drinking before we put stock in this survey, or revise morality.

  2. I am always deeply suspicious of studies such as this – its very difficult to eliminate all the variables in a system and more importantly, most people (sorry to say but sometimes even scientists) seem to always think correlation implies causality. Just because two observations seem to be correlated, in no way does it mean there is a cause-effect relationship between them (sometimes there is causality, but in systems this is often very difficult to prove explicitly). Randomness and/or other unknown complexities are usually not considered.

    Here’s a good test: when studies come out like this make note of them and watch for a contradicting study to appear. It inevitably will. Caffeine is bad for you, then caffeine is good for you, etc. Scientists aren’t the only ones that fall victim to this trap of inferring causality between events which seem to be correlated; the media makes the same mistake all the time. If you watch the news or read the newspapers regularly you probably have noticed this (CNBC comes to mind…markets are up because of jobs report, then later in the day markets are down because of the very same jobs report..)

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