
Risky business: linking Toxoplasma infection and entrepreneurship behavior - XnoiVeX
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2018.0822
======
cultus
This is just p-hacking. It's really sad that in 2018 researchers are still
pumping out garbage like this. All of these toxo behavior studies have been
very poor quality. For example, there's been a few studies purporting that
folks infected with toxo have significantly higher rates of schizophrenia.
However, this is false, because toxo rates differ by 2-3x between first-world
countries but yet the schizophrenia rate is mostly consistent.

~~~
abledon
Can someone explain the math behind the ‘p hacking’ for this study?

~~~
yawaworhtttt
I think the best way to explain it is with this link:
[https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/)

~~~
phaedryx
Thank you, this is both awesome and terrible.

------
cm2012
There's so much BS around toxoplasmosis online. Here's corrections for two
common misconceptions:

1) Almost everyone who has it got it from eating undercooked meat, not from
cats. France has the highest rate of toxoplasmosis in the world because of
their propensity for rare meats:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5312802/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5312802/).

2) Unless your cat lived a long part of it's life as an outdoor cat, it is
very unlikely to have the parasite (like any parasite).

~~~
in_cahoots
This second point really surprised me. I’ve had 5 indoor cats over the course
of more than 20 years and cleaned all of their litter boxes. All were adopted
as stray kittens, so presumably they spent some time outdoors. And yet I
tested negative for toxoplasmosis. As I understand it, you basically have to
ingest the stool of a cat who recently hunted a rodent with the disease. If
your cat stays indoors and you wash your hands after cleaning the litter box,
that’s unlikely. In fact, you’re more likely to get it from gardening because
cats will pee in the soil and you’re probably more likely to touch your face
if you have touched soil than if you’ve just cleaned a litter box.

------
zunzun
Somewhere there now has to be a person thinking "Hmm, I've been eating cat
poop for a month now and have not seen any increase in business revenue - am I
not eating enough?"

~~~
DonHopkins
This new product is certainly entrepreneurial:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2yWAD5OzhM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2yWAD5OzhM)

------
benjaminwootton
This trait and disease was discussed at length on the Joe Rogan podcast with
Mcauley Culkin.

Apparently rats which catch toxoplasmosis are attracted to cat urine, which is
an evolutionary reason for its development.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyb1xz7waY8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyb1xz7waY8)

~~~
rzzzt
Toxoplasmosis is smart enough to spread through the Internet as well:
[https://vimeo.com/69181785](https://vimeo.com/69181785)

------
m0skit0
[https://medium.com/@andrewhayes/correlation-does-not-
imply-c...](https://medium.com/@andrewhayes/correlation-does-not-imply-
causation-21472b85630f)

------
InGodsName
Can we extract the prasite and sell it as entrepreneur drink now?

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
I thought this was the concept behind raw water? Expose yourself to all of
nature's risky and risk-taking-inducing fecal transmitted parasites!

~~~
elif
i got water poisoning in the backcountry... the delusion is not that
dissimilar to a psychedelic experience, and actually intensified by the
pervasive and unavoidable actual fear of death.

------
MentallyRetired
So saying you have the entrepreneurial bug is a real thing? Seems like
correlation without causation, to me.

------
moocowtruck
is this site almost unusable for anyone else? hmm just seems to be in chrome..
smooth in ff

------
tabtab
The only thing I have to say about this is, _meow!_

------
noddy1w
The "jokes" in this thread really underscore how painfully humourless tech
people are

~~~
mushbino
It's a fair tradeoff. You can't have everything.

