
Business students more likely to have a brain parasite spread by cats - breitling
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175045-business-students-more-likely-to-have-a-brain-parasite-spread-by-cats/
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bencollier49
[edited] - I was concerned that they hadn't controlled for country of origin
when assessing the students - a lot of business students are from abroad - but
on a second reading I couldn't tell if they'd checked it or not - it looked
like they might have done, so I'm removing the comment. Don't want to be rude
to the researchers.

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vincebowdren
Apparently they have controlled for this obvious possibility:

 _In each of the three resulting models, our independent variable was the
prevalence of T. gondii in a given country (the proportion of people who
tested positive for T. gondii exposure) – indicated by published
seroprevalence data._

([https://figshare.com/articles/Supplementary_Methods_and_Anal...](https://figshare.com/articles/Supplementary_Methods_and_Analyses_from_Risky_business_linking_i_Toxoplasma_gondii_i_infection_and_entrepreneurship_behaviours_across_individuals_and_countries/6809468))

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vincebowdren
Remember folks, this isn't just any brain parasite spread by cats; it's
specifically Toxoplasma gondii which is well known to have a life-cycle
dependent on deliberately changing the behaviour of its hosts, reducing risk
inhibitions. This has been repeatedly confirmed in studies on rodents, and has
been strongly suggested in a number of correlative studies on humans.

Also, if we're in the business of judging the news by who's delivering it, the
study was published not in New Scientist but in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society.

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plasmosis
The studies that come up about toxoplasmosis are so uniformly strange, weird
and remarkable that I have become deeply suspicious about the entire field of
study.

Whenever you see strange and remarkable results around some topic like this,
it just reeks of academic p-hacking and media attention seeking.

I suspect one day the entire field of toxoplasmosis study is going to get
debunked and all of these media friendly studies will get thrown out.

The number of remarkable toxoplasmosis studies is far, far too high and really
pushes the limit of credibility.

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vincebowdren
Could be. As ever, it'd be good to hear about any studies with _negative
results_ to get a better perspective, but they infamously tend to get binned
or ignored.

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Areading314
New scientist is pretty much a science tabloid... This is just clickbait

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AndrewDucker
Here, have a link to the actual research:

[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1883/2018...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1883/20180822)

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writepub
Are cats more risk averse than dogs? Or other animals? Is that why they lie
indoors all day?

Is going to business school an indication of risk averseness?

None of this seems rooted in science. "A and B have correlation, and A is
anecdotally known for a characteristic B is attributed to, but no definites
folks, so make your own mind"

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kszxgz
This looks like a textbook example of spurious correlation, great for
introductory courses in statistics.

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atonse
T. Gondii is known to reduce inhibitions. And business, entrepreneurship,
sales, etc are all about reducing inhibitions.

Not saying this is a slam dunk correlation, but maybe it isn't so far from
left field to have studied this link.

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seren
That would be weird if T. Gondii actually helped to fuel civilization
development because of having more risk takers (and maybe more prophets as
well). So not really a parasite, but a symbiote for humanity as a whole.

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vortico
Who knows, this could be valid, but remember: "5% of 95% p-value studies are
false positives."

~~~
kilbuz
Not true, see "base rate fallacy".

