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Nobel Prize Winners Live Longer
anthemaniac writes "A new study finds those who won Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1950 lived about 2 years longer than nominees who didn't win. The researchers conclude that the instantly conferred social status leads to health benefits. From the story: 'The research rules out the possibility that intervening prize-related money itself adds the years through improved prosperity.' If you're thinking of aiming for the prize, pick the right field. Nobel laureates in physics lived nearly a year longer than winners in chemistry."
Except for the 1903 and 1911 winner.
Correlation, causation, etcetera.
It really bugs me when they post these things as if they are fact, and then give no indication whatsoever about how accurate the results are. You're talking about 135 winners out of 524 nominees - not exactly a huge sample size. Is it that hard to put in a few extra characters telling you what the error bars are? Something as simple as "the researchers found that nobel winners live 2 (+/- 0.5) years on average" would do, as would a sentence saying "the standard deviation was 0.5". How are we supposed to make any judgement about the validity of the study if we don't at least have the tiniest insight into the statsitics?
Nobel winners - that's a MASSIVE sample size, eh? Especially when comparing against the general population. This sounds NOT like cheesy made-for-CNN sensationalism.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
If you're thinking of aiming for the prize, pick the right field. Nobel laureates in physics lived nearly a year longer than winners in chemistry.
No doubt because they were in better physic-al condition.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
guess I'll live a couple years longer than the rest of you
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*whacks CowboyNeal with a rolled up newspaper*
NO.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They are already old when they win and the ones who dies young can't win. Noble stated that no dead person could win the Nobel Prize. Many often object that Rosalind Franklin the Prize with Watson and Crick but the fact is that she was already dead and Nobel Prize didn't have the power to name her even if they believed that she was deserving.
This is a better conclusion: People who tend to win also tend to live longer, due to a separate causal factor.
Now gimme my Nobel Prize. I just corrected a bunch of Junk Scientists.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
You can't immediately blame it on social status. For all we know, it could be because they're being shuttled around the world giving lectures everywhere, such that they get better exercise; it could be that they're being given more money and have a more relaxed personal life to eat better; it could be a lot of other things.
Gee criminey... It's like using tweezers to pick up sand grains on the far shore of the bell curve to see how sandy they are.
FTFA:
A single car crash could have skewed your margins on that.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I think it goes with that theory of the brain's "use it or lose it" feature. I bet you live a little longer when you feel you have a reason to get up in the morning and do something. This guy does.
So whiners don't live longer than winners. Whats new in that?
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I bet they'll find the results much more striking if they investigate recipients of the Darwin award.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Well, then you've really made the point as to why the article is bogus, eh? Yes, they make a "nearly two years" claim at the top, but if you read a bit further: "The average lifespan for the nominees (including winners) was 76 years. Winners worldwide lived 1.4 years longer on average, and winners from the same country as non-winning nominees lived another two-thirds of a year, on average."
So lemme see. If you take the whole sample, the difference was 1.4 years, or 1.4 * 12 = 16.8 months. I'm still not done with the morning coffee, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but 16.8 months is a bit lower than the 20 months you've calculated for two sigma.
I find it more interesting when they restrict it to winners from the same country, since, well, only then it's really apples to apples. (You'd expect that someone from the USA would live longer than someone from, say, India. Doubly so when there's data from the early 1900's.) Then it's only 2/3 of a year, or 8 months difference. Quite a bit lower than 20 months, I would say. Plus, it's inherently a lot of smaller samples, so even the 20 months figure would become larger.
More importantly, that difference between "winners vs nominees everywhere" and "winners vs nominees from the same country" tells me that the first one might not be entirely unbiased as samples go. If, say, more winners come from the top industrialized nations with high standards of living, while the larger nominees sample include more people from some poorer countries too, that alone could account for the the 8.8 months difference in the two figures.
I haven't properly studied the names and countries of origin for everyone, but for physics and chemistry it sounds at least like a _believable_ kind of bias: you don't see third world countries building big cyclotrons (for advanced physics research) or having advanced big pharma companies (for advanced chemistry research.) Something like, say, the prize for literature might have been a less biased sample: you don't need lab equipment and funding in the billions to write a book. And if the only cause there is that winning a prize and resulting alpha-monkey status instantly gives you some extra months, then the effect should be the same there too.
This gets funnier when you add this quote into the mix: "Oswald and Rablen found that Nobel laureates in physics lived an average of almost a year longer than laureates in chemistry."
Err... wait a minute. Let's do some maths there, then. Assuming there have been roughly as many winners in physics and chemistry, to keep the average, then the 16.8 months figure becomes something like 22.8 months for physics and 10.8 months for chemistry. It may look like now the physics number is finally signifficant, but it also means half the sample, so sigma is 120 months / sqrt(67) ~= 120 / 8 = 15 months, so two sigma is 30 months. Hmm, now even the figure for physicists is still less significant, and the figure for chemists is outright useless.
Let's apply that piece of wisdom for the "winners vs nominees from the same country", since, again, that's really the only one which doesn't have a built-in bias. To keep the 8 month average and assuming again equal numbers from the same country it becomes 14 months for the physicists and 2 months for the chemists. Frankly, living 2 months longer as a chemistry winner already starts to sound thoroughly insignifficant. But probably that 1 year difference doesn't apply here too, or is proportioanlly reduced too, so let's ignore this.
Was there some other difference between
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
All these bogus statistics items remind me of the story of the nerd who (for his own security) always would sneak a bomb on the plane, because of the obvious logic- "What's the probability of TWO independent bombs on the same plane?"
Physics and chemistry before 1950s were mainly conducted in developed countries under very supportive atmosphere. Physics and chemistry today are conducted near everywhere in university labs, mostly insufficiently funded, overshadowed by other technological developments such as stem cells and nano-transistors. The PhDs either work in fields totally irrelevant to their studies (on Wall St. or in booming high tech) or get their lives squeezed out of them by constant pressure to publish and the tenureship rat-race. If we measure their lifespan after 1950s we may get headlines like 'Science shortens your lifespan by 10 years' etc etc.
No statistics was used to back up this hypothesis.
Every time I see a social science study posted here on Slashdot, everyone comes out of the woodwork with "correlation doesn't equal causation", or "this study is obviously [true|false] because of so-and-so obvious effect", etc. Please give the authors some credit. They did consider various biasing effects, such as Nobel nominee age, the fact that nominees may die before being awarded the prize, they examined alternative causal factors such as the possibility that the winners' longevity was due to their increased income, and so on. Sure, correlation isn't causation and this study doesn't prove anything, but it's not as shoddy as the Slashdot armchair experts seem to think. Read the paper, or a brief summary by a statistician unrelated to the study.