“For example, some studies have shown that evening people are less likely to eat a healthy diet and more likely to use substances such as alcohol and illegal drugs, compared with morning people.”
Where can I acquire research funding? I have groundbreaking hypotheses I would like to test such as “people who smile more are happier” or “people who have high net worth are more likely to purchase expensive watches”. I am highly qualified to pursue this research - I have a solid foundation in high school statistics and took a freshman sociology course.
What common sense would suggest is true very often doesn't align with what research has found to actually be true.
Don't take the world for granted. Don't assume you understand something just because the answer seems obvious.
In fact, the example you gave - people who smile more are happier - is true, but the cause is possibly the opposite of what the sentence implies. Some people are happy more because they force themselves to smile; they're not smiling because they're happy.[1]
On the other hand, throwing enough p = .05 studies at the world lets you 'learn' all sorts of unintuitive - and untrue - things.
That smiling/happiness result, for example, looks to be another casualty of the replication crisis. [1] Could it be true? Maybe, but at the quality of existing research it's not clear studying it was an improvement on intuition. Checking our instincts with data is a good thing to do, but it's hardly a silver bullet when searching for the truth.
I know a Psych professor who will always open her first lecture with a statement about the 'obvious,' i.e. "How many here know that babies have no gauge of attractiveness towards people, and thus don't prefer to be around attractive people?". After half the class has raised their hands, she'll then inform the class how the opposite is true, and studies have shown that babies actually prefer to be around more conventionally attractive people.
What I mean to explain with this anecdote is that it's very common to dismiss correlations as common sense, when one could just as easily make a 'common sense' assertion about the opposite.
That's often a good test, in fact -- try to develop a 'common sense' assertion for an opposing side, such as "Why would waking up earlier be correlated to healthier eating?". If it's possible to do so, then the common sense probably isn't so common after all.
"How many here know that babies have no gauge of attractiveness towards people, and thus don't prefer to be around attractive people?"
I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of sophistic assumptions and bad data you would need to reach a conclusion for a question like that. And then you would have to look in the mirror and say to yourself “my contribution to society is spending research money to determine whether or not babies prefer to be around attractive people”
Problem with that is they are not describing regular healthy "evening people".
They are describing people who couldn't care less at what time they wake up because they were in a substance induced coma up to their random waking hour.
Of course those are going to die sooner.
I wish they would find a way to filter those out and test only on people whose internal clock is simply shifted.
Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN, even if you're right. There's a cap on how interesting discussions that start this way can ever become, and it's simply not that high.
Are you a software engineer? Surely you’ve been bitten enough by “that’s obviously true” to welcome a revalidation of assumptions in slightly different contexts?
I don't see it that way. This research is a good first step to show that there is a problem that warrants further investigation.
The big question remaining now is why? Are night owls less healthy because they are forcing their body into an unnatural rhythm? Or are the genes associated with being a night owl also responsible for these other health issues?
Where can I acquire research funding? I have groundbreaking hypotheses I would like to test such as “people who smile more are happier” or “people who have high net worth are more likely to purchase expensive watches”. I am highly qualified to pursue this research - I have a solid foundation in high school statistics and took a freshman sociology course.