MDD is a real disability. It can and often is precipitated by environmental triggers, and episodes can resolve once the environment is changed. Just because someone experiences remission in such a case doesn’t mean they don’t have a disorder that should be treated prior to another episode. Dichotomizing chemical and psychological/environmental is harmful.
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023
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My point is that such a lay interpretation isn’t helpful, and it may be harmful. Plenty of people with MDD have an environmental trigger prior to their first episode, and have their episode remit after that precipitating factor is managed. Convincing someone that their experience isn’t chemical suggests against treatment seeking during remission, such as seeking therapy, which could help prevent another episode (and one that may not have an environmental trigger). A depressive episode can be fatal. Telling someone that because their prior episode remitted spontaneously or after the environmental trigger changed might prevent them from getting the proactive and preventative treatment that they need to keep them from experiencing another episode and thus keep them alive. Don’t gatekeep depression.
And how do you think addressing stressors works? Some non-chemical means?
That first bit is totally untrue. Do you think our grief is not chemical? That we can’t have neural rewiring occur following the loss of a loved one? Don’t dichotomize experience and neurochemistry. They’re two sides of the same coin.
You’re normal in that respect:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.1962
In fact, the idea that autistic individuals are immune to propaganda is, itself, media propaganda. The study that those articles report on was a single study that found that autistic individuals show less of a framing effect on their own preferences. It’s much more easily explained by autistic individuals having strong, internal preferences for their own likes/dislikes than it is by autistic individuals being immune to propaganda.
Speaking from experience here, too.
I’m so in the minority here, but I have a different perspective.
I worked at a grocery store for years, with about a third of my job being cart duty. I loved it when people left their carts outside of the corrals, for a few reasons.
First, if a lot of people did so, I would point it out to whoever was the manager on at the time before I went outside. My manager knew that I would take longer before coming back in, and that would give me more time to stroll/relax/enjoy the outdoors before coming back in to customer craziness. Having those extra minutes because my manager didn’t know how long I should take was nice.
Second, sometimes I had to walk way the hell out to the edge of the parking lot, which was really nice for a long walk away from customer craziness. Such walks were very nice when the weather was nice.
Third, it was job security. Working during the recession made my managers want to let as many people go as they could, but customers who made it so even the most efficient cart duty workers took a while to clear the lot effectively kept more of us employeed than management would have employed otherwise.
For those reasons, whenever the weather is nice, I try to leave my cart in a weird spot that is anchored by something. I realize that many other cart duty folks probably dislike me for it, but I know I appreciated it when others did this. So I do it for the folks like me.
I know all of the arguments against it and I’m not trying to debate here. Just sharing a different perspective; sometimes, leaving your cart in a terrible spot can be nice for some of the workers.
2·10 months agoAverage monthly salary in the cities is listed at the bottom of that link I gave. The two cities differ in monthly salary by $14 dollars on average, per the available data. Those same submissions show that the cost of living is ~20% higher in San Diego than Austin.
Austin is cheaper than San Diego, even excluding taxes:
12·10 months agoNo, it isn’t; performance != ability, and it’s not clear that cognitive performance declines at all–hence the word “may.”
My claim is that
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings
Nothing more.
The RCT is free to access (if you haven’t downloaded more than three NBER papers; if you have, open the page in a different browser). Scroll down on the page I linked and download it via the button.
Statistically, you can control for variables in OLS regression–that’s literally exactly what the model does when you include more than one variable–and, provided that you got your doctorate in anything that uses statistics, I am sure you know that.
Seasonality is one of the more basic economics concepts. The influence of weather and seasonal illness trends on productivity has been shown in a number of studies (e.g., productivity declines during the flu season). The authors didn’t “show” it because it would be like showing gravity in a physics paper. Some things can be assumed. Also, productivity didn’t have a trend, as was stated in the text that I quoted.
You completely ignored the log transformed results, which the authors note were better fit by the regression than the untransformed data, and which showed less productivity in work from home regardless of whether seasonality was controlled.
Personally, I think people should be able to work from home all they want. Productivity isn’t the only important thing in life, nor is it the only important thing to businesses (e.g., retention of top employees is important). I am wholly against WebMD and all other companies requiring employees to return to the office. All I was doing in my comments was trying to clarify the data on WFH and productivity. There are good reasons to continue to allow WFH, but increased productivity is not one.
I’m going to finish my course prep. You can have the final word here; I don’t have time to continue debating anymore.
First, the RCT is a much stronger study. I’m not sure why you’re picking a fight with a correlational paper when there is a causal manipulation that I linked first.
Second, did you actually read the paper? 1B isn’t the graph of productivity; 1C is. You can’t just look at a graph, either–you need statistics.
"For Output, figure 1B, there is no visible monotonic or linear trend, so a seasonal time correction might be more appropriate here. Moreover, average output appears to be slightly lower during WFH.
For Productivity, figure 1C, the graph is more volatile, which is not surprising for a ratio. There is no clear linear time trend before WFH, but some variation from month to month, so a seasonal correction might be more appropriate. Productivity drops visibly during WFH. Finally, figure 1D plots the log of Productivity, which drops considerably after the start of WFH.
To quantify the WFH effect, and to control for employee and team time-invariant variables (via employee and team fixed effects), we now turn to the regression analyses. Informally, the estimates give us average differences in outcomes before and during WFH for the same employee, controlling for team effects (since employees sometimes switch teams) and time trends.
Table 4 reports WFH effect estimates based on OLS regressions for all three outcome variables, plus the natural logarithm of Productivity, in each case with linear and seasonal time trend corrections. All estimates are in line with the visible effects in the raw data in figure 1.
…
Columns 5 and 6 show that both WFH effect estimates on Productivity are negative, but only the estimate with seasonal time trend is significantly different from zero. We prefer that specification, since both the plot and the linear time trend coefficient indicate that a linear trend is not as appropriate. According to this specification, productivity decreased by 0.26 output percentage points per hour worked. Given an average WFO productivity of 1.36, this estimate corresponds to a 19% drop in output per hour worked. This is economically significant: if employees worked a fixed 40 hours per week, this would imply a drop in output of 10.2 output percentage points in a week. In other words, if employees had not increased time worked during WFH, on average they would have completed only 90 of 100 assigned tasks.
Columns 7 and 8 explain the log of Productivity, which strongly increases the fit of the regression. The WFH effect is negative and significantly different from zero at all significance levels, irrespective of time controls."
Beyond self-reports and perception-based outcomes, most extant studies that I’m aware of have found decreases in real output. For example, a randomized controlled trial published by the NBER found that productivity of employees randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than employees randomly assigned to work in the office:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515
Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home, even though hours worked increased:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721803
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:
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71·1 year agoBy season 8 she’s so convinced she’s essentially Mulder. She has times where she’s more or less convinced until then, but it’s a trajectory towards believing until she does. It just takes her a really long time.
2·1 year agoNintendo looooves to sue people over so many things though
71·1 year agoWe’ve known that this isn’t true since 2005:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632230500171X
In addition, plenty of other disorders show worse executive function than ADHD:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00328/full
If executive dysfunction is your primary issue, that is not indicative of ADHD. ADHD is driven by reward processing dysfunction and slower information processing:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1087054714558872
When have we been talking about anyone’s diagnosis? We’ve been talking about the common misperception that depressive episodes caused by environmental triggers are not a result of treatable neurochemical dysfunction. MDD can certainly be a result of environmental triggers, and there are a wide variety of neurochemical bases of it. I distinctly said in my first comment that I was referencing a small part of your reply. I’m not trying to have a needless fight, I’m trying to correct a common public misperception that you reiterated. I do that whenever I see a misunderstanding of science; I care about public science education, especially on topics important enough as psychiatric conditions that are often fatal without treatment. If you feel like this is a pointless fight, sorry. I only commented because I understood your comment to mean something that, no matter my read of your wording, you clearly say you weren’t meaning.