

Does self promotion cause heart disease? - nate
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2010/04/does-self-promotion-cause-heart-disease.html

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secretasiandan
Like most Gladwell related information, there's an anecdotal relationship
between a town that doesn't have much heart disease and a subjective
observation about its inhabitants' lifestyle.

However, I would suspect that self promotion is correlated with heart disease
in general because people who have to self promote are under stressful
conditions. They're trying to change things which they really have little
control over: other people's minds.

I try to avoid that stress by looking for ways to succeed that don't require
much self promotion. Part of that involves finding areas where you have enough
edge that the benefit of other parties working with you is obvious. Admittedly
not a very generalizable route, but I believe I'd be happy just trying as long
as I don't have to bend to others' whims.

~~~
nate
Very true about Gladwell. But I've picked up the original research too by Wolf
and his book. It was Wolf's observation about what made Roseto like it is.
Gladwell just restated it.

[http://www.amazon.com/Power-Clan-Influence-Relationships-
Dis...](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Clan-Influence-Relationships-
Disease/dp/1560000430/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270750637&sr=8-2)

And as for the heart disease premise, you are totally right about there being
a correlation that way. Which makes me curious though what would happen if we
all just all stopped self promoting like you are trying to do. Would we all be
just so much happier. On the blog right now someone brought up the example of
Warren Buffet and how he doesn't do much self promotion. His results speak for
themselves. And his website remains very stark.

I also thought of <http://instapaper.com>. A very popular and useful tool, and
I can't find a review or testimonial on the entire stark, grey site. People
just find out they need this tool and sign up. Even the itunes sales page -
<http://www.instapaper.com/iphone> has nothing on it. No "Techcrunch calls it
the best thing ever".

~~~
discipline
I use <http://toread.cc/> for the same purpose, plus I can always search in
Gmail for my articles.

~~~
nate
Funny. I went there and found this:

"Sounds very handy - Lifehacker.com This is much quicker and cleaner - Hawk
Wings I came across toread.cc and I immediately fell in love with it -
Winston's Attic"

Again, totally admitting we do this too. But this is so interesting to me that
instapaper gets away without having to do this, and still commands quite an
audience.

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carbocation
With 25,000 towns in the US, is there any surprise that you can find one with
an unexpectedly {low,high} incidence of {heart disease,cancer} by pure chance?

This was particularly telling: "... But also leads to stress, ills, and
unhappiness that didn't exist in Roseto. Well, until Roseto became just like
every other town years later."

Ignoring this, let's look at the structure of this "case/control" setup. The
"cases" with unexpectedly low heart disease are all from the same geographic
region and environment. Many are related (up to 3 generations living in the
same town).

The controls are... well, the rest of America, dispersed across hundreds of
millions of acres in diverse environments and with a more diverse genetic
background.

In other words, they inadequately controlled this experiment, so any
assertions about the results are suspect.

~~~
bmason
What you say about the experiment results is true. I don't know if this one is
any better, but the guy who gave this TED talk found similar results when
looking for communities having people with the longest life spans:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100....](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html)

One of the places with a lot of centenarians was a place near Okinawa, Japan,
where people form life long friendships. They also eat healthy and I'm sure
other variables are different. I find the correlations interesting even if
they are not conclusive.

------
bmason
Maybe focus on what you're doing instead of what you've done. Be nice to
people and find ways to help them out with their problems. Instead of listing
out your credentials express your willingness to help.

This seems to be the approach that Richard Feynman took. He says in the BBC
series "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" that he hates the concept of
awards, and he did things for the pleasure of doing it and having it used by
others, not to earn some sort of recognition.

------
jjs
_People cooking for neighbors. Everyone chatting with everyone else on the
street. 3 generations of family living under one roof. And an "egalitarian
ethos"._

With 3 generations living together and everyone taking turns cooking for each
other on an egalitarian basis, I'd expect to see more people eating home-
cooked meals and less fast food and processed food products.

