alt Hacker News„Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.“
I absolutely hate bad science like this. No, your results suggest that remote work IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE 2020s substantially…
The USA is a famously lonely country already and it is incredibly car-oriented culture. And it wasn’t always like this and it might not always be like this. Those are obvious confounding factors that should not be ignored and the fact that the reviewers for such a high profile publication let the authors write a conclusion that doesn’t mention the huge risk to validity is extremely annoying.
This is one reason it's hard to trust science, they start of with a bias and confirm it, but make it look like it was objective. You'd need decades of research to even come near a conclusion on something like this. "suggests" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, but the general public, policy makers, executives, hr, etc.. will read "it's a fact", and I suspect whoever funded this knew exactly what they're doing.