alt Hacker News> I suspect, based on your disposition towards it, you actually are not keeping up with the latest in SDOH research,
Man, you guys keep finding fun new ways of saying "if you don't like what I like, you must be uninformed".
Instead of doing that, inform me: what revolutionary new finding in SDOH have we discovered in the last 20 years? Prove me wrong.
> I'm not sure where your confidence comes from as to whether we're firehosing money into "standard model research" or whether we're building a more refined and useful picture of stuff that was more vaguely understood 20 years ago.
That's called a metaphor. Feel free to substitute any other example that you feel better illustrates the concept of "studying a question we already know the answer to".
Knowledge is always fractal, so it's not particularly responsive to argue that there might be something we don't know about the thing we've already intensively studied. Of course there might be...but when there are lots of questions we don't know the answer to, it's smarter to focus on those, instead.
Sure here's one revolutionary new finding in that timeframe: that a person's social/cultural environment affects DNA methylation and gene expression for the rest of their lives.
Here's another one: a person's perception of whether they "are" rural is actually a better predictor of their health outcomes than whether they actually are rural. I.e. two neighbors living side by side in suburban America, the one who perceives themselves to be rural will have dramatically worse outcomes than the one who perceives themselves to be urban/suburban.
These are both potentially useful things to know as we try to eliminate extreme health disparities between Americans.
You seem to think we have all the answers though, so what's the answer? How do we do it?
FWIW, the specific cited research where she's trying to quantify the health impacts of living near pollution sources is actually important for e.g. lawsuits where people try to hold corporations accountable for poisoning their children. Any value in that?