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Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

unenvironment.org

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Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#151

Post by pavelrub »

r00fus wrote: post #123
Bartweiss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us: > Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 6…

I'd say that a "year of education" is a lot more quantifiable to your average person than "2 points of IQ". IQ isn't used for anything meaningful in terms of ability or qualifications, especially since it's age-adjusted and historically has been biased against minorities/foreigners. A year of development however, is a graspable (if shocking) measure of lost opportunity/capability.

I disagree. "A year of education" is mostly about gaining knowledge. It's obvious that air pullution can't possibly make you forget one year of such knowledge, and I have no idea in what other intuitive way this can be interpreted that makes any sense to the average person. If it's meaningfull to someone then it's only because he understood it wrongly.

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#152

Post by stupidcar »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #63
wowzap wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there actually proof that it "works great"? Asking for myself every time I try to cross the street in downtown Manhattan and have to look for a cyclist on the sidewalk, going against traffic, blowing through a red light, or fighting with another cyclist.

A city that was never designed for bikes is hell for bikes, so you end up with only the most reckless bikers on the road. I commute with a bike every day in Paris, France. The infrastructure isn't great but it's OK, and it's improving. The thing is: I'm a big, strong guy who can legally outrun most cars and motorbikes in such a big, dense city. I can fight my way in traffic, mostly because the law authorizes bikes to…

I definitely agree about the last part. I live in London, don’t drive, and cycling would definitely be preferable to relying entirely on the Tube and taxis. But when I see the hell cyclists here have to contend with, and how aggressive they need to be, I know there’s no way I am a skilled or confident enough rider to do the same. But if the infrastructure and vehicle congestion ever improved to the point where cyclists were adequately protected, I would definitely start cycling.

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#153

Post by Bartweiss »

r00fus wrote: post #123
Bartweiss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us: > Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 6…

I'd say that a "year of education" is a lot more quantifiable to your average person than "2 points of IQ". IQ isn't used for anything meaningful in terms of ability or qualifications, especially since it's age-adjusted and historically has been biased against minorities/foreigners. A year of development however, is a graspable (if shocking) measure of lost opportunity/capability.

How does "losing a year of education" relate to my ability to decide and remember which errands I need to do in what order? If people lose 'a year', how does that respond to varying levels of education? Are they losing a year of education, as in quitting school to work, or a year of development, as in comparing 15 year olds to 16 year olds? The two are substantially different, and seeing them conflated makes me think I'm not the only one confused.

I have no idea at all. I'm not trying to be snarky, I completely failed to grasp what's being lost until I went and looked at the paper.

A year of education is certainly quantifiable when we're talking about learned facts and skills, or even about economic success, but I don't understand it as a measure of cognitive impairment. The studied harms should still be relevant to a farmer who's never spent a single day in a classroom, and the analysis in the study focuses on older adults losing fundamental capacities that are important to decision-making and daily functioning. Using a metric that's based on education doesn't clearly convey losses like that, especially when we're talking about not missed advancement in children but decline in older adults.

The actual result obtained in this study was performance on a set of scores on verbal and mathematical tests relative to a population average. The result in the lead study was a set of verbal and mathematical tests relative to a population average. Expressing one as percentiles and the other as IQ doesn't change the fact that those things are far more similar to each other than either is to keeping children in school for an extra year.

(On a final note, I don't want to open the IQ debate, but I do think the usual problems are uncommonly irrelevant here. I specifically pulled a lead study which was conducted in China, used a Chinese baseline, and compared among same-age children, which avoids the biases mentioned. IQ may be a terrible general comparison, but if we don't need to compare between samples in different studies then it's really just a percentile.)

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#154

Post by siderax »

sxates wrote: post #127
amyjess wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of the excellent comments made by rayiner, tfha, and jwr, we wouldn't even be burning dinosaurs miles away if we switched entirely to nuclear power.

Or Solar or Wind or Hydro. In places like California and parts of Europe renewable sources are 1/3 or more of the electricity mix.

But when we look at the datas, country that use nuclear power are way way ahead of those that use renewable mix.

Easy to look at : https://www.electricitymap.org

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#155

Post by Bartweiss »

ip26 wrote: post #148
Bartweiss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us: > Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 6…

"So-and-so third grader reads & does math at a second grade level" is about the most intuitive metric we've got.

It's a very easy way to talk about childhood progression under compulsory education, yes. But if not everyone is in school then I don't know whether "losing a year" means losing the schooling, or losing the year of development.

More crucially, the main result here was about older adults losing capacities. If someone tells me that a 70 year old dementia patient has effectively "lost a year of education", I don't have any idea what I should expect.

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#156

Post by trhway »

SahAssar wrote: post #150
trhway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cycling isn't space efficient and doesn't really scales that good. It is a luxury ttransportation mode for low/mid density US cities not capable/not willing to build true mass transit modes. Look at the packed subway in say Moscow ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCZKXHsZo68 ) and compare to the best possible bicycle situation - mid-80s China http://www.theurbancountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/83... - around 1…

A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier. A bike track is a low latency, high bandwidth carrier. That is in a subway all "packets" (people) need to wait for the next opportunity to depart, whereas in a bike system all packets move more slowly, but at a more continuous pace (set by the maximum speed of the transport). A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack,…

>A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier.

Trains coming in each couple minutes - show me lower latency than that :)

>A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack

several hundreds (up to a thousand in rush hour packing) people per train each couple of minutes - beat that.

Anyway, the rest of what you're saying about biking is just a theory that doesn't come even close to the reality of any big dense city in Europe/Asia. This is why those cities has highly developed subway system - the low latency high bandwidth and high speed mode of transportation. You put all these people on bikes and they would choke the city.

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#157

Post by tzs »

Meanwhile, the EPA is kicking academic scientists off advisory panels in this area, and replacing the panels with a small group consisting entirely of industry scientists and government officials from conservative state and local governments.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/14...

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#158

Post by SahAssar »

trhway wrote: post #156
SahAssar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier. A bike track is a low latency, high bandwidth carrier. That is in a subway all "packets" (people) need to wait for the next opportunity to depart, whereas in a bike system all packets move more slowly, but at a more continuous pace (set by the maximum speed of the transport). A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack,…

>A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier. Trains coming in each couple minutes - show me lower latency than that :) >A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack several hundreds (up to a thousand in rush hour packing) people per train each couple of minutes - beat that. Anyway, the rest of what you're saying about biking is just a theory that doesn't come even…

I guess you have never visited Copenhagen or Amsterdam? Those two are pretty strong counterpoints to what you are saying.

Re: Air pollution linked to “huge” reduction in intelligence

#159

Post by ben_w »

rienbdj wrote: post #81
ben_w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling is at least four times the space efficiency of cars, unless all the cars are Smart Fourtwo or equivalent. And that’s when parked, the multiplier goes up with speed. Additionally, low density US cities are one of the worst places I’ve seen for cycling, because not only is everything spread out, but also the multi-lane roads everywhere make it much more dangerous than equivalently populated towns and cities in…

wow, I was using London as an example of how NOT to do cycle infrastructure.

London is unpleasant and stressful, but as Reason077 says, traffic is slow. Compared to the American cities I’ve seen, though, it’s second only to Davis.
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