I wonder if they took demographics into account?
Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
131–140 of 241 posts
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#132It's such a typical kneejerk "skeptical" reaction at this point to be like "oh well maybe correlation doesn't imply causation" as if there are no causal relationships ever in life itself. But really if the rationalists just took a few seconds to think about it maybe they'd find a some plausibility in the notion that exposure to harmful pollution could trigger a stress response; stress is intimately wrapped up with ag…
"Kneejerk" skepticism is a good thing. The real problem is posting kneejerk incredulous comments before bothering to read all there is to read about the matter, since reading further would often clear up such concerns.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
And other big part was legalized abortion. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
The abortion theory is pretty much busted by now. You find the same crime-reduction pattern in European countries were abortion has been legal since the 1940s. You don't find subsequent crime increases in countries were abortion has been outlawed or access to it has been severely restricted.
hmm, well I did listen to the above podcast which was recorded in 2019, and they revisited the abortion numbers and still thought it was very relevant.
Do you have a link I can check out?
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I think it's a fact¹ that a large majority of "science" stories that go viral turn out to be wrong. So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?". ¹ Citation Missing
If you want to avoid this, just read the paper. I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.
Because there’s only 24 hours a day? Because my tax dollars are often funding this research?
Why not take this farther and just do the research myself, eh?
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I think it's a fact¹ that a large majority of "science" stories that go viral turn out to be wrong. So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?". ¹ Citation Missing
If you want to avoid this, just read the paper. I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.
> I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.
But to be honest, the reason I read the comments (at least on a place like HN) is to get the key insight / failure without reading the article.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#136If that is the case, why aren't major cities in China, or other major Asian cities like Singapore bastions of crime? Hint: they aren't. They are in fact some of the safest places in the world, and on average have air pollution levels much higher than cities in the US, even dangerous ones!
And yet look at all of the misinformation in the comments, as usual.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I think it's a fact¹ that a large majority of "science" stories that go viral turn out to be wrong. So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?". ¹ Citation Missing
If you want to avoid this, just read the paper. I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.
It's paywalled. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00950...
If I had access, I'd try to dig into more depth into how they approached decoupling this from temperature, because that seems like a really strong confounder. I'm also a bit curious about the underlying physical cause of the change in pollution levels, (weekends? summertime?) because that seems like it could also be a confounding common cause.
Alas, I'm not interested in paying $35 for the paper.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yeah, but they have to remove all the other factors like heat, wind and rain, which are correlated to air pollution. There is likely less violent crimes on rainy days, just because more people stay home. To do this properly, they would have to do a controlled experiment with people in rooms with or without air pollution. And measure how sanguine they get or something of that nature.
From the full paper: "Pollution and crime rates may have common correlations with location and time-varying unobservables. For example, PM2.5 or ozone levels and crime rates may be correlated with county-level covariates such as traffic density, population density, demographics, and industrial activity. Failing to control for such covariates will lead to biased estimates of γPM and γo. Our identification strategy exp…
I'm not sure this fully accounts for the correlation though. Anything that could temporarily increase the number of people going out that day would also increase pollution, no? I'm not sure this methodology corrects for acyclic events.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#139Related: "much of the decline in crime in the 1990s may have been due to the reduction of childhood lead exposure after the removal of lead from gasoline and house paint." http://freakonomics.com/2007/07/09/lead-and-crime/
I'd like studies of connections, if any, between lead and behavior (fear response, anxiety, authoritarianism).
Ditto other pollutants.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#140It's such a typical kneejerk "skeptical" reaction at this point to be like "oh well maybe correlation doesn't imply causation" as if there are no causal relationships ever in life itself. But really if the rationalists just took a few seconds to think about it maybe they'd find a some plausibility in the notion that exposure to harmful pollution could trigger a stress response; stress is intimately wrapped up with ag…
For as long as journals refuse to publish negative results, researchers will scrounge for some type of positive result, even if it's causally questionable, because to do otherwise is to see years of work go for nought. Until these incentives change, the rest of us are right to be skeptical.
Researcher here (in ML), our field is so full of noisy results due to this issue. Everyone talks about it, but you can't get around the fact that you no longer can get away with a low amount of publications.