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Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

economist.com

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Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#141

Post by mcbits »

rockinghigh wrote: post #89
d--b wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

They obvious control for these factors. They actually report that the effects are stronger at lower temperature.

Statistical controls can remove much of the effect from known confounders, but they don't turn an observational study into a controlled experiment.

Sometimes you can use common sense to infer a causal relationship (violent crime linked to emergency room visits), but it seems like a leap here, especially as they're on a bit of a fishing expedition with multiple types of pollution and multiple types of crime.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#142

Post by blurbleblurble »

dekhn wrote: post #122
blurbleblurble wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I did is propose a plausible hypothesis for further research. Theory and speculation have a place in science.

What you did was link to a press release for a paper where they took 53 rats, removed their adrenal glands, injected them with corticosteroids, and saw they were more aggressive. Few, if any, scientists would say that is a plausible hypothesis explaining the epidemiological results observed above. What you did was speculation with limited data and difficult transferrability (rats with adrenal glands are not represent…

Check out Robert Sapolsky's stuff on stress, disease and conflict in primates.

Then go and brush up on your research. Short term exposure to pollution is related to heightened inflammatory responses, which are in turn related to aggressive behavior... In humans and animals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874490/

There's much more where this came from.

I say "related" because we are talking about complex systems here. There are likely feedbacks involved.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#143

Post by imagin8or »

moultano wrote: post #137
josephdviviano wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Preprint from the Colorado State website:

https://pierce.atmos.colostate.edu/Monthly_Pollution_and_Cri...

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#144

Post by dekhn »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #142
dekhn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you did was link to a press release for a paper where they took 53 rats, removed their adrenal glands, injected them with corticosteroids, and saw they were more aggressive. Few, if any, scientists would say that is a plausible hypothesis explaining the epidemiological results observed above. What you did was speculation with limited data and difficult transferrability (rats with adrenal glands are not represent…

Check out Robert Sapolsky's stuff on stress, disease and conflict in primates. Then go and brush up on your research. Short term exposure to pollution is related to heightened inflammatory responses, which are in turn related to aggressive behavior... In humans and animals. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874490/ There's much more where this came from. I say "related" because we are talking about comple…

hey I'm not disagreeing with exposure to pollution being related to aggressive behavior. What i'm saying is that there is no reason to believe that in this particular paper, that you can go from the epidemiological linkage results to a physical mechanism. Normally complex epidemiological observations are multifactorial, have multiple causes, and the associations are still only weakly correlated with those causal mechanisms.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#145

Post by imagin8or »

Preprint is here:

https://pierce.atmos.colostate.edu/Monthly_Pollution_and_Cri...

It points out that they look at data for 99% of US counties, which rules out a simplistic attribution of crime to population density, and describes some of the data cleansing. They also claim it corroborated findings elsewhere.

Since this is a data review presumably other centres can repeat the analysis to confirm the correlation result at least, and medical researchers could conceivably find a real experiment to establish causality.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#146

Post by dTal »

chippy wrote: post #45
PeterStuer wrote: post #35

For all those commenting on 'aren't more polluted areas just more criminal due to other factors", as far as I can tell the researchers examined crime rates for the same place and find correlation with whether there was more Ozone and PM 2,5 on a particular day or not. So they are not comparing clean air neighborhoods to highly polluted neighborhoods, but the same neighborhood on different days. https://www.sciencedai…

Do you know if they controlled for daytime population? As in weekdays vs weekends?

That was my immediate thought. More people = more pollution, and also more crime.

The authors are aware of this and attempt to control, mainly by assuming that all confounding effects are either constant or cyclical:

"We include county-by-year-by-month-by-day of the week fixed effects to control for county level unobservables that are either constant over time, such as state and county-level policies, or that are time-variant, such as changes in population density, demographic composition, seasonal variation in pollution or crime, or changes in state and county-level policies that limit pollution or crime enforcement. These fixed effects also control for cyclical within-week, within-county variation in pollution and crime. Thus, our data allows us to compare for example, the effect of changes in pollution within a series of Mondays within a given county within a given month. We argue that changes in pollution across a series of Mondays within a county-month, conditional on weather controls, is random and thus exogenous to crime."

I'm not at all convinced this holds true, however - lots of systems with humans in it are chaotic rather than cyclical. I imagine if you did a plot of population over time, it would be very noisy. All it takes is a bit of aperiodic noise in the population, and tight correlations between population/crime and population/pollution, and their effect is rendered void.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#147

Post by yachtman »

Seanzie wrote: post #130
blurbleblurble wrote: post #80

It'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.

I dont see why journals can't publish more negative results. In math for example, its a big deal if someone disproves a hypothesis of someone famous.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#148

Post by KirinDave »

catalogia wrote: post #132
blurbleblurble wrote: post #80

It'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.

This kind of skepticism isn't actually skepticism. Its internalizing good arguments without understanding them, instead using the phrases associated with these legitimate concerns as magic words for social dominance and denialism.

The typical "correlation doesn't imply causation" retort we see denialists level is a classic example of how people tend to use a phrase to avoid a reason-driven conversation about correlations (of which causal relationships are a subset) and instead shut down the entire topic.

The core of skepticism is inquiry, not denial. And modern Reactionary skepticism (because that is what it has evolved into now: a kind of reactionary culture clique) is all about stopping any inquiries it isn't predisposed to prefer.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#149

Post by KirinDave »

Seanzie wrote: post #130
blurbleblurble wrote: post #80

It'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.

Skepticism is about inquiry, not denialism. You're not practicing skepticism if you make a decision that something is false. The point is to defer decision (or threshold your decision probabilisticly) on the evidence as it becomes available.

Saying "no" to everything is no different than saying "yes" to everything from a logical perspective.

Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime

#150

Post by BurningFrog »

josephdviviano wrote: post #126
BurningFrog wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

Reading scientific papers uses less time than complaining about them?

Is there a study to back that up? :)

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