171–180 of 241 posts
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from my experience, when science stories that go viral turn out to be wrong it's some secondhand reporting by people misunderstanding or misrepresenting the actual firsthand report
The replication crisis says otherwise.
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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?
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…
My knee-jerk reaction to this was to a find a confounding variable. Maybe people get more violent when the weather is hot, which is also when we use the most energy? I know cops always complain about hot days.
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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…
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I don't think most people are doing the thing you're implying they're doing. Nobody is trying to shut down the conversation. Most studies do an incredibly poor job of controlling for exogenous variables.
That itself is an apocryphal claim, but even if I take it at face value it doesn't really apply to curated data sets that we tend to be exposed to by media outlets with modestly competent science departments. The Economist is certainly not the best out there, but it's very far from an uncurated data set.
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> Saying "no" to everything is no different than saying "yes" to everything from a logical perspective. This is incorrect. The base rate of true findings when talking about causal models is extremely low. If you say "no" to every published finding, you will be right much more often than you're wrong. Now, that doesn't mean you should say no to every published finding. But the idea that "yes" and "no" should be equall…
I agree with this, but we're not talking about equal weighting here. We are talking about absolute bias is towards no or yes without any inquiry. The actual prior distribution of effective to ineffective models is extremely hard to infer from everyday life. We don't have access to unbiased data sources. That's why we should focus on inquiry rather than canned responses. As an example of how this can be misleading com…
However, I would say that if you don't have the time/desire to investigate, your comments in public forums probably aren't worth listening to. So, I do agree that people that simply respond with "correlation != causality" without reading the study probably shouldn't be doing that.
> As an example of how this can be misleading common the average person sees only a tiny fraction of the proposed models that are much more likely to be valid because they've passed far enough along the process of publishing to have received some scrutiny and some credibility in the average case.
Ya, that's definitely true. The base rate of true models in published research is almost tautologically higher than the base rate of true models amongst all possible models. I was going to say that it is tautological...but I suppose it's actually not. All published models could be false. But I certainly agree that the research process is a pretty good filter, and the base rate of true models is almost certainly higher. But i'd be very very surprised if it was higher than 50%, even if you use a fairly high standard for "published research".
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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.
Those are dates in the 60's though, so not sure what European countries you're referring to. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_reproductive_right... the only country with on-demand abortion before 1950s was the Soviet Union for a brief period.
Looking forward to "The air made me do it.." defense coming soon to a court near you
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People have good reasons to be skeptical about such studies: there's like a million of possible confounders for these kind of things, and it's impossible to control for every one of them (remember, if you control for 2 confounders which are themselves confounded by a common source, you're not controlling for anything and you're just adding bias). People should just stop doing this kind of studies, we are just not equ…
I cannot imagine being either dumb or arrogant enough to suggest that people should not attempt to study problems just because they're challenging.
Yeah, like looking for perpetual movement or the philosopher stone.
BTW, I should have worded my thoughts differently: I don't mind if individual people waste their time doing that kind of pseudo-science.
I do mind however that these studies get fundings instead of more down-to-earth ones. I do mind when young researchers are driven to this kind of bs by perverse insentives. And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science.