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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

#181

Post by moultano »

imagin8or wrote: post #143
moultano wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks!

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

#182

Post by lemmsjid »

darawk wrote: post #151
KirinDave wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 correlat…

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.

It's pretty rare that I read a paper that has not at least given some thought to the types of obvious correlation/causation concerns that come up after just reading the title of the paper. That said I'm always interested in what comes up in discussion threads here, so I wouldn't want to shut off the skepticism.

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

#183

Post by dekhn »

PeterStuer wrote: post #170
dekhn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

properly correcting for socioeconomic status in determining causal relationships in epidemiology is still a very hard problem. What if, in this case, pollution has a delayed effect? How would their methodology deal with that (it wouldn't)? Personally, I think what happened here is the author started with a prior belief: ""Several years ago, Fort Collins experienced a fairly severe wildfire season," Burkhardt said. "T…

If you would actually read the paper you would find that all your remarks have been accounted for.

the article is paywalled, also, since I have plenty of experience in this field, I do not think my remarks were "accounted for", rather they probably wrote a couple hand-wavy sentences about how they corrected for SES, but didn't really.

Edit: found a copy of the paper that wasn't paywalled, read the whole thing, and found their attempts to correct for bias wanting (section 4.2).

" Overall, our heterogeneity results indicate the most important explanatory factor in the relationship between pollution and crime is age, and the results are not ameliorated by higher incomes."

uh, ok. if you want to defend this paper go ahead but I've already read enough to know these folks started with a biased belief, carelessly analzyed the data in a way that supported their beliefs, and escalated the results into something that sounded far more significant and certain than their data shows.

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

#184

Post by godelzilla »

downandout wrote: post #78

This article is paywalled with no workaround. My understanding was that HN did not allow such links. Economist.com links, if they are all hard-paywalled like this, should be blacklisted.

Agreed. It's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about an article that barely anybody can actually read.

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

#185

Post by littlestymaar »

mikelyons wrote: post #169
littlestymaar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way these tools are developed is by doing and then replicating and analyzing these studies. (maybe thats what the intent behind "collecting and curating " was?) Exposure to air pollution seems to my intuition like it lowers a persons level of consciousness, and the lower a persons level of consciousness (the further down The Spiral Dynamics model they are) the more prone they are to violence.

> The way these tools are developed is by doing and then replicating and analyzing these studies

Nobody in the field of people publishing this kind of studies has the required skill-set to develop the needed tools. This is the job of mathematicians. I'm not meaning it pejoratively, it's just a totally different job. (I wouldn't trust a mathematician to build a house, you shouldn't trust an economist, a biologist, or anyone to build statistics tooling).

> maybe thats what the intent behind "collecting and curating" was?)

Most of the time the data behind this kind of studies isn't easily available. Sometimes you can shoot an email to the author, sometimes it comes from some publicly available data needing a lot of preprocessing before being consumable, and I wish we had a centralized database of well-formed data.

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

#186

Post by yearofthespider »

littlestymaar wrote: post #180
yearofthespider wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot imagine being either dumb or arrogant enough to suggest that people should not attempt to study problems just because they're challenging.

> 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 layperson…

Your first sentence makes clear (again) that you think you're so smart that you can determine what research is potentially viable and what isn't, without even having any expertise in a given area.

I already stated that you're ludicrously stupid and arrogant. Stop proving me correct. (or don't. no skin off my back either way.)

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

#189

Post by pjlegato »

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…

It is precisely the process you describe -- that people are very prone to thinking about something for "a few seconds" and "find[ing] some plausibility in the notion" -- that makes the rationalist scientific method important in the first place.

If we could just think about something momentarily to evaluate its probable truth, we would have no need for experiments, hypotheses, or sorting out correlation from causation at all. We need those things because superficial "think about it for a moment" analyses are very often totally wrong.

Also note that pointing out that this correlation does not imply causation is not at all the same thing as denying that there exists a causative link between the factors. It's simply stating that this evidence, in itself, is not sufficient to establish that. Other evidence well might.

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

#190

Post by paggle »

4lch3m1st wrote: post #107

That's one dishonest headline. Air pollution areas are commonly associated with big cities, where the crime rate tends to be higher. The website clearly turned this into something else for no reason at all other than clicks.

Ironically, your accusation of them doing this for "the clicks" prevented you from clicking the link and finding out that your criticism is not relevant to this study.
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