Everyone sing with me now: "Correlation does not imply causation!" :D
Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
201–210 of 241 posts
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#202Related: "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 absolutely believe that removing it from gasoline is a big factor, but I think it's often over emphasized in the context of today.
Cleveland has twice the prevalence of lead paint over any other big city in the united states, yet has 25% lower violent crime prevalence than say, st louis, baltimore, detroit, and memphis.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This paper uses differing dates of abortion legalization in Western Europe to find a strong effect of abortion reducing crime: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01448... 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…
The hypothesis is that abortion causes lower crime rates. Thus, a few or even a single counter-example is enough to invalidate the hypothesis. Data points that confirm the hypothesis doesn't add much new information since these results too could be caused by the same confounding variables that caused the first result (correlation doesn't imply causation).
Yes, it was the Soviet union and other Eastern European countries that had liberal abortion laws which they then reversed to spur population growth that I referred to. If Donohue and Levitt's theory were correct, the generation born during the years abortion was legal would be less criminal than following generations.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#204For 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…
Is there a word for the fallacy of believing that another professional didn't consider the factor you thought of in seconds? I see this all the time at meetup tech talks and it infuriates me!
this is like every comment on HN
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#205I remember reading "Sexual Assault increases as Ice Cream Sales go up".
Turns out sexual assault is less likely in the winter.
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science. What is your definition for "science"? To me, this is very much science. Starting off with a hypothesis, gathering/analyzing data, controlling for what you can, and concluding your findings with a number of caveats detailing the limitations of your research. Unfortunately, not everything is a hard science, and even those sciences we…
Worth remembering that astronomy is largely an
Observational science. It doesn’t make it less interesting or ‘hard’
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#207Can someone go into the paper and list out the confounding variables that the authors accounted for?
e.g. weather (temperature and air pressure); day of week; time of year; whether auto-related crime was tagged as "violent" crime; ethnographics/demographics of a community (an aging community will pollute less and be safer) etc etc
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#208For 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…
Is there a word for the fallacy of believing that another professional didn't consider the factor you thought of in seconds? I see this all the time at meetup tech talks and it infuriates me!
Mjlee’s law. Congratulations!
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#209Is there a certain chemical they think causes this?
Re: Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increase in violent crime
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You seem to be overlooking the possibility that such study teams can and do include mathematicians. I'm friends with one who does the statistical legwork for a foundation that studies the spread of infectious disease.