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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

#211

Post by anigbrowl »

zjaffee wrote: post #202
t0mek wrote: post #93

Related: "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.

Lead paint tends to stay on the wall so as long as you don't eat paint chips it's not as big a risk as particulate lead in fuel exhaust. If you are removing lead paint you need to wear a suitable respirator to avoid breathing in fragments but just being in a room with lead paint or a lump of the stuff isn't especially dangerous.

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

#212

Post by anigbrowl »

notJim wrote: post #152
catalogia wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I would argue that this kneejerk skepticism and incredulousness are actually two sides of the same coin. Neither demonstrates actual curiosity or desire to learn.

I think you mean credulity, incredulous(ness) refers to a lack of belief and is thus synonymous with skepticism.

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

#213

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Just use SciHub like everyone else. Even if it's not up on SciHub the Supplementary MAterials are usually available free.

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

#214

Post by rhacker »

OJFord wrote: post #85
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…

That's crazy though, and makes the headline tamer than it need be doesn't it? 'Exposure to' makes me think it's more prolonged, and over time the effect is[...] but actually it's suggesting that it has a reversible, quickly reacting/short-term impact, which (naively) I find much more surprising. Relevant excerpt: > They find that a 10% increase in same-day exposure to PM2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns i…

10% increase PM2.5 means more cars, more cars means more road rage, more road rage correlates to violence.

And even excluding road rage as the mechanism for violence, 10% more people doing actions all over the place can also just cause violence.

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

#215

Post by littlestymaar »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #196
littlestymaar wrote: post #180

Earlier 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…

> I think your suggestion is rather dangerous and implies some arbitrary threshold where we become capable of studying something.

The threshold isn't so much about when we become capable of "studying something" but more about when we become capable of claiming something.

In that particular case, we have so many things at stakes, it becomes really tough to find anything useful. How can you know you're not measuring the correlation between weather and crime? Day of the week and crime? Season and crime? Because season and weather are related, you can't just “control for both” (unfortunately, many people will do it no matter what…). What if air pressure had an impact on crime? It's somehow correlated to air pollution so you could mistake it for an influence of pollution itself.

When just asking the question reveals that the answer would need fancy statistics (some not being invented yet, AFAIK, or at least not mainstream). If you realize that, you should just find another problem, or maybe rescope your problem. If you don't realize that, and still go on with your regular methodology, your results are doomed from the start, and you aren't really doing more science than youtubers attempting to find the recipe for perpetual motion. [I'm not talking about this specific paper here, just answering about your remarks about threshold].

When it comes to this paper, I would say that the level of accuracy of their published result (“0.14% increase”) is dubious. In a lab with controlled conditions, such figures aren't that easy to get, in a real world observation of human behavior, it's looks fishy.

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

#217

Post by Mathnerd314 »

bjourne wrote: post #203
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 countr…

And do you have a source analyzing that? All I can find are some off-the-cuff remarks from 2001 with no data analysis.

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

#218

Post by johnfactorial »

BurningFrog wrote: post #88
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…

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

The rational approach to all peer review is to assume there's a flaw and look for it. Quite a few commenters seem bothered by this reflexive reaction to published research, when the entire point of publishing research is to have it picked apart by critical thinkers everywhere.

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

#219

Post by KirinDave »

pjlegato wrote: post #193
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…

Metagaming the purported hidden motives of people you disagree with is not rational. There is no evidence for your claims about how those you disagree with manipulate social discourse in order to shut down topics.

I'm not talking about intent. In fact, I dont know if they feel like they're being good skeptics or not. What I do know is people engaging in this fashion are not being skeptical no matter how they feel or what they intend to do.

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

#220

Post by yearofthespider »

littlestymaar wrote: post #191
yearofthespider wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Insulting people on the internet using throwaway accounts, what a wonderful hobby. Good day.

Far better than being an arrogant asshole who asserts that people should only research things where you decide in advance that the answers are sufficiently trivial.
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