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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

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Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#31

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

baddox wrote: post #28
rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…

> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any de…

> I'll never understand how

... And if, after looking at the example of lead, you still don't understand the role of regulation, it's likely that you never will.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#32

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

greendestiny wrote: post #7

I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the sam…

> I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation

I's be interested in seeing what you think on that score after reading TFA and possibly even the studies that it talks about.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#33

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jforman wrote: post #20
greendestiny wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat o…

The strength of the correlation or its time-scale have no bearing on whether the correlation should be considered evidence of causation. The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in. In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause cri…

> The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in.

But in the case of lead, the causal chain from lead exposure to worse behaviour is fairly well understood.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#34

Post by don_draper »

He says his article is not partisan and I believe it is not meant to be, but there are political lessons to be learned. The market left alone doesn't always pick the best product, leading to the best outcome for society. Devout readers of Ayn Rand should take heed.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#35

Post by ars »

archangel_one wrote: post #30
ars wrote: post #21

The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener. I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.

I've read about that contributing to the fall of their empire before - I guess we'll never really know, but if it did then the impact of that element on human history must be massive. Wikipedia puts it out as an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_p...

I'm actually thinking less of them being poisoned but rather if their aggression levels went up as a result, i.e. more wars.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#36

Post by greendestiny »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #32
greendestiny wrote: post #7

I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the sam…

> I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation I's be interested in seeing what you think on that score after reading TFA and possibly even the studies that it talks about.

I haven't read any of the studies it talks about. I think the evidence for lead causing brain damage is very strong. Its effect on the crime rate is a different story. Admittedly it says it holds up over multiple countries, which seems like it should be stronger evidence.

Honestly I don't know, but I do think there is a real problem in our understanding of how to interpret population level trends. The rigorous camp simply wants to throw out everything that isn't a double blind study. The optimistic are convinced of every similar looking graph. I think we should be doing more meta-analysis of these things and building up a Bayesian sort of set of priors to apply to these results.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#38

Post by InclinedPlane »

rayiner wrote: post #4

Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their l…

Humans are notorious at prioritizing obvious short-term costs over nebulous, indirect long-term costs. And this applies even across huge orders of magnitude differences, hundreds, thousands, even billions. To bring this back to HN relevancy, consider how to get on top of this problem at a corporate/startup level. Companies that solve those deep, omnipresent, indirect costs problems (often through development of high quality internal tooling) have a huge advantage over their competition, because doing so is a huge force multiplier.

At one point a coworker of mine raised the idea that when you do some process that is painful sometimes it means you need to do it more. Because doing it more frequently can force improvements in process, technique, or tooling which then produce dividends.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#39

Post by nitrogen »

greendestiny wrote: post #27
jforman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strength of the correlation or its time-scale have no bearing on whether the correlation should be considered evidence of causation. The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in. In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause cri…

That's the high level view of the problem of correlation and causation. What I'm really saying is how unlikely should we consider these correlations - especially correlations over very broad average trends in human behaviour. Now I'm sure there are some statistical tools that would give some sense of how surprising the correlation of these trends is but I'd like to know out of all the things about human society we tr…

Presumably one can correlate lead exposure with reduced intelligence independent of time.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#40

Post by vbuterin »

htf wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolu…

If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?

Generally, some kind of economic incentive solution works much better than outright bans. It allows the market itself to decide what instances of pollution provide enough value to justify their harm and which ones don't. The problem is, however, that while such solutions work out great for global (or at least highly distributed) externalities, as you can simply set a rate of some given number of cents per ton of CO2 released and be done with it, they don't work quite so well for problems like these because the problem is semi-localized. One gram of lead released in a suburb is not the same as one gram of lead released in the middle of the city, and one gram of lead in paint is not the same as one gram of lead in gasoline. Sure, you can tax it too, but the tax would be so ridiculously high that the effect would be the same as an outright ban.
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