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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

#161

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

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 equipped with powerful enough mathematical tools yet to deal with this kind of highly entangled phenomenons (and we often don't have the data either, collecting and curating it would be an interesting and useful research topic by itself).

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

#162

Post by KirinDave »

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.

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.

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

#163

Post by jefftk »

yachtman wrote: post #147
Seanzie wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For as long as journals refuse to publish negative results, researchers will scrounge for some type of positive result, even if it's causally questionable, because to do otherwise is to see years of work go for nought. Until these incentives change, the rest of us are right to be skeptical.

I dont see why journals can't publish more negative results. In math for example, its a big deal if someone disproves a hypothesis of someone famous.

The math equivalent of a negative result would be more like "I tried for months to prove this theorem, and it didn't work".

The difference is that in math "here is a proof" is all you need, while in sciences people are typically sharing what amounts to collections of observations. If you publish the collections that lead to interesting conclusions, but not the ones that are boring, people looking at what's been published are misled.

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

#164

Post by PeterStuer »

chippy wrote: post #45
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…

Do you know if they controlled for daytime population? As in weekdays vs weekends?

Yes, they did.

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

#165

Post by nitrogen »

specialist wrote: post #139
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'd like studies of connections, if any, between lead and behavior (fear response, anxiety, authoritarianism). Ditto other pollutants.

They've probably been done. Let us know if you find any good ones on Google Scholar or elsewhere.

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

#166

Post by yearofthespider »

littlestymaar wrote: post #161
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…

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.

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

#167

Post by PeterStuer »

andy_ppp wrote: post #128
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…

Yes but this effect could be caused by people becoming angry at high(er) amounts of traffic on the roads which causes the pollution no? I would be more convinced if ozone/pollution was released by the scientists in an area and they found the same effect.

Traffic, and especially the noise caused by it would definitely be a suspect. However, the paper did take into account the precipitation, with the same amount of traffic causing less PM 2.5 when it rains.

This doesn't mean it is impossible, as rain might e.g. still be correlated with less traffic. The nature of a hidden variable is exactly that its indirect correlations would be not pinpoint-able in the data.

But IMHO this paper does a decent job of trying to account for lots of dimensions, and trying identify the existence of dominant hidden variables from the data at hand.

This is far from a rush job or a 'spurious correlation' piece of work, and its results most certainly are interesting and a very good basis for further investigation into an important observation. I'd even go further and say that these results warrant societal value systems that subscribe to the precautionary principle to take this on board in further decisions about pollution in populated areas.

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

#168

Post by zepto »

littlestymaar wrote: post #161
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…

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 agree that these kinds of study lead to problematic analysis, but it seems weird to say we should stop doing them.

Perhaps simply not drawing false conclusions from them would be better.

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

#169

Post by mikelyons »

littlestymaar wrote: post #161
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…

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.

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

#170

Post by PeterStuer »

dekhn wrote: post #124
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…

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.
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