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.
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 in diameter) is associated with a 0.14% increase in violent crimes, such as assault. An equivalent increase in exposure to ozone, an air pollutant, is associated with a 0.3% jump in such crimes. Pollution levels can easily rise by much more than that.
Yes - for once the headline seems to have undersold the results.
Reading the title, I was expecting this to be a long-term relationship, and to happen at extremely high levels of air pollution. Particularly since the study on China last year showing that exposure to PM2.5 has lasting cognitive effects, which found variation at levels far higher than anything found in the US. And ozone at approved levels (but not PM2.5) has been linked to long-term cognitive decline.
Instead, this is claiming day-to-day variation based on that PM2.5 levels that are 25% of the EPA 24-hour exposure threshold, and even below the annual EPA standard. If you told me that air pollution below the EPA safe thresholds had a noticeable impact on cancer or emphysema rates, I wouldn't be surprised at all. But this is wild - a 5% increase in violent crime based on a day of pollution! For reference, one violent crime study I just checked finds that violent crime is about 10% higher in the summer than the winter in a cold city, and late-night crime (past midnight) is about 5% higher on weekends than weekdays. So 15 micrograms of PM2.5 is about as impactful as "people stay up late and get drunk on weekends".
It's an effect so bizarrely strong that my first reaction is to assume the study is bad or confounded. Except... all the obvious patterns don't work, and the controls look solid. Unpleasant weather keeps people inside and reduces (outdoor) crime. Shared causes like high human activity should have raised property crime rates. The effect looks stable across all kinds of temperature and crime subsets. If there is a confounder, it's presumably something strong and interesting.
> Pollution levels can easily rise by much more than that.
Very true, although I note that the effect doesn't seem to continue across the whole range studied. I wonder why effect falls off, and what happens in places that are always this polluted?
It wouldn't be a formal fallacy in itself although certainly impolite. Perhaps like Slippery Slope.
It is related to arguement from ignorance and Dunning-Kreuger effect in that it often assumes their comprehended issues are the end of all problems and that the objections may already be implicitly handled. Listing everything explicitly in exhaustive detail technically addresses it but would be both inefficient and bad communication from how overloaded it would get.
That said assuming uncovered issues are implicitly covered is itself a fallacious inference. It may be dickish pedantry that is wrong based upon incomplete information but not illogical given what is known and communicated.
It'd be a corollary of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I guess. Like, you don't know enough about the problem space to know that your first thought is already well known?
> particular emphasis on aggressive behavior. To identify this relationship, we combine detailed daily data on crime, air pollution, and weather for an eight-year period across the United States. Our primary identification strategy employs extremely high dimensional fixed effects and we perform a series of robustness checks to address confounding variation between temperature and air pollution. We find a robust positive effect of increased air pollution on violent crimes, and specifically assaults, but no relationship between increases in air pollution and property crimes. The effects are present in and out of the home, at levels well below Ambient Air Pollution Standards, and PM2.5 effects are strongest at lower temperatures
Well yeah, but they have to remove all the other factors like heat, wind and rain, which are correlated to air pollution.
There is likely less violent crimes on rainy days, just because more people stay home.
To do this properly, they would have to do a controlled experiment with people in rooms with or without air pollution. And measure how sanguine they get or something of that nature.
"Pollution and crime rates may have common correlations with location and time-varying unobservables. For example, PM2.5 or ozone levels and crime rates may be correlated with county-level covariates such as traffic density, population density, demographics, and industrial activity. Failing to control for such covariates will lead to biased estimates of γPM and γo.
Our identification strategy explicitly addresses omitted variable bias in several ways.
First, we show that endogeneity with respect to violent crimes and pollution can be addressed by including a series of high-dimensional fixed effects. In our primary specification, we include county-by-year-by-month-by-day of the week fixed effects to control for county level unobservables that are either constant over time, such as state and county-level policies, or that are time-variant, such as changes in population density, demographic composition, seasonal variation in pollution or crime, or changes in state and county-level policies that limit pollution or crime enforcement. These fixed effects also control for cyclical within-week, within-county variation in pollution and crime. Thus, our data allows us to compare for example, the effect of changes in pollution within a series of Mondays within a given county within a given month. We argue that changes in pollution across a series of Mondays within a county-month, conditional on weather controls, is random and thus exogenous to crime.
Second, crime has been shown to respond to changes in temperature, and temperature is generally correlated with air pollution (Field 1992; Jacob et al. 2007; Ranson 2014). Thus, failure to adequately control for temperature, and weather more generally, will lead to biased estimates. To address this concern, we include temperature and precipitation splines in our primary specification, we provide robustness checks with alternative functions of temperature, and in Section 5.3 we perform a series of tests to show that our results are not confounded by unaccounted for variation between temperature and air pollution. For
example, we show that effect of PM2.5 on violent crime is larger at lower temperatures, opposite of the effect of temperature alone."
And as someone living in Chicago or any similar metro area with strong seasonal weather can tell you, there are far higher crime rates in the summer than in the winter. Young people have more down time in the summer and people are outside and get restless in the heat. People stay inside in the cold winter and keep to themselves more.
That was my immediate thought. More people = more pollution, and also more crime.
The authors are aware of this and attempt to control, mainly by assuming that all confounding effects are either constant or cyclical:
"We include county-by-year-by-month-by-day of the week fixed effects to control for county level unobservables that are either constant over time, such as state and county-level policies, or that are time-variant, such as changes in population density, demographic composition, seasonal variation in pollution or crime, or changes in state and county-level policies that limit pollution or crime enforcement. These fixed effects also control for cyclical within-week, within-county variation in pollution and crime. Thus, our data allows us to compare for example, the effect of changes in pollution within a series of Mondays within a given county within a given month. We argue that changes in pollution across a series of Mondays within a county-month, conditional on weather controls, is random and thus exogenous to crime."
I'm not at all convinced this holds true, however - lots of systems with humans in it are chaotic rather than cyclical. I imagine if you did a plot of population over time, it would be very noisy. All it takes is a bit of aperiodic noise in the population, and tight correlations between population/crime and population/pollution, and their effect is rendered void.
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).
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.
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.
From the article you linked: "The economists calculated that a 10 percent reduction in daily PM2.5 could save $1.1 million in crime costs per year, which they called a 'previously overlooked cost associated with pollution.'"
Is that 'million' a typo? I imagine $1.1m amounts to something like one homicide a year.
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. "The smoke was so bad that after a few days, I started to get frustrated, and I wondered if frustration and aggression would show up in aggregate crime data.""
and then they conducted a study that supported their belief, possibly making methodological errors along the way , generating a scientific narrative to support their belief.
These studies only report on the evidence of a statistical relationship and not a guaranteed causal link. They also don’t use correlation but usually some sort of regression that includes other factors like temperature to remove some of the effects of these variables.
"The researchers made no claims on the physiological, mechanistic relationship of how exposure to pollution leads someone to become more aggressive; their results only show a strong correlative relationship between such crimes and levels of air pollution.
The researchers were careful to correct for other possible explanations, including weather, heat waves, precipitation, or more general, county-specific confounding factors."
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."
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.
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.
The main problem I see with this study is that it could be confounded by the fact that high air pollution areas have other problems too that could be causing the bad behaviour instead, like overcrowding, noise, frustration at slow traffic, etc.
The study solved this problem by looking at changes in the same areas, not between areas.
Slow traffic would increase pollution. Noise could be an interesting one, I'm not sure whether there are statistics that measure noise pollution over a country, and how would noise pollution be coincident with air pollution? Overpopulation wouldn't count as they are measuring the same areas with the same population. Daytime population could be an issue (e.g. weekends vs weekdays) but I can't access the study.
Reminds me of one of the prototypical sociological study examples of correlation vs causation where something akin to icecream sales correlated highly with murder rates.
The fact air pollution, in many cases, directly correlates with population density, make the results seem less surprising. It would be more interesting if less populated areas with high air pollution (perhaps near industrial plants, etc.) had a high correlation to violent crime rates in conjunction with highly dense populated areas.
You'd think it would be fairly easy to control for population density. However the study abstract indicates the only other confounding variable they controlled for was 'temperature'.
Since they were looking at increases in violence and air pollution on a daily interval, temperature was probably there to control for weather-related phenomena.
Very interesting - I remember a study when I was at uni saying that mobile phone masts were linked to cancer rates. They also forgot that mobile phone masts were normally on top of very tall buildings and very tall buildings often house lots and lots of people.
So yes the incidence of cancer was higher in that area, but as soon as you controlled for population density, that effect disappeared.
Stuck with me as the 'most dangerous place' was a group of flats near the house I lived in at that time. I guessed it might be due to population density and was relived to find that was the case some time later.
You can't do it with humans, for ethical reasons, but why not take some other social animal, say mice, put one population in a box with zero pollution, and one hooked up to an old car exhaust with leaded gasoline?
I'd wager the ones with the pollution are going to eat each other's faces at a much higher rate than those without.
For giggles and to test some fall of Rome hypotheses, run a 3rd cage where the water comes through lead pipes.
Even within a single area of study "bad days" could involve activities correlated to increased pollution in many different ways.
An example that I can think of offhand: I'm way more stressed on days that neighbors are using powered yard tools (mostly mowers and blowers), which invariably also throw up lots of stuff my body and/or mind react negatively too (never been tested, but I'd be amazed if I didn't have at least an intolerance).
I can't read the article due to the the paywall, but any halfway decent study should be attempting to control for these things. Propensity score matching, or simply including these factors in a regression model should help remove some of the effects. Obviously, there is potentially an unlimited number of possible cofounders, and therefore the assumption that they've all been accounted for should always be met with skepticism, and is why the mantra "correlation is not causation" is so often repeated.
If a modern research paper cited by the Economist has failed to even account for some of the potential confounding here, then I have great concerns for the future of science.
There are many thousands of studies, just like this one, that imply correlation, but not causation and fail to properly account for confounding factors. Occam's razor implies this is more likely to be yet another study that fails to account for X of these factors.
This doesn't mean the future of science is in jeopardy. It just means more study is required and jumping to alter policy or make decisions based upon these studies, well, requires further study! :P
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 aggression.
"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.
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 correlations (of which causal relationships are a subset) and instead shut down the entire topic.
The core of skepticism is inquiry, not denial. And modern Reactionary skepticism (because that is what it has evolved into now: a kind of reactionary culture clique) is all about stopping any inquiries it isn't predisposed to prefer.
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 don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.
from my experience, when science stories that go viral turn out to be wrong it's some secondhand reporting by people misunderstanding or misrepresenting the actual firsthand report
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.
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.
Skepticism is about inquiry, not denialism. You're not practicing skepticism if you make a decision that something is false. The point is to defer decision (or threshold your decision probabilisticly) on the evidence as it becomes available.
Saying "no" to everything is no different than saying "yes" to everything from a logical perspective.
Researcher here (in ML), our field is so full of noisy results due to this issue. Everyone talks about it, but you can't get around the fact that you no longer can get away with a low amount of publications.
Sure it sounds plausible because it fits the world view of most here. The whole reason we have the scientific method and statistics is to remove personal bias that from the equation because if you don't you get nonscientific crap. The process only works if you use it every time. You can't just say "meh, good enough" because you find the results plausible. This study did not attempt to do a very extensive job controlling for other variables and likewise we can't just accept the conclusion at face value because we find it reasonable, more work needs to be done.
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.
The paper doesn't seem to be freely available; there's just the abstract. The first sentence of the abstract mentions "short-term". So I think what they've detected is that in a given locality people get violent when the air is dirty, which is not surprising, of course, but it's interesting to have an estimate of the magnitude of that effect.
One would like to know for comparison what the magnitude of the effect of humidity and temperature is on violent crime. Those numbers are probably in the paper somewhere because the abstract mentions how they had to "address confounding variation between temperature and air pollution". It not being mentioned in the abstract makes me suspect that the effect of pollution on violent crime is probably rather small compared to the effect of weather on violent crime.
(Is there a positive correlation between people stating stupid banalities and violent crime? Probably there is, because people who parrot things like "Correlation does not imply causation" tend to get punched in the face. For the avoidance of doubt, that was a joke, not a veiled threat.)
EDIT: The last sentence of the abstract strikes me as highly questionable (though perhaps there's something in the paper to justify it). Just because there's a short-term correlation between pollution and violent crime doesn't mean that there will be a long-term correlation with a similar magnitude. In other words: if you reduce pollution globally over the next ten years people might just raise their expectations and be just as violent on the days on which pollution is relatively high as they were ten years previously.
Yes violence increases in animals too if the environmental stress (biotic and abiotic) ratchets up. It stands to reason the same applies to humans although we have more conscious control over our responses but we don't often exercise them unless we're aware. These are all subtle mechanisms by which destabilising effects can cascade and proliferate. This is why ecologists and conservationists warned against unrestricted exploitation and an appeal to the assurance of science and technology rescuing us out of the resulting mess, but this is exactly the path we're down on.
Readit News
So they are not comparing clean air neighborhoods to highly polluted neighborhoods, but the same neighborhood on different days.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.h...
'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 in diameter) is associated with a 0.14% increase in violent crimes, such as assault. An equivalent increase in exposure to ozone, an air pollutant, is associated with a 0.3% jump in such crimes. Pollution levels can easily rise by much more than that.
Reading the title, I was expecting this to be a long-term relationship, and to happen at extremely high levels of air pollution. Particularly since the study on China last year showing that exposure to PM2.5 has lasting cognitive effects, which found variation at levels far higher than anything found in the US. And ozone at approved levels (but not PM2.5) has been linked to long-term cognitive decline.
Instead, this is claiming day-to-day variation based on that PM2.5 levels that are 25% of the EPA 24-hour exposure threshold, and even below the annual EPA standard. If you told me that air pollution below the EPA safe thresholds had a noticeable impact on cancer or emphysema rates, I wouldn't be surprised at all. But this is wild - a 5% increase in violent crime based on a day of pollution! For reference, one violent crime study I just checked finds that violent crime is about 10% higher in the summer than the winter in a cold city, and late-night crime (past midnight) is about 5% higher on weekends than weekdays. So 15 micrograms of PM2.5 is about as impactful as "people stay up late and get drunk on weekends".
It's an effect so bizarrely strong that my first reaction is to assume the study is bad or confounded. Except... all the obvious patterns don't work, and the controls look solid. Unpleasant weather keeps people inside and reduces (outdoor) crime. Shared causes like high human activity should have raised property crime rates. The effect looks stable across all kinds of temperature and crime subsets. If there is a confounder, it's presumably something strong and interesting.
> Pollution levels can easily rise by much more than that.
Very true, although I note that the effect doesn't seem to continue across the whole range studied. I wonder why effect falls off, and what happens in places that are always this polluted?
And even excluding road rage as the mechanism for violence, 10% more people doing actions all over the place can also just cause violence.
I see this all the time at meetup tech talks and it infuriates me!
It is related to arguement from ignorance and Dunning-Kreuger effect in that it often assumes their comprehended issues are the end of all problems and that the objections may already be implicitly handled. Listing everything explicitly in exhaustive detail technically addresses it but would be both inefficient and bad communication from how overloaded it would get.
That said assuming uncovered issues are implicitly covered is itself a fallacious inference. It may be dickish pedantry that is wrong based upon incomplete information but not illogical given what is known and communicated.
This seems pretty extensive and serious
There is likely less violent crimes on rainy days, just because more people stay home.
To do this properly, they would have to do a controlled experiment with people in rooms with or without air pollution. And measure how sanguine they get or something of that nature.
"Pollution and crime rates may have common correlations with location and time-varying unobservables. For example, PM2.5 or ozone levels and crime rates may be correlated with county-level covariates such as traffic density, population density, demographics, and industrial activity. Failing to control for such covariates will lead to biased estimates of γPM and γo.
Our identification strategy explicitly addresses omitted variable bias in several ways.
First, we show that endogeneity with respect to violent crimes and pollution can be addressed by including a series of high-dimensional fixed effects. In our primary specification, we include county-by-year-by-month-by-day of the week fixed effects to control for county level unobservables that are either constant over time, such as state and county-level policies, or that are time-variant, such as changes in population density, demographic composition, seasonal variation in pollution or crime, or changes in state and county-level policies that limit pollution or crime enforcement. These fixed effects also control for cyclical within-week, within-county variation in pollution and crime. Thus, our data allows us to compare for example, the effect of changes in pollution within a series of Mondays within a given county within a given month. We argue that changes in pollution across a series of Mondays within a county-month, conditional on weather controls, is random and thus exogenous to crime.
Second, crime has been shown to respond to changes in temperature, and temperature is generally correlated with air pollution (Field 1992; Jacob et al. 2007; Ranson 2014). Thus, failure to adequately control for temperature, and weather more generally, will lead to biased estimates. To address this concern, we include temperature and precipitation splines in our primary specification, we provide robustness checks with alternative functions of temperature, and in Section 5.3 we perform a series of tests to show that our results are not confounded by unaccounted for variation between temperature and air pollution. For example, we show that effect of PM2.5 on violent crime is larger at lower temperatures, opposite of the effect of temperature alone."
The authors are aware of this and attempt to control, mainly by assuming that all confounding effects are either constant or cyclical:
"We include county-by-year-by-month-by-day of the week fixed effects to control for county level unobservables that are either constant over time, such as state and county-level policies, or that are time-variant, such as changes in population density, demographic composition, seasonal variation in pollution or crime, or changes in state and county-level policies that limit pollution or crime enforcement. These fixed effects also control for cyclical within-week, within-county variation in pollution and crime. Thus, our data allows us to compare for example, the effect of changes in pollution within a series of Mondays within a given county within a given month. We argue that changes in pollution across a series of Mondays within a county-month, conditional on weather controls, is random and thus exogenous to crime."
I'm not at all convinced this holds true, however - lots of systems with humans in it are chaotic rather than cyclical. I imagine if you did a plot of population over time, it would be very noisy. All it takes is a bit of aperiodic noise in the population, and tight correlations between population/crime and population/pollution, and their effect is rendered void.
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).
Perhaps simply not drawing false conclusions from them would be better.
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.
Dead Comment
I would be more convinced if ozone/pollution was released by the scientists in an area and they found the same effect.
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.
Is that 'million' a typo? I imagine $1.1m amounts to something like one homicide a year.
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. "The smoke was so bad that after a few days, I started to get frustrated, and I wondered if frustration and aggression would show up in aggregate crime data.""
and then they conducted a study that supported their belief, possibly making methodological errors along the way , generating a scientific narrative to support their belief.
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An interesting result, to be sure, but correlation does not imply causation.
[0] https://xkcd.com/552/
[1] http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/WHY/
The researchers were careful to correct for other possible explanations, including weather, heat waves, precipitation, or more general, county-specific confounding factors."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.h...
Say what? You should write these scientists and explain, I'm sure they've never heard of this concept!
http://freakonomics.com/2007/07/09/lead-and-crime/
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.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
Ditto other pollutants.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18S8Ttan33xbH2UYKY_N1EcNAYyA...
Slow traffic would increase pollution. Noise could be an interesting one, I'm not sure whether there are statistics that measure noise pollution over a country, and how would noise pollution be coincident with air pollution? Overpopulation wouldn't count as they are measuring the same areas with the same population. Daytime population could be an issue (e.g. weekends vs weekdays) but I can't access the study.
The fact air pollution, in many cases, directly correlates with population density, make the results seem less surprising. It would be more interesting if less populated areas with high air pollution (perhaps near industrial plants, etc.) had a high correlation to violent crime rates in conjunction with highly dense populated areas.
Lead fucks people up. Always has, always will. Pretty easy to trace a relationship between lead concentrations and societal disfunction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
EDIT: And the link between cities and higher crime seems to be well known and well studied. Here's what a quick google turns up: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/250109?seq=1#metadata_i...
So yes the incidence of cancer was higher in that area, but as soon as you controlled for population density, that effect disappeared.
Stuck with me as the 'most dangerous place' was a group of flats near the house I lived in at that time. I guessed it might be due to population density and was relived to find that was the case some time later.
Read the study before instantly dismissing it, maybe.
I think it would be very hard to isolate these factors into a "clean" study.
I'd wager the ones with the pollution are going to eat each other's faces at a much higher rate than those without.
For giggles and to test some fall of Rome hypotheses, run a 3rd cage where the water comes through lead pipes.
Even within a single area of study "bad days" could involve activities correlated to increased pollution in many different ways.
An example that I can think of offhand: I'm way more stressed on days that neighbors are using powered yard tools (mostly mowers and blowers), which invariably also throw up lots of stuff my body and/or mind react negatively too (never been tested, but I'd be amazed if I didn't have at least an intolerance).
If a modern research paper cited by the Economist has failed to even account for some of the potential confounding here, then I have great concerns for the future of science.
This doesn't mean the future of science is in jeopardy. It just means more study is required and jumping to alter policy or make decisions based upon these studies, well, requires further study! :P
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 aggression.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2004/10/feedback-cyc...
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 correlations (of which causal relationships are a subset) and instead shut down the entire topic.
The core of skepticism is inquiry, not denial. And modern Reactionary skepticism (because that is what it has evolved into now: a kind of reactionary culture clique) is all about stopping any inquiries it isn't predisposed to prefer.
So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?".
¹ Citation Missing
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.
Saying "no" to everything is no different than saying "yes" to everything from a logical perspective.
Maybe people get more violent when the weather is hot, which is also when we use the most energy? I know cops always complain about hot days.
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.
Even better, if they just took a few more seconds to actually read the article prior to commenting.
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Theory and speculation have a place in science.
One would like to know for comparison what the magnitude of the effect of humidity and temperature is on violent crime. Those numbers are probably in the paper somewhere because the abstract mentions how they had to "address confounding variation between temperature and air pollution". It not being mentioned in the abstract makes me suspect that the effect of pollution on violent crime is probably rather small compared to the effect of weather on violent crime.
(Is there a positive correlation between people stating stupid banalities and violent crime? Probably there is, because people who parrot things like "Correlation does not imply causation" tend to get punched in the face. For the avoidance of doubt, that was a joke, not a veiled threat.)
EDIT: The last sentence of the abstract strikes me as highly questionable (though perhaps there's something in the paper to justify it). Just because there's a short-term correlation between pollution and violent crime doesn't mean that there will be a long-term correlation with a similar magnitude. In other words: if you reduce pollution globally over the next ten years people might just raise their expectations and be just as violent on the days on which pollution is relatively high as they were ten years previously.
https://scitechdaily.com/fascinating-and-scary-is-something-...