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A few things that raised my brow: 1. The press release for the study and this article have completely opposite conclusions. At least the author is relatively u

A few things that raised my brow: 1. The press release for the study and this article have completely opposite conclusions. At least the author is relatively upfront about this, but he characterizes it as if the press release is just a cautious, sciencey take on the results. By the way, it's not just the press release, but the abstract/paper has pretty unambiguous language saying findings "failed" to support such hypotheses. 2. There's a Mother Jones chart that uses data from the study, but it's cherry picked. They take a few cohorts, ignore the (very valid) adjustment the study authors made, and the chart itself is IMO misleading because when you scan it, you're likely to mush up the highs and lows of each cohort to make it look more linear than it is. 3. Looking this guy up, he's clearly an advocate around the lead crime hypothesis, so it should be understood this guy has an angle. So, yeah, this headline sucks.

veridies 9y ago
Responding to your 1: “failed to support” doesn’t mean that they found evidence that contradicted the lead crime hypothesis. The data they found is entirely consistent with the lead crime hypothesis; it’s just that it’s within the realm of possiblity (5%ish chance) that this data would emerge even if the lead crime hypothesis were false. So they’re “failing” to support the lead hypothesis when they’re exercising that scientific caution which encourages false negatives instead of false positives; that doesn’t mean we ought to do the same.
- dmix 9y ago
  At most you could say it doesnt disprove his lead/crime hyptothesis but looking at the data and charts he cherry picked (yes I read both closely) it only very weakly coorelates to his worldview. He even opens the article saying the lead levels were drasrically lower then continues to pretend that it was comparable data to the previous US geographic set. If the author was a good scientist he'd conclude more studies from a broader population need to be done. But ultimately just because he acknowledged bias doesnt mean he effectively accounted for it in his analysis. There's a good reason the authors of the study took the position they did.

veridies 9y ago

Responding to your 1: “failed to support” doesn’t mean that they found evidence that contradicted the lead crime hypothesis. The data they found is entirely consistent with the lead crime hypothesis; it’s just that it’s within the realm of possiblity (5%ish chance) that this data would emerge even if the lead crime hypothesis were false. So they’re “failing” to support the lead hypothesis when they’re exercising that scientific caution which encourages false negatives instead of false positives; that doesn’t mean we ought to do the same.

dmix 9y ago
At most you could say it doesnt disprove his lead/crime hyptothesis but looking at the data and charts he cherry picked (yes I read both closely) it only very weakly coorelates to his worldview. He even opens the article saying the lead levels were drasrically lower then continues to pretend that it was comparable data to the previous US geographic set. If the author was a good scientist he'd conclude more studies from a broader population need to be done. But ultimately just because he acknowledged bias doesnt mean he effectively accounted for it in his analysis. There's a good reason the authors of the study took the position they did.