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Ok I unfortunately don't have the time to listen to the whole episode, but whatever hard data is included in the text of the article doesn't look to fit the tit

by tomp 9y ago

Ok I unfortunately don't have the time to listen to the whole episode, but whatever hard data is included in the text of the article doesn't look to fit the title. > the suicide rate in Sri Lanka has dropped significantly. So, from 57 deaths per 100,000 population in ’95, it has dropped now to 17. This is a 70% reduction. So, it’s a very significant success, in fact the greatest decrease in suicide rate ever seen. So the first thing we see is that 70% reduction amounts to the suicide rate dropping from 0.057% to 0.017%. That would still put Sri Lanka at or near the top (=most suicidal) according to Wikipedia [1], so I guess it's pretty significant; it's just that I always view relative percentages with suspicion ("we reduced the death rate by INFINITY percent!" "oh yeah you saved one life"). Second, if the rate of suicide decreased by 70% in 20 years, that doesn't mean that it can be 100% percent attributed to lack of pesticides (in fact, I cannot think of any scenario where that could be true). 20 years is a lot of time, especially in Asia, so I don't know, maybe it was just the improvement of the quality of life, or (mental) health-care? Edit: I hope the recording sheds more light on why they attribute any part of the drop to lack of pesticides... Anyways, it's discouraging, and therefore I judge the title as "click-bait-y". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

danielvf 9y ago
Also Sri Lanka had something resembling a civil war from 1983 to 2009.
- malikNF 9y ago
  Not "something resembling" it was an actual civil war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War
ArneVogel 9y ago
The gdp per person increased by 5x between 1995 and 2016 [1]. That makes be believe pesticides were only a small part of the change. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sri+lanka+gdp+per+person https://www.google.com/search?q=sri+lanka+gdp+per+person
tomp 9y ago
Ah, there's a transcript "below the cut". So, scanning it, it seems they draw conclusions based on the strong temporal correlation between pesticide use and suicide. > the suicide rate had increased dramatically after the introduction of highly hazardous pesticides into the agriculture > in ’94, the most toxic insecticides [...] were banned [...] another very toxic pesticide [...] was banned in ’98, and further class two pesticides were banned in 2008 to 2011 So I guess it could be true but it's still making huge leaps of faith from the data. Now, my moral value system doesn't classify suicide as negative, so I can't really agree with the premise of the article, yet I definitely support limitations on the availability and use of pesticides, e.g. to prevent children accidentially poisoning themselves etc.
- awild 9y ago
  > Now, my moral value system doesn't classify suicide as negative, so I can't really agree with the premise of the article, yet I definitely support limitations on the availability and use of pesticides, e.g. to prevent children accidentially poisoning themselves etc. I have a similar painpoint with this: even if their attempt at reducing suicide succeeded, they didn't help people much. Assuming (as they have to) that the situation in Sri Lanka is the same or similar as with toxic pesticides, the only thing they achieved is make escaping that shitty situation harder, not making the lives better, by effectively reducing suicidal thoughts. The point they are trying to make that suicide is a spontaneuous/irrational decision hardly counts in a statistic like that.
  - Anderkent 9y ago
    >Assuming (as they have to) that the situation in Sri Lanka is the same or similar as with toxic pesticides, the only thing they achieved is make escaping that shitty situation harder, not making the lives better, by effectively reducing suicidal thoughts. The point they are trying to make that suicide is a spontaneuous/irrational decision hardly counts in a statistic like that. How does it not??? If the suicide is a decision made under the influence of a 30-minute-long depressive episode, and outside that episode the person would prefer to live, how is preventing the suicidies by making them harder to perform spontaneously not making people's lives better? Why does it 'hardly count'?
tdb7893 9y ago
They attribute the drop to lack of pesticides because according to the researcher the drops coincided with changes in policy, drops were also seen in other countries that banned pesticides, and simular situations were seen when access to common forms of suicide were restricted in other countries also saw a drop in rates (i.e. gun restrictions led to fewer suicides). It's hard to run controlled trials at a macro scale so it's unlikely that the effect was only pesticides but it sounds like historically these sorts of interventions do work.
kbuchanan 9y ago
Regression to the mean?
Chathamization 9y ago
This study seems to take that into account[1]: > Restrictions on the import and sales of WHO Class I toxicity pesticides in 1995 and endosulfan in 1998, coincided with reductions in suicide in both men and women of all ages. 19,800 fewer suicides occurred in 1996-2005 compared to 1986 – 1995. Secular trends in unemployment, alcohol misuse, divorce, pesticide use and the years associated with Sri Lanka’s Civil war did not appear to be associated with these declines. Here's another study[2]: > Overall suicide mortality dropped by 21% between 2011 and 2015, from 18.3 to 14.3 per 100,000. The decline in pesticide suicides during this same period was larger than for overall suicides: from 8.5 to 4.2 per 100,000, a 50% reduction. This was accompanied by a smaller concurrent rise in non-pesticide suicide mortality with a 2% increase (9.9 to 10.1 per 100,000). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172893 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- achileas 9y ago
  Pretty much every time someone complains about the whole correlation != causation thing, it's a huge red flag that they didn't read the actual research or have no experience in academic research. It's easily accounted for and is the lowest hanging methodological fruit, and pretty much is always addressed when actually appropriate. It's an undergrad stats thing, and I know for my degree I had to have at least a year of graduate level stats, and the same for undergrad.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    On the other hand, epidemiology is fundamentally incapable of proving positive causation. It can prove that something is not a cause by showing that there is no correlation, but that’s it.
  - tomp 9y ago
    the kind of conclusion as "all of 70% decrease was caused by this single factor" (as the title implies) is incredibly intelectually dishonest to ever make. So I'm not looking at the data from the perspective "I bet they were too stupid/uneducated to think about correlation != causation", but rather from the "looks like they're trying to find data to substantiate their political agenda" perspective. Edit: having said that, yeah, I don't have any actual research experience, and the data does look pretty convincing - as in, banning pesticides probably does contribute to a reduction in suicides a non-trivial amount.
contravariant 9y ago
Those are pretty much all valid points, however at first glance a drop from 57 incidents to 17 is at least statistically significant. The standard deviation can be assumed to be at most around sqrt(57) = ~7.5, so a difference of 40, which would be over 5 standard deviations, shouldn't normally happen. You're right that relative percentages are sometimes a bit dubious (and even in this case you'd fluctuations on the order of 1/sqrt(57) = ~13 percentage points) but 57 is high enough that it actually has some meaning.
jmull 9y ago
> ...therefore I judge the title as "click-bait-y" I think you're out-of-line here. It's fine to be suspicious of relative percentages, but that just means you need to dig into the numbers to understand it. In this case underlying numbers are huge... With a population of 22 million, this is a drop from about 12,500 suicides to around 3,700 per year. And, the suicide rates themselves are high as your own source points out, so a large proportionate change is quite significant from that perspective as well. Your argument would make sense for a similar proportionate change for a country near the bottom of of the wikipedia list, but not the top. To your second point, yes, it's hard to have complete certainty (there's no way to ethically or morally test something like this in a scientifically rigorous way) but they do attempt to account for other factors. It's not like people shouldn't try to reduce suicide rates and attempt to measure the results of those efforts the best they can, simply because they can't have rigorous certainty in those measurements.

by tomp 9y ago

danielvf 9y ago

Also Sri Lanka had something resembling a civil war from 1983 to 2009.

malikNF 9y ago
Not "something resembling" it was an actual civil war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War

ArneVogel 9y ago

The gdp per person increased by 5x between 1995 and 2016 [1]. That makes be believe pesticides were only a small part of the change. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sri+lanka+gdp+per+person https://www.google.com/search?q=sri+lanka+gdp+per+person

tomp 9y ago

Ah, there's a transcript "below the cut". So, scanning it, it seems they draw conclusions based on the strong temporal correlation between pesticide use and suicide. > the suicide rate had increased dramatically after the introduction of highly hazardous pesticides into the agriculture > in ’94, the most toxic insecticides [...] were banned [...] another very toxic pesticide [...] was banned in ’98, and further class two pesticides were banned in 2008 to 2011 So I guess it could be true but it's still making huge leaps of faith from the data. Now, my moral value system doesn't classify suicide as negative, so I can't really agree with the premise of the article, yet I definitely support limitations on the availability and use of pesticides, e.g. to prevent children accidentially poisoning themselves etc.

awild 9y ago
> Now, my moral value system doesn't classify suicide as negative, so I can't really agree with the premise of the article, yet I definitely support limitations on the availability and use of pesticides, e.g. to prevent children accidentially poisoning themselves etc. I have a similar painpoint with this: even if their attempt at reducing suicide succeeded, they didn't help people much. Assuming (as they have to) that the situation in Sri Lanka is the same or similar as with toxic pesticides, the only thing they achieved is make escaping that shitty situation harder, not making the lives better, by effectively reducing suicidal thoughts. The point they are trying to make that suicide is a spontaneuous/irrational decision hardly counts in a statistic like that.
- Anderkent 9y ago
  >Assuming (as they have to) that the situation in Sri Lanka is the same or similar as with toxic pesticides, the only thing they achieved is make escaping that shitty situation harder, not making the lives better, by effectively reducing suicidal thoughts. The point they are trying to make that suicide is a spontaneuous/irrational decision hardly counts in a statistic like that. How does it not??? If the suicide is a decision made under the influence of a 30-minute-long depressive episode, and outside that episode the person would prefer to live, how is preventing the suicidies by making them harder to perform spontaneously not making people's lives better? Why does it 'hardly count'?

tdb7893 9y ago

They attribute the drop to lack of pesticides because according to the researcher the drops coincided with changes in policy, drops were also seen in other countries that banned pesticides, and simular situations were seen when access to common forms of suicide were restricted in other countries also saw a drop in rates (i.e. gun restrictions led to fewer suicides). It's hard to run controlled trials at a macro scale so it's unlikely that the effect was only pesticides but it sounds like historically these sorts of interventions do work.

kbuchanan 9y ago

Regression to the mean?

Chathamization 9y ago

This study seems to take that into account[1]: > Restrictions on the import and sales of WHO Class I toxicity pesticides in 1995 and endosulfan in 1998, coincided with reductions in suicide in both men and women of all ages. 19,800 fewer suicides occurred in 1996-2005 compared to 1986 – 1995. Secular trends in unemployment, alcohol misuse, divorce, pesticide use and the years associated with Sri Lanka’s Civil war did not appear to be associated with these declines. Here's another study[2]: > Overall suicide mortality dropped by 21% between 2011 and 2015, from 18.3 to 14.3 per 100,000. The decline in pesticide suicides during this same period was larger than for overall suicides: from 8.5 to 4.2 per 100,000, a 50% reduction. This was accompanied by a smaller concurrent rise in non-pesticide suicide mortality with a 2% increase (9.9 to 10.1 per 100,000). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172893 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

achileas 9y ago
Pretty much every time someone complains about the whole correlation != causation thing, it's a huge red flag that they didn't read the actual research or have no experience in academic research. It's easily accounted for and is the lowest hanging methodological fruit, and pretty much is always addressed when actually appropriate. It's an undergrad stats thing, and I know for my degree I had to have at least a year of graduate level stats, and the same for undergrad.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  On the other hand, epidemiology is fundamentally incapable of proving positive causation. It can prove that something is not a cause by showing that there is no correlation, but that’s it.
- tomp 9y ago
  the kind of conclusion as "all of 70% decrease was caused by this single factor" (as the title implies) is incredibly intelectually dishonest to ever make. So I'm not looking at the data from the perspective "I bet they were too stupid/uneducated to think about correlation != causation", but rather from the "looks like they're trying to find data to substantiate their political agenda" perspective. Edit: having said that, yeah, I don't have any actual research experience, and the data does look pretty convincing - as in, banning pesticides probably does contribute to a reduction in suicides a non-trivial amount.

contravariant 9y ago

Those are pretty much all valid points, however at first glance a drop from 57 incidents to 17 is at least statistically significant. The standard deviation can be assumed to be at most around sqrt(57) = ~7.5, so a difference of 40, which would be over 5 standard deviations, shouldn't normally happen. You're right that relative percentages are sometimes a bit dubious (and even in this case you'd fluctuations on the order of 1/sqrt(57) = ~13 percentage points) but 57 is high enough that it actually has some meaning.

jmull 9y ago

> ...therefore I judge the title as "click-bait-y" I think you're out-of-line here. It's fine to be suspicious of relative percentages, but that just means you need to dig into the numbers to understand it. In this case underlying numbers are huge... With a population of 22 million, this is a drop from about 12,500 suicides to around 3,700 per year. And, the suicide rates themselves are high as your own source points out, so a large proportionate change is quite significant from that perspective as well. Your argument would make sense for a similar proportionate change for a country near the bottom of of the wikipedia list, but not the top. To your second point, yes, it's hard to have complete certainty (there's no way to ethically or morally test something like this in a scientifically rigorous way) but they do attempt to account for other factors. It's not like people shouldn't try to reduce suicide rates and attempt to measure the results of those efforts the best they can, simply because they can't have rigorous certainty in those measurements.