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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

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.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.h...

chris123 7y ago
Eating prison for also associated. Correlation does not equal causation.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  "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." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.h...
  - 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
    What about city activity with pollution? more activity -> more pollution -> more crime more activity -> more crime
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - johnfactorial 7y ago
    > their results only show a strong correlative relationship The paper's abstract says "The results suggest that a 10% reduction in daily PM2.5 and ozone could save $1.4 billion in crime costs per year, a previously overlooked cost associated with pollution." In my opinion this is a statement of a causal relationship, not merely a correlation. I wonder why they didn't reverse that relationship, too, and propose that violent crime increases pollution. I would love to read the actual paper, but it's only available to people with money.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      "Suggest and could" are different than "indicate and will".
      - johnfactorial 7y ago
        This is probably the nuance I'm missing.
    - csallen 7y ago
      > I wonder why they didn't reverse that relationship, too, and propose that violent crime increases pollution. Probably because you can easily rule out that possibility using common sense, whereas causation in the other direction is at least thinkable and worth investigating further.
    - adenadel 7y ago
      If you attended a university and still have an email address associated with it you can probably use the library to access many academic articles.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >Correlation does not equal causation Say what? You should write these scientists and explain, I'm sure they've never heard of this concept!
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    Given some of the other statements they made, they've at least forgotten it. Most of us often forget.
  - rockinghigh 7y ago
    I’m also surprised by how many people use this meme to dismiss any research. It’s not like researchers just use the Pearson coefficient.
chippy 7y ago
Do you know if they controlled for daytime population? As in weekdays vs weekends?
- nkassis 7y ago
  Seasons
- dTal 7y ago
  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.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Yes, they did.
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smolder 7y ago
I wonder if there are specific components of the polluted air that have effects, like human body odor, pheremones, or just allergens.
- jumasheff 7y ago
  Lead, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
djhaskin987 7y ago
> correlation An interesting result, to be sure, but correlation does not imply causation.
- tomrod 7y ago
  But it may strongly hint at it and warrant further research. [0] https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/ [1] http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/WHY/ http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/WHY/
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  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.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Linear regression is a form of correlation. The model causality is implied but the only connection is correlation. Unless estimating an average treatment effect or diff-in-diff type framework, causality will be hard to identify in observational frameworks
d--b 7y ago
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.
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  They obvious control for these factors. They actually report that the effects are stronger at lower temperature.
  - mcbits 7y ago
    Statistical controls can remove much of the effect from known confounders, but they don't turn an observational study into a controlled experiment. Sometimes you can use common sense to infer a causal relationship (violent crime linked to emergency room visits), but it seems like a leap here, especially as they're on a bit of a fishing expedition with multiple types of pollution and multiple types of crime.
- reroute1 7y ago
  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.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  From the full paper: "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."
OJFord 7y ago
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.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  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?
hrktb 7y ago
> 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 This seems pretty extensive and serious
mjlee 7y ago
Is there a word for the fallacy of believing that another professional didn't consider the factor you thought of in seconds? I see this all the time at meetup tech talks and it infuriates me!
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  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.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  This is 90% of the critique I see of Economics...
- JoelMcCracken 7y ago
  this is like every comment on HN
- mrfusion 7y ago
  Mjlee’s law. Congratulations!
- taneq 7y ago
  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?
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  People are quite skeptical since the great replication crisis.
kolbe 7y ago
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.
easytiger 7y ago
So wouldn't the correlation be that that day is just busier?
dekhn 7y ago
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.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  If you would actually read the paper you would find that all your remarks have been accounted for.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    the article is paywalled, also, since I have plenty of experience in this field, I do not think my remarks were "accounted for", rather they probably wrote a couple hand-wavy sentences about how they corrected for SES, but didn't really. Edit: found a copy of the paper that wasn't paywalled, read the whole thing, and found their attempts to correct for bias wanting (section 4.2). " Overall, our heterogeneity results indicate the most important explanatory factor in the relationship between pollution and crime is age, and the results are not ameliorated by higher incomes." uh, ok. if you want to defend this paper go ahead but I've already read enough to know these folks started with a biased belief, carelessly analzyed the data in a way that supported their beliefs, and escalated the results into something that sounded far more significant and certain than their data shows.
andy_ppp 7y ago
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.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  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.
littlestymaar 7y ago
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).
- yearofthespider 7y ago
  I cannot imagine being either dumb or arrogant enough to suggest that people should not attempt to study problems just because they're challenging.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    > Challenging Yeah, like looking for perpetual movement or the philosopher stone. BTW, I should have worded my thoughts differently: I don't mind if individual people waste their time doing that kind of pseudo-science. I do mind however that these studies get fundings instead of more down-to-earth ones. I do mind when young researchers are driven to this kind of bs by perverse insentives. And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science.
    - yearofthespider 7y ago
      Your first sentence makes clear (again) that you think you're so smart that you can determine what research is potentially viable and what isn't, without even having any expertise in a given area. I already stated that you're ludicrously stupid and arrogant. Stop proving me correct. (or don't. no skin off my back either way.)
      - littlestymaar 7y ago
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chris123 7y ago

Eating prison for also associated. Correlation does not equal causation.

PeterStuer 7y ago
"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." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191003114007.h...
- 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
  What about city activity with pollution? more activity -> more pollution -> more crime more activity -> more crime
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- johnfactorial 7y ago
  > their results only show a strong correlative relationship The paper's abstract says "The results suggest that a 10% reduction in daily PM2.5 and ozone could save $1.4 billion in crime costs per year, a previously overlooked cost associated with pollution." In my opinion this is a statement of a causal relationship, not merely a correlation. I wonder why they didn't reverse that relationship, too, and propose that violent crime increases pollution. I would love to read the actual paper, but it's only available to people with money.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    "Suggest and could" are different than "indicate and will".
    - johnfactorial 7y ago
      This is probably the nuance I'm missing.
  - csallen 7y ago
    > I wonder why they didn't reverse that relationship, too, and propose that violent crime increases pollution. Probably because you can easily rule out that possibility using common sense, whereas causation in the other direction is at least thinkable and worth investigating further.
  - adenadel 7y ago
    If you attended a university and still have an email address associated with it you can probably use the library to access many academic articles.
navigatesol 7y ago
>Correlation does not equal causation Say what? You should write these scientists and explain, I'm sure they've never heard of this concept!
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  Given some of the other statements they made, they've at least forgotten it. Most of us often forget.
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  I’m also surprised by how many people use this meme to dismiss any research. It’s not like researchers just use the Pearson coefficient.

chippy 7y ago

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

nkassis 7y ago
Seasons
dTal 7y ago
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.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Yes, they did.

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smolder 7y ago

I wonder if there are specific components of the polluted air that have effects, like human body odor, pheremones, or just allergens.

jumasheff 7y ago
Lead, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

djhaskin987 7y ago

> correlation An interesting result, to be sure, but correlation does not imply causation.

tomrod 7y ago
But it may strongly hint at it and warrant further research. [0] https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/ [1] http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/WHY/ http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/WHY/
rockinghigh 7y ago
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.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Linear regression is a form of correlation. The model causality is implied but the only connection is correlation. Unless estimating an average treatment effect or diff-in-diff type framework, causality will be hard to identify in observational frameworks

d--b 7y ago

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.

rockinghigh 7y ago
They obvious control for these factors. They actually report that the effects are stronger at lower temperature.
- mcbits 7y ago
  Statistical controls can remove much of the effect from known confounders, but they don't turn an observational study into a controlled experiment. Sometimes you can use common sense to infer a causal relationship (violent crime linked to emergency room visits), but it seems like a leap here, especially as they're on a bit of a fishing expedition with multiple types of pollution and multiple types of crime.
reroute1 7y ago
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.
PeterStuer 7y ago
From the full paper: "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."

OJFord 7y ago

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.

Bartweiss 7y ago
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?

hrktb 7y ago

> 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 This seems pretty extensive and serious

mjlee 7y ago

Is there a word for the fallacy of believing that another professional didn't consider the factor you thought of in seconds? I see this all the time at meetup tech talks and it infuriates me!

Nasrudith 7y ago
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.
BurningFrog 7y ago
This is 90% of the critique I see of Economics...
JoelMcCracken 7y ago
this is like every comment on HN
mrfusion 7y ago
Mjlee’s law. Congratulations!
taneq 7y ago
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?
mensetmanusman 7y ago
People are quite skeptical since the great replication crisis.

kolbe 7y ago

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.

easytiger 7y ago

So wouldn't the correlation be that that day is just busier?

dekhn 7y ago

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.

PeterStuer 7y ago
If you would actually read the paper you would find that all your remarks have been accounted for.
- dekhn 7y ago
  the article is paywalled, also, since I have plenty of experience in this field, I do not think my remarks were "accounted for", rather they probably wrote a couple hand-wavy sentences about how they corrected for SES, but didn't really. Edit: found a copy of the paper that wasn't paywalled, read the whole thing, and found their attempts to correct for bias wanting (section 4.2). " Overall, our heterogeneity results indicate the most important explanatory factor in the relationship between pollution and crime is age, and the results are not ameliorated by higher incomes." uh, ok. if you want to defend this paper go ahead but I've already read enough to know these folks started with a biased belief, carelessly analzyed the data in a way that supported their beliefs, and escalated the results into something that sounded far more significant and certain than their data shows.

andy_ppp 7y ago

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.

PeterStuer 7y ago
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.

littlestymaar 7y ago

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).

yearofthespider 7y ago
I cannot imagine being either dumb or arrogant enough to suggest that people should not attempt to study problems just because they're challenging.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  > Challenging Yeah, like looking for perpetual movement or the philosopher stone. BTW, I should have worded my thoughts differently: I don't mind if individual people waste their time doing that kind of pseudo-science. I do mind however that these studies get fundings instead of more down-to-earth ones. I do mind when young researchers are driven to this kind of bs by perverse insentives. And I do mind when laypersons are taught by mainstream media that this is science.
  - yearofthespider 7y ago
    Your first sentence makes clear (again) that you think you're so smart that you can determine what research is potentially viable and what isn't, without even having any expertise in a given area. I already stated that you're ludicrously stupid and arrogant. Stop proving me correct. (or don't. no skin off my back either way.)
    - littlestymaar 7y ago

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