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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 relatio

• BurningFrog 7y ago
  Well, I think it's a fact¹ that a large majority of "science" stories that go viral turn out to be wrong. So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?". ¹ Citation Missing
  • tekmate 7y ago
    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
    • kortilla 7y ago
      The replication crisis says otherwise.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • dwaltrip 7y ago
        Both of those phenomenona are common. They aren't mutually exclusive.
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      That's definitely also a factor.
    • jsight 7y ago
      I tend to agree, and this article is no different. Articles often report the underlying research in misleading ways.
  • josephdviviano 7y ago
    If you want to avoid this, just read the paper. 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.
    • chibg10 7y ago
      Because there’s only 24 hours a day? Because my tax dollars are often funding this research? Why not take this farther and just do the research myself, eh?
    • gwd 7y ago
      > 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. But to be honest, the reason I read the comments (at least on a place like HN) is to get the key insight / failure without reading the article.
      • josephdviviano 7y ago
        When scientists disagree among themselves, it's hard to use this strategy.
    • moultano 7y ago
      It's paywalled. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0095069619301901 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00950... If I had access, I'd try to dig into more depth into how they approached decoupling this from temperature, because that seems like a really strong confounder. I'm also a bit curious about the underlying physical cause of the change in pollution levels, (weekends? summertime?) because that seems like it could also be a confounding common cause. Alas, I'm not interested in paying $35 for the paper.
      • imagin8or 7y ago
        Preprint from the Colorado State website: https://pierce.atmos.colostate.edu/Monthly_Pollution_and_Crime.pdf https://pierce.atmos.colostate.edu/Monthly_Pollution_and_Cri...
  • johnfactorial 7y ago
    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.
• dekhn 7y ago
  you literally just jumped to imputing a mechanism to back-support epidemiological data; I recommend not doing that.
  • macawfish 7y ago
    What I did is propose a plausible hypothesis for further research. Theory and speculation have a place in science.
    • dekhn 7y ago
      What you did was link to a press release for a paper where they took 53 rats, removed their adrenal glands, injected them with corticosteroids, and saw they were more aggressive. Few, if any, scientists would say that is a plausible hypothesis explaining the epidemiological results observed above. What you did was speculation with limited data and difficult transferrability (rats with adrenal glands are not representative of people exposed to air pollution).
      • macawfish 7y ago
        Check out Robert Sapolsky's stuff on stress, disease and conflict in primates. Then go and brush up on your research. Short term exposure to pollution is related to heightened inflammatory responses, which are in turn related to aggressive behavior... In humans and animals. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874490/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874490/ There's much more where this came from. I say "related" because we are talking about complex systems here. There are likely feedbacks involved.
        • dekhn 7y ago
          hey I'm not disagreeing with exposure to pollution being related to aggressive behavior. What i'm saying is that there is no reason to believe that in this particular paper, that you can go from the epidemiological linkage results to a physical mechanism. Normally complex epidemiological observations are multifactorial, have multiple causes, and the associations are still only weakly correlated with those causal mechanisms.
• bilbo0s 7y ago
  >But really if the rationalists just took a few seconds to think about it Even better, if they just took a few more seconds to actually read the article prior to commenting.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• catalogia 7y ago
  "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.
  • KirinDave 7y ago
    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.
    • darawk 7y ago
      I don't think most people are doing the thing you're implying they're doing. Nobody is trying to shut down the conversation. Most studies do an incredibly poor job of controlling for exogenous variables.
      • KirinDave 7y ago
        That itself is an apocryphal claim, but even if I take it at face value it doesn't really apply to curated data sets that we tend to be exposed to by media outlets with modestly competent science departments. The Economist is certainly not the best out there, but it's very far from an uncurated data set.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
      • lemmsjid 7y ago
• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  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.
• Seanzie 7y ago
  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.
  • L2R 7y ago
    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.
  • yachtman 7y ago
    I dont see why journals can't publish more negative results. In math for example, its a big deal if someone disproves a hypothesis of someone famous.
    • dwaltrip 7y ago
      A negative result means simply they didn't find compelling evidence for their hypothesis. Nothing is proven or disproven (although it adds weight to the idea that the hypothesis is not true), so people think it is unexciting. For that and other reasons, the system incentives not publishing these, which is a pretty big problem.
    • jefftk 7y ago
      The math equivalent of a negative result would be more like "I tried for months to prove this theorem, and it didn't work". The difference is that in math "here is a proof" is all you need, while in sciences people are typically sharing what amounts to collections of observations. If you publish the collections that lead to interesting conclusions, but not the ones that are boring, people looking at what's been published are misled.
  • KirinDave 7y ago
    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.
• cmoscoe 7y ago
  My knee-jerk reaction to this was to a find a confounding variable. 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.
  • guelo 7y ago
    They controlled for temperature.
• pjlegato 7y ago
  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.