> To help suss out cause and effect, the authors analyzed Los Angeles’s daily crime data while controlling for two key factors: whether public schools were in s

> To help suss out cause and effect, the authors analyzed Los Angeles’s daily crime data while controlling for two key factors: whether public schools were in session on a given day and overall traffic volume on the region’s highways (a proxy for total social activity in the city). I note that they did not try to increase violence and then measure whether the temperature went up in response, which is the true way to suss out cause vs effect.