13 ms·

Feminine-named hurricanes are deadlier than masculine-named hurricanes

64 points by lukashed 12y ago

tpowell 12y ago
Duh.
kaybe 12y ago
There is more such as the raw data under supplemental information: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSupplemental http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSu...
tekp2 12y ago
A bit more context from Ed Yong: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-female-hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-...
- Morendil 12y ago
  Let's please upvote this to ensure it remains the top comment on this story. Head and shoulders above your usual science reporting.
- cwyers 12y ago
  The money quote: "But Lazo thinks that neither the archival analysis nor the psychological experiments support the team’s conclusions. For a start, they analysed hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time. 'It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,' says Lazo. Jung’s team tried to address this problem by separately analysing the data for hurricanes before and after 1979. They claim that the findings 'directionally replicated those in the full dataset' but that’s a bit of a fudge. The fact is they couldn’t find a significant link between the femininity of a hurricane’s name and the damage it caused for either the pre-1979 set or the post-1979 one (and a 'marginally significant interaction' of p=0.073 doesn’t really count). The team argues that splitting the data meant there weren’t enough hurricanes in each subset to provide enough statistical power. But that only means we can’t rule out a connection between gender and damage; we can’t soundly confirm one either."
  - ghaff 12y ago
    And BTW they just excluded Katrina as an outlier. While not necessarily a totally unwarranted decision, it makes already marginal conclusions that much more so.
    - jaredsohn 12y ago
      Isn't this conclusion more significant because Katrina is excluded? Edit: I meant the layman's sense of "significant" here. I just don't see how excluding Katrina "makes already marginal conclusions that much more so". I read your "but" statement as just saying that they haven't necessarily proven causality, but I don't see what that has to do with my statement.
      - cwyers 12y ago
        Well, the word "significant" is a loaded one in this discussion -- in this context, it typically means "statistically significant," which has a very narrow (and sometimes questionable[1]) meaning. You're right that leaving Katrina in the dataset (assuming the same techniques were used -- there are other ways to deal with outliers other than dropping them) would bias the result further towards indicating that female-named hurricanes are more dangerous. But the persistence of a significant finding in that regard in the absence of that data point does not prove a causal link, much less the specific one the author suggests. [1] For some criticisms of how statistical significance is currently being used, read this: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf
      - ghaff 12y ago
        It was intended more as a general point about picking and choosing of data. You're of course correct that including Katrina would buttress the female hurricane deadliness theory but would also open up the study to charges that it was influenced by a single outlier.
- jacalata 12y ago
  Whoa now, Lazo wants to say the experiment isn't useful because it uses undergrads who may not represent the actual demographic of interest? Does he want to abandon human-subject experiments altogether?
  - fixermark 12y ago
    Abandoning the inexpensive-but-heavily-skewed "grab some of the local population" (of our university town) (in the Western world) wouldn't be a bad idea for psychology, no. http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology-studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology...
    - jacalata 12y ago
      I think I wasn't obvious enough with the sarcasm.
javert 12y ago
So we should just always give them male names. But we can't because whoever makes such decisions will bow to the pressure of feminism.
- qq66 12y ago
  You do realize that feminists are the ones who lobbied to go from all female names to half male, right? Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate, they saved lives.
  - baddox 12y ago
    > Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate, they saved lives. That doesn't necessarily follow. It could be that people have on average a fixed amount of "preparedness" per unit time that they will spend on various events as they see fit. Switching from all female names to half female half male might have simply caused more of this preparedness to be spent on the half named after males, but the total amount of preparedness would be unchanged.
    - qq66 12y ago
      I suppose that's possible, but it's the kind of claim that needs to be proven rather than disproven (just like the claim in the article, which is light-years from proven).
  - pekk 12y ago
    Then it will save even more lives for every hurricane to be named after a metal band (e.g.: Destructinator.) Then we can apply suffixes, like "the Terrible" (Destructinator the Terrible). Then if that doesn't work well enough to change behavior, we can simply lie about the risks (Destructinator the Terrible will kill you unless you take shelter in Canada with 90% probability.) Hopefully this drumbeat of psychological warfare will cause the coastal residents to move hundreds of miles from the coasts and there will be no more hurricane deaths again. Then we can start naming tornados after biker bars.
    - 12y ago
mitosis 12y ago
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. -- Kipling
- sjclemmy 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ronaldx 12y ago
I can't see the full-text to check the stats, but I'd wager this claim is heavily dependent on single point Fifi: a category 2 hurricane that was amongst the deadliest. Edit: Ah, in fact, there is no significant result that corresponds to the title at all. Statistically, they have no right to claim the headline is true. Pure link-bait :/
Jun8 12y ago
I call BS on this one. First, the implicit assumption seems to be that hurricanes have approximately the same strength and it's people's expectations that is the dominant factor in the death tool, i.e. (from the paper's abstract): "Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness." Now I'm no meteorologist, but it seems like this may or may not be true. Since the male and female names alternate this may be pointing to an underlying mechanism that modulates the strength of consecutive storms' strength. Second, up to 1978 hurricanes were given only female names (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml). Where does that leave this theory?
- sp332 12y ago
  The study included some questions where participants rated the perceived danger from some made-up storm names. People said they expected less danger from a given storm description if it had a more feminine name.
  - pekk 12y ago
    Which really shows nothing, or perhaps that participants accurately inferred what the questioner wanted to hear or what they were supposed to say. There's a reason they didn't lead with THAT headline, but rather the inflammatory and bogus one.
scythe 12y ago
Can this effect be reasonably prevented? See http://xkcd.com/915/ http://xkcd.com/915/ : some hurricane names will always be more threatening than other hurricane names, and will induce consequently more preparation. But the only thing to which people compare the names of hurricanes is the names of other hurricanes (and maybe other named storms), so there must always be a least threatening hurricane name, etc. Even if we took the "nuclear" route and named hurricanes after, for example, historical tyrants (Hurricane Genghis, Hurricane Adolf, etc) this could happen nonetheless.
- aragot 12y ago
  Excellent reference; Do you think if sorted names by increasing threat level we would succeed to reach a constant preparation?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jessaustin 12y ago
  This seems to suggest that hurricanes should not be named in advance. If all we know is that a hurricane of a particular strength will hit tomorrow, we won't hang around due to gender prejudice. Then when we find out next week that the hurricane is named Daenerys we'll realize we shouldn't have worried about it.
  - baddox 12y ago
    It's possible that not giving hurricanes easily-recognizable names would cause even less preparedness and risk estimation.
fixermark 12y ago
This is an excellent example of reasoning that Dawkins refers to as 'PETWAC' (Population of Events That Would happen to Appear Coincidental). Consider three possible scenarios: 1) female hurricanes, as a set, are deadlier than male hurricanes 2) male hurricanes, as a set, are deadlier than female hurricanes 3) neither male nor female hurricanes are deadlier Surprisingly, if you assume a uniform distribution of deadliness independent of the names, you actually find that it's more likely that either 1 or 2 is true than that 3 is true; 3 being true would require that an arbitrary partitioning of the hurricanes would have resulted in equal deadliness, but if the partition is arbitrary, it's more likely that it creates two unequal groups. However, a quick appeal to symmetry shows that either 1 or 2 being true are equally newsworthy. It's like the news getting excited that a coin-toss was heads... "Wow, look at how heads that coin toss was!"... When in reality, the odds of heads OR tails were exceptionally high and the newsworthy item would be the coin landing on edge.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Given that this was published in PNAS and edited by someone from Princeton, it's safe to assume (unfortunately it's paywalled so I can only assume) that the authors know how to perform a significance test.
  - Anderkent 12y ago
    http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Exactly. What's at play is a combination of publication bias and (possibly) a slightly-too-narrow null hypothesis. This kind of silliness can squeeze through without any need for the null hypothesis to be entirely absent, which is the aspect of fixermark's post that I object to. I'd bet good money at 5:1 odds that the null hypothesis the paper used was more sophisticated than his uniform distribution let alone the delta distribution he accuses them of using.
samstave 12y ago
"Hell hath no fury like a woman stormed" /sorry
mcv 12y ago
If I understand this correctly, hurricanes should be named with the most threatening names possible. So no more Sandy or even Edward, but Cerberus, Smaug, and Grendel.

64 points by lukashed 12y ago

Duh.

kaybe 12y ago

There is more such as the raw data under supplemental information: http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSupplemental http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSu...

tekp2 12y ago

A bit more context from Ed Yong: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-female-hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-...

Morendil 12y ago
Let's please upvote this to ensure it remains the top comment on this story. Head and shoulders above your usual science reporting.
cwyers 12y ago
The money quote: "But Lazo thinks that neither the archival analysis nor the psychological experiments support the team’s conclusions. For a start, they analysed hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time. 'It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male names,' says Lazo. Jung’s team tried to address this problem by separately analysing the data for hurricanes before and after 1979. They claim that the findings 'directionally replicated those in the full dataset' but that’s a bit of a fudge. The fact is they couldn’t find a significant link between the femininity of a hurricane’s name and the damage it caused for either the pre-1979 set or the post-1979 one (and a 'marginally significant interaction' of p=0.073 doesn’t really count). The team argues that splitting the data meant there weren’t enough hurricanes in each subset to provide enough statistical power. But that only means we can’t rule out a connection between gender and damage; we can’t soundly confirm one either."
- ghaff 12y ago
  And BTW they just excluded Katrina as an outlier. While not necessarily a totally unwarranted decision, it makes already marginal conclusions that much more so.
  - jaredsohn 12y ago
    Isn't this conclusion more significant because Katrina is excluded? Edit: I meant the layman's sense of "significant" here. I just don't see how excluding Katrina "makes already marginal conclusions that much more so". I read your "but" statement as just saying that they haven't necessarily proven causality, but I don't see what that has to do with my statement.
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Well, the word "significant" is a loaded one in this discussion -- in this context, it typically means "statistically significant," which has a very narrow (and sometimes questionable[1]) meaning. You're right that leaving Katrina in the dataset (assuming the same techniques were used -- there are other ways to deal with outliers other than dropping them) would bias the result further towards indicating that female-named hurricanes are more dangerous. But the persistence of a significant finding in that regard in the absence of that data point does not prove a causal link, much less the specific one the author suggests. [1] For some criticisms of how statistical significance is currently being used, read this: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf
    - ghaff 12y ago
      It was intended more as a general point about picking and choosing of data. You're of course correct that including Katrina would buttress the female hurricane deadliness theory but would also open up the study to charges that it was influenced by a single outlier.
jacalata 12y ago
Whoa now, Lazo wants to say the experiment isn't useful because it uses undergrads who may not represent the actual demographic of interest? Does he want to abandon human-subject experiments altogether?
- fixermark 12y ago
  Abandoning the inexpensive-but-heavily-skewed "grab some of the local population" (of our university town) (in the Western world) wouldn't be a bad idea for psychology, no. http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology-studies-biased-toward-we-10-08-07/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/psychology...
  - jacalata 12y ago
    I think I wasn't obvious enough with the sarcasm.

javert 12y ago

So we should just always give them male names. But we can't because whoever makes such decisions will bow to the pressure of feminism.

qq66 12y ago
You do realize that feminists are the ones who lobbied to go from all female names to half male, right? Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate, they saved lives.
- baddox 12y ago
  > Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate, they saved lives. That doesn't necessarily follow. It could be that people have on average a fixed amount of "preparedness" per unit time that they will spend on various events as they see fit. Switching from all female names to half female half male might have simply caused more of this preparedness to be spent on the half named after males, but the total amount of preparedness would be unchanged.
  - qq66 12y ago
    I suppose that's possible, but it's the kind of claim that needs to be proven rather than disproven (just like the claim in the article, which is light-years from proven).
- pekk 12y ago
  Then it will save even more lives for every hurricane to be named after a metal band (e.g.: Destructinator.) Then we can apply suffixes, like "the Terrible" (Destructinator the Terrible). Then if that doesn't work well enough to change behavior, we can simply lie about the risks (Destructinator the Terrible will kill you unless you take shelter in Canada with 90% probability.) Hopefully this drumbeat of psychological warfare will cause the coastal residents to move hundreds of miles from the coasts and there will be no more hurricane deaths again. Then we can start naming tornados after biker bars.
  - 12y ago

mitosis 12y ago

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. -- Kipling

sjclemmy 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ronaldx 12y ago

I can't see the full-text to check the stats, but I'd wager this claim is heavily dependent on single point Fifi: a category 2 hurricane that was amongst the deadliest. Edit: Ah, in fact, there is no significant result that corresponds to the title at all. Statistically, they have no right to claim the headline is true. Pure link-bait :/

Jun8 12y ago

I call BS on this one. First, the implicit assumption seems to be that hurricanes have approximately the same strength and it's people's expectations that is the dominant factor in the death tool, i.e. (from the paper's abstract): "Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness." Now I'm no meteorologist, but it seems like this may or may not be true. Since the male and female names alternate this may be pointing to an underlying mechanism that modulates the strength of consecutive storms' strength. Second, up to 1978 hurricanes were given only female names (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml). Where does that leave this theory?

sp332 12y ago
The study included some questions where participants rated the perceived danger from some made-up storm names. People said they expected less danger from a given storm description if it had a more feminine name.
- pekk 12y ago
  Which really shows nothing, or perhaps that participants accurately inferred what the questioner wanted to hear or what they were supposed to say. There's a reason they didn't lead with THAT headline, but rather the inflammatory and bogus one.

scythe 12y ago

Can this effect be reasonably prevented? See http://xkcd.com/915/ http://xkcd.com/915/ : some hurricane names will always be more threatening than other hurricane names, and will induce consequently more preparation. But the only thing to which people compare the names of hurricanes is the names of other hurricanes (and maybe other named storms), so there must always be a least threatening hurricane name, etc. Even if we took the "nuclear" route and named hurricanes after, for example, historical tyrants (Hurricane Genghis, Hurricane Adolf, etc) this could happen nonetheless.

aragot 12y ago
Excellent reference; Do you think if sorted names by increasing threat level we would succeed to reach a constant preparation?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 12y ago
This seems to suggest that hurricanes should not be named in advance. If all we know is that a hurricane of a particular strength will hit tomorrow, we won't hang around due to gender prejudice. Then when we find out next week that the hurricane is named Daenerys we'll realize we shouldn't have worried about it.
- baddox 12y ago
  It's possible that not giving hurricanes easily-recognizable names would cause even less preparedness and risk estimation.

fixermark 12y ago

This is an excellent example of reasoning that Dawkins refers to as 'PETWAC' (Population of Events That Would happen to Appear Coincidental). Consider three possible scenarios: 1) female hurricanes, as a set, are deadlier than male hurricanes 2) male hurricanes, as a set, are deadlier than female hurricanes 3) neither male nor female hurricanes are deadlier Surprisingly, if you assume a uniform distribution of deadliness independent of the names, you actually find that it's more likely that either 1 or 2 is true than that 3 is true; 3 being true would require that an arbitrary partitioning of the hurricanes would have resulted in equal deadliness, but if the partition is arbitrary, it's more likely that it creates two unequal groups. However, a quick appeal to symmetry shows that either 1 or 2 being true are equally newsworthy. It's like the news getting excited that a coin-toss was heads... "Wow, look at how heads that coin toss was!"... When in reality, the odds of heads OR tails were exceptionally high and the newsworthy item would be the coin landing on edge.

jjoonathan 12y ago
Given that this was published in PNAS and edited by someone from Princeton, it's safe to assume (unfortunately it's paywalled so I can only assume) that the authors know how to perform a significance test.
- Anderkent 12y ago
  http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Exactly. What's at play is a combination of publication bias and (possibly) a slightly-too-narrow null hypothesis. This kind of silliness can squeeze through without any need for the null hypothesis to be entirely absent, which is the aspect of fixermark's post that I object to. I'd bet good money at 5:1 odds that the null hypothesis the paper used was more sophisticated than his uniform distribution let alone the delta distribution he accuses them of using.

samstave 12y ago

"Hell hath no fury like a woman stormed" /sorry

mcv 12y ago

If I understand this correctly, hurricanes should be named with the most threatening names possible. So no more Sandy or even Edward, but Cerberus, Smaug, and Grendel.