It's not just treated negatively by elites, but I think that's very straightforward. Because a biological or chemical explanation for behaviour, especially such a simple one, throws a pretty big wrench into the moralistic and individualistic worldview that underpins our Western societies, in particular in regards to crime or intellect.
If you accept the, from a scientific point, very obvious observation that a bunch of chemicals in your drinking water can turn you into an idiot or a criminal you just about undermine most stories of self-earned merit or responsibility we are being fed in our mother's milk and that justify bringing the hammer down on said inner city youth.
It's a good example actually. We've done incredible damage by moralizing drug use rather than treating it as medical issue and instead promote quackery like AA which has horrible outcomes.
Lead is a lot harder to do it with because it was in water or paint.
The worse thing I think comes from some really old chemistry books from the early 1900's I inherited. The thing from those books is educated people back when they started putting lead in paint and gasoline absolutely knew lead caused developmental brain damage.
The point they are making is that selection bias in which studies get published and which get suppressed can fool us (and may have done so) into believing an effect is real that isn't, or into thinking an effect is much larger than it is. Forget about which study this is and look at the point they are making on its own. Is there bad science going on here?
> but the mass media reaction to it just shows how much is wrong with our society
There is a whole other branch of mass media that desperately wants the lead-crime hypothesis to be not just true but the only reason for the crime rate falling in the 90s. Why? because it's much preferred over the alternative answer: Roe vs Wade. That side of the mass media is very aggressive in defending the lead-crime hypothesis.
Good discussion on the subject here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
And they suspiciously focused on murder only, they may have peeked at the data before deciding.
Theoretically the connection is sound (so I think it warrants a pretty solid prior probability), after all unwanted children lead to decrease in socioeconomic status, which is a very surefire way to have a lot of problems in life, and without a supportive family and state, the number of options quickly dwindles to illegal and not so great ones. (Basically the "not so great" option is that in the Soviet dictatorships around here - Eastern Europe - at least the full employment mandate meant that there was enough make believe work available to not starve. )
That is an oversimplification, and I think it's in the original article. Let me try to give an alternative explanation.
In an ideal world where all the studies have the same amount of subjects and all the countries have the same conditions, when you make an histogram of the result of the test you expect to see a Gaussian distribution. Some graphics in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
If half of the studies have 100 participants and the other half have 10000 participants, you expect to see the sum of two Gaussian distributions with the same center, it looks like a low wide mountain with a bump in the center. In a more realistic universe, each study has a different number of participants, and you get something in between. A rounded symmetrical bump.
Also, in a magical world where there are two type of countries, you will see the sum of two bumps with different centers. If they were far enough, you would see two humps. If they were too close, you will see only one hump but wider than the expected only form noise. And in between you can get weird shapes.
In a realistic word where each country is unique, and they are not so different, you get a bump. With enough variations, some luck, and crossing your fingers, you expect to see a bump that is similar to a Gaussian. It's not exactly a Gaussian, but somewhat close enough. More technical details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
So if you have a very big number of studies, you expect to see in the histogram something like a Gaussian. In the first graph, instead of the histogram, the article uses another representation. In an ideal word, you expect to see an inverted ʃ. See again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
In a real word you expect to see something somewhat similar to an inverted ʃ. But the graphic shows only a L, Where is the top horizontal part of the inverted ʃ???
It's a very difficult question, and it's difficult to understand without a deep analysis. (That I can't do.) Perhaps there are good reasons, but it's strange.
In particular, the vertical part of the inverted ʃ in the graphic is close to 0, too close to 0. You can see that the lower tic of the inverted ʃ goes quite a bit to the right, so the "missing" upper tic should go approximately the same distance to the left. (Or there must be an explanation. Not all distributions are symmetrical, but it's strange that it's so asymmetrical.)
Now, the "missing" experiments in the "missing" upper tic of the inverted ʃ are the ones that say that the hypothesis is wrong (or even that lead is good for you). So it would be nice to have an explanation of thee weird distribution or the disappearance of these experiments.
Oversimplifying, there are no studies disproving this theory, but from the distribution there should be studies disproving this theory, therefore there is something weird happening here.
(Note: Sometimes the vertical part of the inverted ʃ is so far away from 0 that you don't expect any result in the negative part. Just the two tics at the top and at the bottom of the inverted ʃ, both in the positive part.)
In less interesting problems, the authors may decide to just not publish it.
In political areas, it's a risk that the far-right or far-left decides to support your preprint and later when you find the error claim that Big Something paid you to suppress the true. And the other side to claim that you are a far-other-side supporter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
OTOH, this meta-analysis was published, showing a negative result ...
Based on the blog post, I'm most concerned about the focus on murder rather than violence more generally.
# of violent incidents >>>> # of violent incidents that are also murder
So there really might not be enough murders to do the statistical inferences you want to do. Also, if there is a qualitative difference between murder and other violence, not merely a quantitative difference in degree, then it might get at the wrong things. Like, sometimes people go into a violent rage, and occasionally those end up killing some one. OTOH, sometimes people, say, rob a store, get scared, and shoot, and that's murder too. And then there are the people who carefully plan a murder to get something they want. Those all seem like they involve different kinds of brain states...
Maybe affect is so strong that to get opposite result you'd have to botch so many things that your chances of getting through peer review are so low that not a single wrongly successful research debunking this made it through peer review. Probably not many people are trying to debunk it and those that failed to prove it don't publish because people don't like publishing negative results.
If the effect is so strong that hardly ever happens, then it should also be so strong that there aren't many papers showing only a weak effect, but there's a huge amount of them. Maybe they're all botched but got published because their results agreed with the accepted idea whereas a contrarian botched paper would get more scrutiny and be rejected?
Also, "my" model is an informal version of the model used in the research paper. You can read there an explanation with more technical details and more accurate.
It's a bit difficult to commit violent crime at that age.
Yet it's easy to sit on the internet posting and believing in outright insanity and extremism.
It will take until 2040+ for many of these people to leave the political system.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
As for whether this is a matter of degree rather than kind, there frankly have not been enough studies done of pre-post illness, and there should be. I know that depression is common in cases of severe pneumonia, and maybe there is a loss of gray matter in those cases too.
If it turns out that lead exposure the culprit the throws a big monkey wrench in that.
Random thought as well, what if it turns out that the rise in obesity and type II diabetes is due to something similar?
I’m not suggesting pollution doesn’t have any correlation to crime (it probably does) but it doesn’t seem to be one of the more significant factors if you wanted to try to explain why some neighbours / populations commit more crime.
Could you explain what is true? You are talking about a societal wide chemical change in behaviour in all aspects of life.
To start, what % or amount of the reduced crime is due to the lead-crime hypothesis?
Since the lead has brain damaged somewhat equally everyone's impulse control can we see this in TV viewing habits and other everyday behaviour? I'd expect if it can cause us to murder more, it'd also have many everyday effects.
Do you have any conversations around it's effects on other animals also in these environments. How would our pets changed or city animals like birds have changed their behaviour?
Societal wide chemical changes are pretty out there, but they happen, IQs rise as countries become richer through diverse food security but this a limit function, 90% of people get enough iodine so the IQ changes will on be the 10%. Lead-crime hypothesis is ~100% changed.
The Middle East was late to reducing lead. Do the think the we will see more stability there. Do you think lead-crime hypothesis is that important? What is true?
First of all, the lead-crime hypothesis is good news. It is great to realize that small entirely achievable environmental changes can cause such marked improvement in wellbeing in people's lives.
But for some reason it has not been accepted as good news by the mass media. And then you have papers like the one discussed by the article that try to debunk the theory on absolutely ridiculous grounds. (You see there are no studies disproving this theory therefore there must be studies disproving this theory, therefore this theory is wrong. What a bunch of BS!)
So why is the lead crime hypothesis treated so negatively by our elites? Perhaps to avoid another round of massive litigation. Perhaps to prevent people from finding other ways other pollution can affect people's behavior and thus prevent the banning of other substances and other rounds of massive litigation. Or perhaps to preserve an image key in international culture -- the violent city youth.