The above, of course, is from xkcd. In contrast, Freakonomics went contrarian cool a bunch of years ago with “A Headline That Will Make Global-Warming Activists Apoplectic,” featuring a claim of “about 30 years of global cooling” and a preemptive slam at any critics for “shrillness.” I guess the Rogue Economists could issue a retraction and apology, but given they never retracted that ridiculous claim that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls (further background here), I guess we can’t expect anything on this one either.
But I can keep bringing it up!
I’m reminded of the joke:
Q: What’s the difference between xkcd and Freakonomics?
A: One of them is a long-running serial featuring a mix of interesting ideas and bad jokes, not to be taken seriously . . . and the other one is a cartoon.
And again I feel the need to say that everybody makes mistakes; what’s important is to learn from them, which requires acknowledging the mistake and coming to terms with the patterns of thought that led to it. Which is especially important if you represent an influential news outlet and you’ve been peddling junk science.
P.S. At this point, you might ask, Why am I picking on Freakonomics so much. They’re not so bad! And, indeed, Freakonomics is not so bad. It has some great stuff! That’s one reason I’m picking on them, because they can do better. There are lots of media outlets our there that are worse than Freakonomics. Alex Jones is worse—a zillion times worse. Gladwell’s worse. That Hidden Brain guy on NPR who falls for everything from PNAS, he’s worse. David Brooks doesn’t even try. Mike Barnicle used to be entertaining but he made stuff up. Gregg Easterbrook . . . well, he’s retired. I’m sad about all those guys too, but I have a special sadness in my heart for Freakonomics because they have the demonstrated potential to be so much better. I’m not trying to persuade them in this blog to change their ways—I’ve kinda given up on that—but maybe this can be a cautionary example for others, a continuing story of a lost opportunity to grapple with errors and learn from one’s mistakes. So sad, it makes me want to cry . . . and sometimes to laugh.
Just think, there was once a time, back in 2006 or so, when Freakonomics was one of the most widely respected science brands in the world and xkcd was an obscure website. How things have changed!
I’m not sure that even in 2006 if Freakonmomics was well respected. I remember getting really annoyed with the book. They spend some time at the beginning telling you that correlation is not causation, and then for the rest of the book they just seem to forget this and present correlation as causation. Maybe the book is better than I remember, but I don’t really want to read it again.
Is the sentence “correlation is not causation” the only thing American university students learn in their first statistics course?
Justin:
The original Freakonomics book was not perfect, but it was kinda cool in that gave some sense of ideas in microeconomics and social science in a way that was hard to find elsewhere. Before that, the usual economics book was all about inflation and unemployment and the jobs of the future and how the Japanese are kicking our ass or whatever, and the usual business book was all about the habits of successful people and the dude who owned McDonalds and stuff like that.
Freakonomics also had a charming, anything-goes attitude. In some ways, then, the strengths and weaknesses of the franchise are related, in that part of an anything-goes attitude is an openness to ideas which, to experts, are ridiculous. If you’re willing to go up against the sumo wrestling establishment, why not also promote fringe theories in biology, climate science, psychology, business, etc.? From that perspective I can understand their willingness to entertain ideas that I think are foolish. What bothers me is their unwillingness to confront their mistakes.
The original Freakonomics book was not perfect, but it was kinda cool in that gave some sense of ideas in microeconomics and social science in a way that was hard to find elsewhere.
As a psychologist, more or less, I found much of the original book fun but failed to see what economics had to do with it. It looked like good statistics, psychology and sociology with, perhaps, a bit of anthropology tossed in.
It’s been about 15 years, but from what I recall, they define economics as the study of how people (I guess more generally, economic agents), use resources and respond to incentives. I think the book was almost entirely about that.
I thought this is really good – particularly on a phone where you have to scroll .
https://xkcd.com/1732/
I like the freakonomics podcast sometimes. I don’t feel ashamed.
Not sure how tall your monitor on your computer would have to be so that you wouldn’t need to scroll that. But the image I’ve got in my mind is hilarious!
You’re right. The effect is no less dramatic on my laptop.
Nice chart but it may be outdated. The likelihood of the scenario labeled “current path” is now considered low by the IPCC. Projections of emission trends in the absence of additional climate policies suggest that with the current policies we may be more in line with the “optimistic scenario” in that chart.
I guess it’s based on RCP 8.5?
I though so, buy I don’t really know. It seems broadly consistent with that but it could be a projection from another source or just a naive extrapolation.
Most are missing a major forcing however. In 1900 Beavers were nearly extinct due to trapping and the fur trade. Since then the population has grown with a doubling time of ~10 years. In 2000 this was around 40 million beavers, projected to be ~160 million in 2020. Around 2050 the beaver population is projected to cross the 1 billion mark and reaching 64 billion by 2110.
As of 2000, the beavers were releasing ~350 billion g/yr (~ 400k tons) of methane into the atmosphere, also doubling every 10 years. This projects 1.6 million tons of CH4 by 2020, 12.4M by 2050, 100 M by 2080, and 800M by 2110.
Methane is an 80x stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so the beaver forcing should approach the human forcing in the tens of billions of CO2 tons around 2080.
This is the world our children’s children will have to address.
It’s even worse than that. As temperatures continue to warm, any lingering demand for beaver fur will vanish, leading to an even more amplified acceleration of the beaver population due to beaver feedback.
Nice joke!
(I’m happy they’re teaching logistic growth in schools nowadays.)
Unfortunately, it is no joke.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25515021/
Unless something is done, beavers will eventually melt the actic permafrost and release far more greenhouse gas than humans are capable of doing.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab80f1
I don’t understand, why doesn’t the beaver population cap out to where it was before their near-extinction? Have we introduced beavers to places they weren’t before as invasive species?
somebody –
> I don’t understand, why doesn’t the beaver population cap out to where it was before their near-extinction?
Can you just make that assumption? The environment has been altered since then. Perhaps the population of many predictors is lower or for other reasons they could find more or fewer suitable environments in which to live?
Beavers are being purposefully (re-)introduced to many areas. Humans have also greatly reduced the populations of many predators such as wolves. Their preferred foods are also common ornamental and fruiting plants that humans have planted everywhere.
Without predation or food shortages the population growth has no reason to slow down. The near extinction may also have selected for fertility and other traits that contribute.
You sound so serious but you really can’t be serious. I’m not sure what to believe here (about your state of belief, I mean).
Houseflies can multiply by about 100x per week. If we extrapolate then by the end of the year all of the biomass on earth will consist of houseflies. That is a much more immediate threat than beavers. Surely we should start working on this right now. Indeed, it may already be too late!
Wouldn’t we just reduce restrictions on beaver hunting/trapping and dam disturbances as their population grows? We already do this for deer when they cause problems. “If nothing is done” there’s a lot of money and meat to be made in the doing, no? Am I being trolled?
I don’t know where you got your numbers from but the best estimates I found with a quick search is about 15-20 million beavers currently. Historic population size estimates vary of course but are thought to be around some 400 million at the top end. No biological population grows exponentially forever, as you note in your comment food constraints will kick in and slow everything down. Predation and disease will also help brake the system but food and space limits are the biggies. There is arguably less habitat available now for beavers to expand into so there is little chance they will get back to historic levels of abundance, IMO. I think there are a lot of other methane sources that are a higher priority than beaver ponds.
Ok, so, first, it’s not about the number of beavers, it’s about the amount of surface turned into ponds through beaver dams. This is limited.
The number of beavers is limited as well.
Each ecosystem has a maximum capacity, so growth will not continue exponentially, as your original post assumes, but approach the capacity logistically (S-curve).
The way you’re extrapolating the data 100 years into the future is a joke; unscientific; and if serious, fearmongering.
For what it is worth, Levitt does talk about the global warming article. He recently discussed it with Attia on a podcast. https://peterattiamd.com/stevelevitt/
It starts at minute 18:45.
“In retrospect, I regret that we wrote about it in such a lighthearted way”
They discuss how some of their proposed solutions are now much more mainstream. So give the guy a (small) break! :)
Russell:
I listened to the interview. Levitt talks about mitigation efforts to cool the planet. Nowhere does he address the fact that he was promoting a ridiculous-even-at-the-time claim that were were heading for “about 30 years of global cooling.”
In this interview, Levitt does not address that he made errors. He writes: “In retrospect, I regret that we wrote about it in such a lighthearted way, I didn’t realize that environmentalists had no sense of humor.” He did not acknowledge or come to terms with his mistakes, which is too bad because admitting a mistake is the first step toward learning from it. Instead he created a defensive structure, a world in which the people who point out his mistakes are all haters and so he can just ignore the substance of the criticism. I can see why he might want to creating this world which allows him to avoid confronting his own mistakes, but it makes me sad. When you get something wrong, fix it. Who cares if the people who pointed out the error have a sense of humor??
I usually don’t psychoanalyze, but “You’re too sensitive, it was a joke” is a response characteristic of a narcissistic personality.
+1
Kyle:
Could be, but it’s been my impression from everything I’ve read and heard that Levitt is a pretty humble guy, that he sees himself not as a genius but more as a person who’s been in the right place in the right time. What I’m saying is, I don’t know that he sees these criticisms as about him; it seems more like he thinks that this kind of non-response to criticism is part of the rules of the game. I guess he’d be happier if academics just complimented each other and gave each other awards, in a manner reminiscent of that hypothetical island whose occupants make a living entirely by doing each others’ laundry.
Andrew –
> it seems more like he thinks that this kind of non-response to criticism is part of the rules of the game.
Huh?
Saying that the problem is that environmentalists can’t take a joke isn’t merely a non-response to criticism.
And hippie-punching is boring.
Nicely ironic:
From Urban Dictionary:
hippie punching
[…]
2. The practice common among establishment centrists of ritualistically denigrating progressives in order to win over imaginary swing voters and David Brooks…
I mostly stopped reading / listening to the Freakonomics guys several years ago, but I know enough of Levitt to have an informed judgment.
Actually let me start by speaking for myself: there’s a certain kind of earth-crunchy “trees have souls” environmentalist that drives me nuts. They have knee-jerk reactions to every damn thing, they don’t really know what they’re talking about factually but they have these strong beliefs about stuff…it’s very irritating. And I’m irritated even though I want to save the redwoods and the spottted owls and the monarch butterflies just like they do!
I think Levitt finds such people so irritating that it clouds his judgment. If one of these people say “black” he feels like the right answer must be “white”, or at worst “very light gray.” He wants them to be wrong so he thinks they are wrong. And if he gets a chance to ridicule them while he says they’re wrong, that’s even better.
I could be wrong, certainly, but that’s my impression.
Phil:
Could be, but that doesn’t explain why they didn’t acknowledge their errors in other, non-climate-related areas. As I wrote in some other comment, my best guess is that they consider public communication to be a strategic game. Not only are they behaving strategically (not acknowledging criticism because this could be perceived as a sign of weakness), they’re also assuming others are behaving strategically. Thus when climate experts point out errors in their work, they (the Freakonomics team) assume the climate experts doing this not in a sincere, we’d-like-to-help way, but as a strategic move to shoot down the Freaknomics brand. So they respond in kind using the crude tools they have available (labeling their critics as “shrill” people who have “no sense of humor”). And, again, they’ve had difficulty handling criticism in areas unrelated to climate.
They assume others are acting in bad faith, and then they don’t themselves intellectually engage with the criticism. I’ve seen this before in academia (and elsewhere), and I can’t stand it. It all just seems so unnecessary. What’s the point of being a tenured professor at the University of Chicago and then not intellectually engaging with criticism? I’m not saying these guys should be “on” all the time. Go relax, play golf, do a podcast, whatever. But at some point when they’re back in “Freakonomics” mode, why not engage? That’s the point, right?
Economists are trained to feel superior to almost all others, particularly do-gooders like environmentalists. They enjoy pointing out how naive and shallow thinking prevails – ignoring costs, failing to realize how imperfect government policies are, and most of all, failing to account for the importance of incentives. To some extent, there criticisms are fair, but for many economists it is a source of pride to dwell on them and dismiss concerns that sound idealistic (such as voluntary efforts to promote environmental quality, or failure to consider the costs of affirmative action policies, etc.). Freakonomics is simply well-packaged traditional economics thinking. As Andrew has said, it was creative and provoking, but I don’t think it was ever intended to deviate from that tradition. And many economists seem quite content to play this role that they were trained for.
To your point: in The Armchair Economist, Landsburg wrote that he’d be embarrassed of her daughter if she recycled.
If this were in the context that many recycling efforts are failing due to lack of a market for recycled materials, that would be fine. But as I recall it’s just that he’d be embarrassed if she did something that helped other people unless she got paid for it.
Is this actually the argument given, that helping others doesn’t have value? I am skeptical, especially since Googling shows an argument from the book that recycling may reduce the amount of forest (https://www.thegwpf.com/steven-landsburg-the-science-of-economics-vs-the-religion-of-ecology/). (Not that I’m endorsing that argument, but it’s at least not absurd.)
Raghu,
I’m not 100% sure. I first read the book about 25 years ago and skimmed through parts of it again about ten years ago, then got rid of it. So I can’t check. But I’m pretty sure Landsburg was not claiming that recycling is ineffective at reusing resources or at reducing mining or whatever; I think he really was saying (something like) the only reason anyone would ever do it is because they feel pressured into doing it, and his daughter ought to have more gumption than to cave in on something like that.
I loooove that excerpt that you posted, just so full of smug self-righteousness and ill will towards people he doesn’t like…it’s like a parody of something a certain type of economist would write, except that sort of economist actually did write it! I had completely forgotten about this passage and indeed had forgotten just how much disdain Landsburg has for environmentalists. I remembered he had some, but this seems so over-the-top.
The book predates the first known usage of the term “virtue signaling” but Landsburg is all-in with the idea that environmentalists don’t really care about solving environmental problems: “Suggesting an actual solution to an environmental problem is a poor way to impress an environmentalist, unless your solution happens to feed his sense of moral superiority.”
That cracks me up. I’m going to do a blog post about this excerpt, there are several things that I think are interesting about it (and several that are mockable, which is always fun too).
I suppose I need to mention that I quite liked “The Armchair Economist”, learned a lot from it (some things about economics, some things about how some economists think), and I recommend it to everyone…just as I’d recommend Freakonomics to everyone. I don’t think everything in it is right or even reasonable, but it’s still a really good book.
The “proper” economic analysis of voluntary recycling is that it is fine, provided that the person recycling gets value from the effort. The economic issue is whether such voluntary action is effective – it is classic economic reasoning that such voluntary actions are inferior in the face of flawed incentives (throwing away materials that could be recycled has no price attached to it). I have no arguments with either of those statements. But economists find satisfaction in expounding this logic and denigrating those that believe in voluntary efforts like that – thus, the “embarrassment” if one’s child were to do that. It is that attitude that I find repulsive.
Dale:
Remember, a quick rule of thumb is that when someone seems to be acting like a jerk, an economist will defend the behavior as being the essence of morality, but when someone seems to be doing something nice, an economist will raise the bar and argue that he’s not being nice at all.
The example in the above-linked post is worth looking at, just because it’s not a simple liberal/conservative issue; it’s more of a general pattern of coming up with reasons why behavior that appears self-interested is actually socially beneficial, and coming up with reasons why behavior that appears socially beneficial is actually bad for society.
Raghu –
You say:
> (Not that I’m endorsing that argument, but it’s at least not absurd.)
About an argument that includes this:
> This suggests that environmentalists — at least the ones I have met — have no real interest in maintaining the tree population. If they did, they would seriously inquire into the long-term effects of recycling. I suspect that they don’t want to do that because their real concern is with the ritual of recycling itself, not with its consequences.
Hmmmm. I wouldn’t necessarily first reach for “absurd” to describe that argument but it’s such a bad argument that absurd wouldn’t be an entirely wrong characterization, imo.
Even if we assume that the argument for recycling doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny, and that “environmentalists” (let’s look past the absurd notion that environmentalists are monolithic) would resist accepting purely rational arguments because of “motivating” biases, the notion that Landsburg can suss out what environmentalists really care about, let alone that he can determine that none of them really have any actual interest in maintaining tree populations, is well, pretty damn close to absurd.
I see that form of argument all over the place. “If you really cared about what you claim to care about, then you… [would agree with my opinion about what should be done].
That’s not a rational argument, imo. I see it all over the climate wars (particularly at places like the GWPF, which is essentially a right-wing thing tank). It relies on a specious premise that people can’t act in ways that are contradictory to their true feelings (whether because of ignorance or just “irrational” behaviors) – and that you can reverse engineer from anything they do that you don’t agree with to divine what their true beliefs are in contradiction to what they say their beliefs are.
Economists, if anyone, at this point should have a more sophisticated view of the “rational” actor. If they don’t, we’ll isn’t that kind of absurd?
Landsburg’s argument is an emotional, ideological antipathy wrapped up in a weak argument. Of course, that is a boringly normal behavior.
Joshua:
I agree. It seems odd to think that the purpose of recycling is “maintaining the tree population.”
Andrew –
> It seems odd to think that the purpose of recycling is “maintaining the tree population.”
What? You mean there might possibly be other rationale? You don’t say.
My favorite of this form of argument goes something like: “If you value the IPCC’s assessment of climate science you clearly don’t care about children starving in Africa.”
I went to the library today and checked out “The Armchair Economist” and read the few pages on recycling / environmentalism. The author’s arguments are poor and the tone is infuriating — disclaimer: I’m immensely fond of nature and spent other parts of today hiking — but he most certainly does not make the claim Phil attributes to him based on 25 year old memories.
Raghu
I’ve never read The Armchair Economist and I’m not about to buy it in order to check. You may be correct that Landsburg never wrote what Phil claimed he did. But I did find (by poking Google a bit) these excerpts from a letter Landsburg wrote to his daughter’s teacher: “We teach our daughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights….I am frankly a lot more worried about my daughter’s becoming an environmentalist than about her becoming a Christian.”
Not quite what Phil claimed, but it is coming close. And, as you say, the tone is infuriating.
I can see an argument that trying to “force her to recycle” is intruding on her rights. But it’s kinda crazy to say that trying to “convince her to recycle” is intruding on her rights! What about trying to convince someone -not- to recycle, would that also be an intrusion on their rights?
“He writes: “In retrospect, I regret that we wrote about it in such a lighthearted way, I didn’t realize that environmentalists had no sense of humor.””
Interesting he says “environmentalists” rather than atmospheric scientists and others involved in the relevant research. This comment in itself is another putdown of the climate science community.
While they might not have a well-developed since of humor, they did understand that the Freakonomics analysis of their field was a joke, though presumably unintentional …
Suppose I wrote a study comparing lung cancer risk in those who smoke one pack a day vs one pack and one cigarette a day, and concluded “quantity smoked has almost no detectable effect on lung cancer risk.”
replied in the wrong place
I haven’t bothered with Freakonomics since putting down their second book midway through. That said, I also lost a lot of respect for xkcd with that idiotic cartoon they did about free speech.
I reserve the hate that you have for Freakonomics for Gladwell for the same reasons that you hate Freakonomics more than Gladwell.
Not so interested in Freakonomics, am interested in the XKCD cartoon. I had seen something on the Exxon report a good while back but had forgotten about it. They knew, even back in 1982, and made a reasonably accurate forecast. Now compare with some of the many comments that have graced this blog on global warming and climate change – I am too old and too much of a gentleman to point out which ones.
Have you also seen the ProPublica story about how PR people for corporations funded the early recycling movement in the 1970s (including designing the triangle logo) specifically to deflect attention from corporations to individuals to deal with what was then called “pollution”? It’s amazing and free online I believe, and exactly what a “hippie” would have alleged at the time!
You do not mention Levitt and abortion/crime. That is where Levitt has bet his reputation. For background, see Legalized abortion and crime effect.
I don’t know whether Levitt is right or not, but it seems to me that there has been a lot of legitimate criticism of his position, and he has doubled down.
Roger:
Yeah, they’ve made a lot of questionable claims. Also there was the thing about child car seats, the thing about drunk walking, the hepatitis and missing girls, and lots more. Controversy is fine, the problem is, as you say, when they duck criticism instead of directly addressing it.
I look forward to this blog addressing the science-denying taboos enforced by the left regarding group differences and the inheritability of those differences. That would involve taking risks in today’s climate; prodding anodyne behavioral economists or outgroup climate change sceptics involves none.
Chrisare:
That’s an interesting comment, especially your word “outgroup,” which relates to this recent post. In particular, you might reflect upon your characterization of Steven Levitt, the Alvin H. Baum Professor at the University of Chicago, as part of the outgroup. Just to be clear, I recognize that I’m an insider too!
No effect is exactly zero and in principle I’m not just open to this sort of discussion, but interested in it. Unfortunately, in practice I am not. Most of the people who are most interested in discussing the magnitude of the effects seem to want them to be large and in a specific direction, often (it seems to me) to promote a reactionary socio-political stance. Some vocal and substantial fraction of these people are willing to distort or ignore facts or ideas that they don’t like. At the same time, most of the people who argue vociferously against discussing the magnitude of the effects want to promote a progressive socio-political stance. She vocal and substantial fraction of these people are willing to distort or ignore facts or ideas that they don’t like. Putting it all together, discussions of these issues turns into a shitshow (is that one word or two?).
This might be an issue that needs to wait a few hundred years or so before people can have honest discussions about it, as was the case with claims that Irish were naturally morally inferior. Hey, maybe people of Irish descent _do_ have genes that make them morally deficient, in any given environment. Or maybe they’re morally superior. Or maybe they’re morally inferior in some ways and morally inferior in others. Or maybe morally inferior in some environments and morally superior in others. No effect is identically zero and the answer has to be one of these. If you had tried to quantify these issues any time between 1000 years ago and 100 years ago in most of the English-speaking world, there would have been a large, vocal group of people (including some scientists) arguing that of course the Irish are inferior and it’s just a matter of how much. I don’t think there would have been much to gain by engaging in that discussion. But at this point I think if someone wanted to study the issue, passions have cooled enough to make that possible. Unfortunately, the same cooling of passions that makes it possible also makes it uninteresting or maybe even stupid-seeming to most people. Whereas I think it would be pretty interesting, if someone would do some good studies!
Anyway, I think I can guess why you (chrisare) are interested in having this discussion, and to the extent that I’m right, it makes me unwilling to get involved.
Related:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters
And
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/12/kathryn-paige-harden-psychologist-genetics-education-school
Not sure where else to post this, but you might like this
https://jamesjlee.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IQ_adoption_rv2_final.pdf
Given exactly one sentence in the methods section, as if it’s unimportant
I imagine the authors would say, isn’t that almost exactly what a convenience sample of undergrads is? So it’s “common in the literature”!
Presumably this is in response to the post on Marginal Revolution?
No, but I’ll check it out
How important is it? I imagine “driving distance” covers more than half of the state’s population and a larger share of adoptions. What else should they say about it?
Leaving the causal issues inherent to the adoptive study’s setting, suppose I wrote a study comparing lung cancer risk in those who smoke one pack a day vs one pack and one cigarette a day, and concluded “quantity smoked has almost no detectable effect on lung cancer risk.”
I don’t understand what you’re getting at; the problem doesn’t seem to be the geographical restriction?
The study aimed to analyse families with 1 biological and 1 adopted kid (or more) because you can co pare them with each other and with the parents; as controls, they also had families with 2 biological or 2 adopted kids (or more), which is reasonable, I think?
So it makes sense to exclude families with 1 kid or less, and if you want to compare the kids to each other, limiting the age difference seems a good idea as well, given that the educational environment can change over time.
How else should they have selected the participants, given this methododology, in your opinion?
You “smoking example” sounds like you expected them to include couples without kids?
No. The point of the smoking example is that going from one pack a day to one pack and one cigarette a day is a tiny fraction of the variation in smoking rates out there. Similarly, the range of parents likely to drive to the laboratory constitutes a minuscule fraction of the range of possible parental environments in the world. Homes that are geographically colocated are–get this–pretty similar.
Statistics is not magic. Whatever they compute will necessarily be restricted to the range of variation in parental environments in their sample. If you’re trying to measure the effect of, say, a European parenting style compared to an American one, you’re not going to magically detect it in a study without any Europeans. If you’re trying to measure the effect of a parent not being able to afford to feed their kid, you’re not going to find it if all the parents in your study can afford to feed their kid.
I expect universal conclusions about the nature of genetic and environmental influences to not be based on a sample from a handful of zip codes. The conclusion should be:
“In a sample of nearly identical adoptive parental environments, adoptive parental environment does not predict adult IQ.”
What should they have done? Well, first of all, random sampling from the population of interest is not some kind of elite statistical idea, that one is pretty obvious. Or else, they could also be honest about the implications of their limited sample; their discussion talks about power calculations and p-values but not a word about sampling bias. But yeah this is a hard problem regardless. On top of the general problem of assigning causal interpretations to R^2 statistics for LASSO regressions, which is pretty much meaningless but is also just about all we can do, the adoption process itself intrinsically presents a selection bias problem, even without the geographic restriction. I’m not going to propose that we randomly assign kids to alcoholic parents with a history of domestic abuse and no income in order to measure the effect of that environment on kids. However, even if they were doing the best anyone could possibly do on a hopelessly difficult problem doesn’t mean it’d be a success. The highest jumper in the world doesn’t get to claim they can fly just becauase they’re closer than everyone else. If the best study possible does not provide evidence about conclusions of interest, then don’t draw a conclusion. Conclusions like this
Simply do not follow from their methodology–either they don’t understand the fundamental mathematics of the computations they’re running, and are treating it like magic, or they’re intentionally glossing over it so they can publish a punchy result.
A pilot takes off with a nearly empty tank and of course the plane goes down. “Well there was no fuel, what would you have done to stay in the air?” I wouldn’t have flown the plane!
Nowhere does it say that the parents and not the researchers are doing the driving; the selection criteria do not include car ownership. “Adoptive and biological families were identified from adoption agencies and Minnesota birth records”.
“Eligible parents and sibling pairs from this sample began their third follow-up assessment in 2017 via phone interview and mailed or online survey.”
Lol how exactly is that relevant? Do you think that rescues the generalizability of this study? First of all, vagueness is a point against the study, not for it. Second, the best possible sampling design under this horrifically vague specification is still out of this world biased. Why are you so attached to defending this nonsense? They take a sample from a couple square miles and generalize to the world without a moment’s discussion! AT LEAST they could have specified what driving distance is!
The global warming article Freakonomics was playing off of was by Paul Hudson of the BBC. Among the experts quoted in the piece was “solar scientist” (more mundanely, weather forecaster) Piers Corbyn, brother of the former Labour Party leader. Piers, in addition to global warming denial, has a particular view of Covid vaccines. A more recent BBC headline:
Piers Corbyn arrested over vaccine ‘Auschwitz leaflet’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-55933373
Some years ago during a particularly warm and droughty summer, our 40-something plumber commented that it was the worst he’d ever seen around here.
During the same weather a day or two later, our 80-something yardman commented that ‘if this keeps up, it might get as bad as the 30s’. (It didn’t keep up.)
At the EPA site, once you get past its heatwave figure 1 (aka the plumber), there is the thumbnail figure 3 (the yardman).
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves#%20
Yes, lifetimes are different from heatwaves, but so too are perspectives. (I have a related query for the teaching modelers here, but that’s for another time.)