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TimS comments on Long-chain correlation: lead paint and crime - Less Wrong
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Comments (21)
Does having a good grip on the causal mechanism help increase our confidence in the result?
It's pretty clear that lead causes cognitive damage. Cognitive damage in children (especially high functioning with emotion control issues) seems like a plausible cause of crime when the children grow up.
That doesn't tell us the magnitude of the change, but does tell us what direction to expect the effect to be.
Pinker isn't arguing that lead and crime have no association, but rather that the crime decline isn't substantially caused by environmental lead contamination.
Not quite - he's arguing that this is not good evidence that the crime decline is substantially caused by environmental lead contamination. He says a few times it's an interesting and plausible hypothesis, he's stressing that this doesn't constitute good evidence for it. The text is an essay on reasoning, not an essay on lead and crime.
And its worth noting the cohort studies Pinker suggests need to be done HAVE in fact been done- and while not a slam-dunk case, are largely supportive of the hypothesis (at least if Drum's article is to be believed, I haven't yet dipped into the research papers)