And it is hard to understand. People want straightforward measures. A similar example is voting: there is a great amount of math that has gone into getting a good voting system. There's plurality, approval, ranked pairs, minimax, runoff. Then there's ways to judge them: Coombs' method, Condorcet -- these things require a college-level math to understand. So it is not realistic to expect any large group to implement them. So it is with education. Nobody wants their salary determined by a computer ranking system they don't understand.
He claims that understanding different number bases is pointless
Hmm..... that's not *exactly* what he said. He said that teaching students how to convert bases is pointless. My gut reaction was "I do that all the time between binary, hex, and decimal!" But that doesn't mean it should be something we teach to every kid. There are ways to get the gist of mathematics without making them do rote tasks that they will never remember. I think we should teach stuff that sticks. I'm not sure of a field in mathematics that requires converting arbitrary bases. It is useful to understanding arithmetic encoding. I believe you would need to do it symbolically when integrating logarithms. But converting them by hand from arbitrary bases is tedious, and probably not helpful.
I vote for moving it to Chernobyl. Our homeowners association is fine with storing nuclear reactors in the back yard so long as the siding and paint match the rest of the neighborhood.
Well, you could start by making a nominal effort to show gweihir doesn't know what he/she is talking about.
That would make this really easy, but it isn't likely to happen for two reasons:
First: The burden of proof has to lie on the person making the claim. Otherwise, someone could post any random statement about a complex controversial topic. Does every assertion stand as true until proven otherwise? If it did, one troll could consume the resources of the entire scientific community!
(Actually, aliens caused the earthquake, and that the US government erected an invisible radiation forcefield around Fukushima to keep the radiation in.)
Second: Gweihir's post is abstract enough that it is tough to evaluate scientifically. He said:
"Tokyo becoming uninhabitable within a very short time is a real possibility. There is so much radiation in there, it is staggering... only the wind not blowing in the wrong direction could save most of Japans industrial base and a significant part of its population.
It creates a good scary image - fires that cannot be put out, wind carrying radiation and fire to destroy Tokyo. There's a reason this is used in lots of movies and anime -- it is compelling, and plays on our fears. But scientifically, I don't know how much radiation is "staggering." He was talking about spent fuel tanks, which certainly can't self combust in the presence of water. And even if they did, I'm not sure how that fire could carry hundreds of kilometers to Tokyo. It sounds implausible. I have read a lot about Fukushima and never heard anything near this magnitude. But ultimately, it would take a think tank to imagine such a scenario and see if it is plausible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." - Cosmos, Carl Sagan
An ICU ward is a room of patients in critical condition staffed by dedicated personnel who can quickly run to any patient when their monitoring equipment starts to sound a loud alarm.
Agreed. My point still stands. Those dedicated personnel can't do it all without a computer and a network. In some cases, it is even a WAN.
Yeah, my second example wasn't so great. But I didn't make this up.:-) Here is one example of I am referring to: Philips EICU
But there is a wonderfully effective way to use computers in education. You look at student's marks.
It's a trap! Actually, research is quite divided on how much teacher performance correlates to student grades. It's not simple at all! That is the kind of thing this web site is there for. To educate teachers about these kinds of tricky correlations.
At the very least, if one is to use student marks to evaluate a teacher, you must first control for other factors. Take your example: The 8th grade middle-school math teacher stunk. So the next year, the 9th grade high-school math teacher looks bad because 1/2 the class came from tat middle school.
Or another: A local disaster occurred in one of the districts that feeds the school. Many families are left homeless. Those students are mostly taking Mrs. Smith's Algebra class. Or perhaps students are moved into this district from the disaster district. The result is Mrs. Smith looks like a poor teacher.
It is actually possible to control for these factors, and some studies do that. That is how they create these lists of factors that impact student success. (Like this one, which doesn't jive with what I've been reading about, but at least it illustrates the point.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1201/ For those not sure why this is appropriate: the hypothetical teacher explains the rule, but not how to apply the rule or what use it is. We have all had professors like this. It is why teaching is a whole separate skill from the trade itself.
So what if you have to pay someone to get off his ass and check an inconvenient readout manually: at least that's a job created in an otherwise machine-driven economy.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.
As an example, take an ICU ward. There may more than a dozen of pieces of equipment connected to a patient. First problem: there is a lack of skilled people who can read those machines. You would essentially need a highly trained person sitting in the room with them staring at each one. According to a 2009 article there are 100,000 beds so that would be another 100,000 people. Considering the nursing shortage that seems impossible.
Next problem: Humans can't process the amount of information the computer can. The computer will be processing data from all those medical instruments in realtime, and it might make a split-second decision to notify a caregiver that something is wrong. Even a human in the room looking at all those readouts couldn't do what the computers can. Not that a human can watch all those dials and guages for an entire shift without zoning out now and then. If they were making rounds to the rooms, they might miss the critical moment and the patient could be dead before they get back to the room and see. Plus, there might be a machine running a blood culture that is 10 minutes walk away. They can't keep their eyes on that too.
Better to feed that data to a central point, and let the human monitor it from one central point. But that requires a network. Worse yet, perhaps the hospital is in a rural area and they may not have the personnel 24/7. So why not send the data to a more populated area 50 miles away, where there are enough people to monitor. But now we not only have a network, but we need a WAN.
This is the kind of problem hospital administrators have to face every day. There are lives on the line. Don't envy that position, and don't pretend that it is easy.
This thread exemplifies the entire radiation insanity fear very well. I hope every intelligent Slashdot reader is watching this. Because this is what it is like to discuss Fukushima or Global Warming amongst the public.
Just this week I sat across from a veteran software engineer who, in all seriousness, said "Fukushima will be uninhabitable for 6,000 years. Probably 60,000 years." He had no basis for such a claim. I assumed engineers would not make such statements without any knowledge, but apparently not. Radiation fear goes deeper than that. People don't even understand the basics of how radiation works. But this kind of insanity is so ingrained into peoples minds that it doesn't need a source. The two ingrained assumptions seem to be that "Any amount of radiation = deadly" and "All radiation lasts for thousands of years." It is just treated as common sense, and doesn't need any backing. Oh, the other one is that "if radiation contacts something, that thing because radioactive, and so on into perpituity." Beware of these assumptions when discussing anything involving radiation.
As this thread continues, notice that gweihir claims that there is no need to backup his claims "unless you are illiterate." Wow. Just. Wow. If I wasn't having to debunk this kind of thing every week, I would shake my head and move on thinking "Troll." But folks: this is your peers. Your fellow voters.
So many of these claims are like saying a firecracker exploded a mile away, and you got hit by the debris. People seem to have a common-sense understanding of everyday physics: fire, explosions, guns, maybe even chemicals. But nuclear radiation is just magical. It can do anything, over any distance, any time..
I really have to thank durrr for his comment about HystericGreenAlarmism.com. That is not that far from the truth. Let me show how this situation is worse than one might think.
Last week I had a relative link to an article at some site like nature news blog or something named like that, which made similar insane claims to what gweihir is claiming -- BUT WITH CITATIONS. That is where things become a real problem. There is so much false science out there, and it isn't easy to determine what is real and what isn't. The claims in the article were so egregious that anyone with familiarity with the subject would instantly know it was false. It was like my firecracker example. But not everyone has that background. A 5 minute search turned-up a Scientific American article that basically showed the study was intentionally faked. But the nature blog had several such ridiculous claims and I don't have time to debunk each and every one. Real information is harder to find than fake information.
Much of the high operating cost is probably related to the Tritium leaks and other maintenance problems. The legislature tried to force the plant to close but failed. Ultimately, this plant needed a lot of maintenance and it is probably a good sign that we are willing to close down leaky plants rather than just keep renewing their licenses and running them into perpetuity. One of the common complaints with nuclear plant politics is that they keep running them long after their usable lifetime, which is a pretty big environmental risk. It's just too bad that we aren't building a new one in its place.
Yet another "top 10" list. Can I get a list of the top 10 top 10 lists? Seriously, I'm tired of articles that amount to "someone's list of top 10 X will shock you!"
Why do they still not know if the spent fuel pools are leaking?
From the article:
"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.
1) It is trivial to determine if there is saltwater in a pool 2) People dive in those spent fuel pools to inspect the rods. So what do they mean by "you can't get close enough to the pools?" 3) When water leaks out of a container, you can detect the water level going down. Plus, it would increase the radiation that escapes the pools. 4) If there is a concern about spent fuel pools, move the spent fuel to another site!
Can someone explain what the article is trying to say?
This may sound stupidly, blindingly, mind-numbingly obvious, yet: Hang Glider pilots have a specific "hook check" procedure to prevent them from jumping off a cliff without their glider attached. When performing a complex operation, humans are very good at forgetting easy steps irrespective of importance. Most commonly, you are supposed to announce when you hook in, and one of your wire crew should tug on the primary and backup lines to make sure both are attached. Google for hang gliding hook check and you will find instances where people forget.
Pick up glider. Proper grip. Wings level. Wind is smooth. Wind speed good. Wait! Lemme go get my water bottle! Unhook. Fumble around for water bottle. "Hey Joe, Bob is on deck to launch next, are you ready?" "Be right there!" Come back. Pick up glider. Proper grip. Wings level. Wind is smooth...
I agree that it must be the paint chips then. I'm just not sure which of us is affected.:-) The author of that article is trying to explain why the lead-crime relationship is pretty much bunk. The stuff you quoted even says that, in a more nuanced way.
If we accept the 20% figure (crime that is lead related), which seems plausible, then this indicates a significant role for lead, but lead is certainly not the only important factor.
Is that plausible? Why do we think that 20% of crime is related to lead? The commentator bases that figure on an article that he quotes as saying:
“as much as 20%” of crime is “lead related.”
Wait! So not 20%... less than 20%. Then he goes on to say in his comments section:
I don’t know how reliable the 20% figure is... taking all this at face value.
So does this idea really have merit? Well, lets read the entire article. It explains how at first, the lead-crime figure was 90% (Mother Jones article) then it was revised to 50% (after criticism)... then it was <20% (the linked PDF). So really... for real... what percentage of crime is caused by lead?
ANSWER: We don't know!
The sensationalistic article that Slashdot linked to is trying to say: poor people commit crimes... and poor people have less healthcare access... so they are more likely to have lead poisoning... so therefore, lead poisoning must be the cause of their crimes. By juxtaposing that with the statement that the NRA is pro-lead, the submitter is implying that the NRA is evil. That is hyperbole, and editorializing, and it shouldn't be in the Slashdot summary. Lead in bullets is not part of the discussion about crime.
The first sentence of the article is preposterous:
When the US military tested PCP on volunteers in 1984, "some subjects became irritable, argumentative or negative under the conditions of social stress and demanding tasks." Now, a study published by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Vermont have found not-so-different results in children that do too much Dew.
So soda is just as bad as PCP? Certainly not. Such hyperbole is reason alone not to read any further.
I have an alternative theory: Parents who let their children drink soda have less self-control and discipline, and so do their children. Isn't that much more likely than the proposition that soda has the same side-effects as PCP? But that won't get hits.
Certainly it contributed. But it didn't cause it. Baseballs to the head contributed to 20th-centrury deaths. But we wouldn't say baseballs cause deaths. Don't lose site of the context: Lead bullets didn't cause an increase in crime rates. The article summary was implying that it did.
You need to read more than the first paragraph of the first Google hit. The vast majority of them point out why there is no correlation at all. That's why I only bothered to link to the Google search. After seeing the results it becomes obvious that this is an alarmist thing. There is no widespread lead poisoning. And since the discussion is about bullets, it's irrelevant anyway!
My point is merely that such grand oversimplifications of an unrelated issue are just trolling in the summary. Lead bullets don't cause crime.
...like the crime rates dropping in the decades following every ban of lead in consumer products and gasoline, it's then causation and correlation proving the point.
First of all, that's *exactly the flaw*. You can't prove anything via correlation. It's compelling, but it isn't proof. Furthermore, that isn't what they found! See the linked articles. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the individuals performing crimes had lead poisoning And there wasn't widespread lead poisoning to that degree. It just really didn't correlate.
I did. It sounds to me like you read summaries. But rather than reply here. look to my reply to the "group" (by replying to my own comment). In short: At best, the link is disproven. At worst: it is irrelevant to a discussion of lead in bullets.
Slashdot Mirror
And it is hard to understand. People want straightforward measures. A similar example is voting: there is a great amount of math that has gone into getting a good voting system. There's plurality, approval, ranked pairs, minimax, runoff. Then there's ways to judge them: Coombs' method, Condorcet -- these things require a college-level math to understand. So it is not realistic to expect any large group to implement them. So it is with education. Nobody wants their salary determined by a computer ranking system they don't understand.
He claims that understanding different number bases is pointless
Hmm..... that's not *exactly* what he said. He said that teaching students how to convert bases is pointless. My gut reaction was "I do that all the time between binary, hex, and decimal!" But that doesn't mean it should be something we teach to every kid. There are ways to get the gist of mathematics without making them do rote tasks that they will never remember. I think we should teach stuff that sticks. I'm not sure of a field in mathematics that requires converting arbitrary bases. It is useful to understanding arithmetic encoding. I believe you would need to do it symbolically when integrating logarithms. But converting them by hand from arbitrary bases is tedious, and probably not helpful.
I vote for moving it to Chernobyl. Our homeowners association is fine with storing nuclear reactors in the back yard so long as the siding and paint match the rest of the neighborhood.
I think there is reason to believe the reactor is leaking stuff into the groundwater.
Stupid question: Can the melted-down reactor be moved?
Well, you could start by making a nominal effort to show gweihir doesn't know what he/she is talking about.
That would make this really easy, but it isn't likely to happen for two reasons:
First: The burden of proof has to lie on the person making the claim. Otherwise, someone could post any random statement about a complex controversial topic. Does every assertion stand as true until proven otherwise? If it did, one troll could consume the resources of the entire scientific community!
(Actually, aliens caused the earthquake, and that the US government erected an invisible radiation forcefield around Fukushima to keep the radiation in.)
Second: Gweihir's post is abstract enough that it is tough to evaluate scientifically. He said:
"Tokyo becoming uninhabitable within a very short time is a real possibility. There is so much radiation in there, it is staggering... only the wind not blowing in the wrong direction could save most of Japans industrial base and a significant part of its population.
It creates a good scary image - fires that cannot be put out, wind carrying radiation and fire to destroy Tokyo. There's a reason this is used in lots of movies and anime -- it is compelling, and plays on our fears. But scientifically, I don't know how much radiation is "staggering." He was talking about spent fuel tanks, which certainly can't self combust in the presence of water. And even if they did, I'm not sure how that fire could carry hundreds of kilometers to Tokyo. It sounds implausible. I have read a lot about Fukushima and never heard anything near this magnitude. But ultimately, it would take a think tank to imagine such a scenario and see if it is plausible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." - Cosmos, Carl Sagan
An ICU ward is a room of patients in critical condition staffed by dedicated personnel who can quickly run to any patient when their monitoring equipment starts to sound a loud alarm.
Agreed. My point still stands. Those dedicated personnel can't do it all without a computer and a network. In some cases, it is even a WAN.
Yeah, my second example wasn't so great. But I didn't make this up. :-) Here is one example of I am referring to:
Philips EICU
But there is a wonderfully effective way to use computers in education. You look at student's marks.
It's a trap! Actually, research is quite divided on how much teacher performance correlates to student grades. It's not simple at all! That is the kind of thing this web site is there for. To educate teachers about these kinds of tricky correlations.
At the very least, if one is to use student marks to evaluate a teacher, you must first control for other factors. Take your example: The 8th grade middle-school math teacher stunk. So the next year, the 9th grade high-school math teacher looks bad because 1/2 the class came from tat middle school.
Or another: A local disaster occurred in one of the districts that feeds the school. Many families are left homeless. Those students are mostly taking Mrs. Smith's Algebra class. Or perhaps students are moved into this district from the disaster district. The result is Mrs. Smith looks like a poor teacher.
It is actually possible to control for these factors, and some studies do that. That is how they create these lists of factors that impact student success. (Like this one, which doesn't jive with what I've been reading about, but at least it illustrates the point.
Obligatory XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/1201/
For those not sure why this is appropriate: the hypothetical teacher explains the rule, but not how to apply the rule or what use it is. We have all had professors like this. It is why teaching is a whole separate skill from the trade itself.
Richard Feynman's story on textbooks was eye-opening: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
(Thanks BobTree)
So what if you have to pay someone to get off his ass and check an inconvenient readout manually: at least that's a job created in an otherwise machine-driven economy.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.
As an example, take an ICU ward. There may more than a dozen of pieces of equipment connected to a patient. First problem: there is a lack of skilled people who can read those machines. You would essentially need a highly trained person sitting in the room with them staring at each one. According to a 2009 article there are 100,000 beds so that would be another 100,000 people. Considering the nursing shortage that seems impossible.
Next problem: Humans can't process the amount of information the computer can. The computer will be processing data from all those medical instruments in realtime, and it might make a split-second decision to notify a caregiver that something is wrong. Even a human in the room looking at all those readouts couldn't do what the computers can. Not that a human can watch all those dials and guages for an entire shift without zoning out now and then. If they were making rounds to the rooms, they might miss the critical moment and the patient could be dead before they get back to the room and see. Plus, there might be a machine running a blood culture that is 10 minutes walk away. They can't keep their eyes on that too.
Better to feed that data to a central point, and let the human monitor it from one central point. But that requires a network. Worse yet, perhaps the hospital is in a rural area and they may not have the personnel 24/7. So why not send the data to a more populated area 50 miles away, where there are enough people to monitor. But now we not only have a network, but we need a WAN.
This is the kind of problem hospital administrators have to face every day. There are lives on the line. Don't envy that position, and don't pretend that it is easy.
This thread exemplifies the entire radiation insanity fear very well. I hope every intelligent Slashdot reader is watching this. Because this is what it is like to discuss Fukushima or Global Warming amongst the public.
Just this week I sat across from a veteran software engineer who, in all seriousness, said "Fukushima will be uninhabitable for 6,000 years. Probably 60,000 years." He had no basis for such a claim. I assumed engineers would not make such statements without any knowledge, but apparently not. Radiation fear goes deeper than that. People don't even understand the basics of how radiation works. But this kind of insanity is so ingrained into peoples minds that it doesn't need a source. The two ingrained assumptions seem to be that "Any amount of radiation = deadly" and "All radiation lasts for thousands of years." It is just treated as common sense, and doesn't need any backing. Oh, the other one is that "if radiation contacts something, that thing because radioactive, and so on into perpituity." Beware of these assumptions when discussing anything involving radiation.
As this thread continues, notice that gweihir claims that there is no need to backup his claims "unless you are illiterate." Wow. Just. Wow. If I wasn't having to debunk this kind of thing every week, I would shake my head and move on thinking "Troll." But folks: this is your peers. Your fellow voters.
So many of these claims are like saying a firecracker exploded a mile away, and you got hit by the debris. People seem to have a common-sense understanding of everyday physics: fire, explosions, guns, maybe even chemicals. But nuclear radiation is just magical. It can do anything, over any distance, any time..
I really have to thank durrr for his comment about HystericGreenAlarmism.com. That is not that far from the truth. Let me show how this situation is worse than one might think.
Last week I had a relative link to an article at some site like nature news blog or something named like that, which made similar insane claims to what gweihir is claiming -- BUT WITH CITATIONS. That is where things become a real problem. There is so much false science out there, and it isn't easy to determine what is real and what isn't. The claims in the article were so egregious that anyone with familiarity with the subject would instantly know it was false. It was like my firecracker example. But not everyone has that background. A 5 minute search turned-up a Scientific American article that basically showed the study was intentionally faked. But the nature blog had several such ridiculous claims and I don't have time to debunk each and every one. Real information is harder to find than fake information.
So what do we do about this?
Much of the high operating cost is probably related to the Tritium leaks and other maintenance problems. The legislature tried to force the plant to close but failed. Ultimately, this plant needed a lot of maintenance and it is probably a good sign that we are willing to close down leaky plants rather than just keep renewing their licenses and running them into perpetuity. One of the common complaints with nuclear plant politics is that they keep running them long after their usable lifetime, which is a pretty big environmental risk. It's just too bad that we aren't building a new one in its place.
Yet another "top 10" list. Can I get a list of the top 10 top 10 lists? Seriously, I'm tired of articles that amount to "someone's list of top 10 X will shock you!"
Ultimately, time will tell. It will be interesting to see a paper published on this in the future once they have the data to correlate.
Why do they still not know if the spent fuel pools are leaking?
From the article:
"There is absolutely no guarantee that there isn't a crack in the walls of the spent fuel pools. If salt water gets in, the steel bars would be corroded. It would basically explode the walls, and you cannot see that; you can't get close enough to the pools," he said.
1) It is trivial to determine if there is saltwater in a pool
2) People dive in those spent fuel pools to inspect the rods. So what do they mean by "you can't get close enough to the pools?"
3) When water leaks out of a container, you can detect the water level going down. Plus, it would increase the radiation that escapes the pools.
4) If there is a concern about spent fuel pools, move the spent fuel to another site!
Can someone explain what the article is trying to say?
This may sound stupidly, blindingly, mind-numbingly obvious, yet: Hang Glider pilots have a specific "hook check" procedure to prevent them from jumping off a cliff without their glider attached. When performing a complex operation, humans are very good at forgetting easy steps irrespective of importance. Most commonly, you are supposed to announce when you hook in, and one of your wire crew should tug on the primary and backup lines to make sure both are attached. Google for hang gliding hook check and you will find instances where people forget.
Pick up glider. Proper grip. Wings level. Wind is smooth. Wind speed good. Wait! Lemme go get my water bottle! Unhook. Fumble around for water bottle. "Hey Joe, Bob is on deck to launch next, are you ready?" "Be right there!" Come back. Pick up glider. Proper grip. Wings level. Wind is smooth...
I agree that it must be the paint chips then. I'm just not sure which of us is affected. :-) The author of that article is trying to explain why the lead-crime relationship is pretty much bunk. The stuff you quoted even says that, in a more nuanced way.
NOTE: I found the article you referred to here: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/lead-and-crime/. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the article they used as a reference: http://hsb.sagepub.com/content/45/2/214.full.pdf Maybe I'll pay the $32 for it just so I can put this to bed.
If we accept the 20% figure (crime that is lead related), which seems plausible, then this indicates a significant role for lead, but lead is certainly not the only important factor.
Is that plausible? Why do we think that 20% of crime is related to lead? The commentator bases that figure on an article that he quotes as saying:
“as much as 20%” of crime is “lead related.”
Wait! So not 20%... less than 20%. Then he goes on to say in his comments section:
I don’t know how reliable the 20% figure is... taking all this at face value.
So does this idea really have merit? Well, lets read the entire article. It explains how at first, the lead-crime figure was 90% (Mother Jones article) then it was revised to 50% (after criticism)... then it was <20% (the linked PDF). So really... for real... what percentage of crime is caused by lead?
ANSWER: We don't know!
The sensationalistic article that Slashdot linked to is trying to say: poor people commit crimes... and poor people have less healthcare access... so they are more likely to have lead poisoning... so therefore, lead poisoning must be the cause of their crimes. By juxtaposing that with the statement that the NRA is pro-lead, the submitter is implying that the NRA is evil. That is hyperbole, and editorializing, and it shouldn't be in the Slashdot summary. Lead in bullets is not part of the discussion about crime.
Teaching someone how to beat a polygraph is not a crime.
The first sentence of the article is preposterous:
When the US military tested PCP on volunteers in 1984, "some subjects became irritable, argumentative or negative under the conditions of social stress and demanding tasks." Now, a study published by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Vermont have found not-so-different results in children that do too much Dew.
So soda is just as bad as PCP? Certainly not. Such hyperbole is reason alone not to read any further.
I have an alternative theory: Parents who let their children drink soda have less self-control and discipline, and so do their children. Isn't that much more likely than the proposition that soda has the same side-effects as PCP? But that won't get hits.
Certainly it contributed. But it didn't cause it. Baseballs to the head contributed to 20th-centrury deaths. But we wouldn't say baseballs cause deaths. Don't lose site of the context: Lead bullets didn't cause an increase in crime rates. The article summary was implying that it did.
A few shots from retards firing firearms isn't going to make much difference
I'm glad we agree. The article summary was implying that bullets caused lead poisoning which caused crime.
You need to read more than the first paragraph of the first Google hit. The vast majority of them point out why there is no correlation at all. That's why I only bothered to link to the Google search. After seeing the results it becomes obvious that this is an alarmist thing. There is no widespread lead poisoning. And since the discussion is about bullets, it's irrelevant anyway!
My point is merely that such grand oversimplifications of an unrelated issue are just trolling in the summary. Lead bullets don't cause crime.
...like the crime rates dropping in the decades following every ban of lead in consumer products and gasoline, it's then causation and correlation proving the point.
First of all, that's *exactly the flaw*. You can't prove anything via correlation. It's compelling, but it isn't proof. Furthermore, that isn't what they found! See the linked articles. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the individuals performing crimes had lead poisoning And there wasn't widespread lead poisoning to that degree. It just really didn't correlate.
I did. It sounds to me like you read summaries. But rather than reply here. look to my reply to the "group" (by replying to my own comment). In short: At best, the link is disproven. At worst: it is irrelevant to a discussion of lead in bullets.
NOW, extend that to lead poisoning the entire population.
1) The entire population doesn't have lead poisoning.
2) The research showed that when lead poisoning rates decreased, crime didn't decrease.