Autism Cases Track Organic Food Sales
Monday, May 23, 2022
But, as scientists know, correlation does not imply causation.
Over at the Genetic Literacy Project, Arvind Suresh debunks the idea that the increase in autism cases over the past couple of decades might be due to vaccines, or GMOs paired with glyphosate. In fact, he argues that there is a solid explanation for the increase.
But before getting to that explanation, Suresh recaps the sordid beginnings of such scares in the case of research fraud that kicked off the original vaccine scare, and briefly addresses the more recent claims about GMOs-glyphosate.
The latter he does in part by pointing out the absurdity of cherry-picking data, finding spurious correlations, and running with them. The title of this post comes from my favorite of the graphs he generated or found, which shows a correlation between organic food sales and cases of autism diagnosed between between 1998 and 2008 with a p-value of 0.9971.
Once the debunkery is over comes what may prove anti-climactic for the reader: The real explanation is that the increase is a statistical artifact. Suresh a quotes a 2015 story from Forbes on this:
Suresh notes that these criteria changed "in every country that has seen soaring autism rates."In Denmark in particular, the diagnostic criteria for autism expanded in 1994 to include a spectrum of disorders with a broader list of symptoms, thereby widening the definition of autism. Then in 1995, national data tracking began to include diagnoses made from outpatient patient visits rather than just diagnoses of those admitted to a healthcare facility.
Organic food is a rip-off, but it does not cause autism. (Image by Kenny Eliason, via Unsplash, license.)
...
Changes in reporting practices can account for most (60 percent) of the increase in the observed prevalence of ASDs [Autism Spectrum Disorders --ed] in children born from 1980 through 1991 in Denmark. Hence, the study supports the argument that the apparent increase in ASDs in recent years is in large part attributable to changes in reporting practices.
I seem to recall hearing about this at some point, but the fact that there are evidently many people who go on pushing the vaccine and glyphosate narratives makes me appreciate what the good folks at the Genetic Literacy Project are doing.
There are doubtless plenty of people out there who lack strong scientific backgrounds, have been conditioned by our dominant culture to fear technology and corporations, and are also swamped by bad information. Nevertheless, they can be reached with good data, sound reasoning against crackpot theories, and solid, more scientific thinking.
-- CAV
Updates
Today: (1) Changed rates to cases in title. (2) Fixed some grammatical errors in the last paragraph.
2 comments:
Yo, Gus, a major takeaway from this is that when you have a sudden, major change, the first step is probably always to check "all else being equal"--or, more generally, what else is equal. In the sciences, of course, this is the sort of thing you're trained to check automatically, and the same in the social sciences, history, and so on. (Hence the utter amateurishness of someone saying that inequality of incomes by definition means racism or whatnot. I learned about the fallacy of composition when I was 13 or so; those people are that dumb in their supposed adulthood with PhDs that they would dismiss the fallacy of composition as racist.)
I was thinking about that more generally recently, the habits of mind you acquire when doing experimental science, or history, or the social sciences, methodological rules of thumb in data analysis, when I was reading a COVID vax-naysayer claiming to be an Objectivist. He also went on a sudden tear a year or two ago when he ran across fringe YouTubers looking at data on a global earthquake information board--the epicenters in one place (Canary Islands) were all on a grid! It was clearly manmade, and the only question was whether it was something positive like fracking experiments or something wicked by the CIA in its globalist endeavors to reduce us all to slavery to NATO-Davos Nazis. (Yeah, they guy's also a Trump-licker who seems to have become the receptacle of Murray Rothbard's soul escaping from the hell dimension it should have stayed in.) Someone replied, "You know, you should just check the data source; they don't report as many significant places as other groups do." Obvious, right? Certainly it was my first thought. The guy replied, "The grid pattern doesn't exist. Yeah, right. Blah blah blah. The 'superior ones' keep getting busted over and over in all kinds of areas and it never ends."
This is an entirely representative specimen of his glorying in his lack of scientific training, like a brain-dead creationist. He makes the same response throughout his postings to anyone who adduces ANYTHING he doesn't know--he insults them as pointy-headed Poindexters trying to make him feel stupid because, well, like it or not, he's stupid: Dumb as rocks and, what is immoral, refusing to learn anything and dismissing anything he doesn't immediately understand as lies. Someone like that is self-immunized against reason, and the immediate problem is that he advertises himself as an Objectivist.
The Davos comment reminds me of some rubbish about election results I read this morning. It was from something like Red State, and it described some candidate as "the real conservative" because, among other things, she was a protectionist.
Great.
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