Moderate 3ea

>>3e8 They found a correlation not causation, but which the author themselves admit at the end. CO2 emissions increase in the 20th century was positively correlated to crime in the UK. Am I supposed to conclude CO2 in the air causes crime? It was later found that it was because of tetraethyl lead, which was added to petrol to mitigate bumping. When cars burnt leaded petrol, lead oxide particles were released into the air in urban areas and respirated by people, causing cognitive decline and the lowering of IQs which made people more violent and the positive correlation was due to CO2 emissions being also covariant with lead emissions upto the 90s. Most countries banned leaded fuel after the study was published,with Bangladesh officially doing so in 1998 although there is a good chance people still use leaded petrol here.Either ways almost all the countries experienced a drop in crime rates from the 90's onwards due to the ban on leaded petrol. The regression of gray matter could be due to almost any other factor covariant with porn consumption. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/CO2-emissions https://journals.openedition.org/chs/989 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Recorded-crime-in-England-and-Wales-1900-to-2015_fig1_333637536 Needleman et al. (1979) Lanphear et al. (2005) And this is just one issue with the paper. You aren't considering that a correlation can be interpreted the other way around as well, Gray Matter regression-> increased porn consumption.They also don't elaborate on the sample they are measuring the change in gray matter volume against. The sample size was only 64 men, their porn consumption hours were self reported and has self report bias. The readings were only taken one time and lack temporal ordering. The graph they show is extremely noisy, likely due to MRI voxel data being very noisy themselves, so this can lead to overfitting and false positives.