Having a mother who lived within 1,000 feet of a freeway while pregnant doubles a child's odds of having autism [1].
Basically, white noise can cause autism. People are screwing up their kids at an exponential rate [2].
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210609042055/https://www.latim...
[1]: https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20101217/fast-lane-t...
[2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=childre...
It seemed to me nearly all of it was correlative. Which is fine, as it may be true.
But very few corrected for the fact freeways often run through the worst areas in town, which could mean nutrition, drugs, alcohol, lead paint, asbestos, heck about anything else bad about living in older, run down areas.
I was a strange child that could only sleep if mother turned on a hair dryer next to me some nights. This is materially different from highways - I briefly got to experience what it was like living next to a noisy road and I would argue it would be more likely that it is the role of noisy cars, screeching tires, horns, and pollution that is at play in these studies, not the white noise of highways. Would children that lived in windy forests with no sound isolation having to listen to the noise of the trees fare the same?
Most autistic people are sensitive to stimuli - sensitivity being nearly completely genetic determined and little to do with environment. I wonder if it this greater sensitivity being triggered by highways and disturbs sleep that impairs brain development.
Also, I'd say that modern children programming that's optimized for grabbing as much attention as possible isn't exactly autism friendly; I find older cartoons with their slower pacing much more comfortable to watch.
"White noise causes autism" is a pretty weird conclusion to get from all of that and would require extraordinary evidence to support it.
As far as I can tell the paper is nothing but honest truth seeking, you know a study doesn't equal truth, the article itself doesn't say it is a confirmed hypothesis. And while correlation doesn't mean causation, when you see a correlation, the first thing you do is you investigate if it is a causation too. The most logical thing to do and thanks God smart people did that with lead and many other toxic chemicals that affected society in the past.
Conclusion: the standard for evidence in economics is much lower than the standard of evidence in medicine or sociology.
Perhaps not consciously, but I take NBER research on causes of autism as seriously as NIH research on causes of recessions.
This is the kind of "research" that leads to CNN headlines like "TV is turning your child autistic!", and other such scare stories for frightened and confused parents that lead to more bullshit salves and treatments that only harm autistics even more (as if we're not getting shit on enough already).
And if it's not intended as a joke, that's even worse.
[0]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989648
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/articlepdf/3...
They're assuming a lot of things here:
* Rain means children watch televsion, no rain means they do not. This is a harsh oversimplification of how parents work.
* Cable TV was correlated to increased autism diagnosis. But what else is correlated to Cable TV? Wealth. And what's correlated to wealth? Getting your kid diagnosed properly in the country where healthcare is not easily affordable maybe? If you think that's a stretch, well, the entire paper is argued on this sort of thin ice.
* Autism isn't generally considered to have "a trigger", but some circumstances like stress can make it more obvious how a someone with autism is different. Autism is one of these things that aren't objectively measured, but often are diagnosed as a result of how annoyed parents are.
Growing up in part of the California Central Valley where it is intolerably hot outside for a large portion of the year and has near-desert levels of precipitation, and then moving to the Bay Area which has more precipitation and less intolerable heat, I found the reverse to be the case, which given where the research was conducted...
> If that is the case, then a finding that areas with higher levels of precipitation have higher autism rates would be strongly suggestive of a role for television watching as an autism trigger,
“Strongly suggestive” ludicrously overstates the case.
I mean, there's a lot of things more strongly associated with precipitation than television watching.
Edit: Add;
White Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise
Pink Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise
Red (Brownian) Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise
Purple Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_noise
Grey Noise : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_noise
This is the same kind of thoughtful question as "why are there so many more left-handed/gay/trans people than x years ago" - because social factors have changed visibility of these traits, not because they didn't exist.
