[homulilly]

Or, like, reduce air pollution since in addition to this possibility it's already known to cause asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease.

[barney54]

This is not true of asthma. Outdoor air quality in the United States has improved over time [1] and asthma rates has increased.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/air-trends

[dtwest]

Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor symptoms I had.

So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a thought.

[icandoit]

The guys say that death by asthma (severe cases certainly) are gently falling, but it looks pretty flat to me.

https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...

Do you have any intuition for how to identify an increased willingness to over-diagnose? It may be true, but how do we test this hypothesis?

[elhudy]

Auto immune diseases as a whole have increased over just the past 30 years; I'd speculate asthma is a part of this.

It will be interesting to see the driving environmental causalities behind these autoimmune disease increases if pollution is not a key variable.

[blaser-waffle]

The immune system is a use-it-or-lose-it thing. Lots of healthy bodies mean the immune system has to go after something...

[elhudy]

yeah, like in my case... rolls dice....eggs

[cookingrobot]

Is that true? Would frequent vaccines help give the immune system something to do?

[Omnitaus]

Outdoor air quality isn't the only factor in developing asthma

[vanderZwan]

This kind of gets into philosophical questions about what could still be considered a causal link. If the increased chance of depression is caused by significant reduction in quality of life which is caused by pollution, do we still say air pollution has a causal link with depression? I'm leaning towards yes because removing the air pollution will through multiple steps reduce depression/suicide in that case.

[frank2]

About 20 years ago our society gained a deep understanding of the notion of causality. (To learn more, search the web for "Judea Pearl".) According to the terminology standardized at that time, yes, if adding particulate pollution to the air makes it more likely that a person breathing that air is depressed, then that is a casual link or a cause-and-effect relationship. It might be the case however that polluting the air reduces the person's quality of life and that if it were possible to effect an identical reduction of quality of life without polluting the air, then polluting the air would have no further effect on the likelihood of depression. if that is the case, we say that quality of life "screens off" the effect of air pollution on depression.

[icandoit]

I feel that mere causation is sufficient to promote action. Waiting for causation feels like rationalizing laziness.

People don't wait to determine whether school district performance is caused by the staff or the selection effect of eager parents, they just move to good school districts.

Chase those good effects AND attempt to understand them. Understanding the mechanism is not necessary to select for good results.

(All ethics is utilitarian in effect. Kantians stop pretending.)