Transport noise linked to increased risk of dementia, study finds

Huh. Of course. Hoarding the attention budget. Great framing, thanks.

If the assumption is that people in the same building have the same exposure to pollution but differential exposure to noise based on distance, I would prefer that it were tested. I am sceptical that this is the case, as I would expect folk on the road facing side to be exposed to more particulates and pollution and noise.

Epidemiological studies in general are flawed and hard to trust due to omitted variables that you don't know about, p-hacking and publication bias making it difficult or impossible to interpret causality. You say "of course" as if it's a foregone conclusion that the results should be trusted and the authors have done a good job, when the default should be disbelief and scepticism in this particular approach unless shown otherwise with unusually strong results. I only have a positive reaction and belief by default in large scale RCTs. Epidemiological studies have not earned the benefit of the doubt. At best they are indications of future experimental research directions, i.e. they are a means to an end.

I've worked in academic applied statistics research and seen how the cookie crumbles, it's not pretty, and yes there are groups and industries of people who may be individually intelligent but nevertheless act like idiots given the incentives they face to churn out low-effort publications. Search for "hegemony" or "Fuzzy neural net Dow Jones" in Google Scholar to see 140 IQ people mass produce drivel. Just because I am not trained in medicine doesn't mean I am not allowed to draw this conclusion, I have years of experience in statistics and know a bullshit application of these tools when I see it, and I don't appreciate appeals to authority or other arguments that try to invalidly shut down people's opinions without knowing why those opinions were formed in the first place.

Ideally construction noises are temporary though :)

Are these household VOCs actually harmful, though? I get that VOCs from car exhaust or a factory are terrible, but is it true also for cooking bacon?

It seems I was wrong and the phenomenon does really exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_madness

> Some settlers specifically spoke of the wind that rushed through the prairie, which was loud, forceful, and alien compared to what settlers had experienced in their former lives.

https://core.tdar.org/document/441632/the-wind-cries-mary-th...

> A number of conditions such as acute hyperacusis can cause increased sensitivity to environmental sounds. These conditions can result from high stress and have been known to cause behavior consistent with descriptions of prairie madness such as depression, insomnia, and violent behavior.

I also found this interesting case report:

https://casereports.bmj.com/content/2012/bcr-2012-006300.sho...

> Wind direction appeared to be related to the patient's energy levels; these were significantly lower when the wind blew from the southeast. This effect could not be explained by other weather parameters. Decreases in energy in turn predicted increases in anxiety. The reverse effect was observed as well, with increases in anxiety predicting decreases in energy, indicating a positive feedback loop.

It seems plausible that wind from a specific direction through and across certain building structures could produce sound that is causing these variances.

Mythbusters assemble!

Hmm. Actually, ”le vent des fous” seems to be referring to a wind from the south, supposedly bringing in heat and humidity from the Mediterranean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence,_Drôme#Climate

> Valence enjoys a humid subtropical climate, whose main characteristic is an almost constant wind …. When it comes from the south, it usually announces the arrival of stormy disturbances. It is then called le vent du midi ou le vent des fous [the midi wind or the uncaring wind] because, for some people, it makes the atmosphere painful to bear, especially in the summer.

If you aren't astonished, you're not paying attention. This study was conducted over six years, on two independent cohorts, involving tens of thousands of patients.

A moment's consideration shows why an RCT to check tobacco smoke and lung cancer was impossible. We are nonetheless 100% confident, in the entire absence of an RCT, that smoking does directly cause lung cancer. The sort of fetishism you promote is exactly what delayed institutional recognition of the fact, by decades.

Ask any professional statistician about failure modes of RCTs. Be prepared to listen for a long time. Instead of worshipping blindly at the altar of RCTs, we should pay attention to what actual statisticians have to say about actual results.

Judea Pearl, in a recent book, "The Book of Why", provides a readable, in-depth exploration of statisticians' fundamental relationship with causuality, and the historical development of statisticians' decades-long loss of their ability to form conclusions from observational data, and their recent recovery. We are all healthier now that we know how and when we may confidently act on results of observational studies, without fetishism.

> The worst offenders by far were motorcycles and cars which had aftermarket exhausts designed to be noisy.

You aren't wrong.

The drivetrain in a Tesla has not-negligible weight. Few could lift it. Not I.