
Feminine-named hurricanes are deadlier than masculine-named hurricanes - lukashed
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1402786111
======
tekp2
A bit more context from Ed Yong:

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-
have-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-female-
hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones/)

~~~
cwyers
The money quote:

"But Lazo thinks that neither the archival analysis nor the psychological
experiments support the team’s conclusions. For a start, they analysed
hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They
only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters
because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time.
'It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because
more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male
names,' says Lazo.

Jung’s team tried to address this problem by separately analysing the data for
hurricanes before and after 1979. They claim that the findings 'directionally
replicated those in the full dataset' but that’s a bit of a fudge. The fact is
they couldn’t find a significant link between the femininity of a hurricane’s
name and the damage it caused for either the pre-1979 set or the post-1979 one
(and a 'marginally significant interaction' of p=0.073 doesn’t really count).
The team argues that splitting the data meant there weren’t enough hurricanes
in each subset to provide enough statistical power. But that only means we
can’t rule out a connection between gender and damage; we can’t soundly
confirm one either."

~~~
ghaff
And BTW they just excluded Katrina as an outlier. While not necessarily a
totally unwarranted decision, it makes already marginal conclusions that much
more so.

~~~
jaredsohn
Isn't this conclusion more significant because Katrina is excluded?

Edit: I meant the layman's sense of "significant" here. I just don't see how
excluding Katrina "makes already marginal conclusions that much more so". I
read your "but" statement as just saying that they haven't necessarily proven
causality, but I don't see what that has to do with my statement.

~~~
cwyers
Well, the word "significant" is a loaded one in this discussion -- in this
context, it typically means "statistically significant," which has a very
narrow (and sometimes questionable[1]) meaning.

You're right that leaving Katrina in the dataset (assuming the same techniques
were used -- there are other ways to deal with outliers other than dropping
them) would bias the result further towards indicating that female-named
hurricanes are more dangerous. But the persistence of a significant finding in
that regard in the absence of that data point does not prove a causal link,
much less the specific one the author suggests.

[1] For some criticisms of how statistical significance is currently being
used, read this:
[http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf](http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf)

------
fixermark
This is an excellent example of reasoning that Dawkins refers to as 'PETWAC'
(Population of Events That Would happen to Appear Coincidental).

Consider three possible scenarios: 1) female hurricanes, as a set, are
deadlier than male hurricanes 2) male hurricanes, as a set, are deadlier than
female hurricanes 3) neither male nor female hurricanes are deadlier

Surprisingly, if you assume a uniform distribution of deadliness independent
of the names, you actually find that it's more likely that either 1 or 2 is
true than that 3 is true; 3 being true would require that an arbitrary
partitioning of the hurricanes would have resulted in equal deadliness, but if
the partition is arbitrary, it's more likely that it creates two unequal
groups. However, a quick appeal to symmetry shows that either 1 or 2 being
true are equally newsworthy.

It's like the news getting excited that a coin-toss was heads... "Wow, look at
how heads that coin toss was!"... When in reality, the odds of heads OR tails
were exceptionally high and the newsworthy item would be the coin landing on
edge.

~~~
jjoonathan
Given that this was published in PNAS and edited by someone from Princeton,
it's safe to assume (unfortunately it's paywalled so I can only assume) that
the authors know how to perform a significance test.

~~~
Anderkent
[http://xkcd.com/882/](http://xkcd.com/882/)

~~~
jjoonathan
Exactly. What's at play is a combination of publication bias and (possibly) a
slightly-too-narrow null hypothesis. This kind of silliness can squeeze
through without any need for the null hypothesis to be entirely absent, which
is the aspect of fixermark's post that I object to. I'd bet good money at 5:1
odds that the null hypothesis the paper used was more sophisticated than his
uniform distribution let alone the delta distribution he accuses them of
using.

~~~
ronaldx
You may have missed that the result is _not_ significant, despite the
headline, when considering the real data.

Only laboratory questioning showed a significant psychological bias (and there
an unnamed hurricane was rated less risky than either).

~~~
jjoonathan
> We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that
> feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths

What am I missing?

~~~
6d0debc071
From post down the page by tekp2 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836326)

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-
have-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-female-
hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones/)

 _" But Lazo thinks that neither the archival analysis nor the psychological
experiments support the team’s conclusions. For a start, they analysed
hurricane data from 1950, but hurricanes all had female names at first. They
only started getting male names on alternate years in 1979. This matters
because hurricanes have also, on average, been getting less deadly over time.
“It could be that more people die in female-named hurricanes, simply because
more people died in hurricanes on average before they started getting male
names,” says Lazo.

Jung’s team tried to address this problem by separately analysing the data for
hurricanes before and after 1979. They claim that the findings “directionally
replicated those in the full dataset” but that’s a bit of a fudge. The fact is
they couldn’t find a significant link between the femininity of a hurricane’s
name and the damage it caused for either the pre-1979 set or the post-1979 one
(and a “marginally significant interaction” of p=0.073 doesn’t really count
[this is a link in the actual article -
[http://mchankins.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/still-not-
signific...](http://mchankins.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/still-not-
significant-2/) ]). The team argues that splitting the data meant there
weren’t enough hurricanes in each subset to provide enough statistical power.
But that only means we can’t rule out a connection between gender and damage;
we can’t soundly confirm one either."_

------
ronaldx
I can't see the full-text to check the stats, but I'd wager this claim is
heavily dependent on single point Fifi: a category 2 hurricane that was
amongst the deadliest.

 _Edit:_ Ah, in fact, there is no significant result that corresponds to the
title at all. Statistically, they have no right to claim the headline is true.
Pure link-bait :/

------
kaybe
There is more such as the raw data under supplemental information:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/30/1402786111.DCSupplemental)

------
scythe
Can this effect be reasonably prevented? See
[http://xkcd.com/915/](http://xkcd.com/915/) : some hurricane names will
always be more threatening than other hurricane names, and will induce
consequently more preparation. But the only thing to which people compare the
names of hurricanes is _the names of other hurricanes_ (and maybe other named
storms), so there must always be a least threatening hurricane name, etc. Even
if we took the "nuclear" route and named hurricanes after, for example,
historical tyrants (Hurricane Genghis, Hurricane Adolf, etc) this could happen
nonetheless.

~~~
jessaustin
This seems to suggest that hurricanes should not be named in advance. If all
we know is that a hurricane of a particular strength will hit tomorrow, we
won't hang around due to gender prejudice. Then when we find out next week
that the hurricane is named Daenerys we'll realize we shouldn't have worried
about it.

~~~
baddox
It's possible that not giving hurricanes easily-recognizable names would cause
even less preparedness and risk estimation.

------
Jun8
I call BS on this one. First, the implicit assumption seems to be that
hurricanes have approximately the same strength and it's people's expectations
that is the dominant factor in the death tool, i.e. (from the paper's
abstract): "Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause
significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived
risk and consequently less preparedness." Now I'm no meteorologist, but it
seems like this may or may not be true. Since the male and female names
alternate this may be pointing to an underlying mechanism that modulates the
strength of consecutive storms' strength.

Second, up to 1978 hurricanes were given only female names
([http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml](http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_history.shtml)).
Where does that leave this theory?

~~~
sp332
The study included some questions where participants rated the perceived
danger from some made-up storm names. People said they expected less danger
from a given storm description if it had a more feminine name.

~~~
pekk
Which really shows nothing, or perhaps that participants accurately inferred
what the questioner wanted to hear or what they were supposed to say.

There's a reason they didn't lead with THAT headline, but rather the
inflammatory and bogus one.

------
mcv
If I understand this correctly, hurricanes should be named with the most
threatening names possible. So no more Sandy or even Edward, but Cerberus,
Smaug, and Grendel.

------
mitosis
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. -- Kipling

~~~
sjclemmy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wIvsZBFhQ)

------
javert
So we should just always give them male names. But we can't because whoever
makes such decisions will bow to the pressure of feminism.

~~~
qq66
You do realize that feminists are the ones who lobbied to go from all female
names to half male, right? Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate,
they saved lives.

~~~
baddox
> Meaning that if this dubious research is accurate, they saved lives.

That doesn't necessarily follow. It could be that people have on average a
fixed amount of "preparedness" per unit time that they will spend on various
events as they see fit. Switching from all female names to half female half
male might have simply caused more of this preparedness to be spent on the
half named after males, but the total amount of preparedness would be
unchanged.

~~~
qq66
I suppose that's possible, but it's the kind of claim that needs to be proven
rather than disproven (just like the claim in the article, which is light-
years from proven).

------
tpowell
Duh.

------
samstave
"Hell hath no fury like a woman stormed"

/sorry

