
Paper finds a surprising link between warm temperatures and math test scores - jfuhrman
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/12/paper-finds-a-surprising-link-between-warm-temperatures-and-math-test-scores/?postshare=7651431446442153
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cafard
Those who have been around long enough may recall the late Daniel Moynihan's
discovery that math proficiency scores had a strong inverse relationship to
the distance of the state capital from the Canadian border. As I recall, he
thought it an excellent way for northern-tier states to raise revenue by
renting out enclaves where other states might place their capitals.

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a8da6b0c91d
For the unenlightened the point here is you need to control for race, which I
doubt the study in the referenced article did.

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duaneb
Is it race or education policy? Hmmm...

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a8da6b0c91d
Probably race in some way, because when you control for race all ethnic groups
in America outperform the respective groups overseas. Swedish Americans score
higher than Swedes, black Americans score higher than west Africans, etc.

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duaneb
Race is extremely difficult to control for opposed to income, employment,
education, etc. It's difficult to understand from a european racial
perspective, but it's like stuffing everyone from the mediterranean to
scandinavia into the same race. People who are otherwise genetically disparate
share skin color. This is extremely evident in Africa proper but is also
evident in e.g. the american "African American" ethnicity.

TL;DR unless you're trying to correlate with a specific gene, you're gonna be
called racist for trying to correlate skin color to anything. Race in general
is a word that is difficult to use correctly in an argument unless you're
shooting down someone else's argument. It is virtually meaningless outside of
how people extrapolate phenotypes to ethnic identification.

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a8da6b0c91d
> but it's like stuffing everyone from the mediterranean to scandinavia into
> the same race

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do almost any way you try to look at
it.

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duaneb
> That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do almost any way you try to look at
> it.

...why? Europe is a culturally, politically, and genetically diverse place. It
makes no sense to group them by "race".

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a8da6b0c91d
> genetically diverse place

On a relative basis, no it isn't.

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pasbesoin
I suffer from allergies compounded by an injury. This has led to a varying
degree of obstructed breathing and discomfort.

Warmer weather tends to bring greater allergic and perhaps other factors
influencing this condition. I notice a significant cognitive decline under
these conditions.

When I work in air conditioned environments, I perceive my cognitive ability
to increase as the cooler, drier, and filtered air gradually mitigates the
symptoms of congestion and discomfort.

In my experience, there is _a lot_ that medicine and formal study do not
recognize nor study. For lack of a better word, a "hollistic" perspective that
looks beyond easily reducible and isolated factors is significantly absent and
is so particularly with respect to acknowledging and addressing current
conditions as opposed to promoting one particular theory or product.

So, it's anecdotal, but for me, I have little difficulty believing such a
correlation is possible. One might think that populations would adapt to
warmer environments to not be cognitively challenged by them. But we've been
moving around a lot, and changing our environment a lot, in recent decades. As
just one possible reason why not.

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brc
Something I have always looked at was that, from a historical point of view,
the fastest development in the industrial revolution occurred in more
temperate areas, up to a pint where severe winters curtailed the effect. Thus
Manchester developed more than Moscow.

A long time ago I came up with the half baked theory is that people in these
climate zones had to work harder for food and shelter, and that the hard work
for that had a motivating effect, or perhaps increased the reproductive
success for those willing to put in the work. Whereas someone in a warmer
climate could be half-assed with their shelter and food production and still
get along fine.

It's possible that warmer temperatures just slow down brain function as well.
People from warmer areas tend to have slower, drawn out speech patterns. Maybe
there is something in it.

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rachelbythebay
You might be interested in Guns, Germs, and Steel. It has a similar N-S vs.
E-W thing going on.

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duaneb
And with all geographical determinism there's gonna be too many edge cases for
the theory to hold any water. See: diamond's academic reputation.

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kijin
> _“I’ve got to tell you, we puzzled over that for at least a year, to try to
> really wrap our heads around whether we’re doing it right and what might
> explain such a pattern of results,” said Graff Zivin._

I don't understand the reason for puzzlement. The result is straightforwardly
intuitive. Discomfort is distracting, not to mention it takes a lot of energy
to maintain homeostasis when it's either too hot or too cold. If anything, the
researchers should be trying harder to falsify the obvious conclusion rather
than dig up more reasons to believe it.

Googling "temperature" and "productivity" leads to multiple articles
explaining how different office temperatures influence workers' productivity.
The sweet spot seems to be somewhere between 70F and 75F, and productivity
decreases as the temperature moves away from this range. Why would children
respond any differently to discomfort? Does anyone seriously believe that the
temperature has absolutely no impact on productivity?

So discomfort itself can be a confounding factor. I would very much like to
know whether discomfort explains all the variance, or whether there's
something else about high temperatures that affects the human brain in a
different way. (Are our brains like CPUs that need to throttle down when they
get too hot?) Likewise, I'd like to know whether acclimatization can explain
the lack of long-term effects, because if so, the "global warming is making us
stupider" angle is just plain stupid.

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strommen
> But poorer math performance...on particularly hot days

> Overlay test scores with the average temperature in the county where they
> lived

Wait, what? Is the study about hot days or warm climates?

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blahedo
You cut off the quote too early:

> "... _on the day of testing._ "

The "average" means they're not taking the high or low for the day, but it's
definitely warm days, not warm climates.

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TrevorJ
Much more likely to have warm days in warm climates.

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RA_Fisher
This is a HUGE claim. As many have said, the larger (stranger) the claim, the
more skeptical we should be and the more evidence should be required
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Truzzi#.22Extraordinar...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Truzzi#.22Extraordinary_claims.22)).

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joshu
I like how you provided a citation for that, in case anyone disagrees.

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RA_Fisher
The history of attribution is pretty interesting. :)

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kstenerud
Hang on...

So in the second part of the study, these guys are trying to determine if the
heat effects are cumulative, and find that they are not (obviously, since
susceptibility to permanent damage due to > 70 degree weather would have
crippled our species intellectually from the get go).

They then go on to explain that parents are somehow "adapting" to this by, for
example, sending kids to math camp, thus negating the cumulative effect. Huh?

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blahedo
They explain the possible A/C confound like this:

 _“We don’t know what the kid is doing 2 hours before the test implementer
arrives at the house, it’s quite possible the kids are outside,” he says.
“It’s quite possible these kids are exposed to some heat even if they can then
come in and cool off.”_

I actually had a different and precisely contradictory explanation: the test-
takers on hot days were more likely to be in heavily air-conditioned
environments and thus the air in the test-taking environment is too _cold_
(and dry, and probably mouldy).

It's certainly an interesting effect but they need to do a lot more work to
establish the cause.

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gnur
It also could be the effect that it's a nice day outside and you are inside
taking a test (regardless of a/c)

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jeorgun
Interesting; I was recently binge-reading some old blog posts and came across
this[1] not dissimilar claim from 2012. Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.

[1]
[http://squid314.livejournal.com/320770.html?thread=2386178](http://squid314.livejournal.com/320770.html?thread=2386178)

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lloyd-christmas
Beyond being just a crappy study... People have lower performance when they
are uncomfortable? Who knew.

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WillPostForFood
Or when they'd rather be playing outside.

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leshow
if this isn't an exercise in correlation not being equal to causation then i
don't know what is.

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ashark
The part about the researchers being surprised that the effect isn't
cumulative seemed like something from The Onion.

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marcosdumay
All the trust those researchers have on their finding, and all that certainty
that the correlation isn't cumulative because children in hot weathers must
study more.

No, the Onion wouldn't be able to get away with an article like that. People
would claim up front that it's too contrived and unrealistic for comedy.

