MTV launched in August, 1981. So while MTV can’t have caused autism, autism clearly caused MTV. Thanks for playing.
I blame Ronald Reagan’s election campaign, the Iran Hostage crisis and my high school graduating class.
Cecil Beaton, Bert Kaempfert, and Colonel Sanders all died. Could it be possible that they were the ones keeping autism from spreading?
That’s a good question, but let me explain the study a little bit more. I’ve already discussed the issue of the poor, and twice removed proxies, so let’s take that part as given and move on from there. What they did was to take precipitation in certain counties in several states and run that against the autism rates. Since precipitation is correlated with more television watching (which they correlate to young children watching television), it would be hard to argue that precipitation causes autism; however, there is the obvious caveat that indoor air pollution, allergans, &c. can be the cause—being indoors more may cause autism. They address this question, although I don’t recall how.
Thus, if we give them the benefit of assuming their reasoning is valid (precipitation means young kids watching television and being indoors not being the cause and weather-related issues not being the cause), then it would be hard to argue that the relationship can go the other way, since it would imply that autism causes precipitation.
IIRC, they tried to control for that sort of thing, though I don’t recall how.