I wonder if anyone has conducted a study on how many internet comments on articles alleging bias are variations of 'now hang on a second, there may be an innocent explanation here'.
Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
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Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#32Even though there are only 3 comments in the thread, they are still rife with dismissive and bad-faith arguments. It's extremely telling how when black America mentions something about systemic racism in the context of the US, the response is "what's the p-value", "I don't like that sample size", "correlation != causation". The article has studies with authors from the BIG 10 and with Ivy League heritage, but it's th…
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Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#33> The root, she says, lies in structural racism. Another HNr deleted his comment, but this needs more substance before thrown around. When I was studying sociology I noticed this trend of finding some general stat and the author follows with statements such as is systemic xism. Most of the times it comes as intellectually weak. Why not researching further, before typing such gross statement. Often it is a non sequitu…
I submitted this twelve days ago and it got no traction, but it's an interesting read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567826
It seems interesting as an hypothesis, but it could also be wrong.
In the Internet most of the times you don't know who you're talking to, so just in case I come across as rude, bear in mind, I'm not in or from the US, and I already shared my experience studying sociology.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#34Could people please read articles before reacting?
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I submitted this twelve days ago and it got no traction, but it's an interesting read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25567826
It seems interesting as an hypothesis, but it could also be wrong. In the Internet most of the times you don't know who you're talking to, so just in case I come across as rude, bear in mind, I'm not in or from the US, and I already shared my experience studying sociology.
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Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black America is well aware of the fact that being black means that we will run into sub-part outcomes in US society. This isn't news to our community. Just because it causes feelings of racial anxiety in other groups doesn't mean it shouldn't be mentioned and be studied. Before such a study, when black Americans would have noted that something seemed off, we would have been met with "You need data to back that up, X…
Well we could avoid "black/white America" terms probably if we were more careful about the statistical significance of such inflammatory statements. If it is indeed the case, then it is a horrible thing that should be researched more, and dealt with. If not, publishing it is just racist and divisive.
I challenge you to read the whitepaper and show us the “inflammatory statements”.
https://1410c6d1-d135-4b4a-a0cf-5e7e63a95a5c.filesusr.com/ug...
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#37> The root, she says, lies in structural racism. Another HNr deleted his comment, but this needs more substance before thrown around. When I was studying sociology I noticed this trend of finding some general stat and the author follows with statements such as is systemic xism. Most of the times it comes as intellectually weak. Why not researching further, before typing such gross statement. Often it is a non sequitu…
I somewhat agree, but for maybe a different reason. I think racism probably is a major root cause, but think it's intellectually lazy because identifying it doesn't help much.
Racial disparities exist in virtually every important measure of health (and I only say "virtually" because I don't know them all off the top of my head). Genetics plays a part in some, but the root cause of many is the current or lingering effects of racism: families that never accrued much wealth, communities who had much worse professional prospects so education wasn't as valued, "bad" neighborhoods where towns invested less in public transportation or sanitation. A bunch of ways racism shapes communities.
However, pointing out the racism root is only useful for long-term sociological planning. You also need to focus on the immediate causes. Systemic racism is actually a perfect example of this: even if a system becomes "race blind," the effect of past racism means non-white people are at a disadvantage.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#38It would be really-really important to use pre-registration especially in socially sensitive studies like this one. It is possible that these numbers are artifacts even if the stated p value is low. I'm not saying that the study is wrong, just that shocking results like this one need extreme methodological rigor behind them before we start telling everyone that white doctors are killing black babies etc. https://en.m…
> ...before we start telling everyone that white doctors are killing black babies etc.
We aren't yelling that, though, and you're the first one to say it here. This fear of being accused of racism is intense; as if acknowledging that black people are actually treated worse by our society is actually more harmful than the loss of life that black people experience.
This is a preliminary study, and yes, it deserves a followup. If you're saying that preliminary studies should always be kept under wraps and not discussed, that's weird and anti-science. There are a couple of well-understood phenomena that can explain this. The first is unconscious bias -- it's been shown time and time again, across the board with various population differences, and could easily explain this. Second, bad training data -- if a doctor hasn't been trained with black patients, and pictures of black people with various ailments, then they might not recognize symptoms as readily (insert analogy to facial recognition). Also, a large proportion of black people in the US speak a different dialect than their white counterparts -- the way folks describe their symptoms differs between dialects -- so if a white doctor can't understand what their black patient is saying, they're operating on less information than a white doctor treating a white patient would be. Finally, a matter of trust -- psychosomatics are real -- black women know their history, and might not trust a white doctor as well as a black doctor, and that can impact outcomes. Rebuilding that trust will take generations of trustworthy, good faith efforts to correct the wrongs of the past.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#39Even though there are only 3 comments in the thread, they are still rife with dismissive and bad-faith arguments. It's extremely telling how when black America mentions something about systemic racism in the context of the US, the response is "what's the p-value", "I don't like that sample size", "correlation != causation". The article has studies with authors from the BIG 10 and with Ivy League heritage, but it's th…
I'm not sure. Psychology and sociology has such a horrible track record when it comes to reproducibility of studies that have some kind of political significance that we just have to be careful. In case of these topics, there's a relatively strong publication pressure here. Also: the raw data is unfortunately not enough without pre-registration. (For obvious reasons.) "bad faith" is absolutely required in science. Es…
I'm not sure there is a crisis of reproducibility in a study like this. We can tell with accuracy what the race of the physician is, the race of the baby and whether or not the baby dies or not.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#40Even though there are only 3 comments in the thread, they are still rife with dismissive and bad-faith arguments. It's extremely telling how when black America mentions something about systemic racism in the context of the US, the response is "what's the p-value", "I don't like that sample size", "correlation != causation". The article has studies with authors from the BIG 10 and with Ivy League heritage, but it's th…
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