Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#71

Post by croissants »

sz4kerto wrote: post #61
croissants wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean the dataset is so small, one off can derail any conclusion What do you mean? Per the Supplement, their data comes from a pool of ~4k white doctors and ~500 black doctors, with hundreds of thousands of observations/patients. This dataset doesn't seem "so small"? [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2020/08/12/191340511...

It really all depends on the methodology. I recommend some reading about 'p-hacking'. It is not that hard to find to find really shocking findings in large datasets -- the question is how hard you look. In this particular case, the question is how many hypotheses have been evaluated, i.e. has the author 'mined the data' for correlations. If yes, then the acceptable p value is much smaller than normal.

I think it's a bit of a reach to suggest that this is p-hacking. Some of the relevant authors have studied this hypothesis (a gap in pregnancy-related outcomes between black and white people) across multiple papers, and the effect found here -- ignoring any p calculation -- is pretty big. It's not like they're picking some extremely specific combination of factors.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#72

Post by chestertn »

This is interesting, I couldn’t read the article that the WaPo references since it is paywalled, but lots of doctors today are ethnically Asian and Indian - can the experiment be extrapolated to this doctors too?

I’ve seen also some calls to the need of training more Black doctors to address inequalities in the healthcare due to racial biases. Should this also be extended to other races or ethnicities? (e.g Iranians, Vietnamese, Latinx, Greeks) Should we maintain a ratio of doctors according to race percentages? What should we do with those ethnicities that are over represented in medicine, should we curtail them? What do we do with mixed race patients?

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#73

Post by klyrs »

jart wrote: post #64
klyrs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 fo…

> If you're saying that preliminary studies should always be kept under wraps and not discussed, that's weird and anti-science. See https://www.medrxiv.org/ > Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information. It's annoying when new…

This was published in PNAS, though, which is a peer-reviewed journal.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#76

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

croissants wrote: post #71
sz4kerto wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really all depends on the methodology. I recommend some reading about 'p-hacking'. It is not that hard to find to find really shocking findings in large datasets -- the question is how hard you look. In this particular case, the question is how many hypotheses have been evaluated, i.e. has the author 'mined the data' for correlations. If yes, then the acceptable p value is much smaller than normal.

I think it's a bit of a reach to suggest that this is p-hacking. Some of the relevant authors have studied this hypothesis (a gap in pregnancy-related outcomes between black and white people) across multiple papers, and the effect found here -- ignoring any p calculation -- is pretty big. It's not like they're picking some extremely specific combination of factors.

And this is the narrative that I'm speaking of when I mention how these discussions go. It's a gish-gallop of saying that since we have imperfect knowledge, we can't draw a single conclusion about phenomena and systems that are well documented. First it's the lack of studies, then you get a study and it's a hidden bias in the populations used in the study, then it's the "low sample size" (that's a favorite), after that it's p-hacking or whatever else.

And it goes on and on, even though for hundreds of years, the country and society were tuned to ensure that the black community enjoyed degraded outcomes in all aspects of life.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#77

Post by lawnchair_larry »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #56
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blacks are last hired, first fired. Sounds like you don’t have much exposure to large companies these days. If anything it’s the opposite. You’re incorrect that there are any racist laws remaining that might influence hiring, unless you are referring to govern contracts, in which minority owned businesses are given preference. It is silly to introduce historical artifacts as though they are the situation today.

Black people account for about 12% of the U.S. population, but occupy only 3.2% of the senior leadership roles at large companies in the U.S. and just 0.8% of all Fortune 500 CEO positions https://www.cbsnews.com/news/black-professionals-hold-only-3... A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times gre…

I know you know how statistics work, and you know this isn’t evidence of what you’re suggesting. I don’t know why anyone pretends that these stats suggest that companies are being racist about hiring. Having been involved with hiring for several of the major tech companies, and being aware of the DEI targets at others, I can tell you that they are fighting over non-white male and non-indian male talent. It’s simply not true. Given that you’ve seemingly been out of the workforce for some time, I don’t know why you insist on being so adamant about how hiring works.

As for laws on the books, you found a historical artifact that has no legal effect, which the article you linked explains. It’s a reminder of a racist past, yes. These reminders will always exist in our society, and while it makes sense to continue to scrub them from legal documents over time, it’s not a good faith argument to cite such a thing as though it has any legal effect today.

To be intellectually honest, you should also be upset that virginia makes it illegal for unwed couples to live together. It’s also illegal to kill a sasquatch in Washington. In Kansas, it’s illegal to put ice cream on cherry pie.

To falsely say that blacks are hired last and fired first in America is not only preposterous, but extremely counterproductive to the outcome you’re presumably looking for. This is just inventing bogus reasons for Americans to feel hostile towards each other, and discouraging more people from even trying.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#79

Post by onecommentman »

watwut wrote: post #69
croissants wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It's not like the internet has a shortage of people happy to read a study's editorialized conclusion on Twitter, take it as truth, and go on with their day. A little critical thinking --- and this means going beyond "I don't like this, so I'll say correlation does not imply causation and move on to something else" --- seems fine if you're trying to do it honestly and carefully?

But like, whenever there is positive study about computer games, HN is not critical at all. Instead, it is completely non critical, extrapolates findings, even if the n is like 5 and study weak. My point is, some studies are knee jerkly believed and others are knee jerkly doubted.

The set of studies accepted or rejected out-of-hand varies depending upon the individual or group. A fact of life, since individuals come to a proposition with different life experiences, both educational and directly experiential.

If you are saying that HN as a community has commonality in beliefs about what is “generally accepted as true” and “generally accepted as false”, you are basically saying the HN community has shared experiences somewhat unique to that community. You are probably right.

If the community is challenging more findings on bias, they probably have life experiences that suggest such findings are incorrect or that too many such studies themselves have, in the past, been of low-quality, self-serving and/or misleading. Putting the quote marks around social “science” in general. There is also the natural bias for people to want to ignore problems outside of their scope or vision...24 hours in a day and so forth.

If HN is infested with IT professionals who have worked in environments where everyone is a minority of one sort or another and observed or managed the dynamics, their lived experience in ethnic/gender dynamics and opportunities may differ from other groups. If HN skews older, then they also have had the lived experience of both the many successes and many failures of the Civil Rights movement on which to base opinions.

On the specific issue of computer games, there is a dramatic difference in societal and economic impact between Fortnite and the direct personal welfare of tens of millions of people. The latter warrants more due care and attention. There have been a few posts on the psychological harm from gaming, so some balance there.

Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors

#80

Post by lawnchair_larry »

watwut wrote: post #68
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blacks are last hired, first fired. Sounds like you don’t have much exposure to large companies these days. If anything it’s the opposite. You’re incorrect that there are any racist laws remaining that might influence hiring, unless you are referring to govern contracts, in which minority owned businesses are given preference. It is silly to introduce historical artifacts as though they are the situation today.

Common, even employment statistics for last year show that white males gained while black women lost the most. It is not just racism/sexism but, seriously, white people are not oppressed.

I think you also know better than that when it comes to how statistics work. And I don’t know why you’re telling me that white people are not oppressed. That isn’t related to my comment.
Post reply on HN