Could people please read articles before reacting?
Now that would be against the spirit of Hacker News
Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#82Curious, in many other studies we see that minorities are somewhat equally biased. Maybe, seeing a tiny reflection of yourself helps mitigate cultural bias..
Or could it be that black doctors are just overall better?
Assuming it's harder for a black person to become a doctor, it could stand to reason that those that do are among the very best. (Or skews that way statistically)
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
I don’t know why anyone pretends that these stats suggest that companies are being racist about hiring.
That isn't anything I said.
I don’t know why you insist on being so adamant about how hiring works.
That's not what I'm doing. You latched onto that as a thing to argue with me about in a way that ignores everything else I say and is a tactic that looks very bad faith. It looks like it is hand waving off known widespread racial bias in the name of "this one detail you said is inaccurate."
It's like attacking someone over a misplaced comma to imply they are stupid without bothering to engage anything they have said.
What I originally said is just that this is not shocking and talked about generally known statistics and you are latching onto "This woman knows nothing about hiring and I am going to dog her to the ends of the earth about that while pretending it is a good faith argument and overlook how shitty and racist it looks to deal with her in this fashion."
This is a routine thing that whenever racism, sexism and similar come up, someone wants to go to town and nitpick something in a way that looks extremely dismissive of the very existence of the problem because they want to argue they aren't guilty of something. Some people have an expression for that along the lines of "moves to innocence" -- in other words, it is vastly more important to most White people to insist "I'm not a racist and I don't do that and that's not how hiring works" than to actually talk about how racism does work and how to remedy it. Defending their own claimed innocence is their highest priority rather than working on understanding how racism persists and what needs to be done to remedy it.
"Last hired and first fired" was very much a known and standard thing for a lot of years and you have not provided any citations and I haven't gone looking because this style of arguing is so bad faith I don't want to engage it by agreeing that I need to "prove" that long-known practice remains true.
There can be lots of ways that still happens without any hiring managers intentionally discriminating against Blacks. There are lots of ways that someone can be effectively removed from the pipeline before it gets to the point of applying for a particular job which is one of the things that contributes to people fighting over the few qualified candidates who do apply and have certain traits.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#84This is not Reddit. Flagged for rules violation, no politics.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#85Earlier 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…
Since what grandparent is actually encoding in there statement is the implication that the Black hires aren't deserving of their hire rather than desirable Black hires aren't selected for
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Since what grandparent is actually encoding in there statement is the implication that the Black hires aren't deserving of their hire rather than desirable Black hires aren't selected for
I have no idea what you are trying to say. (I am not even sure if you are on my side or not. I'm not accusing you of anything at all.)
But "Last hired, first fired" is not and has never been exclusively about "Hiring managers are just racist assholes who look for bullshit reasons to not hire Blacks."
It's an observation about general trends that result in worse unemployment for Blacks. Some ways that can play out without any hiring manager being blatantly racist and intentionally wanting to exclude Blacks:
1. It's harder to get a job with a criminal record and you are more likely to have a criminal record if you are Black.
2. It's harder to get a job if your criminal record is for certain kinds of crimes and Blacks are more likely to be convicted and do hard time rather than get probation for the same thing.
3. It's harder to get a job if you have less education and education costs money and Blacks tend to have less of that than others.
4. It's harder to get a job if your education is from a less prestigious institution and the prestigious institutions cost more money.
5. Certain classes of jobs may be cut at a big company to save money because they are deemed "less essential" and those classes of jobs may be typically held by Blacks while the "essential" jobs are typically held by Whites.
At my corporate job during a recession, they cut janitorial service to save money. They stopped having all trash removed daily and had it removed every other day.
Janitorial jobs and cleaning jobs are very often held by people of color.
You don't have to be a racist piece of shit to go "Oh, the company is not doing well. We need to make some cuts. Um...let's have the trash taken out less." You can do that for completely good reasons that aren't inherently racist and it can still result in higher rates of unemployment for some groups than others.
I don't really want to argue this further. I cannot believe I am being given so much grief over this as if no one on the planet has heard that "racism is alive and well in the US of A."
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they picked up outstanding doctors who deliver outstanding results regardless of patients race? I mean the dataset is so small, one off can derail any conclusion
> 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...
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Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#88For those trying to assert some sort of bizarre abortion-based theory for skewing the statistics: the study is specifically only about the mortality rate of Black babies delivered in a medical facility. It does not study the mortality rate of babies whose mothers had Black obstetricians during their pregnancies. The researchers did not attempt to identify a cause for this disparity in this study, and noted only that…
> The researchers did not attempt to identify a cause for this disparity in this study I think that's an important point. I see people already jumping to the conclusion they prefer in other comments, but from what I understand we don't know what is causing the disparity. The paper points that it exists and should be studied more in details. Which is quite important, but it's too early to declare that a specific cause…
I'm a cynic. I doubt they will follow up since the initial report will be used to arrive at the conclusion most people seem to want anyways. If the researchers do follow up and find a non-racist cause it will be ignored.
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they picked up outstanding doctors who deliver outstanding results regardless of patients race? I mean the dataset is so small, one off can derail any conclusion
> 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...
Thanks for posting this, I must have misread the original article. The samples are x10 larger than I understood at first. However, please keep in mind that the subset of white ph/patients is almost 4 times larger than black ph/black patient. Data fitting seem questionable from there on. 4x is not that large of a scale but still analyses should have been more nuanced from here. For example, hospitals are not considered a variable at all. I would think that it is a major one
Re: Mortality rate for Black babies plummets when they’re delivered by Black doctors
#90Earlier 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?
I 100% agree, but I was curious so I went through a few pages of hacker news posts, looking for some other scientific studies to see the general sentiment in the comments. Here's one I found on an antidepressants impact on covid hospitalizations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25701446 Far from scientific, but there seems to be a general acceptance of the study in the comments of that article. I cannot say the…
Studies that blame a large demographic of malicious behavior is likely to be received with less acceptance than one that does not.
If there were a covid study that said that Americans was more likely to become sick because they don't care enough about they fellow beings to follow recommendation, even with great sample size and statistics, most would look at such conclusion with skepticism.