suppose for a moment that this were actually true what do physical reality do you imagine might cause this outcome? what specific actions can you imagine all white doctors taking that no black doctors take that would *triple* infant mortality independent of everything else?
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stray intrusive thought 'average white doctor kills black babies at triple rate of black doctors' factoid a statistical error. average white doctor kills black babies at same rate. Racist Georg who delivers in a cave and eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not h
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generally when a model produces fantastical results you should feel good about discarding the model. and this is absolute insanity there are a million things that can go wrong in this kind of estimation and the approach used by the authors handles like . . . five of them
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this kind of cockup is the *norm* in reduced form microeconometrics it is remarkable only for being wildly unreasonable, and nevertheless making it through a paper-thin review process (by people whos careers are built on the same methods) because it produced the Correct result
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the authors are careful to run through a series of apotropaic tests to ensure that a few well-understood issues did not obtain in their model its thorough, people myself included spend years learning these Rituals its akin to making sure submarine screen doors are up to code
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if you complete the Ceremony it is extremely unlikely that anyone will bother observing that your results are absolutely cockamamie its econometrics-by-recipe "order the data in such a way, run all the standard tests, publish, gib tenure" no iota of reflection necessary
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This paper is so egregious that it knocked me awake If they'd claimed /using the same methods/ like "5% increase in mortality" I would have slept through it But--those methods would have been equally bad /had they produced a reasonable result/!
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I want to emphasize that in closing Everything is fucked and you don't usually see it because it's not egregious enough to break the surface but everything in social science is fucked. Don't succumb to Gell-Mann Amnesia just stop reading empirical papers. Ed Prescott was right.pic.twitter.com/g20u9dGCXE
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Replying to @eigenrobot
question tho the paper does not seem to say black newborns die under the care of white doctors at three times the rate of black doctors. they say black newborns die at three times the rate of white newborns.pic.twitter.com/FTHX63WNbM
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Replying to @phil49472744 @eigenrobot
given that your advice to those not statistically literate to comb through the primary research (which happens to include myself), is to realize the 3x black baby-white MD seems insane and pay no mind, how does one asses the paper rather than the headline?
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The numbers about the effect come from interpretation of the estimated coefficients in some of the tables, which is why they have that 38-59% range
they ran a lot of tests 
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Replying to @eigenrobot
I guess my question is what should they have done/not do cause even after reading your thread all I really come away with is “their methodology was bad/insufficient” is it a matter of controls? error correction? anyway to say what the specific issue is in layman-speak?
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Replying to @phil49472744
I mightve tried to feed the data through a tricksy ML model but if I were really being honest as a scientist I would like to think I would have looked at the dataset and said "no fucking way" hard reality is that some questions cant realistically be answered by available data
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